The Skeptical Anarchist

If I look over my blogs and Facebook posts, I realize that two topics tend to come up more often than others: superstition and free expression. Though I have made attempts to connect a number of ideas together in the past, I think I have failed to unite these two accurately, mainly because I think that there are enough internal contradictions that I am disposed to what I condemn; belief. The belief I am speaking of is the creation of order through chaos. The music I like, and play is free, even anarchistic in form. There is very little applied structure, yet when analyzed later by critics, musicians and listeners of any kind cohesion can be found, even if that unity wasn’t intended. This happens all of the time to me. I speak with a musician, and compliment them on the use of spectral dissonance through harmonic clustering, or something pretentious like that, only to hear “we were just jamming at midnight.” Now that doesn’t make my analysis wrong, or the intent wrong, but it does suggest that I am deeply involved in trying to mentally connect dots, even though the dots were actually laid out randomly.

 The wonderful documentary film “Between The Folds” http://www.greenfusefilms.com/, explores a world of extremely serious origami artists and scientists, which I had no idea existed. This group includes a range of people, from the compulsive paper folder who creates life like animals with over 1000 folds, to an MIT mathematician who uses origami techniques to solve some of math’s most difficult questions to a group of style improvisers of the form, which the film calls The Anarchists. The absolutely contradictory styles of the Mathematician and the Anarchists especially appeals to me. The Mathematician concentrates on the perfection of each fold in relation to consecutive folds. He uses computer models to enhance this. While this may seem crazy, in doing so he was able to not only solve some esoteric mathematics theories, but even practical ones, like the most efficient way to fold an airbag for car safety. The Anarchists by contrast bunched and folded paper in completely random chaotic ways. It is the free jazz of origami, and like free jazz they create something that is both highly interesting, and also complex when analyzed. The forms they create may or may not resemble figures, but they do have inherently enlightening results at their best. The Anarchists even perform improvised experiments on the completed forms, like seeing the effect of sunlight over time, or water, or heat. You in a sense viscerally learn things that the mathematician would have trouble formulating.

The fascination with these two approaches is what leaves my time partially in the quantitative and experimental world of applied physics, and partially in the anarchistic world of free jazz and surrealist poetry. Somehow I think that by doing both I will be able to recognize patterns that are unique and surprising. Though I suppose that there is nothing wrong with this, there may be nothing right about it either. In his recent TED Talkhttp://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shermer_the_pattern_behind_self_deception.html, the great skeptic Michael Shermer points out that animals (humans included of course) are predisposed to search for patterns, even when they do not exist. There is good Darwinian reasons for this because the problems with not seeing patterns in life and death situations are more immediately life threatening. He speaks of a predator/prey situation. When an animal has before heard a predator rustling leaves, he learns to run. Therefore even if he hears the wind rustle leaves, he is likely to run. He may have been wrong, but it was safer to be wrong. With more highly evolved pattern recognition we can arrive at misinterpreted correlations, which in turn can do harm.  Decisions made about education, food, weapons and drugs, which are based on false pattern recognition can do a great deal of harm, and do all of time. In fact Shermer points out that we are not even all that good at recognizing patterns. We see patterns in everything, and not always the correct ones, as he shows with some slides of dots, some of which have embedded figures and some nothing. People will see figures where none exist, see wrong ones where they do, and sometimes get it right. All is possible with our limited abilities.

So what is the point of all of this introspection about my own abilities at pattern recognition? Perhaps it is to enjoy the anarchy even when there is no pattern to be found. There is truth in its own right in chaos, where our thoughts and anxieties so often reside. Then, perhaps some lucky time useful patterns will emerge that will allow a communication between reasoning and freedom. 

