Science – Page 8 – Me on the net

Dwelling in the past

Some accounts have the wizard Merlin living his life from future to past, in the opposite direction to the rest of us. This meant that to him, what would a final farewell to us would be a joyous first meeting for him, and a first meeting would a sad goodbye. He remembered the future, but the past was a complete mystery to him.

The trolls in Terry Pratchett’s Diskworld had similar ideas. They considered that they travelled through time from past to future, as is normally understood, but they also considered that we were facing backwards in time as we travelled through it. This was conjectured by the trolls, to explain the fact that we can see where we are going when we travel in whatever direction we choose but we cannot see where we are going in time. Similarly we can’t see where we have been when walking from one place to another, but we can see where we have been in time.

Scientists have no difficulties with direction in time. In an equation with a time variable in it, one can trace the changes to other variables from the nominal zero point to see what would occur in the future, merely by incrementing the time variable. A scientist can predict the trajectory of a thrown item (a parabola) merely by substituting later times into the time variable in the equation.

y =ax² + bx + c

The scientist should compare these results to experiment and find, that this more or less works. Lets say though, that the scientist is an astrophysicist investigating an asteroid or other object on a parabolic trajectory around a larger object, like a moon or planet. (A parabolic trajectory is the trajectory which divides objects in hyperbolic trajectories which are not bound by the larger body’s gravity, from those in elliptical trajectories where the object is bound by the larger body’s gravity).

The astrophysicist would be able to track the trajectory of the body backwards in time, simply by substituting negative values for time into his equations. He would be able to see where it had been. However this process of substituting negative time values into the equations only works so far. At some point the body will feel the influence of other objects and the retrograde trajectory will deviate from the values predicted by the parabolic equation.



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Of course, if the trajectory is projected forwards far enough similar considerations arise. Eventually some other body will divert the body away from the parabolic trajectory. However in the region in which the parabola applies, the behaviour is symmetrical with respect to time. From a film of the event one could not tell whether or not the film was being run forwards or backwards.

Of course, if a film is run backwards for any length of time, it becomes obvious that something is wrong. Things fall upwards, and broken crockery comes back together again. People walk backwards.



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On a closer look, people can intentionally walk backwards and it is possible that a spring or other mechanism could be used to shoot things upwards, but it is a lot harder to imagine a way of reversing the breakage of the crockery. It implies that some process involved in the breaking of crockery is not reversible at a macro level.

It is likely that the process in question is at the molecular level or slightly above. To rejoin two broken surfaces spontaneously would presumably require that the molecules be in the correct positions and that a little burst of energy (equivalent to the little burst of energy that comprises the sound that the crockery makes in breaking and any heat release) be supplied at an instant in time. The weak bonds between the parts of crockery would need to be created, and that is really difficult.



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There’s therefore a discrepancy between the scientist’s view of the world, through his equation which time-symmetrical, and the man in the street’s view of the world, which is asymmetrical with respect to time. In fiction this asymmetry is used to good effect, when the protagonist may “wind back time”, to write a wrong or divert history to an alternate course.

When we consider space we usually imagine a three dimensional space. Events happen at locations in this space and three coordinates are enough to locate an event in space. Every possible point in space has its set of unique coordinates. It is common to add an extra dimension for time, making the space four dimension and consequently difficult to imagine successfully.

All events in space and time have a location and time and are represented by a point in the four dimensional space. The path of a particle is a line within this space, and any point on the line represents the position of the particle at a particular time. Positions on the line are either before or after this point, so it constitutes a “now” point for the particle. There is no actual motion over the line, since in the 4-D space all points represent the past and the future of the particle. They are already there.

The Klein bottle immersed in three-dimensional... — The Klein bottle immersed in three-dimensional space. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

To move to an earlier time, all we need to do is move to an earlier spot on the line. We would need to either travel back along the line at a speed of so many seconds per seconds where the first “seconds” is seconds measured in the space and the second “seconds” is some other time scale or we could jump out of the space-time completely and return to the requisite point earlier in time. We’d need to do the latter in some other space-time that embeds the original space-time, adding a number of extra dimensions to the mix.

Both options require the addition of extra dimensions, which while possible complicates the situation unacceptably to my mind. The process of adding extra dimensions could be repeated and go on forever, so we end up with infinite dimensions. I believe that it is correct to employ Occam’s razor at this point and declare that it appears unlikely that we could either roll back time or jump to an earlier point in time because of the implication that we would needs infinite dimensions as a result.

