Category: Uncategorized

The First Three Minutes by Nobel Prize winning Steven Weinberg, is a short little book about how our universe began.  It is not new, first appearing in 1977, and updated in 1993, but still very readable and not quite out of date, a scientific classic.  While reading The First Three Minutes, I can’t help but compare it to The Book of Genesis.  Weinberg chronicles the science behind, “Let there be light.”

I would like to say this book is readable by any well educated person, but I don’t know if that’s true.  I do think any reader who has kept up with popular science should find it a thrilling quick read.  The first link I give at the top is to Google Books where you can read as much as you like online and decide if you want to buy a copy, but I will say Weinberg has done an excellent job of explaining an extreme mathematical subject with very little actual mathematics.

It is quite presumptuous of scientists to talk about the first three minutes of creation from 13.7 billion years ago, except that we have one direct existing clue, the cosmic background radiation discovered by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson in 1965.  However, that’s like saying we should predict a cake recipe by taking the temperature of a slice of German chocolate before we pop it in our mouth.  What Weinberg is saying, by knowing the average temperature of the universe now, by measuring its rate of expansion, by studying all the sub-atomic particles we can, we can plot backwards to a point in time when the universe was infinitely tiny and very hot.

This is why we spend billions on high energy particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider.  The more we know about all the sub-atomic tiny, the more we can say about the super big cosmos.  Once you get a taste for reading about this kind of science, the more you realize that speculating about the first three minutes after the big bang isn’t just idle chatter.  Our scientific view of reality is based on putting a puzzle together of logical pieces.  A student of popular science might begin with a 50 piece puzzle, to get a vague image of the universe, but eventually you’ll want to move on to 500 and 1,000 piece puzzles.  Every science book read helps create a finer mental model of how reality works.  The First Three Minutes by Weinberg provides many major puzzle pieces.

I like to think of our universe as rather hot, because of all the fiery stars, but in actuality, our universe is in a very cooled state.  The average temperature of the universe is just a few degree above absolute zero, whereas during it’s early stages it was millions upon millions of degrees hot, so hot that the particles and atoms we all know and love could not exist as we see them now.  Our visible universe, full of empty clear space, through which light from distant stars and galaxies shine, didn’t develop until the universe got relatively cool.  Before that the universe was opaque.

The First Three Minutes was written just a dozen years after Penzias and Wilson discoveries in New Jersey, and the updated edition was written after early results from the COBE satellite was put into orbit in 1989, giving more confirmation to ideas that were originally just speculation.  I highly recommend people read the CMB and COBE links at Wikipedia.  I wish Weinberg would write a totally new edition of The First Three Minutes, and expand it greatly to show what science has learned about the Big Bang since 1993.  For example, Weinberg had only known the Hubble Telescope during its early failure state, and not the mega success it would become.  He still thought Texas was going to have a super collider.  And there’s no telling what will go in the science books when research from the Planck spacecraft starts coming in.

Weinberg has continued to write science books, such as last year’s Cosmology, but it is expensive and more suited for graduate students, being The First Three Minutes with all the math left in.  It would be nice to have a complete rewrite of The First Three Minutes for us cosmological ground hogs.  I’m having a difficult time finding a current popular science book that covers the same territory as The First Three Minutes but catches up with all the latest scientific discoveries.  Even the 2004 Big Bang by Simon Singh is barely past the early COBE results.  I’d appreciate anyone posting recommendations to more current reading.

JWH – 7/5/9

The NY Times recently ran a piece, “Blogs Falling in an Empty Forest” by Douglas Quenqua, which told how 95% of blogs are abandoned by their creators.  According to Technorati, the paper said, only 7.4 million blogs, out of the 133 million blogs that Technorati tracks, have been updated in the last 120 days.  Most people just don’t stick with blogging, especially when they find out there is no money in it.  I never thought I’d find riches in blogging, but I do find the hobby very rewarding.  It’s a shame Mr. Quenqua only focused on people who quit blogging.

Blogging for me is therapeutic.  Since I’ve grown into my 50s, I’ve been forgetting more and more words.  The more I write, the better I remember.  Recently when I had an eye problem and couldn’t write on my blog for weeks, my memory went into a decline.  Picking a topic and focusing on it for several hours is good exercise for my mind.  Writing about the past has psychoanalytical benefits too.  I’m constantly examining where I got an idea, and why I believe something.  I’ve spent a lot of blog time examining the science fiction I read in my teens, trying to figure out how those fantastic stories shaped the thoughts of my life.  It’s been amazingly revealing to me.  That’s just one of many blogging projects I pursue.