The Poetic Life of Scientists

More than any interview of a physicist of my generation, last Friday's NPR Science Friday Interview with Cal Tech Physicist Sean Carroll created a mystique for the life of a theoretical scientist. It happened in one moment, which was just marginally different from the common job description of a theoretical scientist. Ira Flotow asked Carroll if he spent his time thinking up these big ideas about time, which is what his new book "From Eternity to Here" (http://www.amazon.com/Eternity-Here-Quest-Ultimate-Theory/dp/0525951334/lecturenotesonge) describes to a general audience. He said that is his job. He goes to the wine bar with a pencil and paper, and thinks of new ways to visualize time and space, and new equations to put the puzzle together. He also said that he was lucky that he worked in such a dynamic field where he could discuss his ideas with colleagues, who we get the impression are his friends. In that moment he managed to elevate the image of a gen x physicist in Pasadena, to lost generation poets in Paris. This is a needed transformation of the imagination. Scientists of my generation and younger have been caught in a historic limbo where social and solitary explorations of the mind have been replaced in large part by social and solitary explorations on-line. We think that science happens only because of computing power, our information gathering resources, and our mass connectivity, while all the while admiring with nostalgia the thought experiments of Einstein, the Eagle Pub of Watson and Crick, or long walks through Copenhagen parks. My favorite book of 2009 was Steven Johnson's, "Invention of Air" (http://www.amazon.com/Invention-Air-Science-Revolution-America/dp/B0031MA7UW/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1265357899&sr=1-1) which not only told of the contribution of Joseph Priestley, but about how coffee bar culture in London led to many of the most important ideas in English science.
Over the last year there have been several books about the need for scientists to be better communicators with the public. I like "Don't Be Such a Scientist" by Randy Olson (http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Be-Such-Scientist-Substance/dp/1597265632/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1265357791&sr=1-1) which dealt with this topic, by describing the necessity of scientists to use film, and other multimedia tools to demonstrate ideas to a larger public. What I realize now though is that there is an essential step missing from the picture of going from the lab to the screen. That is the step where we write, draw and eventually talk with each other, not at seminars, but at wine bars. A Greek symposium was a long night of drinking and discussing. A college symposium usually takes place in a classroom during the day and is much shorter, but for some reason I think I would be much more likely to sleep in that daytime class than drunk on Plato's sofa. While poets and philosophers have searched for ways to explain the human condition, scientists are exploring ways to understand nature in its entirety. Friendship, debate and Pinot Noir are welcome companions in this pursuit.

Unfinished Business?

There is a wonderful scene in the film “Six Degrees of Separation”, which as a parent I think about nearly every day. The Kittredge family, who provide the bourgeois Upper East side backdrop of the film, also provide a number of insights into excesses and ambition in contrast to natural instincts. As modern art dealers, they academically understand that the textural and prospective flattening of images represents not merely a shift in aesthetics. It also characterizes a reduction of experience, emotion and philosophy to a two dimension painting. In this particular scene Flan Kittredge, as played by Donald Sutherland, reminisces about his daughter’s second grade class. He remembers how when visiting the classroom, he was stunned, as if entering a gallery at MoMa. All of the paintings of the children struck him as spectacular. He asked the teacher how she managed to get such profound art from every student. Each piece was like a Matisse, a Cezanne, a Kandinsky or a Picasso. The teacher replied that she did nothing. Only that she knew when to take them away. In other words all children are modern masters, but by leaving them to continue work on a painting, that masterpiece may be disguised and colored over.


Children are experimenting with paints and drawings, as we continue to with blogs, with lovers, with restaurants, with financial instruments, and with scientific experimentation. What we often lack however is the equivalent of the teacher who tells us when the experiment is over. For anyone who has played free jazz with a group of musicians for the first time, they will know that it is nearly impossible to bring a piece to its conclusion. This is one of the things that I love about improvisational music, but also one thing that separates those initial experiments from a band that is fully connected. At the heart of free jazz is an assumption that there is nothing a musician can play that is inherently wrong. If a dissonant interval from one instrument is played against a consonant interval from another, it may not be planned, but becomes an idea that requires exploration. During those first meetings of a group, every second of playing is packed with these micro experiments, all of which are of interest to the musicians. Resolving those tonal and rhythmic variations without discussion or pause is an infinite process, which leads to long sessions. For me this is often where jazz starts and ends, as I often don’t have time to rehearse or perform regularly with one particular group. I am often the sit-in pianist who comes into a session with a group who understands each other in such a metaphysically intense way that they instinctually know the movements of the others. It is still a process of experiment for these musicians, but one where a hypothesis has already been stated, and the theory is being tested. I then become a dependant variable in this equation. When it works, the process becomes a calculus, or more metaphorically accurate, a quantum wave function. When listening to the recording the results can be heard, but only as an approximation. Like a subatomic particle whose position and velocity cannot both be measured with complete certainty, neither can any one moment in the cacophony of the sound scape be isolated and understood. It is an evolving process, which as a whole can be experienced. Like the second graders, it takes discipline or a leader to know when to remove your hands from the keyboard.

