Lisa Randall "Knocking on Heaven's Door"

What you see depends on how you look. Showing a picture of the Eiffel Tower, theoretical physicist and author Lisa Randall begins by demonstrating the deceptively simple idea of scale.

Example: because humans have until recently only used the visible spectrum to observe the universe, knowing that it’s 10²⁷m in size omits crucial information. Finiteness or infiniteness cannot be determined - that’s just how long the earliest photons has been traveling before emptying into our eyes.

Today, she’s going to talk about what we can’t see.   

“As you probe at smaller and smaller scales you don’t find new objects, but new laws.”

I’m struck by the argument she’s making for theorizing, conceptualizing, and its importance to discovery. It’s the same force used by artists, for example, but their conclusions are deeply meaningful rather than deeply independent.  

She transitions to the Large Hadron Collider, which is now using great energies to produce data that can be collected and matched - potentially - to theory. The best matches add to the knowledge of matter at the smallest scales.

A couple LHC facts: it can reproduce a “tenth of a trillionth of a vacuum” and produce a cold “only 1.9 degrees above absolute zero,” which is colder than space.

What can physicists learn using this massive machine? She suggests a few: how particles acquire mass, why gravity is so weak (think about it, the whole Earth is tugging at you right now, yet you can still jump up and down), suggest (or disprove) the symmetry for space and time, or add new dimensions to space and time.

This is an interesting thought: “Mass is not an intrinsic property of particles, otherwise physics would not make sense.”

The LHC has just this summer produced very good evidence for one of the theorized particles, the Higgs boson. Physicists believe that particles acquire mass by by interacting with the Higgs’ field. An excitation of the field produces the boson.   

As for other dimensions, why even consider that possibility? There are a lot of things we don’t know about until we get to the scales that make the possibility meaningful. Relativity, the science of the very big, is in theory compatible with any number of scales. There are connections that we couldn't have anticipated. Other dimensions might explain why gravity is so weak by suggesting, for example, that these dimensions drain, to use a bad metaphor, gravity from the three dimensions with which we’re familiar. If so, experimental physicists hope of find so-called Kaluza–Klein particles, which would provide evidence of interaction between the colossally massive and fantastically small, and perhaps thereby unify the two into a single physical theory.  

She ends with a quote from Steve Jobs’ well known Stanford graduation speech.

“You can’t connect the dots by looking forward, but only by looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”

As a theorist, her role is to suggest where the dots may connect.

Wayne

Baratunde Thurston: Dear America, can we talk?

Dear America, can we talk?

Entrepreneur, comedian, former digital editor of The Onion and author of "How to Be Black," Baratunde Thurston delivered one punchline after another at an afternoon presentation at the IdeaFestival, poking fun at our expectations and what can, but often isn't, talked about in the United States - race.

Whether is was showing clips of his black friends describing when "they first learned that they were black," or joking that his panel of blackness experts included one white Canadian, "for a control," he brought down the house with one wry observation after another. Those of a certain age will remember the historic television show that traced the African American experience in America. But "Roots" was never like this. Was Baratunde serious? Oh yeah. Ernest? Never. I was reminded of one public broadcasting piece that I read when I knew that Baratunde would be returning to the IdeaFestival in 2012. It seemed a bit too studied, and I blogged that "PBS examines blackness expert Baratunde Thurston, finds him 'totally unpretentious, candid young man.'"

We can say in humor what needs to be said without the insincere nods to the wider, stilted conversation about race, and still stop short of abdication, of failing to be who we are as individuals. "How to Be Black" is about individuality too often obscured by race, by education, by social status and by all the other boxes into which we put people. Baratunde excels at demolishing boxes while leaving the contents intact. It's a rare skill.

Clearly, "there are ways we talk about race that we pursue that are not productive." My book "gives people permission to play."

Wayne

Image: Geoff Oliver Bugbee

Creative Cap artists WOW, again

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time - Thomas Merton

Invariably one the highlights of the IdeaFestival, Creative Capital returned once again with visionary artists, four to be exact: Liz Cohen, Sam Van Aken, Hasan Elahi and Tahir Hemphill.

It's impossible to capture the excitement, insight and unexpected connections made by artists of this caliber, so in the ridiculously-too-brief summary on offer here, I'll include links to representative work from each. Please read more.

And make plans to be at IdeaFestival 2013!