Cold

At the time that I write this the temperature at this desk is 12.7 degrees Centigrade. Of course it will warm up soon, but overnight the temperature drops dramatically at this time of year. I hate the cold. As the saying goes it makes your bones ache.

The climate here is “cool to warm temperate”. This means that places in the south see low temperatures which drop to zero degrees Centigrade or a few degrees below, with occasional falls to lower temperatures in some places. Snow rarely lasts long except of course in the mountains and hills.

A powder snow avalanche (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In the north, places like Auckland rarely drop to zero, remaining a few degrees above zero in most winters. Auckland and further north rarely experience snow, and a flurry of sleet in Auckland would usually gets a mention on the television news.

While snow rarely lasts long at low altitudes, it tends to come in quantity when it does, closing hill roads and even sometimes brings southern cities to a halt. Dumps at higher altitudes can of course cause severe issues to farmers. The farmers’ worst nightmare is a dry summer and autumn resulting in low yields from pastures followed by an early heavy fall of snow.

Of course the skiers rejoice when there is a snow dump and they head for the many ski fields in their hundreds sometimes causing traffic jams on the access roads! Snow for skiing can be undependable so most major ski fields have snow generating machinery as a backup.

When the snow melts the rivers rise of course. New Zealand rivers can be chillingly cold as a result. Many parts of the country have what is know as braided rivers, which appear to be mostly boulder filled for much of the time. Sometimes during a dry spell it may be possible to cross the river from bank to bank without getting one’s feet wet, while a surprising amount of water travels below the surfaces between the boulders.

When there is a thaw or after heavy rain such rivers rapidly fill and the water rises to the surface, creating a broad and sometimes heavy flow filling the river bed from bank to bank. The flow can be impressive, carrying large trees and other debris from the higher altitudes down to the lower altitudes.

Consequently there are long bridges on these braided rivers that seem to mostly traverse an expanse of rocks and boulders with maybe a relatively small looking river, possibly split into several channels.

Sometimes the boulder banks are populated by Russell lupins, which can block and change the nature of these braided rivers. While picturesque, the lupins are an introduced species and can damage the river’s ecosystem.

The water in the rivers is cold and can be bone-achingly cold as the water is mainly melted snow from the Southern Alps and other mountain ranges. Consequently swimming in such rivers can be challenging. I have swum in a river in the United Kingdom, wearing a wetsuit, with chunk of ice floating down the river, and that was an experience that I will not forget. The rivers here are likely to be at least as cold.

Ice is a strange substance. Well, perhaps that should be water is a strange substance. As water is cooled its volume reduces, like other substances. When it reaches four degrees Centigrade however it reaches a maximum density and then starts to expand again, which is counter intuitive. The reason for this behaviour is related to the way that water molecules link weakly to one another, as a result of the polar nature of the water molecule.

So water at 3 degrees Centigrade is lighter than water at 4 degrees Centigrade and so tends to move to the surface of the water. At 0 degrees Centigrade the water turns to ice, which floats on top of the liquid. This allows all sorts of things and protects fish and other aquatic organisms from the elements and from freezing solid, up to a point. It also allows us to skate on the surface of frozen bodies of water since the slight pressure of the blades causes the ice to temporarily melt.

When a human body gets cold, the body has various defences. As warm blooded animals we need to maintain our body temperature and if we don’t we die. So, when we get cold, blood flows to the centres of our bodies to maintain our core temperature, which means that our hands and feet become significantly colder than the rest of our bodies.

If the cold reaches into our core bodies, things start to shut down and hypothermia sets in. Brain function is hit hard and we start to behave irrationally and we would be in danger of dying. Fortunately as humans we have invented things like fire, houses, and clothing to keep us warm when the weather is cold. I personally have problems with maintaining heat as I do not like to wear gloves and I don’t like any form of headgear!

Another thing that I find in cold weather is that my breath passes over my moustache and beard so in colder weather the moisture in my breath condenses on my moustache and beard making them wet, and if it is cold enough the condensed moisture will freeze. My moustache and beard develop icicles.

On cold days everyone likes to sit beside the fire. An open fire, though, is horrendously inefficient! Even a free-standing stove, which radiates heat into the room, sends much of the heat directly up the chimney or flue. Even the radiant heat quickly rises to warm the air in the ceiling of the room. To add insult to injury, the air that keeps the fire burning is drawn from other places in the house, and has to be replaced by cold, cold air drawn into the house making these other places even colder.

