Books I ought to finish reading

Just for fun, here’s a list of them. As it happens, they’re also books I want to finish reading but keep forgetting to, or doing something else instead. In no partcular order (actually, the order in the pile):

Books to finish

• Miles Kington, How Shall I Tell The Dog?
• Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: tales of music and the brain
• Stephen Fry, The Book of General Ignorance
• Stephen Fry, The Book of Animal Ignorance
• Steven Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals: the origins of music, language, mind and body
• Robin Dunbar, The Trouble with Science
• Seth Lloyd, Programming the Universe: a quantum computer scientist takes on the cosmos
• John D Barrow, Impossibility: the limits of science and the science of limits
• Rodney Huddleston, English Grammar: an outline
• Barry Green, The Inner Game of Music
• Andrew George (trans.), The Epic of Gilgamesh
• Eknath Eswaran (trans.), The Upanishads
• Stephen Fry, Stephen Fry’s Incomplete and Utter History of Music
• Roger McGough, Collected Poems

Some of those are books I’ve started, some I’m half way through, some I’ve nearly finished . . . and maybe some aren’t exactly for finishing, since really they’re for dipping into.

Actually, one of the most interesting of those is also one of the most demanding to read: the grammar book. It’s not, as you might imagine, a guide on how to write; it’s a very concentrated analysis of how English grammar works, and I see that on the next page I have a section which starts

Constructions involving a non-finite as complement of the predicator exhibit a great deal of diversity and complexity; they present formidable problems for the analyst—and it is not surprising that widely varying accounts are to be found in the literature. One problem is this. The prototypical complement is an NP, which is why we speak of the occurrence of non-finites in complement function as involving nominalisation.

All of which does in fact make sense, but it’s not the kind of material that effortlessly goes into the brain, especially if it’s a few months since you were last reading the book and need to remind yourself what a predicator is and what is or isn’t being nominalised, i.e. being treated like a noun. Let’s just say that once we start looking at how English grammar actually works, it makes languages like German with nice, rigid, clearly-defined rules start to look a lot more straightforward than English.

Maybe I’ll focus instead on the Miles Kington book, which has stuff like this coming up (see, I can’t help reading ahead):

Dear Gill,

People are making a lot of money out of self-help books these days, and I would like you to be one of those people.

By helping to promote my new self-help book.

Which would be about self-pity.

Did you notice in my first letter that I referred to the jumble of self-pitying thoughts I first had when I was diagnosed with cancer?

My immediate response was to be apologetic for this stance, because we are always taught not to be sorry for ourselves, as if there were something dreadfully feeble about it. There are no nice words in English at all for ’self-pity’. There are lots of disapproving ones. Whingeing, sulking, moping, etc., etc.

(Personally, I think we are entitled to indulge in a little self-pity when we are told we have cancer, as long as we disguise it as something else. Shock, a nervous breakdown, long sobbing fits. Something like that.)

But self-pity is so common that it earns no respect at all, only disapproval, as in phrases like: ‘Sitting around all day feeling sorry for herself,’ or ‘You’d think he was the only one who had ever had leukaemia.’ Which quickly leads to phrases like: ‘Why doesn’t she just pull herself together?’ and ‘Cheer up dear—it’s only bi-polar disorder!’

My brilliant idea would be to turn it all round and treat self-pity as a potentially positive force.

This certainly seems to be a brilliant book, from the 40% or so that I’ve read in its intended order. Miles Kington wrote it in the last months of his life, when he knew that he did in fact have cancer and might well die from it. It takes the form of supposed letters to his literary agent about ideas for books he might write about the situation, but is really a humorous but heartfelt look at attitudes encountered and so on. Very entertaining, but also thought-provoking.

But that’s just one list of books. Here’s another:

Books to start

The main reason I haven’t started the books in this list is that I don’t have them. They’ve been recommended, or mentioned, by other people:

• Paul Davies, About Time
• [I don't know the author], The Universe is a Green Dragon
• Peter Bernstein, Against the Gods: the remarkable story of risk
• Daniel M Wegner, The Illusion of Conscious Will

Now that’s a much shorter list, but I’ve a nasty feeling that’s simply because of having forgotten to make a note of them all . . . Oh dear. I wonder what’s missing . . .

The bizarre similarity between money and quantum physics

I don’t know about you, but I’ve always found money very puzzling for various reasons. Especially when it comes to what the banks do with it. I’ve never been quite convinced that money actually exists: it’s a number that we do things with. If you pay me for something, your number goes down and my number goes up. If my number goes down to zero and my bank won’t let it keep going then I’m in big trouble, because people won’t hand things over to me in shops and so on. To do that, they want me to make their number go up.

And I’ve never really understood how “the money supply” can be increased. Coins and notes can be printed, sure, but whose are they and how do they get into circulation without somebody in effect “stealing” them? Is it actually valid to create it out of nowhere? All very strange.

The subject came up again when my friend PamBG, who once worked in finance and is now a Methodist minister, wrote a puzzled post about “quantitative easing”.

