The Day That Newton Met the Aliens

I always enjoy the sixth week of the semester in Mechanics class.  It usually includes the story of Isaac Newton; though in recent years, I have been offering two alternative stories, and asking the students which one is more likely to be the correct one.

Story 1: The Traditional Version

As many literary accounts attest, Isaac Newton was a very bright young fellow from England, who, in his mid-twenties, in the late seventeenth century, had an interest in many areas of science, most notably astronomy.  It was not so much the taking of the astronomical data that he was interested in, but rather, the analysis of the data.

It is important to realize that at this point in human history, science did not really concern itself with the explaining of phenomena.  Science was about observation: experimentation and perhaps noting patterns in the data - science did not seek to establish a framework, a model, ie, a code that seems to govern all matter and interactions in the universe (this is what science has become today).  The young Newton was fascinated with the data, and, encouraged by other prominent scientists of the time, tried to explain the data.

The data as recorded by numerous astronomers stated that planets seemed to orbit the Sun in elliptical orbits.  This upset the religious hard-liners of the time (like, um, just about everyone), as many felt that God would prefer circles over ellipses (not the first or last time humanity felt the need to suggest to God what universe was best).  It may have even upset Newton himself, because he too was religious.  Still, Newton could not and would not place his personal beliefs above the evidence that was before him, and so began the most famous foray into science in human history.

All Newton really had to work with was the fact that orbits had elliptical shapes.  He also had, like all of us do, the ability to interact with his environment, and to observe how rain, snow, and, yes, apples, fall.  Here is where the story gets weird, perhaps even disturbing...

Newton proposes the Law of Universal Gravitation as well as certain laws of motion.  Some might call this 'playing God' - I suspect that some at the time actually did.  He then needed to check if these laws, as proposed, were consistent with the elliptical paths that orbiting bodies exhibited.  In other words, he needed to see if his theoretical framework matched the experimental data.  He ran into a problem: the only way to do this required a new branch of mathematics (Mathematicians of the day were extremely adept at geometry, but not much else).  So, he took it upon himself to invent Calculus.

Yes.  Some guy in his twenties ran into a problem in his pursuit of science, so instead of raising his arms and accepting this dead end, he invented arguably the most important branch of mathematics we currently know of.  And then, he used this new math to address the advanced ordinary differential vector equation that results when you combine Universal Gravitation with Newton's Second Law of Motion.  Orbital Mechanics experts today refer to this particular analysis as "The Two-Body Problem."

I recall being in Professor Misra's Orbital Mechanics course at McGill University.  During class #2, he showed the class the Two-Body Problem, and proceeded to solve it.  At that point in my young career, I had been exposed to Calculus and Linear Algebra for six years and had taken at least ten math courses that covered these branches of the discipline.  I recall thinking that it was a very tough problem to solve.  I still find it to be a tough problem today.

Apparently, Newton did manage to solve it, and all of his ground-breaking work in this area is described in a book as sacred as most any religious text: Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (published in 1687; an original copy is surely stored today somewhere behind glass).

Gravitation, laws for motion, mass, inertial frames, momentum - all of these concepts that are central to most any scientific pursuit were established by this one guy in a handful of years.  Today, any scientific analysis that does not involve the very small (microscopic), the very fast (>10% light speed), or the very dense (black holes), utilizes the framework described by Newton to the letter.

The End.

But there is another possibility...

Story 2: The Alternate Version (The Aliens Theory)

Isaac Newton was a very bright young fellow from England, who, in his mid-twenties, in the late seventeenth century, had an interest in many areas of science, most notably astronomy.  One night, he wished upon a star that he could be a famous scientist.

The next day, Newton was visited by aliens.  These aliens visited him quietly every night for the next several years.  They taught him Calculus and Mechanics, and eventually helped him write his famous Principia.  The aliens said, "Call it The Coolest Book by the Coolest Dude," but Newton insisted it get a different very long name.

The aliens were annoyed with Newton and his fancy book title, so they stopped visiting him once the book was published.