A science lab can be much the same as this, and like the examples of the children’s art and the free jazz session, it is not completely clear to me that a solution to an experiment ever truly represents a completion. Perhaps it is merely a disciplined end point, chosen aesthetically, artistically or randomly somewhere in the middle for any number of reasons. A corporate research project must have a point at which a conclusion is made, or a product would never be released. We know that the results are rarely perfect, as all products have some degree of uncertainty built into them. A drug is effective in a percentage, hopefully high, of the users, but not 100%. A Ph.d dissertation also must have a completion date, or the student would never get the diploma. American innovation is actually tied to this ability to wrap up an experiment. The first personal computers, IPODS, cell phones and MRI machines weren’t perfect when released, and the scientists who worked on them knew it. But an entrepreneur or manager knew that the product needed to be released.

There is a dilemma for me in this question of creation and completion, which I also think about when watching my daughter paint. It is not whether a painting will look better if it is taken away from her at a certain time. It will certainly be more understandable if it is. We could all be like the second grade teacher in “Six Degrees of Separation”. The big question is rather by taking it away I am stopping a process which for psychological and even artistic reasons should continue to play itself out as long as she wants it too. For my daughter I would want her to continue, as the goal is not for her be a Matisse (at least not yet), but rather to have fun, and express herself. Who I am I to say that she is finished? As we consider ourselves more mature when playing in a band or on nuclear physics experiments, we start to want to be master something rather than just express it. Is that mastering or compromising? Of course it is necessary, and in the cases I mentioned it is important. I wouldn’t want a cure for HIV or cancer to be in a lab somewhere with a scientist saying, “I am not satisfied yet. It only works on 99% of test patients”. I also wouldn’t want every recording to be like most pop albums, where every moment is produced, and planned. This may all seem very trivial and obvious, but it is a question I face every day, as a professor, as a musician, as a scientist, and as a father.

Embracing Abstraction

Mathematics and philosophy have come together and separated countless times in Western civilization. It seems to me that they diverged in one of the strongest ways just over 100 years ago when Einstein published his great works on special relativity, the photoelectric effect and quantum mechanics. Suddenly science and mathematics seemed to encompass such an important and large part of the imagination that philosophy was relegated to dealing primarily with human suffering and existential dread. Both of these are important, but they are limited to human consciousness, while physics was not just reaching towards far away galaxies, but also inwards. It was analyzing time in new ways and exploring the invisible, but real worlds of atoms and molecules. This was the unofficial debut of the theoretical scientist as the stars of logic. The idea of theory to an artist and philosopher is one of ideas. To a scientists theory is mathematics. Theoretical physicists use mathematics to model the universe. To extrapolate our experience beyond our vision.

Recently my wife Marine was explaining Montessori education to me, and the systems that are used for teaching mathematics. Though I am now deeply interested in this, I still don’t know much at all. The main point was that children will learn numbers as a physical reality in small quantities. They can then extrapolate the concept for larger values. Only after this do they learn the symbols, which are written numbers. Though this is a digression from my point, it is what got me thinking about abstraction and science for this blog.

A scientist derives, proves and calculates in order to represent reality in a precise way. What the artist and theoretical scientist have in common in this regard is that both pursuits exist only with a strong ability to abstract. Physics which is the study of nature is not explored by the theoretician in a manner of direct observation, but by manipulation of matrices and formulae.

Abstraction may be a unique human ability which makes the creation of technologies, sculptures, space ships and books possible. It is also likely connected to our desire to distance ourselves from real nature by abstracting it further and further into our models. Goethe, the great poet, famous for words, which are abstractions en par with numbers, pushed back from Newtonian reductionism in favor of a more observation based science of Optics. In most ways Goethe’s scientific ideas were wrong. Newton describes nature in a much more accurate way; the question which remains however is who saw it (as opposed to describe it) more accurately? I believe what the Physicist Richard Feynman said to an artist friend who complained to Feynman that scientists take away the beauty of a yellow flower by reducing it to its scientific components. Feynman said that because he understands why a flower is yellow he appreciates it more. Feynman was unique in his ability to see nature on a deeper level esthetically and realistically while representing it with numbers and diagrams. This is the human intellectual evolution where we can congregate to abstract, but not without first observing. A child may not be able to calculate 1,000,000, but because she understands how to get from 1 to 10, from both observing and abstracting, she can comprehend the concept of 1,000,000. This is what Marine explained to me. As scientists we need perhaps to intuitively understand those things we can see, create numerical abstractions, then extrapolate. With that the theoretician, artist and philosopher can meet on common ground.

Was Wilbur a Rheologist?

