Wraenna

Murray Shanahan finishes his book The Technological Singularity like this:

As I watch a wren through the kitchen window, clinging to a hawthorn bush, I hope that we never lose sight of the things we already have that still matter, whatever the future holds.

This sends me back to Birds Britannica by Mark Cocker and Richard Mabey, who quote Max Nicholson:

The wren cannot adequately be described as a bird of woodlands, gardens, field, moors, marshes, cliffs or wastelands — although it is all of these — but must be looked at rather as a bird of cervices and crannies, of stems and twigs and branches, of woodpiles and fallen trees, of hedge-bottoms and banks, walls and boulders, wherever these may occur. Wrens cut across, or rather scramble under, the imaginary boundaries we are accustomed to draw between different types of country.

Cocker and Mabey also quote Jeremy Mynott on the St Kilda wren:

The bird is surely the wild spirit of the place. After all it has been there some 5000 years, whereas human occupation is thought to have lasted a 1000 years. Its piercing song can already be heard from among the rocks as you first approach the islands by boat, even above the noise of crashing waves and the cries of a million seabirds. The wren seems elemental — a tiny persistent life in these desolate landscapes governed by the huge impersonal forces of wind, tide and weather.

Image: RSPB

'On the edge of what we know...'

The heat of black holes is a quantum effect upon an object, the black hole, which is gravitational in nature. It is the individual quanta of space, the elementary grains of space, the vibrating 'molecules' that heat the surface of black holes and generate black hole heat. This phenomenon involves three sides of the problem: quantum mechanics, general relativity and thermal science. The heat of black holes is like the Rosetta Stone of physics, written in a combination of three languages — Quantum, Gravitational and Thermodynamic — still awaiting decipherment in order to reveal the true nature of time.

Carlo Rovelli

Image via wikipedia

An augmented future

I think [genetic] augmentation will actually increase diversity. 

Some of it will be driven by need or ambition. People who want to go to space may want super-strong bones to protect them from osteoporosis in low gravity, while people who go to live at the bottom of the ocean will want a different set of modifications. And people who want to be super bankers are probably going to want a different set than the people who want to be super athletes. There isn’t a best kind of human, just like there isn’t a best kind of car. 

If you’re going to worry – which I do all the time – I would worry about adult augmentation, because it will spread fast. If I were to augment a child, an embryo, it will take 20 years before they have any significant impact on society.

George Church


Image via pinterest

Miracle enough

My wife and I spend summers on a small island in Maine, far from any town. At night, the skies are quite dark. Sometimes, when there is no wind blowing and the tidal flow is small and the ocean is very still, I can see the reflection of the stars in the water near our dock. At such moments, the water looks like a dark carpet with a million tiny sparkles of light, which gently bob and ripple with each passing wave. Even though I know all the science, I am totally mesmerized and awed. For me, that is miracle enough.

Splitting the Moon Alan Lightman

Varieties of Wonder

I recently took part in a panel discussion titled Varieties of Wonder. The script for my opening comments is here.


Image of Balinese masks by Gunawan Kartapranata

'A vacuum is never really empty'

In... quantum field theory, a vacuum is never really empty... It is an arena in which quantum fluctuations produce evanescent energies and elementary particles. 

These short-lived phenomena might seem to be a ghostly form of reality. But they do have measurable effects, including electromagnetic ones. That’s because these fleeting excitations of the quantum vacuum appear as pairs of particles and antiparticles with equal and opposite electric charge, such as electrons and positrons. An electric field applied to the vacuum distorts these pairs to produce an electric response, and a magnetic field affects them to create a magnetic response. This behaviour gives us a way to calculate, not just measure, the electromagnetic properties of the quantum vacuum and, from them, to derive the value of c.

Why is light so fast? Sydney Perkowitz

Black Square by Kazimir Malevitch. Tate

'Multifarious descriptions of many things'

We don’t need an answer to the question of life’s meaning, just as we don’t need a theory of everything. What we need are multifarious descriptions of many things, further descriptions of phenomena that change the aspect under which they are seen, that light them up and let us see them anew. 

There is no theory of everything Simon Critchley

Image: Seascape study with raincloud by John Constable