She didn’t get the answer to her question, some discussion ensued about the nature of money, the value of a company’s stocks, and the like. (The more I think about these things, the more convinced I become that money is really just a mental trick.)

As it happens, I had to study quite a lot of quantum physics at university, for my electronics degree. (This isn’t surprising, since quantum physics is the physics of the extremely small, electrons are extremely small, and electronics is based on their behaviour.) And in studying that, I had the same sense of things only just existing, or not quite existing. (I mean, an electron exists but doesn’t properly know where it is or how fast it’s going, or if it knows one it doesn’t know the other; that’s roughly what the Uncertainty Principle says.) It seemed very much like a game played with certain rules and numbers. A game which happened to predict very well what measurement you’d get if you did a particular experiment, but a game nevertheless, which simply dealt with the numbers and rules and was silent about the actual nature of the physical objects playing the game. All it said was that they obeyed the rules. (Scientifically, all that can be studied is the rules and numbers, since they can be observed; all we can say about any underlying reality is that if there is one, it’s one which fits them.)

And it also so happens that I find the ideas of quantum physics easier to “grasp” [1] than the ideas of finance, so the analogy that follows was a bit of a breakthrough for me. Here are some shortened extracts from the later part of the conversation:

Pam:

In some senses ‘money doesn’t really exist’ – which was people’s complaint when the West went off the gold standard in the 1970s. (Previously, all money printed had to have a certain value with respect to an ounce of gold.)

And markets are driven by psychology. Fear and greed. A very simple explanation: financial instruments are priced according what people will think that they will be worth in the future. So, if a particular company is expected to grow by 5% per annum over the next two years, and its assets are now £100, its stock price would be £110.25. (This is hugely simplistic for illustrative purposes.)

The problem, of course, is that you have to guess how much everything is going to grow [. . .]

Tim:

[. . .] I heard on a radio programme that the first time there was a real banking crisis after the Bank of England formed, people were very unhappy about paper money, complaining that it wasn’t actually money.

It’s interesting: atheists accuse us of basing our lives on something that doesn’t exist, namely God, but arguably modern society runs on something that doesn’t exist, namelly money! (I’m only half joking.)

ISTM you’re saying that the value of a piece of paper simply exists in the mind of the buyer and seller.

Pam:

Yes, I think it probably is. It’s a corollary of ’something is only worth what a buyer is willing to pay for it’ [. . .]

Tim:

Bizarrely, there’s a parallel with quantum physics, too [. . .]

In quantum physics—the physics of the ultra-small—a quantity generally exists in an “indeterminate” state until it is measured. The act of measurement forces it to stop being indeterminate and have a definite value.

Similarly it seems to me that a house, say, doesn’t have a definite value until you measure the price by letting somebody pay for it.

So in a way, the financial value of something is always in the future and hovering on the brink of existence.

Hmmm…

Pam:

Tim – Not only does that seem quite correct to me with respect to money and financial markets, but you’ve just helped me to better understand that principle in quantum physics.

And maybe that’s why money is so confusing. In quantum physics, you mostly don’t know things like the position or momentum of a particle; you only know the probability of it being within a particular range. And, according to the most widely accepted interpretation, the particle doesn’t “know” either. It really doesn’t have a precise position or momentum until it’s “observed” in some way.

Similarly with money: your house doesn’t have a precise value except at the moment of sale. All it has is a particular probability of lying in a particular price range. And the same is true of the the things in which your money in the bank is invested.

And it seems to me that this might be why the economy gives us so much grief: we’re dealing with things which have at best a shadowy existence, but much of the time we treat them like the most concrete reality there is.

Thoughts?

Note

[1] I think it was either Heisenberg or Schrödinger who said that if you weren’t confused by quantum mechanics you hadn’t understood it; hence “grasp” in quotes. Back

Sanity and the Large Hadron Collider

Sorry this is a bit long–I’m trying to cram quite a lot of science into a rather small space–but not at anything like the speed of light
Wednesday was the “start-up” of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. As I’m sure you all know…

Encouraging the insanity

What should have been an exciting day was marred for me by all the persistent “end-of-the-world” hype in the media and on the Internet. There was a news report of a teenage girl in India who believed the stories enough to kill herself: she thought that when it was switched on, the Earth would be swallowed up by a black hole. It makes me angry that there’s so much misinformation around, both about what is/was being done and about the “likely” effects.

It makes me particularly angry to hear that small children, who one would hope would be getting excited about science in the same way that we as children got excited about space when we saw the moon landings, have instead been going around terrified of the end of the world.

Now, not everyone understands particle physics. But surely simple explanations are possible which address people’s fears. And one would hope that the media would search these out and pass them on.

OK, maybe that was a reckless statement, because I now have to try to write a simple explanation myself. And I’m not a particle physicist, just someone who did a physics-related subject at university. But here goes. [Edit: someone has now helpfully pointed out that as a blogger, I am one of the media. Hmmm...]

What are they doing?

