Freeman Dyson Has Died

By: | March 2, 2020

Freeman Dyson’s death is a little like the death of the last member of a rare species, only he didn’t even belong to a species, he was a one-off individual, he was singular. The point is, the world is a less interesting place now.

I wrote two posts about him; one was about his astonishingly varied interests; this post is about his one-off-ness and first ran on January 24, 2011.

What an odd-looking person this Freeman Dyson is.  His nose is long, his ears stick out, his smile is tentatively friendly, but what to make of those eyes?

Dyson is hard to describe:  he’s not like anyone you’ve met before and whatever he says is not what you’ll expect him to say.  He’s spent his career and so far, his retirement, in one of the most intellectually-rarified places on the planet, the Institute for Advanced Study.  But he doesn’t have a PhD – he says that doctoral students end up middle-aged, over-specialized, trapped, discouraged, and mentally deranged; and not having a PhD is “a badge of honor.”  He’s extremely smart and the few people smart enough to understand just how smart he is, are generally in awe of his intelligence. His manners are exquisite and never fail; in conversations he’s omnivorously interested and listens with a sort of stunned joy, surely this person is about to say something delightfully original. 

He is the subject of profile after profile after profile, some startlingly good.  One of the latest is in The Atlantic, and I’d like to suggest it’s incomplete – an easy shot since every profile is by nature incomplete.  But still.

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Trivia Friday

By: | February 28, 2020

Last weekend, I played a game with my family called Placing the Past. Each player gets cards that describe different historical events. You arrange the cards in the order you think the events happened, then check your guess. I kept wishing the game included more science history, so I decided to make my own, short version of the game to play here with you, dear LWON readers!

There was no method to my selection beyond looking for 10 events that would be easy to draw. The goal is not to know precisely when each event took place, but to put the events in the right order. Some of the dates were hard to pin down (i.e. things that happened thousands of years ago or when there were multiple discoverers) but oh well – the key at the bottom is as close as I could get. Begin!

First submarine
  1. The first navigable submarine could carry more than a dozen people, and was powered by rowers. It glided 15 feet below the surface of a famous London river. When was it built?
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Sunrise in the Caribbean

By: | February 27, 2020
The sun rises over the water

Wednesday night, Washington, D.C.: Because my work life is slightly on fire right now, and because I already spent 10 hours of this day either sitting in front of my computer or walking around in circles talking to people on the phone, I present to you a photograph of a sunrise in the Caribbean last month. Isn’t it nice? Please imagine that you are on a small and fast boat, speeding across the water, and that everything is lovely.

Photo: Helen Fields, for sure

Life is a Seed Highway

By: | February 26, 2020

These little friends got a ride home with me from the gym the other morning, stuck into the spiderwebs that cling to the side mirrors. There were more all across the front of the car, stuck in the small valley between the folded windshield wipers and the glass. I was delighted—could this be seed dispersal in action? In the absence of hooking into fur or feather, they’d found something else that worked: a minivan. (Does this count as carpooling?)

Creative seed transport isn’t always whimsical—or wanted. A paper this month in PNAS followed native and non-native plantains and found that these plants can break ecological rules and thrive far outside their native range. They became even more genetically diverse in far-away lands, where only a few seeds may have traveled to start the plantain explosion, than in large groups of plantains back home.

Oh, dear little ones on my mirror, I should probably feel differently about you. Still, I love how you found these small spaces to land, and how you hung on for the ride.

*

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The Polymorphic Spree

By: | February 25, 2020

Earlier this month, on a night hike in Costa Rica’s Monteverde cloud forest, I made the acquaintance of the above insect, which, best I can tell, is a member of the Pterochrozinae, a group commonly known as the leaf-mimic katydids. (Entomologists, please correct me!) Walter, our guide, found this individual, which is fortunate because I never could have. Examining this photo anew, I’m freshly astonished by the detail of this katydid’s impeccable camouflage: the green-and-brown mottling of the dying “leaf” (which also serves to break up the critter’s silhouette), the well-defined midrib, the delicate veining. My favorite grace note is the missing chunk along the wing’s underside — a feigned attack from a colony of leafcutter ants.