The End.

The way I see it, both stories are unbelievable.  The more I think about both stories, the less comfortable I feel in asserting that one story is more likely than the other.  I suppose all of the historical accounts point to Story 1, but I ask this question in all seriousness: How could a person have accomplished that without outside help? 

I am bewildered not only by the creativity of thought it took to propose those laws and the genius required to develop the math that it takes to assess them; I am equally stunned by the instinct Newton had to even suggest that mathematical equations could be used to describe the world and to predict what happens next.  Scientists today accept this to be true, but a universe could just as easily, at least in theory, have zero mathematical framework.  That Newton did all of this despite the reservations of the Church, as well as his own, is just icing on the cake.

Many historians today would describe Isaac Newton as one of, if not the most important and influential figures in human history.  And, I think that such a designation is warranted regardless of which of the two stories is actually the true one.

You Are a Miracle

Truth be told, I cry in public sometimes.  I estimate that 95% of this crying comes from uncontrollable laughter, which, for me, is one of life's greatest gifts, like mango and avocado, and also tortilla chips dipped in guacamole consisting of mango mixed with avocado.

The other 5%, well, that is another kind of tears, sometimes out of sadness, but not always.  This variety of tears can be rendered uncontrollable with well-timed music (or poorly-timed, depending on one's desire to cry).  Films like E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial - I just get so triggered by the music at the end.  If I watch Elliott hug E.T. good-bye on mute, I'm just like "Bye E.T.," but turn up the volume, and I'm a mess.  Don't even get me started on the ending of Coco (the combination of my wife's tears and my own required more tissues than were available).

There is yet another variety of tears, which show up during public speaking (Yay!  I mean, public speaking is just so easy otherwise).  Giving a eulogy at a funeral (or trying to) can bring tears to even the most hardened individual.  As a 'soft' individual, I am batting a perfect 1.000 for crying during eulogies at this time of writing, and I see no chance of that success rate changing.

The weird thing is that I probably cried most trying to deliver a speech at my own wedding (insert marriage joke here).  Honestly, it was such a joyful occasion, and yet, I simply fell apart in the moment.  I have come to realize that I cry not really due to sadness, but actually, due to truth.

I find that truth has the power to overcome me.  If I am standing at a podium, speaking about stuff I do not truly believe in, it will not be touching to anyone listening, and it will not make me feel any kind of emotion other than, perhaps, boredom.  Words that are true to me, and deeply meaningful to me, are hard for me to speak out loud.  That is why I will not record an audio-book for this or anything else I ever write.

This brings me to this short piece, which I will never attempt to read aloud again, because there is just no point.  It reduces me to a sobbing mess, even in the absence of background music.  I remember feeling pride as I wrote it, and then nearly cried trying to read it to my class.  Then I really cried when I tried to read it at a community 'spoken-word' event.  So, I am done.

Feel free to read these words aloud to someone you love...

You Are a Miracle 

"Consider all of the extremely improbable events that led to your being here today...

After the Big Bang, matter needed to become complex enough to form stars.  These stars burned for billions of years, and it was necessary that many of them ended their life cycle in supernova events, which led to the formation of new stars, more complex matter, and planets that orbit these stars.  Of these planets, some were in habitable zones - not too hot, not too cold.  For life to evolve, a conducive chemical soup was necessary, and then, perhaps the most unlikely event of all: one that synthesized a single-celled organism.  Then came evolution, whereby more and more complex organisms evolved - each necessary species along the line managed to avoid extinction before its critical mutation that led to the next branch in the tree.  Finally, the human race emerges (perhaps the most fragile form of all life thus far), and manages to survive millennia of hardship.  And if that were not enough, of all of the billions of humans to have come and gone, your parents met, and pro-created you.

How can you not feel at least a little bit special?  How can you see your existence as anything less than a miracle?

I think this is what is most beautiful about life: a seemingly endless set of possibilities out of which one actual outcome emerges.  I cannot help but have a certain affinity for each and every one of these improbable outcomes.