Eventually (but not on Wednesday): trying to bash protons together at very high speeds, i.e. with a lot of energy. A proton is the heavy bit in the middle of a hydrogen atom. If you do this hard enough, the actual energy of the collision is converted into extra particles. One hope of the experiment is that these will include the famous Higgs Boson which everyone wants to find. Being a particularly heavy particle if it exists, it needs a lot of energy to make it, which means incredibly high speeds.

Wednesday: simply tests to check that a beam of protons, going at speeds that have been in use for years–not at the colossal speeds hoped for in future–could make it all the way round the 27-km circuit in a clockwise direction. Then a similar test to see if another beam could get round in the anticlockwise direction. No ultra-high energies. Not even two beams colliding with each other. Lots of very relieved engineers who’d spent years of their lives working on the project finally getting some indication that the machine might work. Bottles of champagne.

Given that what happened on Wednesday wasn’t even really new, it’s hard to see why so many people thought it was going to end the world. Unless maybe THE MEDIA didn’t bother to find out the facts properly and report them responsibly… Perish the thought.

Is it going to destroy the world, then?

We’ve heard a lot about various speculative ways for this to happen. Sadly we’ve heard a lot less about why nobody in the physics community thinks they’re the least bit likely. I suppose “nothing will happen” and “science fiction is fiction” aren’t really news. They’re not even particularly exciting. So they don’t get reported. I also suspect that to the physicists, who are intimately familiar with the science, the idea seems so fatuous that it barely seems to need explaining. Would you expect someone to come and ask you to explain why sailing over the horizon won’t make you drop off the edge of the world? No, because you’d have to change your whole view of the world you deal with every day.

CERN has produced a quite informative Safety page. What follows is a summary of that, with some additions from other sources. The CERN page also includes links to various safety reports and relevant scientific publications.

The experiment has happened already

In fact, it happens all the time. I’m talking about cosmic rays.

These are particles from space which routinely hit the earth, some at extremely high energies–considerably higher than the LHC is aiming for. So, in fact, the LHC experiment (and more energetic ones) is effectively happening in the Earth and its atmosphere every day. But at random and mostly without any fancy detectors to observe it. The LHC safety page points out that the Earth has already been hit by the cosmic-ray equivalent of about a million LHC experiments. Oddly, it still hasn’t been destroyed.

Is it really like cosmic rays, though? After all, cosmic rays don’t arrive all bunched together in a very thin beam. Might this make a difference? After all, we’ve got lots of collisions happening close together… Well I asked someone at the LHC about this and it turns out that the collisions are still WAY too far apart to have any effect whatever. So yes, it’s like cosmic rays.

Ways the world won’t end

Black holes: Could the LHC produce an earth-swallowing black hole? Well…

• Standard theory says it can’t produce black holes at all. But if that’s wrong, then
• the theories that think it can all say that the black holes would disappear in a tiny instant and have no chance to start growing.
• a black hole that could grow and swallow its surroundings would need to start off as heavy as Mount Everest anyway. (Imagine trying to stuff a whole mountain into the machine and accelerate it to almost the speed of light…)
• If the LHC could swallow up the earth in a black hole, then so could the cosmic rays which keep hitting us. Not only haven’t they succeeded, but there’s no sign that its happened anywhere else in the universe either.

Vacuum bubbles: As I understand it, these are part of a speculative theory where regions of the universe could “flip” into a different state, where matter would have different properties and we could not exist.

• If the LHC could cause this, then high-energy cosmic rays would already have done it. The LHC is quite weedy in comparison
• and actually there’s no evidence of ANYTHING having caused it anywhere in the observed universe.

Strangelets: the idea here is that the LHC produces a tiny lump of an exotic kind of matter, which then converts ordinary matter to strange matter when it comes in contact with it.

• This is the opposite of what strange matter would be expected to do. If it can exist, it’s expected to convert itself immediately to ordinary matter.
• The “possibility” was however explored before the start-up in 2000 of another machine, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider or RHIC, which was far more likely than the LHC to produce strangelets. Eight years on, it still hasn’t managed to produce any.
• The particles to make strangelets can only stick together if they’re travelling slowly enough; the LHC simply bashes things together too fast. If the RHIC couldn’t do it, the RHC hasn’t a chance.

Magnetic monopoles: These are hypothetical particles a bit like magnets with only one end. (I have trouble imagining them!). Some theories think they could do nasty things to the protons in ordinary matter. However,

• the theories that say they can do this also say they’re too heavy for the LHC to produce.
• if the LHC could make them, then the cosmic rays that hit us are already making them, and have been for billions of years, with no ill effect.

So they’re either impossible for the LHC to make, or safe and here already.

Links

• BBC news story about the suicide: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/7609631.stm or http://is.gd/2zQS
• BBC article on children’s fears picked up from adults, with suggestions for addressing them: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7610413.stm or http://is.gd/2zR2
• Blogs by US scientists at the LHC: http://blogs.uslhc.us

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Seth Zenz at the LHC for answering my question about the concentrated beam, and for taking the trouble to read through this post to check I’d represented the science accurately.