Archive for the ‘Science’ Category

On the Fundamental Nature of the Universe

Thursday, February 18th, 2010

A Rational, Logical View of the Universe is Depressing

I pride myself on my rationality.  Whenever I have an idea, I try my best to check it for unsupported axioms, and I try to make sure it is consistent, both with itself and with other ideas that I know make sense.   Years ago, I concluded that God, as described by Catholicism, could not possibly exist. There was too much suffering in the universe for that to make sense, I thought.  I even believed that arguing for the existence of a God was in some way justifying all the suffering. If God is all powerful, I reasoned, he could simply wipe away all suffering and make it impossible for us to be unhappy. Because there is definitely suffering in the world, then anyone who believes in a just God must also believe that the suffering is somehow just, because a just god would not allow injustice.

I thought a lot about suffering and pain and problems in the world. My understanding of science told me that the universe is made up of lifeless particles interacting according to simple mathematical rules, and that humans are biological robots made from those particles, competing with each other, and with other organisms, for the limited resources that the world has to offer.  As I saw it, we were either going to exhaust all available resources and make our world completely uninhabitable, or we were going to destroy each other through warfare. I saw the world as a horrendous place, and instead of viewing my life as a gift to be treasured, I saw it as a curse inflicted upon me, and often wished I could simply disappear.   When you think that the universe is fundamentally an awful place, it’s hard to be happy, even for a little while.

All of this has changed for me, though, largely thanks to my girlfriend, Megan.   We met almost exactly a year ago, and as I got to know her I soon realized she saw the world in a different way. To her, the world is a beautiful place and life is a gift. At first I figured she was just deluding herself like everyone else, but I soon started thinking she might be right. She saw life not as a curse but as a wonderful blessing, a gift, and this view of life made her happy, gave her peace of mind, and helped her not to worry about stupid things that really don’t matter.

I wanted to share Megan’s optimistic view of the universe, but I felt that science made it very clear that the optimism was completely unwarranted.  I recently realized, though, that perhaps my understanding of science was incorrect.

Or Perhaps Not?

Everything in the universe that has momentum has a wavelength. It’s called the de Broglie wavelength, and it’s a result of quantum mechanics.  Simply put, everything in the universe, from the smallest atom, to very the galaxy we live in, is vibrating at a specific frequency. Not only are there spatial vibrations; light is also a wave characterized by frequency.  Every object that has a temperature emits light; the frequency of this light is determined by the object’s temperature.  This light is called ‘black body radiation‘, and everything that has a temperature emits it. On top of the spatial vibration due to the de Broglie wavelength and the electromagnetic vibration due to black body radiation, scientists also think objects with mass emit gravity waves, although these have yet to be detected.

So everything in the universe is sending off all kinds of different waves.  The waves that are emitted by a given object are not random, though, they have specific frequencies.  A question arises: do you know of anything that could be described as collection of waves with carefully selected frequencies? Sure you do – it’s called music. The universe is not some giant computer simulating biological robots competing for scare resources; it’s a musical instrument. The very laws of physics that govern our universe and make it work are designed so that everything is vibrating and giving off  different waves.

The interesting part hasn’t even come yet. If the universe is playing a song, who’s listening? What does it sound like? We are all part of the universe, which means we are all listening to the song.  Every bit of information you have about the outside world comes to you through your nerves. A nerve is a special type of cell that can fire a chemical pulse. If a nerve is stimulated beyond a certain threshold, such as a nerve responding to the temperature sensing a temperature above 90 degrees Fahrenheit, it fires a pulse, and that pulse goes to simulate the other nerves to which the firing nerve is connected.  After a nerve fires, it has to wait a bit before it can fire again. The minimum time a nerve needs to wait before it can fire again determines the frequency at which the nerve fires.  A nerve is like a string on a musical instrument that can be plucked, and when it is plucked, it plays a specific frequency to your brain.

So the universe is playing a song, and your nerves are translating electromagnetic waves entering your eyes, and sound waves entering your ears, and heat entering your body,  the music of the universe, into a music that your brain understands.  Your brain listens to this music, and it responds by sending signals along various nerves, causing your muscles to contract and your vocal chords to move. How does your brain send signals to your body? it causes nerves to fire signals to your muscles.  As I explained before, a nerve is like a string that can be plucked because it can fire at a specific frequency and is either firing or not.  Your brain is singing a song to your body, causing it to move and manipulate the universe, changing the song the universe sings back to you.  If you go to a house with a dial-up connection to the internet, you can pick up the phone while a computer is connected to the internet via a modem, and you can listen to the computer singing to the internet service provider.  Your brain sings to your body in the same way.