Blogging is like practicing the piano in public though, because writing fast often produces sentences with many sour notes.  I try hard to revise my essays before hitting the publish button, but all too often I find bumpy passages and mistakes the next day.  This is actually good for me, because it pushes me to try harder, although I think I’m currently on a plateau.  Seeing how I’m not improving as fast as I was a year ago, makes me want to try something new, like reading books on writing essays, or studying fine prose in magazines to improve my sentence structure.  Lately, I’ve even thought of studying poetry, something I hated in school.

WordPress provides statistics about my blog pages, that I use to examine which ideas I write about are popular  This is probably a false assumption, but I assume if a piece gets a lot of hits it means it’s interesting.  That doesn’t mean my writing is better in that piece, but at least I found something that people want to read about.  My most successful essay has been “The Greatest Science Fiction Novels of the 20th Century.”  My stats tell me that 8,505 people have loaded that essay into their browser for whatever reason.  My ego would like to believe people actually read the essay, but all it really means is 8,505 folks have stumbled upon that page, whether or not they have read it is another story.  The act of writing it is what’s important.

My least popular essay is, “Super Men and Mighty Mice,” with 3 hits, but I think it’s one of my better efforts.  Hits don’t mean a thing.  Actually, both essays are very informative to me, and help me remember things I noticed about the world.  That’s why my blog is called, “Auxiliary Memory – Things I Want to Remember.”  I think Douglas Quenqua missed a great story by not researching why 7.4 million people do keep blogging.

Not only am I getting to know myself better, but I’m also meeting so many fascinating people online.  If you read blogs, you get to know people in a way you seldom do by just talking with acquaintances at work or parties.  I wished all my friends wrote blogs.  If my wife published her thoughts in little essays I expect I’d discover a whole new woman that I never got to know during the 31 years we’ve been married.  I’m constantly discovering things about myself that I didn’t know.  Writing is revealing.

Every evening after work I have about three hours of freedom where I can do absolutely anything I want.  All too often, I pick watching television.  I love television, it’s quite stimulating, but it’s basically parking my brain – unless I respond in some way.  If I watch a show, whether fiction or non-fiction, and then write about it in a blog, I will see that show far differently.  It becomes a real experience.

In my hours of freedom I could choose to read, listen to music, work at a hobby, play on the Wii, cruise the net, clean house, listen to an audio book, call friends on the phone, cook a better than average dinner, study a Great Course on DVD – the list goes on and on.  Writing on a blog post pushes my mind more than anything else.  Struggling to find the right words to capture a fleeting concept that came to me as a mini-epiphany during the day takes a great deal of concentration.  More concentration than I put into anything else I do. 

I wished I could have blogged when I was seven and first learned to string words together into sentences like they taught us in grade school.  I think it would have transformed my life and greatly improved my K-12 experience.  If I had had to write an essay about every lesson I studied, from math to PE, I think I would have learned so much more during my educational years.

Pedagogy puts a tremendous focus on reading.  At the College of Education where I work, students can get a master’s degree or doctorate in Reading, but we don’t offer any educational degrees that focus on writing.  Inputting words is important, but I think outputting words is more important for a good education.  It’s a shame that blogging is not catching on.  It’s a shame that it’s seen as a scheme to get rich quick on the net.  It has so much more potential.

We should encourage children to blog, and we should also support the permanent archiving of blogs, so kids growing up can look back over their own development.  We should develop a curriculum that asks children to explain what they studied each day by writing essays that explain their subjects in words, drawings, diagrams, videos, photos and so on, and not in checking multiple variations of A) … B) …  C) …  D) … at the end of the week in a quiz.

So Douglas Quenqua, write another article for your Fashion & Style section, and explore the positive aspects of blogging that those hundred million plus are missing by giving up on blogging.  I think if you examine a 100 different good blogs you’d find a 100 different reasons why blogging is too valuable to just dismiss as a passing fad.  Here’s just one creative example, Golden Age Comic Book Stories, that I discovered the same day as your article.  I don’t even like comic books, but I could spend endless hours exploring Mr. Door Tree’s passion for illustrations.  There’s real history in his pages.

Everyone should scrapbook their life in a blog.

JWH – 6/8/9

I love the Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, and feel that we really got a major return from our taxes with these two robots.  However, I have a request for NASA.  I want them to send a robot that films its Mars roving adventures in HD at 1080p so watching the video will feel like walking on Mars.  That means, the cameras need to be at head height, and the vehicle needs to move along at the same clip as an average walker.  We could call it the Mars Hiker mission.