Liz Cohen, Explores the tension between individuality and culture, memorably in her work with a jacked-up Trabant and El Camino, for which she taught herself to be a mechanic. Ultimately, neither “could not forget where it had come from.”

Sam Van Aken (shown here) literally created a Tree of Life, grafting 40 varieties of fruit onto a single tree. The result in bloom is breathtaking. 

Having been stopped on numerous occasions by security at airport, Hasan Elahi began to think, of course, about the creative elements of always being, whether figuratively or literally, in sight. Sardonically: “it was a really unbalanced relationship,” he said. "Why is it only the FBI that should know exactly what I’m doing?" So Elahi decided to stream his whereabouts to avoid the travel unpleasantries. The result has been “incredibly specific and incredibly general at the same time. By putting it all out there, I’ve lived this anonymous life....”

And with bemusement: “I’ve just celebrated my ten year anniversary with the FBI.... I simply don’t know anymore when I’m working and when I’m not.” Read this Wired story about the project.

Tahir Hemphill was raised to be an engineer by his family, so all the art he does is informed by science. His cultural research uses, for example, interactive mapping software to network the words used in Hip Hop. “Knowing how to listen to Hip Hop,” one of the required skills to get the most out of the music, has never more vivid. His "Hip Hop Word Count" visualizes all the threads between mentions of "Champagne," for example, pointing out the unusual connections between artists - including at least one beef between a pair of artists.

Again, FAR TOO short. Please follow some the links to read more about these visionaries, these documentarians, these forecasters. 

Wayne

Cynthia Lowen: Bullying at odds with human nuture

Showing deeply moving scenes from her documentary, Bully, Cynthia Lowen brought the crowd at IdeaFestival 2012 to a hushed silence on numerous occasions this afternoon.  

No, she does not believe we are hard-wired to bully - and explained why in her remarks.

This tweet during the session stood out for me.

"Bullying is in fact AT ODDS with our human nature. We need teamwork to survive" - Jeff Rider, @cloudwrangler on twitter.

Easily - my view - one of the more memorable presentations in recent IdeaFestival history. See the documentary!

Wayne

Image: Geoff Oliver Bugbee

The Hippies that Saved Physics: "Wrong in productive ways"

How did we get to a world where quantum mechanics makes the covers of national magazines and popular literature? You might be surprised.

Kaiser begins his talk by tracing a massive public effort to recruit new students to physics and science in the 1940’s, ’50’s and ‘60’s. The peak, preceded by a dramatic and steep climb, occurred in 1970, and was followed by an equally steep decline in national enrollment. Suddenly, there were far more qualified science graduates than there were available jobs.

Shortly thereafter, a group of these disillusioned young physicists, which subsequently called themselves the “Fundamental Fysiks Group,” was formed. They quickly homed in on one new discovery.

“Bell’s Theorem” proposed some strange physics indeed. The basic idea: measuring the property of one entangled particle, let’s say Particle A, instantaneously affects the property of entangled Particle B. It’s sometimes called “spooky action at a distance,” or quantum entanglement.

The newly formed group focused intensely on that counterintuitive result. They were among the earliest to connect the results to popular culture, and were doing this at Berkeley, not in the staid redoubts of learning such as Cambridge or Princeton.

The Fundamental Fysiks Group ALSO began to wonder if there was a connection with mental telepathy, even arranging for Yuri Geller to be tested. Along the way they attracted patrons like the CIA and New Age Gurus like Werner Erhard.

The American Physical Society’s journal, Physical Review, was not amused, and refused at one point to publish more articles on Bells’ Theorem if it meant giving more ink to the Fundamental Fysiks Group.

But the group was succeeding in popularize a real physical phenomenon, no matter how counter-intuitive it seemed.

Despite the odd tangents the group took, it did, however, prove to the rest of its counterparts in physics departments that Bells’ Theorem did not violate principles of relativity worked out by Einstein decades earlier.

Kaiser on the “Hippies that Saved Physics:” They:

Conducted first experimental tests of Bell’s theorem
First proved that it was compatible with the earlier discoveries of relativity.
Helped bring foundational physics back into classrooms.

Let me be clear, Kaiser says, the members of the Fundamental Fysics Group “were wrong far more often than they were right, but they were wrong in productive ways.”
 
Wayne

Image: Geoff Oliver Bugbee