So each of us is engaged in a duet with the entire universe.  Everything you see and feel and touch, every sensation you experience, is a note in the song the universe is playing for you.  Everything you do, every action to take, every muscle you contract and each word you speak is a note in the song that you are playing for the entire universe to hear.  What does this all mean?

You can’t predict anything with this theory;  and because it doesn’t predict anything (that I can think of) we can’t really test it.   Is it true? I’m not sure.  The thing is, it’s completely consistent with a logical, science-based understanding of the world, but it’s also beautiful. When you realize that your life is a song you are playing for the entire universe, how could you not want to make that song as beautiful and inspiring as possible? How could you not want to learn to master your instrument and learn all of its techniques? Just looking at the science, with a strictly rational perspective, you can be incredibly positive about the nature of the universe and about your own life. When you realize that the universe is playing you a song, you can start to listen for it, to understand the chord structure and the melody and to enjoy it in a way that you never would have imagined.

When you hear the song of the universe, you realize that even though life has pain in it, and that bad things can happen to you, focusing on those bad things is completely missing the point.  Living life with a negative focus, complaining about problems in your life and in the world is like being a concert violinist who is playing her most important performance ever, but instead of doing her best to play her instrument with passion, doing her utmost to make the song as romantic and wonderful as possible, to play a song fit to be the song of all existence, she’s fixated on whether the guy two seats over isn’t maybe just a little out of tune.  When you live your life fixated on bad things that might happen and things that hurt in the past and what pain could lay ahead, you’re missing the whole song. You’re not playing it as best as you can, and you’re taking away from the whole.

Because I thought the world was a horrible place, I thought about suicide a lot.  If I killed myself, I knew it would hurt a lot of other people but I also knew that it would prevent me from suffering any more pain.  I realize now how stupid this way of thinking is. Imagine a beautiful concert, the orchestra playing the most wonderful piece ever, and right in the middle of the song, one of the violinists cuts the strings off his violin.  Not only will his part stop abruptly, but the snapping of the strings will make an awful noise which will distract all the other musicians; they may get so upset about what he did that they miss their queues and they forget to play their parts.  Do I really want my last action to be screwing up the song of the universe?

Your death is not the end of your song, because the song you are playing right now is altering the physical structure of the universe, changing the way in which the universe vibrates. The song you play resonates on long after you’ve played your last note. It plays on in the ideas you’ve created, and in the things you’ve built. It plays on in your family and the people who loved you when you were still playing; we hear the songs we play for each other and inspire each other to create beautiful new melodies.  The melodies and phrases that you create are shared and passed on, enriching the song of the universe long after you’ve breathed your last.

Your life is a song that you are playing through your actions, your contribution to the song of all existence.  What reason could you give, what excuse do you have, not to make it the best song you possibly can?

Posted in Happiness, Philosophy, Science | Comments

On Genetics, Programming Languages, and God

Friday, June 26th, 2009

The genetic code is the programming language used to make living organisms.  Right now, biologists are attempting to ‘reverse engineer’ this genetic code, in order to determine how it works and to make changes to it. I (in my infinite wisdom) think they’re going about this the wrong way.

To understand why, we must first delve into the languages of computers. When humans program computers, they usually write in “high level languages”, which look like a series of mathematical formulas and instructions.  Here is an example of a simple function to compute the nth Fibonacci Number, written in a high level language called C:

//computes the nth fibonacci number
unsigned int fibonacci(unsigned int n)
{
	unsigned int term1 = 1;
	unsigned int term2 = 1;
        unsigned int result = term2;
 
	unsigned int i = 1;
	while (i < n)
	{
		result = term1 + term2;
		term1 = term2;
		term2 = result;
		i = i + 1;
	}
 
	return result;
}

The Computer cannot understand this program as it is written. It must be translated into instructions that make sense to the computer. This  translation process is called compiling. The compiled program will look different depending upon what computer it is compiled on, but all computers basically operate the same way: they can read from and write to memory locations, and they can add, multiply, divide, and subtract numbers.  Here is an English-language translation of what the compiled Fibonacci function might look like. Provided to make things more clear is a mapping of variable names to their memory locations:

n 0
term1 1
term2 2
result 3
i 4 
# set the value in location 1 to 1
# set the value in location 2 to 1
# set the value in location 3 to the value stored in location 1
# set the value in location 4 to the 1
# if the value in location 4 is not less than the value in location 0, go to instruction 11
# set the value in location 3 to the result of the value in 1 plus the value in 2
# set the value in location 1 to the value in location 2
# set the value in location 2 to the value in location 3
# set the value in location 4 to the value in location 4 plus the value 1
# jump to instruction 5
# return the value in location 3

