like, wow

Quantum mechanics says that the part of reality that we do not perceive is radically different than the part of the world that we do perceive. The difference is so profound that we still don’t fully understand how to talk about quantum reality. There doesn’t seem to be any direct analogy between quantum reality and the reality we perceive with our senses.

— read more from Hans Halvorson

Villa-Lobos

My father had a special fondness for Heitor Villa-Lobos and for the cello.  Villa-Lobos had a special fondness for the cello but not, to my knowledge, for my father.

Both of them were born on the 5th of March, but 34 years apart.

Listen to the Villa-Lobos fantasy for cello and orchestra,
performed by Janos Starker and Orquestra Sinfônica da Paraíbas

Wittgenstein

By the time he decided to teach, Wittgenstein was well on his way to being considered the greatest philosopher alive.

Born into fabulous wealth and privilege, he gave all his assets to siblings and went to earn an honest living teaching elementary school in a rural village. There he inspired students and he beat them.

Wittgenstein was “interested in everything,” and he engaged his students in a sort of “project-based learning” that wouldn’t be out of place in the best elementary classrooms today.

His whole life was one great struggle…to form a self. In working with poor children, he wanted to transform himself, and them. Their parents had no interest in his unforgiving honesty and/or his ambitions for their children.

— Here is an Article in Paris Review about Wittgenstein’s years as a schoolteacher.

“The real discovery is the one which enables me to stop doing philosophy when I want to—the one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions.”

Does Quantum Mechanics really matter?

Much of 20th Century philosophy is rooted in 19th Century physics. All that message that life is ‘absurd’ and ‘meaningless’ that were prominent in the mid 20th Century come from a belated response to the world-view of Newtonian mechanics.

What world-view comes out of 20th Century physics? Quantum mechanics is so strange that it’s hard to say. To make matters more interesting, QM is really just a prescription for calculating answers, and physicists differ widely on the underlying reality that it implies, or even whether there is an underlying reality.

In a world where the future is mechanically determined by the past, the idea of free will is meaningless. Does QM open a window for understanding how our experience of freedom can be reconciled with physics? Or does it just add an element of pure randomness to the determinism?

At Cracking the Nutshell, a young physicist named Dolors presents deep and provocative thoughts.

Why is the sun hot?

The core of the sun is millions of degrees, heated by nuclear reactions.
The temperature decreases from the center outward, because the surface is cooled by constantly losing radiant energy to cold space. The surface that shines upon us is ‘only’ 6,000 degrees.
This is just what you might expect. The earth, likewise, is hottest at its center, and cooler toward the surface.
But the sun has a thin atmosphere above it that is millions of degrees hot, hotter than the center (though, of course, much less dense and incapable of fusion reactions for that reason)
Why is the sun’s atmosphere so hot?

‘Magneto hydrodynamics’ is the general answer. There is a moving magnetic field from a rotating sun that churns up electric currents in the atmosphere, and the electric energy is converted ultimately to heat.

But details remain mysterious, despite decades of study.

Dumbed-down version from NASA.
Update from Astronomy magazine

In honor of Pi Day

Today is Pi Day, 3/14.

There are many pieces of music based on the random digits of pi. Here’s the one I find most satisfying, quite tonal, with interesting harmonies. The digits of pi pass every test for randomness. Of course, they are not really random—they are the digits of pi—but there is no other pattern in them.

I’ve ceased to be surprised when I find people who are interested in both mathematics and music, and seek a connection.

Capitalism without capital

‘Human beings, to prosper, must be able under all circumstances to give themselves out for what they are. A man must be something, not appear something; he must be able to stride through life with head erect—to speak the truth without incurring the risk of hardship or injury.  Sincerity must not remain the privilege of heroes.  The economic order must be so framed that a man may combine sincerity with the highest degree of economic success. The dependence inseparable from economic life should affect things only, not men.’

— fr The Natural Economic Order, by Silvio Gesell, born this day in 1862.

Gesell was a theorist for a humanistic capitalism. What makes his system uniquely interesting is that he opposed rents and interests of all sorts. Capitalism without capital.

He believed that the Earth should belong to all people, regardless of race,
gender, class, wealth, religion and age and that borders should be made obsolete.

One data point

Sometimes a single experimental result is so strange and unexpected that you can see in it the demise of an old scientific order. And even if you can’t see right away the birth of the new order, it’s a fruitful place to ponder, let your imagination run, and think about what is going to have to change to embrace this new finding.

Einstein reportedly came up with Special Relativity based on the perplexing result of the Michaelsson-Morely Experiment. That seemed to show that if you add a velocity to the speed of light, the result is that the speed of light is unchanged; and if you subtract a velocity from the speed of light, the light doesn’t go any slower.

Here’s a paradox I learned of just last week. A human-ish mummy discovered in the desert of Chile has the proportions of an adult, but is only 6 inches tall and has a large, funny-shaped head. Carbon dating says it is less than 100 years old. Lab analysis shows that its DNA has 91% in common with humans.

What is it? If it were human, the DNA would be 99.99+ % human. If it were any kind of mammal, you would still expect the overlap to be 97+% . On the other hand, if this were some alien that arrived in a space ship, you would expect it not to look anything like a human, not to have DNA at all.

— HuffPo   Science Mag   video

‘I view the spreading of pessimism as treason against the universe.’

— from a speech yesterday by David Swanson, who has taken it upon himself to remind us, day after day, in ways that get past our distraction and our fatigue, that war is horrific, insupportable, and endable.

Ikon—Music of the Soul

from an album by Harry Christophers and The Sixteen

Rachmaninoff: Tebe Poem
Holst: Holst: Nunc Dimittis
Kalinnikov: Vespers

A Boundless Moment

He halted in the wind, and—what was that
Far in the maples, pale, but not a ghost?
He stood there bringing March against his thought,
And yet too ready to believe the most.

“Oh, that’s the Paradise-in-bloom,” I said;
And truly it was fair enough for flowers
had we but in us to assume in March
Such white luxuriance of May for ours.

We stood a moment so in a strange world,
Myself as one his own pretense deceives;
And then I said the truth (and we moved on).
A young beech clinging to its last year’s leaves.

— Robert Frost, born this day in 1874

‘Why muck and conceal one’s true longings and loves, when by speaking of them one might find someone to understand them, and by acting on them one might discover oneself?’

— Everett Ruess, born this day in 1914

A Parliament of Birds

…Nor yet Themselves: no Selves, but of The All
Fractions, from which they split and whither fall.
As Water lifted from the Deep, again
Falls back in individual Drops of Rain
Then melts into the Universal Main.
All you have been, and seen, and done, and thought,
Not You but I, have seen and been and wrought:
I was the Sin that from Myself rebell’d:
I the Remorse that tow’rd Myself compell’d:
I was the Tajidar who led the Track:
I was the little Briar that pull’d you back:
Sin and Contrition—Retribution owed,
And cancell’d—Pilgrim, Pilgrimage, and Road,
Was but Myself toward Myself: and Your
Arrival but Myself at my own Door:
Who in your Fraction of Myself behold
Myself within the Mirror Myself hold
To see Myself in, and each part of Me
That sees himself, though drown’d, shall ever see.
Come you lost Atoms to your Centre draw,
And be the Eternal Mirror that you saw:
Rays that have wander’d into Darkness wide
Return, and back into your Sun subside.’

— Edward Fitzgerald, born this day in 1809, was a mystical poet best known for his translations of the Persian masters of the Islamic golden age. This is from Fitzgerald’s 1500-line rendering of a poem by Attar of Nishapur that was three times this long.