I’ll conclude by noting that the days are becoming longer and while we are still in the depths of winter, spring is around the corner. Indeed, some early blooming plants are already showing signs of life, although they won’t amount to much until later in the year. The day length here will increase by one minute and 11 seconds tomorrow, and this rate of increase will grow rapidly until the equinox (around 21 September) by which time we should be much more cosy. However due to seasonal lag, we may still have the coldest times for this year ahead of us.

Rising San Bernard River causes flooding in Fort Bend County neighborhood

“Yet feet that wandering have gone, turn at last to home afar”

The title is part of the poem spoken by Bilbo Baggins at the end of “The Hobbit” by J.R.R Tolkein, as he sees his home from afar on his return. However he did not finally settle there, moving to Rivendel before the events of “The Lord of the Rings”. Eventually he and others, including Frodo and Gandalf sailed off to the West and out of the knowledge of the people of Middle Earth.

This poem came to mind as we returned to New Zealand from England, having visited relatives in England, Wales and Ireland. We had a great time and it was sad to leave, but when we touched down in Auckland I have never previously felt so deeply that we had arrived home. And we still had the leg to Wellington to complete!



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The leg from Auckland to Wellington was brilliant! The air was so clear, although with some cloud, so the mountains poked their snowy heads through the white blanket. Even the lower peaks of some of the hills showed snow cover, as New Zealand had just emerged from a cold snap.

As we closed on Wellington I could see Kapiti Island from the window. Unfortunately my cell phone had run out of power so I could not take any pictures. To add insult to injury we turned left and passed south of Kapiti Island before passing to the west of Titahi Bay Porirua Harbour.

Just before Porirua city the clouds closed in, hiding the city itself and the northern suburbs of Wellington. The cloud cleared a little further south but not in time for me to spot our roof from the air!

As we passed over Wellington Harbour I got a good view of the lower Hutt Valley, including Petone and its wharf, close to where I used to work. Then it was all stations go for landing.

My own experiences led me to consider travels in general. As you do. We were excited to leave, since were going to see our relatives and have interesting times. Bilbo Baggins set out excitedly and with trepidation. In his case he knew very little about what was going to happen to him, and had he known, his cautious streak may well have impeded his going.

As with Bilbo’s travels, our travels had their excitements and their tedious aspects. As with Bilbo, the first sight of home came as an immense relief and the experiences of our travels became things to tell other about, to share with them. We however met no dragons though we saw many representations of them in Wales.

English: Side view of Smaug at the Juarez stre... — English: Side view of Smaug at the Juarez street portion of the parade. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This seems to me to be a common pattern. Even to blasé businessman travellers there must be some slight anticipation of events of the day or days ahead. When returning home, even the businessman would probably be looking forward to sleeping in his own bed. Even a simple commute to work embodies this pattern of anticipation, experiencing and relief on return to home.

Frodo reports that Bilbo warned of the dangers of going on a journey.

“He used often to say there was only one Road; that it was like a great river: its springs were at every doorstep, and every path was its tributary. ‘It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door,’ he used to say. ‘You step onto the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.'”.

While neither Bilbo (in “The Hobbit”) or Frodo (in “The Lord of the Rings”) left home completely willingly, Bilbo being chivvied into it by Gandalf, and Frodo out of duty, many people completely willingly step into the “great river” that starts at every doorstep. There appears to be a conflict between the desire to remain comfortable at home and to experience new things.



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We were extremely tired by our journey which took a mere month or so. I can’t imagine how people such as Christopher Columbus and Marco Polo spent so long travelling. Marco Polo was away for 24 years!

Interestingly many travellers returned with truly amazing tales, of tribes of people with no heads, their faces in their torsos. Of people who consisted of large feet with eyes and mouths, presumably divided into left-footed and right-footed tribes. Where are these strange tribes today?

Today of course we can travel round the earth in a day, and to places in between in a few days or so. It is apparent to us that those fanciful peoples could never have existed, so where did they spring from?

Well, a traveller would know that his tall tales would be next to unverifiable. He may well have been travelling for months and would know that it was unlikely that anyone would go and check his reports. It may be that his communications with local inhabitants was limited and that he misunderstood the locals and then reported what he thought they had told him as his own experiences.



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Maybe the traveller would be trying to source funds to go back again, maybe to bring back one of these mysterious people. I can report that all the people that I met and saw were built to the standard pattern!

