Carried Away by Music

... Imagine there’s no music
I wonder if you can
No notes or rhythms to move us
A tragedy for man ...

Will art be man’s enduring legacy?  A recent discussion with one of my best friends, Peter Katz, urged me to ponder this question further.  The two of us usually have a lot to talk about, because he is a professional musician who is fascinated by science, and I am a scientist who is fascinated by music.

Peter and I met in the year 2000, when we played together in a Dave Matthews Band cover band called “Spoon”.  He sang, I drummed, and to this day, those Spoon days sit in my mind among my favourite adolescent memories.  Peter is a Montreal native, but moved to Toronto ten years ago to pursue a degree in Theatre, and was bit by the performing bug.  For the better part of the past decade, Peter has been busy writing a wonderful collection of songs, and winning the hearts of audiences throughout Canada and Europe.

How much does Peter Katz tour?  Toronto is where his home is, but he spent only two months living there in 2010.

I had the delightful opportunity to drum in his band in 2004, but logistics brought that to an end.  Peter has been performing as a solo artist in recent years, and brings more passion to his performance than just about any full band I have ever witnessed. 

For years, people of the press have been referring to him as a budding singer songwriter with a great deal of talent.  While his talent as a singer, poet, and guitar player is substantial, he is no longer merely “budding”.  A recent Peter Katz show that I attended at La Sala Rosa was a showcase of an artist in full bloom.

Misinforming About Global Warming

This morning, I was planning on posting a pleasant article describing Watson’s dominance on Jeopardy! (for those of you that missed it, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter had a two-day total of around $20,000 apiece, whereas Watson surpassed $77,000).  However, my mood is less than pleasant, and there is something I need to get off of my chest.  I don’t get angry very often, but yesterday morning I was fuming.

On February 16, 2011, a local radio morning show featured a con-artist posing as a scientist.  Larry Bell, a man with no expertise in climate science, was pedalling his book, which claims that global warming is a hoax.  It is not illegal to deliberately misinform the public, but if it were, Bell would be behind bars.

I firmly believe that those who mislead the public intentionally should be made accountable for their actions.  People like this Larry character move the world several steps backwards.  Scientists, rather than focusing on the science, must spend their time correcting the cranks, like damage control.  It is like when a teacher must focus his efforts disciplining a student rather than teaching content.  Bell is an adult, who should not need a parent to hold his hand.  At the very least, Bell should not be allowed to publish anything in the future.  I believe in free speech, but my disdain for propaganda trumps it.

As you can clearly see, I am less than pleased with Mr. Bell, a Professor at the University of Houston.  Yes, you read that correctly: this man teaches students – what could be more dangerous than a crook with an audience?  He wrote a book about global warming.  Does this make any sense, considering that the man is a Professor of Architecture?

The Love Function

Typically, my semesters are spent teaching Physics courses.  The past two semesters have been a little bit different for me, with some Mathematics courses thrown into the mix.  A few weeks ago, in my Calculus course, one student, we will call “Jimmy”, asked if math could be used for something useful.

I explained that math was the language of science, and science affects us every day.  Also, business requires math to predict where it will go based on where it has been and other factors.  The social sciences require a deep understanding of statistics to make sense of our lives.

Jimmy said that business and science are good, but not all that important to him at this stage of his life.  “Can math help us find love?” he asked.  What an excellent question.

Jeopardy is Elementary for IBM's Watson

Mark this coming Monday on your calendar: history will be made.  On Valentine’s Day, as you are sitting down to dinner with the love of your life, make sure that your PVR is set to record Jeopardy!.  From the 14^th to the 16^th of February, Jeopardy! will feature its first non-human contestant.  IBM’s most ambitious creation, an intelligent computer, will compete on TV’s longest running game show against its two top champions: Ken Jennings, who won on seventy-four consecutive outings and Brad Rutter, the show’s top money earner.

IBM’s super computer was affectionately named Watson, after the company’s founder (not Sherlock’s sidekick).  Watson is just a jumble of silicon, wires, and coding, yet it represents a major step towards artificial intelligence.  By today’s standards, it is not a significant accomplishment to build a computer that stores massive amounts of information, and accesses it on a whim.  What sets Watson apart from other super computers is its ability to understand a question and generate an appropriate answer.  Of course, to succeed in Jeopardy!, it must comprehend a question and generate the correct answer, but it amounts to the same thing.