Sometimes I stay up late at night and read, watch sci-fi television or write these blogs. Of course in the blogs sometimes my exhaustion shows, as I make rather strange connections between the science I am working on and art. This is all to say that though this one may involve the most farfetched of analogies, I am perfectly awake, and at least as sane as I usually am. Since I am up late some nights, it is especially difficult to wake up early when my little girl does. Many times my wife gets up with her, but other times I do. I find that coffee is slow in getting me going, and since my little girl wants to play, I find things that will get us both moving, and that we both like. My wife put the kibosh on gansta rap music, which had become a nice ritual, when my daughter started saying that “it’s all about the Benjamins baby”, and “It’s hard out here for a Pimp”, at family dinners. So I turned to another source of funny entertainment from my childhood, the 1960’s television series, Mr. Ed., which I had watched in reruns, while home sick from grammar school. Thanks to You Tube I can now share the miraculous talking, brilliant, hilarious horse with my 4 year old daughter, who now even translates “a Horse is a Horse of course of course” to French. I guess that the show was a hit in those days, because it was so damn funny, but also because people could relate to both the horse Mr. Ed., who due to the unfortunate act of birth was born a horse with an IQ and vocal abilities that combined Albert Einstein and Frank Sinatra, and Wilbur, who had such a brilliant friend, but because this friend lived in the stables, could not share the companionship with anyone. Perhaps we all feel lonely like this sometimes, and that either ourselves, or the people (or animals) we love are misunderstood. Mr. Ed. reads every newspaper that Wilbur brings to him, and he has an excellent analytical mind. In one episode for instance he figures out the problem in the Dodgers line up, and has Wilbur write to Dodgers management. The solution clears up the whole problem, and the Dodgers go on to winning a pennant, in addition to getting great publicity with pictures of a horse sliding into home base taken when Wilbur brings Mr. Ed. to the field. What didn’t occur to me, though it must seem obvious to anyone who thinks about it outside the isolation of Nickelodeon Syndication, is that Wilbur most likely has a severe case of schizophrenia. Though we mostly think of people with this disease as homeless, and in many cases dangerous, it is a rather common disease, and it is not unlikely that upper middle class Californians like Wilbur are visiting the barn for a night cap with a thoroughbred. So suddenly this old sitcom became all the more personal to me, as I have related to Wilbur and Ed since 1980i. I started thinking about my days, and whether I am either farm animal living amonst creatures who don’t speak my language, or a bourgeois business man whose intellectual equals eat hay while standing on all fours. It is probably not so uncommon that I am thinking in these terms, as I am living in France, where my French is not so good. I have conversations in a language, where I might as well be saying neigh half of the time. Still there is something more to this. I also spend the majority of my day working in a small field of physics called Rheology. If you ask 99.9% of all Physicists in the world their opinion on rheological issues they will not know what you are talking about. Yet like most academic pursuits those of us who do spend a good amount of time considering issues relating rheology, we find it very interesting, compelling to the point of obsessiveness, and even extremely important. Though I assume everyone reading this must have a basic understanding of rheology (do I suffer from delusions?), it will sum it up to say that it is the study of complex flow of materials. Any materials that is, which to me seems like it is the study of nearly everything in the Universe. That is very a very broad philosophical interpretation of it though, as the truth is we have to study very specific properties, of very specific materials, which means that the universe as a whole rarely comes into focus. Still, I spent all week, and will spend many more working on this topic, with one, or at most two other people who are smarter, than, and at least as passionate as I am about this subject. This weekend I played with the family, and tomorrow I go back to the University (or is it the stable), and figure out how to analyze polymers in the fluid state, or is that win the pennant?


It may seem like I am saying that either I am a nut who can’t communicate with other people, like Wilbur, or a genius that no one understands, Like Mr. Ed. This is not really true in a directly analogous way. Wilbur and Mr. Ed. are cultural extremes. Wilbur is the most middle class normal married guy, and Mr. Ed is the most… well talking horse. Neither of these extremes exists in real life. What do exist are small enclaves in University science departments, art schools, back rooms of jazz clubs, and internet chat rooms. In these places everyone is working very hard at doing something they find important in some way, while struggling with to find a language that the rest of society can understand. We run up against a society where conformity now means not only having the best cocktail parties for the neighbors, but how many Facebook Friends you have, and Google hits occur when you type your name into the subject line. All of this pressure to speak and to be understood by the world as a whole however isn’t what our lives are really about. Really it is more like Wilbur and Mr. Ed, facing the world together and apart.