One thing that Columbus and Polo would not have had to cope with is jet lag. This condition is a consequence of moving to fast between time zones. At the rate that Polo was travelling that would be the least of his problems. I’ve not read his history but I can guess that he did not so much as travel slowly as move his home steadily to the east and then to the west as the commercial opportunities arose. While Columbus travelled faster, his rate of travel through the time zones probably caused him few problems.



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So, glad as I am to get home, I find jet lag debilitating. I’m fine when I get up, and fine during the day, but for some reason, when 7pm or 8pm rolls around my eyes start to droop. They say that jet lag lasts for a few days, so I should be over it in a day or so.



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(This blog has returned to normal. I hope someone out there enjoys my maunderings.)

Sinistralism

English: Photo of the sinistral shell of Achat... — English: Photo of the sinistral shell of Achatina fulica. Locality: Mauritius. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

At one time banks and post offices used to tie down the pen that they provided for people to sign things, such as cheques, with a piece of string or chain to prevent customers from stealing the pens. These days you are more likely to have a bunch of pens (with the bank’s logo) pressed on you.

Anyway, I was always discomforted by these tied down pens as I am left-handed and the string or chain was always fixed to the right of the counter and rarely was long enough for me to easily sign my cheques with left hand. As a result I was cramped up and twisted round as I manoeuvred the cheque book closer to the right hand side.

This is only one of the many times that my sinistralism has left me disadvantaged. Corkscrews and scissors, even power tools, wood screws and nuts and bolts are all designed for the majority who are right-handed. (I believe that the correct term would be dextralist). Can openers are the things that I find most tricky to use.

However, sinistralists living in a dextral world soon learn to use right handed tools, to at least some level of competence. There are tools made specifically for left-handed people and it is quite funny to give one to a right-hander. They don’t have a clue! This is because they have not had to learn to use tools with a sinistral configuration, whereas a sinistral has at least a level of competence with right-handed tools since they are everywhere.

The Universe obviously has a basic chirality or handedness which is a bit odd to say the least. It’s interesting to wonder why chirality exists. Is it just so that we can easily remove corks from bottles of wine? “Thanks, Deity, that just what we needed. Will you take a glass?”

Chirality makes it hard for some creatures. Imagine that you are a mollusc with a left-coiled shell and all the other mollusc are right-coiled. You’d find partners to be rare. Of course, it can’t make reproduction too difficult or the left-coiled molluscs would become extinct within a generation or so. (That’s probably too simplistic, but let’s not quibble).

Chirality allows us to have streams of traffic travelling both ways on a single road, but I’m sure that Deity would have considered that and arranged for some way that we could duplex our highways. Allowing a way for solid matter to inter-penetrate would be one, but perhaps “both directions” implies chirality anyway and in a non-chiral universe there would only ever be one way.

In some universes (and maybe in this one for all I know) there may be cases of even more complex situations. One reflection of a chiral object changes it into another object that can’t be superimposed on the original object. A second reflection does allow it to be superimposed on the original. Imagine a universe where three or more reflections are need to allow the superimposition! In that universe the motorways and autobahns would need at least three carriageways.

The spin of some sub-atomic particles has an interesting spin characteristic. The linked Wikipedia article says in one place:

However, if s is a half-integer, the values of m are also all half-integers, giving (−1)^2m = −1 for all m, and hence upon rotation by 2π the state picks up a minus sign.

Rotation through 2π is a rotation through 360 degrees. So a particle with a spin of ½ turns into its mirror reflection on one full rotation. At least I think that’s what that means. Two full rotations and it is back to its original orientation (or at least, its original spin value).

In the macro world two reflections of an object create an image that can be superimposed on the original. That means that if you look at the reflection of your reflection you see yourself as others see you rather than your mirror image. You are so much more used to seeing your reflection that it can be difficult to comb your hair while looking at a doubly reflected image of yourself.

Chiral objects are not symmetrical. Reflections of symmetrical objects can be superimposed on the original object however (after being moved and turned). Symmetry and asymmetry are part of the fabric of the universe that we live in and I think that having both allows for much more complexity in our universe than would be possible in a universe without the symmetry/asymmetry dichotomy.

Volvo fire engine of the "Bedfordshire an... — Volvo fire engine of the “Bedfordshire and Luton Fire & Rescue Service”, with “FIRE” in mirror writing (“ERIF”) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

One of the great questions of philosophy is “Why does anything exist?” or “Why does something exist rather than nothing?” The real answer to this question is that no one knows and no one is likely to know. I suppose the Deity might if the Deity exists Itself. Given that the universe exists why is does it embody the concept of left and right? Again, no one knows or is likely to know, or so it appears at this time.