A Mechanical Pulse

Can we synthesize a beating heart directly from stem cells?  Did Dorothy’s friend, the Tin Man, have a heart?  Does blood flow through the veins of computer engineers?  Not yet, yes, and not until proven otherwise.

The term pulse has taken on a biological meaning in popular culture.  It is used to describe the gush of blood sent streaming from the heart throughout the body.  You can feel your pulse rate by pressing against your neck.   Fictional characters always check the wrist to see if someone is dead, but the neck seems like a more reliable indicator (if I were a doctor using the wrist to be fancy, I would probably pronounce some living people dead).

In science, a pulse takes on a more general meaning.  It is a single disturbance that propagates through a medium or material.  The source of the pulse may be a beating heart, but it can just as easily be a loud horn.  The loud horn creates a sound of a certain intensity, which travels in all directions through the medium of air.  Sound waves may appear to be mystical, but it is just a game of broken telephone between neighbouring air molecules; information, in this case, longitudinal vibrations on a molecular scale, is being transported. 

Obama Calls for Science

At the 2011 State of the Union Address, President Barack Obama issued a very clear challenge to his nation: “Win the future.”  While the future is something that all nations will share in, it is true that the U.S. does like to have the lion’s share.  Realistically, even if America begins to wake up from its decade-long hibernation, when dreams and ambition were replaced by a sense of entitlement, it will have to share the honour of economic superpower with other nations like China.

Applying a Safety Factor in your Life

Nearly all engineering designs serve a purpose.  When they fail to serve the purpose for which they were designed, they are considered to have failed.  Failure is an expectation, as nothing has an infinite lifetime.  As such, all engineering designs have an expected or intended lifetime after they are built and delivered, which may be thought of as a best-before date. 

Things with moving parts, like cars, may have a lifetime of fifteen years and 200,000 km.  That is because a very popular mode of failure is fatigue.  The strength of a material actually decreases when it is stressed, even at low values.  On the other hand, static objects, like chairs, tend to survive longer than is required – typically, the paint will fade long before a leg breaks.  A chair tends to go out of style before it falls apart.  This is not surprising: whenever it is possible, engineers apply a high safety factor to their designs.

Cultural Assimilation: It is the Zeroth Law

There are several laws of thermodynamics, all of which have applications across the various scientific fields.  These laws also have deep philosophical implications, with the second law leading the charge in this regard.  I have already written two articles describing the first law (energy balance).  I will soon cover the depths of the second law, but I feel the need to discuss the most fundamental law beforehand.  Strangely enough, there is a law that comes before the first law.

 

The zeroth law of thermodynamics states that if two systems are in thermal equilibrium with an external system, then they are also in thermal equilibrium with one another.  Thermal equilibrium means that heat is not being exchanged between two systems.  When two systems having different temperatures come into contact with one another, they will inevitably experience heat transfer.  Once thermal conduction is complete, the collective system will arrive in thermal equilibrium.

Balancing Relationships and Design Parameters

We all would like to get it just right.  Our soup should not be too hot so as to avoid “leather tongue”, or too cold, because cold chicken soup does nothing for the soul.  Driving either too fast or too slow on the highway is illegal and dangerous.  Shoot the basketball too softly and it does not reach the rim, too hard at it clangs off the backboard.  There is a narrow range of force and angle for which you will score, and with practice, you can find that optimized scenario with regularity.

Goldilocks is not the only person interested in finding the optimal bed or porridge.  It is in fact the primary concern for an engineer to look at a design problem, and optimize its parameters.  The goal is to design a prototype whose safety, mass, volume, cost, and delivery time fall within an appropriate domain.  The optimization problem that ensues may be thought of as a search for balance.  A computer scientist may view this as an interpolation algorithm, perhaps a bisection code, being run until a satisfactory solution is found.

What is Time?

Most people are aware that we live in a Universe in which we observe four dimensions.

The three dimensions of space allow us to see three-dimensional shapes, like cubes and spheres.  If we lived in a world of two-dimensional space, we would instead see squares and circles with zero thickness.  Stephen Hawking explained long ago that such a two-dimensional space could not support life, as a two-dimensional being could not both eat and defecate.  A shape with two openings could not hold itself together, and would fall apart or bleed to death (try to draw it and you will get the point).

Of course, the fourth dimension of our Universe is time.  Time is an essential ingredient in the space-time continuum.  Without the dimension of time, the 3D shapes we see would not change.  Everything would be steady state, and there would be no need for the word transient.  Put simply, what is time, but the entity preventing everything from occurring at once?