In this frame of mind, everything is worthy of attention, every topic deserves to be studied.  It seems to me that this is the place where science should begin."

Politics Through a Scientific Lens

There are many parallels between the world of politics and that of the physical sciences, but some major differences, of course, too.  The upcoming election in my province of residence within Canada (Quebec), as well as the unstable and too often brutal reality in many other jurisdictions across the globe, has brought politics to the forefront of this engineer's brain.

To be honest, when I turned eighteen, and obtained the right to vote, I had little interest in politics (I probably could not have named my province's Premier at the time).  My feeling is that today, this age group is more worldly than I was.  However, until we truly grow roots where we live, be it through having kids or buying real estate, politics are usually quite far from one's mind.

As an adolescent with an interest in science, I had a kind of skewed view of what people should focus on.  My father explained to me that not everyone needed to know science, but everyone needed to be involved in democracy, be politically literate, and cast a vote.  I thought that if the choice was one or the other, people should be scientifically literate.

Now that I am older and hopefully wiser, I see that we were both wrong.  People should have a minimum literacy with both science and politics.  If we do not understand the basic science behind an energy crisis or global warming, how can we establish who has the best energy or environmental policies?  We certainly cannot trust most journalists to inform us - for two reasons: (1) they often work for a media company with a political agenda and (2) they rarely possess a basic background in science themselves.

The most interesting contrast between science and politics that I see is as follows...

2013 Year in Review

As I usually do at the end of a year, this post summarizes some of the exciting science and engineering stories of 2013 and provides a quick status of this blog, The Engineer's Pulse.

The Relativity of Religion

On June 30, 1905, Albert Einstein proposed that the Universe worked much different than the way anyone alive had supposed it did.  In short, Einstein’s theory of special relativity claims that space and time are not absolute quantities, but are rather malleable, relative scales of measurement.  This astonishing statement, which has not been disproven in the 105 years that have passed since its inception, should boggle your mind unless you have been aware of it for some time.  As I tell my Modern Physics students, if special relativity does not disturb you to the core the first time you hear it, it is because you did not really hear it.  The theory, which has attained law status, goes against everything we observe in our day to day lives.  For this reason, special relativity, which shows that classical physics only applies perfectly to relatively stationary objects, went unnoticed for so long. 

It should be noted that Einstein did not notice that time dilates for two objects moving at relative speeds, he just had a strange intuition that light was special, and wished to understand it better.  His journey towards this understanding required a certain leap of faith.  When Einstein was on this historic path of discovery, he told his friends that he wanted to get inside the head of God, to which they replied, “Could you tell him to pick my 6/49 numbers?"

We Must Always Question Science

I am currently taking my Physics students through a quick synopsis of modern physics.  I have to catch myself on occasion from stating any relatively recent science developments as though they are factual.  The stories behind modern scientific discoveries are factual, but we must not be too quick to dub any finding a scientific law.

What in the scientific realm can we say we are completely certain of?  A scientific law is a rule that, in the eyes of the scientific community, has not yet been broken.  In science, we begin with a hypothesis or an observation, and devise an experiment that will test it.  Eventually, a theory becomes a law if it appears to stand the test of time.  It is easy to disprove a law; it just takes one example.  It is nearly impossible to prove a law to be true.  Mathematics is a relatively pure and exact discipline, and is borrowed by the science community on a regular basis.  Science is not a pure discipline in the sense that there is always human error associated with it.  By error, I do not mean calculation error, although there are plenty of those too. 

Fundamental scientific errors are made when the experiments are devised as a means of proving something.  This process is very difficult, as it requires a particular setup, and, inevitably, certain assumptions must be made.  Essentially, all experiments require that the scope of what is being tested be narrowed.  Although tempting, it is dangerous to expand the experiment’s results as applicable to other test setups.  A scientist’s greatest desire is to generalize a concept, but it is a leap that must be based on further experimentation, not a hunch.