Oh, and I want sound.  I don’t know if there’s much sound on Mars, but I want to hear what’s going on, even if it’s just the whir of the robotic motors.  And while the NASA’s engineers are at it, provide readouts at the bottom of the screen for temperature, air pressure, wind speed, time of day, etc.  Anything to help me feel like I’m rambling around on Mars.  And it would be unbelievably cool if the rover actually walked like a man, and could climb up places that a rover couldn’t go.  It doesn’t have to be a technical mountain climber, but I’d want the Hiker to visit places equivalent to hiking around Yellowstone Park.

I don’t know if it’s possible, but I’d love to see the night sky on Mars, and what the stars and Milky Way look like from such a dark planet.  Another thing I’d like the Mars Hiker to do, is walk up to a Viking lander.  For my final wish, I’d like to watch the robot build something on Mars.

I suppose we haven’t had videos from Mars, the Moon, Titan and other landing sites because the bandwidth is beyond what NASA can send back home, but we have a lot of Geek power on planet Earth, so I’m hoping tech wizards can solve that problem.

I don’t want robots to have all the space traveling fun.  I understand it might be too expensive, dangerous and impractical to send humans on these missions, but I NASA could make their missions more of a collective exploration experience.  I wonder if engineers could design a helmet to wear while communing with the Mars Hiker, so that we could have an even more immersing experience?  I would have loved to have worn such a helmet during the recent Hubble repair mission.

I’ve resigned myself to never becoming an astronaut, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t treasure the vicarious thrill of remote viewing.  It’s pretty pathetic to have robot envy, but hey, I’ll take my space kicks any way I can.

JWH – 6/4/9

I don’t know how many people caught the documentary last night on ABC, Earth 2100, but I hope it was everyone with a TV.  If you didn’t catch the broadcast, follow the link and watch it online.  The show uses an imaginary biography of a woman named Lucy, born June 2, 2009, the day of the show, and follows her to the year 2100.  Lucy’s life is shown in anime-like graphics, interspersed with very famous talking heads.  Well famous to me, since I read a lot of books on climate change, and also watch a lot of science shows featuring these same big brains Wizards from Oz..

The show is two hours long, and I’ll spoil the ending for you.  Things go very bad.  But that’s the point.  The producers want to scare us, and their scenario is very scary.  Imagine spending a lot of your life like those poor bastards at the stadium in New Orleans after Katrina.  Throw in the Mad Max flicks, Waterworld and The Postman, and you’ll get the picture. 

The producers of Earth 2100 claimed they were giving the worst case projection, but I’ve read and imagined far worse.  In the last ten minutes of the show the producers pull back and plead, “It doesn’t have to be this way, if we act smart now.”

I’m afraid my first thought was of last broadcast of the Tonight Show with Jay Leno, and his Jaywalking routine.  I’m not trying to be a holier-than-thou snob.  I just read The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time by Will Durant, and I’ve been feeling like total dumb-ass all day as it is.  The world is loaded with brilliant people, but most of us aren’t so Einsteiny.  The happy alternative ending to Earth 2100 only works if the average billions of ordinary boob-tube addicts start acting a lot smarter than we have been up to now.  Is that even possible?  As long as a good percentage of the population refuse to even accept we have a climate change problem, the odds of avoiding the coming dark ages is betting on a long-shot.

Within the show they bring up the conservative belief that, “The American Way of Life is Not Negotiable,” which is a fascinating philosophical stance.  But that’s like a junky declaring that giving up heroin is not negotiable.  A way of life that is totally self-destructive shouldn’t be one you want to keep, unless you are deluded that it’s one hell of a high that you can’t live without.  If only it was an American problem!  The Earth might survive just our abuse.  The trouble is the rest of the world wants to copy our way of life.

At one point in the show they have a graphic that basically says, “Whoops, we just had 6 billion people die.”  But that leaves the remaining 3.1 billion living in Hell on Earth.   For decades we have sat in our wealth and watch African famines on high definition TVs and don’t do shit.  But what if the American way of life becomes one of living in a refuge camp, starving with flies buzzing around our faces, and waiting all day for the water truck so we can riot to fill our plastic buckets?  It’s one kind of ethical crime to ignore dying people half-way around the globe, but it’s a whole other monumental ethical failure to not help yourself and your family when you do have the resources.

Of course, prophets have always yelled that Hell is coming to town, but anyone who studies the Old Testament actually knows how many people pay attention.  Who knows, maybe one day in the far future when a new civilization chronicles our looming dark ages, they will give credit to Earth 2100 as being some kind of 21st century televised Isaiah.

JWH – 6/3/9

Science fiction has a long history of exploring the theme of religion.  Childhood’s End, A Case of Conscience and Stranger in a Strange Land are a few standout examples.  Arthur C. Clarke even has two very famous short stories that depend on religion for O’Henryesque gimmicks, “The Star” and “Nine Billion Names of God.” 

