Author Archives: Larry Franz

The Weight of the World

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There is a funny scene in Annie Hall in which the young Alvy and his mother visit the doctor. Alvy is depressed because he’s learned that the universe is expanding. Eventually, it will all come apart. So what’s the point of doing homework?

We rational adults understand that it’s silly to worry about what’s going to happen to the universe billions of years from now. Nevertheless, like Alvy, I’m troubled by a situation that is way too big to worry about.

The good news is that I’m nowhere near as troubled as Woody Allen’s alter ego (or Woody Allen himself). If I had homework, I’d do it all, pointless or not. But I figured I’d share my concern here, since confession can be good for the psyche.

It seems to me that the world is too big and complex to function. By “the world”, I don’t mean the natural world. Remove human beings from the world and it would chug along just fine. I mean the human world, the world that we’ve created, the world of fiber optic cables, water treatment plants, international air travel, electrical grids, server farms, Amazon fulfillment centers, health insurance for dogs and the global market in fruits and vegetables.

I walk into my local supermarket and am confronted by an array of apples, oranges, broccoli, lettuce, some of which was transported to our town from thousands of miles away. Consider the number of grocery stores in America and the rest of the world, all of them selling fruits and vegetables. Where does all this stuff come from? How can this gigantic cornucopia be produced and distributed so that it can make its way to our shopping carts in an edible condition? Can this system really work? I don’t think so.

The whole enterprise, i.e. human civilization, seems like a giant house of cards.

I mean, have you ever considered the number of pipes running under Manhattan? The amount of fresh water that’s consumed every day by a billion Chinese? The number of ingredients that go into a package of frozen Swedish meatballs?

I have – and it’s a lot.

Where the Girls and Boys Are

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The Washington Post has an article called “40 Maps That Explain the World”. They don’t explain the whole world, but this one is interesting:

population-map

There are about 7 billion people in the world, and more than 3 billion of them live in 5 countries in that circle: China, India, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Japan. If you throw in the other countries in the circle, like the Philippines and Vietnam, you get another 600 million people. That means 51% of the world’s population lives in that relatively small part of the world.

The map above is number 24 in the list, which is here:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/08/12/40-maps-that-explain-the-world/

Six Men with Something to Say about Israel and the Palestinians

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If you’re interested in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, you should consider watching The Gatekeepers. It’s an Israeli documentary from 2012 that features interviews with six men, each of whom has been in charge of Shin Bet, Israeli’s internal security service. Apparently, none of these men had ever been interviewed on camera before.

They talk about the history of Shin Bet, including the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, but more importantly they express their opinions regarding the conflict with the Palestinians. The impression I got was that they would all prefer fewer Israeli settlements in the occupied territories, in addition to more cooperation and negotiation with the Palestinian authorities. 

These are all men who spent years working for Shin Bet protecting their fellow Israelis from terrorist attacks. It’s highly significant that they support a less confrontational approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. One of them says he’s in favor of talking to everyone, including Israel’s enemies. Another observes that Israel is winning battles but losing the war.

I Had a Dream

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People say that listening to other people talk about their dreams is boring. Freud found them interesting, but there’s a reason psychiatrists now listen to their patients for ten minutes before asking “How’s your supply of pills?” and finishing with “I’ll see you in three months”.

I don’t especially enjoy hearing other people’s dreams either. The ones with lots of strange things happening can be especially hard to follow. 

Still, dreams aren’t the most boring topic of conversation by far. Most of us understand that the most boring topic of conversation is “home improvement”, as in “here’s what we’re going to do with the windows in our living room”.

It should also be noted that some dream conversations are better than others. For one thing, the short ones are better than the long ones. Or if a co-worker says “I dreamed that you and I were in a space station orbiting the earth”. That might be of interest. Or if your spouse tells you about a recurring dream in which he or she sets fire to your hair. 

All of which brings me to a dream I had a few years ago. It was quite short, but also quite scary. If you want to hear it, keep reading.

All of a sudden, the world ended. Everything disappeared. Not just for me but for everyone. Realizing that I was dead but still conscious, I said to myself something like: “Oh no, they were right!”

Which meant that the stories about life after death were actually true! 

Then I woke up. It was still dark but not as dark as the void I’d escaped.

Being back in the world was a tremendous relief. The idea that I was going to be eternally alone in the darkness, doing nothing but thinking and remembering, was truly terrible. Because it wasn’t going to be for a very long time. It was going to be forever.