Leaf-mimic katydids are — pardon the cliché — the snowflakes of the insect world. (I’m talking here about their uniqueness, not their emotional fragility in the face of online trolling.) Seldom do two individuals, let alone two species, look alike. Their remarkable diversity is nicely illustrated in a 1995 paper by James Castner and David Nickle, entomologists who began collecting katydids in Peru in 1986. Castner and Nickle note that many leaf-mimics are “polymorphic” — i.e., divided into several distinct forms — and that some species come in as many as seven flavors. Take Typophyllum bolivari, which has four very different morphs: “overall color dark green”; “irregular blotchy pattern of medium and light browns, some approaching pink in color”; “overall monochromatic medium brown”; and “generally dark brown” with “two well-developed transparent elliptical areas.” Fake holes, in other words, in the middle of a fake leaf.

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11:59:59:59:59:59:59….

By: | February 24, 2020

Cosmology is timeless, perhaps literally—as this post argued on January 23, 2015.
11-59-59

In the 1992 documentary A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking describes what we would see if we were observing an astronaut nearing a black hole’s event horizon—the barrier beyond which gravitation is so great that not even light can escape. He invites us to imagine that the astronaut is wearing a watch, and that the second hand is ticking toward 12:00. As the astronaut gets closer to the event horizon, the motion of the second hand will appear to us to be slowing down. The closer the astronaut gets to the event horizon, the slower the motion of the hand, from our perspective. “Each second on the watch would appear to take longer and longer,” Hawking says, “until the last second before midnight would take forever.”

Then the documentary reverses the point of view and explores what the astronaut would be experiencing. That poor sap has a perspective, too. And that’s where things get weird. (Well, weirder.)

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Asking the Big Questions

By: | February 21, 2020

Gosh darn it, right now I have so many big questions about what’s happening in the world, and there seem to be so few good answers that it makes me want to shut down and hide under the bed. Not to sound negative. But I think you’re right there with me, yes?

And so, I’d posit it can be useful on occasion to escape by turning inward, or at least to glance down at ourselves and notice what’s happening right here. The big world’s terrifying turns are practically invisible if you zoom in on what’s in your immediate space, kind of in the same the way that, when you drive, the mountains stay put while the roadside trees whip by. (I’m not sure that analogy works, but I’m going with it.)

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A = B, B=C, so A=C. Right? Right?

By: | February 20, 2020

My neighbor likes to ask big questions about big ideas.  He’s not pretentious and doesn’t pontificate, so I think he just likes big questions.  Anyway, the other day he asked what the necessary components of an ideal public education were.  “Writing,” I said, naturally.  He agreed partly because, he said, good writing involves good thinking.  That’s certainly true, at least of good nonfiction writing.  I’m less interested in big questions, though, and I didn’t take it any further – into, for instance, whatever “good thinking” might be.

Then at the coffee shop:  Grace and Larry were arguing about the violence in Ferguson, Missouri.  Larry said what you always hear, that the conflict between the police and the community was because the police force was white and the community was black.  Grace said, “those two facts are not necessarily related,” and pointed out that Baltimore (where we all were) had its Freddy Grey violence but the police force and community, not to mention the city council, are pretty much the same mix of black and white.  This is not quite true: Baltimore is 28 percent white; its police force is 45 percent white.  But Grace’s point was that Larry wasn’t being logical, that he was committing a logical fallacy.

That is, he assumed that the tension between police and community is determined by the racial mix of each, and that Ferguson’s police force and community had different racial mixes, and so Ferguson had tension.  The logical fallacies are all named, oh joy!  I think, but am not sure, that this is the logical fallacy of begging the question, petitio principii:  “a conclusion is derived from premises that presuppose the conclusion, ” or you try to prove a thing by assuming it’s true.  

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