Two contemporary theistic science fiction stories I’d like to explore are The Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons and the recent cult TV series, Battlestar Galactica (BSG).  There is a curious overlap between these two epic space operas.  Both tales are long, with the four Simmons books taking 96 hours on audio, and Battlestar Galactica running 65 hours on DVD.  Both stories deal with galaxy spanning human populations in conflict with AI descendents.  Both stories explore religion in a super-science context.  Both stories have human/AI babies playing important roles.  Both stories have a woman leader of the human occupied galaxy.  Both stories features AI minds inhabiting human looking bodies (Cybrid and Cylon).  Both stories depend on easy FTL travel.   Both stories feature heroic fighting women.

Of course, the lists of differences are just as interesting.  BSG’s humans chose not to live with computer networks.  The Hyperion Cantos emphasizes English literature, with the first novel structured like Canterbury Tales, and featuring a cybernetic recreation of John Keats, with many characters often quoting William Butler Yeats and other poets.  BSG plays up astrology, Greek myths, and parallels 9/11 and other early 21st century politics.

Hyperion, the first book in the series came out in 1989, while Battlestar Galactica began airing in 2004, so I have to wonder if Dan Simmons influenced Ronald D. Moore?  Or do these stories just reflect the evolution of science fiction in general?  But why do both stories deal with the intersection of religion and artificial intelligence?  I was totally blown away when I discovered the Cylons were followers of monotheism and hated the humans for not follow the one true God, but strangely enough, the humans of BSG play out the role of the twelve tribes of Israel.

Finally, both stories end up affirming the supernatural and the power of love.  Are they making a philosophical statement about the sacred and the future, or are these just ingredients to make best selling stories by playing up to the public’s sweet tooth for spiritual mumbo-jumbo?  I’m a lifelong atheist, but I love both of these tales, and find the religious underpinnings of the stories to be absolutely juicy storytelling.  In fact, if these stories had been totally secular, I might not have liked them.  Why is that, I must ask myself.

After a few episodes of watching Battlestar Galactica, I wondered how long I would watch the series if it was just a bunch of murderous robots out to exterminate the poor humans.  Ditto for the world of Hyperion.  Another war of AI versus people would be ho-hum.  But as soon as a the Cylon babe in red mentioned her obedience to the one true God, I went, “Whoa!  This is new.”

So are these Astounding Stories science fiction?  I think John W. Campbell would have loved both of them, but I think H. G. Wells would have sneered down at each.  Both yarns play up to sentimentality while being very unscientific.  If you compare their science fiction to the science of Rare Earth Hypothesis, which Dan Simmons prefigures at one point eloquently in his story, we have to consider these stories as escapist fantasies.

This is why I ask if these stories are the direction that SF evolution is moving.  I was totally enthralled by the stories, but they completely lack any realism.  Has science fiction become another hopeful heaven, a new opium of the masses, in which millions dream of escape from the unromantic details of this reality?  Time and again, it has occurred to me that science fiction is a substitute for religion, with promises of far out living up in the sky.

I believe artificial intelligence is in our future, but not faster-than-light travel.  I see religious belief slowly declining in our secular world, so it shouldn’t play a role in speculative fiction about the far future.  Science fiction writers always predicts humans at war with robots, but I can easily imagine that artificial intelligence does evolve, but AI machines leave humans on Earth, and they travel to the stars without us.  Now, that still leaves plenty of room to speculate as to whether AI life will take up religion.  Simmons goes into this, but I don’t want to spoil his story.  But I find it hard to believe that intelligent machines would ever consider something real they cannot detect with science and technology.

Would future robotic civilizations really want to exterminate homo sapiens?  Why do we believe so firmly in that idea?  Is it guilt?  Do we feel that Earth needs to be disinfected from us human vermin?  Is the appeal of Battlestar Galactica and Hyperion Cantos from some deep rooted psychological condition?  Do we secretly fear machines?  Many of my hardcore science fiction friends hated the angelic implications in BSG, but lots of people ate it up.  We’re a nation that loves UFOs and angels.   We want our FTL spaceships and immortal spirits. 

Should science fiction play to this weakness of ours, or should it explore reality in the same way as science?  I can write off my enjoyment of these stories at the expense of believability by saying I’m just having fun.  They are Ben & Jerry’s New York Chocolate Chunk for my brain.  But I’ve always justified my science fiction diet by claiming it’s educational, but the sad fact is science fiction is no more real than a reality TV show.  I just have to accept that I’m getting fat on SF sweets.  I think I’ll go have some more Ben & Jerry’s, though.

JWH – 6/2/9