Each of the above instructions would be represented with a single word, which on a top-of-the-line modern computer is 64 bits of information. The human genetic code is also a sequence of simple instructions, interpreted not by a central processing unit, but by intracellular organisms.  Instead of dealing with changing values in memory locations, the genetic code’s instructions are for amino acids used to build proteins.  There are approximately 6 billion instructions in the human genome, making it roughly 10 million times as complex as our simple Fibonacci function.

Notice that the machine language program is  no where near as easy to understand as the C program. If I gave you a machine language program with 100 million lines of code, you’d have a heck of a time trying to figure out how it worked.  Poking around and changing single instructions, then determining what happens when you change those instructions probably wouldn’t be a good start. Unfortunately, as I understand things, that is exactly how biologists are proceeding.  They are stepping through the genetic code piece by piece,  using experiments to try and figure out what different sequences of instructions do.

There is, I think, a better approach. The key to understanding this approach is a simple fact about computer programming: It’s easier (and more fun) to write your own program than it is to read someone else’s program and figure out what it’s doing. Instead of trying to reverse engineer existing DNA code, which evolved over millions of years and is therefore probably extremely convoluted and hard to follow, we’d be better off trying to ‘write’ our own organisms.  Biologists could start by writing DNA ‘programs’ to code simple proteins.  After getting good at this, they could invent a ‘high level language’  for DNA programming (AKA GeneticC) which could be used to speed up the development progress. The next step would be to write a single cellular organism, and then more complicated organisms.

Interestingly enough, this process of building our own organisms could provide a lot of insight into the question of whether there is some being who designed us.  Once we have a better understanding of genetic programming,  we could look at the quality of the code that builds human beings. If it’s clean, neat, and straightforward,  that would be strong evidence of a creator at work. If it’s messy, garbled, hacked together, redundant and nonsensical in parts, we could conclude that the code evolved over time.  Either that, or god is a perl scripter.

Posted in Code, Computer Science, Philosophy, Science | Comments

Credo

Thursday, August 14th, 2008

I believe in myself.  I believe that the mind has incredible power over the body, and that eating breakfast every day is good for you.  I believe in small miracles. I believe in the power of free markets to improve the human condition. I believe that human history is a story of progress, and that the future will be better than the past. I believe that family is the single most important thing there is on this planet. I believe in a thing called love, but I don’t really know what it is or how it works. I believe that peace will  come to the world, albeit gradually.  I believe low pocket pairs are rarely worth the trouble they can cause you.  I believe that strawberry jelly is superior to grape jelly, especially vis a vis peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I believe a first kiss should be as romantic as possible. I believe in following big dreams, no matter how likely you are to obtain them.  I believe in opening the door for others. I believe that not all cultures are ‘equal’ in any real sense, and that the values a culture holds effect that culture’s economies and social freedoms.  I believe in taking responsibility for my actions, and ensuring that others do the same. I believe a man should take his fate into his own hands, whether or not he has the ability to do so. I believe that life is 10% what you’ve been given, and 90% what you make of what you’ve been given.  I believe in preventative maintenance.  I do believe Jones Soda to be absolutely delicious.  I believe in making small differences, especially when they don’t seem to matter at all.  I believe that, somehow, we are all one. I believe that sometimes, the only solution to a problem is violence. I believe that game theory is one of the most underutilized mathematical constructs. I believe that P will eventually be found to encompass all of NP, but that NP-Complete problems will still be effectively intractable. I believe python to be an amazingly useful language. I believe that computer programs are beautiful in of themselves, regardless of what they do.  I believe that the scientific method has been phenomenally successful  in helping us divine the nature of our world. I believe organized religions like modern Christianity have spread good works all over the world. I believe Islam is fundamentally incompatible with a Free, Democratic society. I believe in challenging common wisdom: Can you really boil a frog to death by gradually increasing the heat? I sincerely doubt it. I believe that saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ make a small difference in someone’s day. I believe that small differences can make a big difference. I believe that voting is irrational. I believe it’s OK to be irrational every now and them.  I believe the world was created by a phenomenally intelligent entity, as an act of supreme love.  And in the end, I believe that everything will work itself out.

Posted in Computer Science, Economics, Observations, Philosophy, Politics, Programming, Science | Comments