Category Archives: Science

Maybe It’s All Jelly

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From The New York Times:

It would be one thing to concede that science may never be able to explain, say, the subjective experiences of the human mind. But the standard take on quantum mechanics suggests something far more surprising: that a complete understanding of even the objective, physical world is beyond science’s reach, since it’s impossible to translate into words how the theory’s math relates to the world we live in.

[Angelo] Bassi, a 47-year-old theoretical physicist at the University of Trieste, in northeastern Italy, is prominent among a tiny minority of rebels in the discipline who reject this conclusion. “I strongly believe that physics is words, in a sense,” he said across the picnic table. [He makes] a case for what a vast majority of his colleagues consider a highly implausible idea: that the theory upon which nearly all of modern physics rests must have something wrong with it — precisely because it can’t be put into words.

Of course, much about quantum mechanics can be said with words. Like the fact that a particle’s future whereabouts can’t be specified by the theory, only predicted with probabilities. And that those probabilities derive from each particle’s “wave function,” a set of numbers that varies over time, as per an equation devised by Erwin Schrödinger in 1925. But because the wave function’s numbers have no obvious meaning, the theory only predicts what scientists may see at the instant of observation — when all the wave function’s latent possibilities appear to collapse to one definitive outcome — and provides no narrative at all for what particles actually do before or after that, or even how much the word “particle” is apropos to the unobserved world. The theory, in fact, suggests that particles, while they’re not being observed, behave more like waves — a fact called “wave-particle duality” that’s related to how all those latent possibilities seem to indicate that an unobserved particle can exist in several places at once….

Bassi’s research is focused on a possible alternative to quantum mechanics, a class of theories called “objective collapse models”…. And [he is] now leading the most ambitious experiment to date that could show that objective collapse actually happens….

The hard part [was making sure the new theory didn’t] contradict any of quantum mechanics’ many unerring predictions. The trick, it turned out, was to endow fundamental particles with some funky new properties.

“You should remove the word ‘particle’ from your vocabulary,” Bassi explains. “It’s all about gelatin. An electron can be here and there and that’s it.”

In this theory, particles are replaced by a sort of hybrid between particles and waves: gelatinous blobs that can spread out in space, split and recombine. And, crucially, the blobs have a kind of built-in bashfulness that explains wave-particle duality in a way that is independent of human observation: When one blob encounters a crowd of others, it reacts by quickly shrinking to a point.

“It’s like an octopus that when you touch them: Whoop!” Bassi says, collapsing his fingertips to a tight bunch to evoke tentacles doing the same.

If objective collapse were to be confirmed, … the way the world works will once again be expressible in words. “Jelly that reacts like an octopus” will be the new “particles subject to forces.” New, exotic phenomena will be identified that could spawn currently inconceivable technologies. Schrödinger’s cat will live or die regardless of who looks or who doesn’t. Even the unpredictability of the subatomic world could turn out to be illusory, a false impression given by our ignorance of octopoid innards.

The Economy, the Virus and Us

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Annie Lowery of The Atlantic says that economists have four major concerns regarding the US economy.

(1) The household fiscal cliff:  Government stimulus payments have kept the economy in fairly good shape this spring, despite massive unemployment. However, the stimulus is supposed to end a month from now. Republicans don’t favor renewing it. That will mean  “millions of families just keeping their head above water will sink”. Consumer spending will plummet.

(2) The great business die-off:  “This steep decline in consumer spending will hasten mass business failure… An estimated 100,000 small companies have shut permanently. On top of that, numerous businesses—airlines, restaurants, live-events businesses, hotels, private schools, oil and gas companies—face severe and stubborn slumps….Economists expect that 42 percent of people recently let go will not return to their former employers.

(3) The state and local budget shortfall:  Every state except Vermont is required to balance its budget, but “sales taxes, real-estate-transfer taxes, income taxes, fines and fees—they are all collapsing, leaving local governments with a budget gap expected to total $1 trillion next year. Without help from Washington, this will necessarily mean massive service cuts and job losses: namely, an estimated 5.3 million job losses.

(4) The lingering health crisis:  “The catastrophe of the American government’s management of the … pandemic …  has led to the unnecessary deaths of tens of thousands of people…. The country is reopening with the disease still spreading and maiming and killing, as several states experience a dramatic surge in caseloads. Never getting the pandemic under control means never unleashing the economy…. Ending the pandemic would have been the single best thing the federal government could have done to preserve the country’s wealth, health, and economic functioning. The Txxxx administration, in its hubris, obstinacy, and incompetence, failed to do it.”

“Congress could extend unemployment insurance, offer new help to flailing businesses, send monthly cash grants to poor families, offer fiscal relief to the states, and implement a nationwide test-and-trace program.” Or things may get a lot worse.

From Stat News:

The “respiratory” virus that causes Covid-19 made some patients nauseous. It left others unable to smell. In some, it caused acute kidney injury….The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention constantly scrambled to update its list [of symptoms] in an effort to help clinicians identify likely cases.

[But] in late January, … scientists in China identified one of the two receptors by which the coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, enters cells. It was the same gateway, called the ACE2 receptor, that the original SARS virus used. Studies going back some two decades had mapped the body’s ACE2 receptors, showing that they’re in cells that line the insides of blood vessels — in what are called vascular endothelial cells — in cells of the kidney’s tubules, in the gastrointestinal tract, and even in the testes.

Given that, it’s not clear why the new coronavirus’ ability to wreak havoc from head to toe came as a surprise to clinicians. Since “ACE2 is also the receptor for SARS, its expression in other organs and cell types has been well-known”….