I can’t think of anything I’d want to do forever, except sleep. That’s the point of resting in peace.

The Uncertainty Principle and Us

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It’s difficult to discuss physics if you aren’t a physicist or don’t understand the math involved. Nevertheless, what physicists tell us about the world is so strange that it’s hard not to discuss it sometimes, whether we understand it or not. (The brilliant physicist and all-around cool guy Richard Feynman once said that nobody understands quantum mechanics, but some understand it better than others.)

There are philosophers who specialize in the philosophy of physics and aren’t shy about discussing physics at all, among themselves and with physicists. One of these philosophers, Craig Callender, has recently written two interesting articles for the New York Times. In these articles, Callender argues that Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, probably the best-known part of quantum mechanics, shouldn’t be as famous as it is. 

Heisenberg was one of the founders of quantum mechanics. He published the uncertainty principle in 1927. If you look up “uncertainty principle” now, you’ll find statements like this: “The position and momentum of a particle cannot be simultaneously measured with arbitrarily high precision” and “The uncertainty principle is at the foundation of quantum mechanics: you can measure a particle’s position or its velocity, but not both.”

Well, here is Callender on quantum mechanics:

[Quantum mechanics is] a complex theory, but its basic structure is simple. It represents physical systems – particles, cats, planets – with abstract quantum states. These quantum states provide the chances for various things happening. Think of quantum mechanics as an oddsmaker. You consult the theory, and it provides the odds of something definite happening….

The quantum oddsmaker can answer … questions for every conceivable property of the system. Sometimes it really narrows down what might happen: for instance, “There is a 100 percent chance the particle is located here, and zero percent chance elsewhere.” Other times it spreads out its chances to varying degrees: “There is a 1 percent chance the particle is located here, a 2 percent change it is located there, a 1 percent chance over there and so on.”

According to Callender:

The uncertainty principle simply says that for some pairs of questions to the oddsmaker, the answers may be interrelated. Famously, the answer to the question of a particle’s position is constrained by the answer to the question of its velocity, and vice versa. In particular, if we have a huge ensemble of systems each prepared in the same quantum state, the more the position is narrowed down, the less the velocity is, and vice versa. In other words, the oddsmaker is stingy: it won’t give us good odds on both position and velocity at once.

Callender then points out that he hasn’t said anything about measurement or observation:

The principle is about quantum states and what odds follow from these states. To add the notion of measurement is to import extra content. And as the great physicist John S. Bell has said, formulations of quantum mechanics invoking measurement as basic are “unprofessionally vague and ambiguous.” After all, why is a concept as fuzzy as measurement part of a fundamental theory?

Callender later shares another quote from J. S. Bell (considered by some to be the greatest physicist of the second half of the 20th century):

What exactly qualifies some physical systems to play the role of “measurer”? Was the wavefunction [the quantum state] of the world waiting to jump for thousands of millions of years until a single-celled living creature appeared? Or did it have to wait a little longer, for some better qualified system … with a Ph.D.? If the theory is to apply to anything but highly idealized laboratory operations, are we not obliged to admit that more or less “measurement-like” processes are going on more or less all the time, more or less everywhere?

When physicists use their instruments to measure a subatomic particle’s position or momentum, the instruments affect the particle. It’s the interaction at the subatomic level between the instrument and the particle that’s important, not the fact that the interaction has something to do with measurement, observation, mental energy or human consciousness. We aren’t that important in the vast scheme of things.

Viewing the theory of quantum mechanics as a cosmic oddsmaker may seem unhelpful. We want to know what’s going on at the subatomic level that results in the theory calculating certain odds. Heisenberg thought physicists shouldn’t even think about an underlying reality — they should simply focus on the results of their observations. But some (many?) physicists working today believe that quantum mechanics is an incomplete theory that will eventually be replaced by a more fundamental theory, possibly one that explains away the apparent randomness that exists at the subatomic level (that’s what Einstein thought too). Their hope is that uncertainty will one day be replaced by certainty, or something closer to it.

If you do a Google search for “uncertainty principle consciousness”, you’ll probably get more than 8 million results. If you search for “uncertainty principle measurement”, you can get more than 32 million. Professor Callender thinks those numbers should be much, much smaller.

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This is Callender’s first article in the Times:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/21/nothing-to-see-here-demoting-the-uncertainty-principle/

Here he responds to questions and criticisms from readers:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/25/return-of-the-stingy-oddsmaker-a-response/