The assumption that infection would first and foremost cause respiratory symptoms was misplaced. In the week before they were diagnosed, Covid-19 patients were 27 times more likely than people who tested negative for the virus to have lost their sense of smell. They were only 2.6 times more likely to have fever or chills, 2.2 times more likely to have trouble breathing or to be coughing, and twice as likely to have muscle aches. For months, government guidelines kept people not experiencing such typical signs of a respiratory infection from getting tested.

Faced with a disease the world had never seen before, physicians are learning as they go. By following the trail of ACE2 receptors, they are more and more prepared to look for, and treat, consequences of SARS-CoV-2 infection well beyond the obvious.

One Way To Return To Work and School

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Three professors think there is a good way for people to start going back to work and school. Their suggestion is partly based on how long people who get the virus usually become contagious, which is three days on average.

First, the population would be divided into two groups — like our cars were divided into two groups by odd and even license plates when OPEC made trouble in the 1970s and it was very hard to buy gas.

Grouping could be done using the first letter of everyone’s last name, such as A to L and M to Z. Doing the groups that way would give the members of a family the same schedule (of course, there would have to be flexibility to handle special cases).

Each group would then go to work or school on a schedule of four days on, ten days off. Group A to L would start work on a Monday, work four days, then take off ten days. Group M to Z would go to work or school the following Monday, work four days and then take off.

The result would be that people would be at work or school 40% of the time: four days instead of the usual ten every two-weeks (of course, there would have to be flexibility again, one reason being that somebody has to mind the store or the police station on Fridays and weekends).

Working or being educated would still be possible during our ten days “off” at home. The totally unemployed would be working part-time. The point is that we’d be taking a step toward a more normal existence for most people.

When I read the professors’ article, I wondered why they chose a four-day schedule if people are usually contagious after three days. Aside from how four days fits nicely into the fourteen days of two weeks, they believe that getting sick would be unlikely even if people were in close contact and someone became contagious at the beginning of the four days. They did some math:

Models we created at the Weizmann Institute in Israel predict that this two-week cycle can reduce the virus’s reproduction number — the average number of people infected by each infected person — below one. So a 10-4 cycle could suppress the epidemic while allowing sustainable economic activity.

More from the article:

Even if someone is infected, and without symptoms, he or she would be in contact with people outside their household for only four days every two weeks, not 10 days, as with a normal schedule. This strategy packs another punch: It reduces the density of people at work and school, thus curtailing the transmission of the virus.

The cyclic strategy is easy to explain and to enforce. It is equitable in terms of who gets to go back to work. It applies at any scale: a school, a firm, a town, a state. A region that uses the cyclic strategy is protected: Infections coming from the outside cannot spread widely if the reproduction number is less than one. It is also compatible with all other countermeasures being developed.

Workers can, and should still, use masks and distancing while at work. This proposal is not predicated, however, on large-scale testing, which is not yet available everywhere in the United States and may never be available in large parts of the world. It can be started as soon as a steady decline of cases indicates that lockdown has been effective.

The cyclic strategy should be part of a comprehensive exit strategy, including self-quarantine by those with symptoms, contact tracing and isolation, and protection of risk groups. The cyclic strategy can be tested in limited regions for specific trial periods, even a month. If infections rates grow, it can be adjusted to fewer work days. Conversely, if things are going well, additional work days can be added. In certain scenarios, only four or five lockdown days in each two-week cycle could still prevent resurgence.

The coronavirus epidemic is a formidable foe, but it is not unbeatable. By scheduling our activities intelligently, in a way that accounts for the virus’s intrinsic dynamics, we can defeat it more rapidly, and accelerate a full return to work, school and other activities.

New Jersey’s Steps to Reopening

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Governor Murphy just presented the steps he thinks the Garden State needs to take before life can become more normal. Other states are doing the same thing. Murphy added that everything would be coordinated with neighboring states: “This isn’t just about NJ. Rushing ahead of our partners would risk returning our entire region back into lockdown mode”.

He didn’t announce a timeline:

Until we give the public confidence that they should not be fearful, we cannot take further steps. A plan that is needlessly rushed is a plan that will needlessly fail.

If businesses like restaurants, barber shops and theaters reopen, but their customers stay home, there won’t be any point to reopening.

The PowerPoint version:

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He skipped page 19 (is it a state secret?):

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The Toddler Strikes Again — Pandemic Edition

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From Crooked Media’s informative newsletter:

The T—- administration abruptly removed the doctor who led the federal agency working on a coronavirus vaccine because he pushed back against the administration’s efforts to promote [the president’s] favorite unproven drugs. Now he has become a whistleblower: “I am speaking out because to combat this deadly virus, science — not politics or cronyism — has to lead the way.”

Dr. Rick Bright said he was dismissed as director of [Health and Human Service’s] Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) because he insisted that the government invest funding into scientifically vetted treatments, vaccine research, and critical supplies, and resisted widespread use of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine to treat coronavirus symptoms. (On Tuesday, a panel of experts [at the National Institutes of Health] specifically advised against the use of hydroxychloroquine outside of clinical trials.)

Bright believes he was transferred to a smaller role at NIH as an act of retaliation. He said he’ll request an investigation into the politicization of BARDA, including how the administration has pressured scientists to “fund companies with political connections and efforts that lack scientific merit.”

A vague but stunning accusation of political corruption hobbling the government’s response to one of the most deadly crises the country has ever faced….

Remember during Trump’s impeachment,a mere 400 years ago, when we learned that Trump fired an experienced career diplomat because she wouldn’t go along with his corrupt Ukraine scheme? We’ve just seen him do the same thing to a career scientist in a key public health role, in the middle of the worst public-health crisis in our lifetimes. Somebody ask [Republican Senator] Susan Collins if she still thinks T—- learned his lesson.Â