One reason may be that if asymmetry did not exist one could probably not travel from A to B. If one started from A to travel to B in a universe without symmetry and hence without asymmetry, and someone else was travelling in the opposite direction then to pass one another the two travellers would have to pass on one side or the other of the other traveller.

It seems to me that the concept of “side” implies the concepts of “left” and “right”. Asymmetry comes in because, to either traveller, one passes to the left or right of the oncoming traveller who passes to the right or left of you. Symmetry comes in because, to pass one another both traveller has to keep to their left or their right to successfully pass one another.

Of course, that is only true for our universe. It is conceivable that a universe could exist where symmetry and asymmetry do not exist, but it is a universe which we would, most likely, be unable to conceive of, except in the broadest terms.



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Philosophy and Science



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Philosophy can be described, not altogether accurately, as the things that science can’t address. With the modern urge to compartmentalise things, we designate some problems as philosophy and science, and conveniently ignore the fuzzy boundary between the two disciplines.

The ancient Greek philosophers didn’t appear to distinguish much between philosophy and science as such, and the term “Natural Philosophy” described the whole field before the advent of science. The Scientific Revolution of Newton, Leibniz and the rest had the effect of splitting natural philosophy into science and philosophy.

Science is (theoretically at least) build on observations. You can’t seriously believe a theory that contradicts the facts, although there is a get-out clause. You can believe such a theory if you have an explanation as to why it doesn’t fit the facts, which amounts to having an extended theory that includes a bit that contains the explanation for the discrepancy.

Philosophy however, is intended to go beyond the facts. Way beyond the facts. Philosophy asks question for example about the scientific method and why it works, and why it works so well. It asks why things are the way they are and other so called “deep” questions.



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One of the questions that Greek philosopher/scientists considered was what everything is made of. Some of them thought that it was made up four elements and some people still do. Democritus had a theory that everything was made up of small indivisible particles, and this atomic theory is a very good explanation of the way things work at a chemical level.

Democritus and his fellow philosopher/scientists had, it is true, some evidence to go and to be fair so did those who preferred the four elements theory, but the idea was more philosophical in nature rather than scientific, I feel. While it was evident that while many substances could be broken down into their components by chemical method, some could not.

Antoine Lavoisier developed the theory of comb... — Antoine Lavoisier developed the theory of combustion as a chemical reaction with oxygen (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

So Democritus would have looked at a lump of sulphur, for example, and considered it to be made up of many atoms of sulphur. The competing theory of the four elements however can’t easily explain the irreducible nature of sulphur.

My point here is that while these theories explained some of the properties of matter, the early philosopher/scientists were not too interested in experimentation, so these theories remained philosophical theories. It was not until the Scientific Revolution arrived that these theories were actually tested, albeit indirectly and the science of chemistry took off.

Model for the Three Superior Planets and Venus... — Model for the Three Superior Planets and Venus from Georg von Peuerbach, Theoricae novae planetarum. Image enhanced for legibility. The abbreviations in the center of the diagram read: C[entrum] æquantis (Center of the equant) C[entrum] deferentis (Center of the deferent) C[entrum] mundi (Center of the world) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Before that, chemical knowledge was very run by recipes and instructions. Once scientists realised the implications of atomic theory, they could predict chemical reactions and even weigh atoms, or at least assign masses to atoms, and atomic theory moved from philosophy to science.

That’s not such a big change as you might think. Philosophy says “I’ve got some vague ideas about atoms”. Science says “Based on observations, your theory seems good and I can express your vague ideas more concretely in these equations. Things behave as if real atoms exist and that they behave that way”. Science cannot say that things really are that way, or that atoms really exist as such.

Indeed, when scientists took a closer look at these atom things they found some issues. For instance the (relative) masses of the atoms are mostly pretty close to integers. Hydrogen’s mass is about 1, Helium’s is about 4, and Lithium’s is about 7. So far so tidy. But Chlorine’s mass is measured as not being far from 35.5.

This can be resolved if atoms contain constituent particles which cannot be added or removed by chemical reactions. A Chlorine atom behaves as if it were made up of 17 positive particles and 18 or 19 uncharged particles of more or less the same mass. If you measure the average mass of a bunch of Chlorine atoms, it will come out at 35.5 (ish). Problem solved.

English: Chlorine gas (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Except that it has not been solved. Democritus’s atoms (it means “indivisibles”) are made up of something else. The philosophical problem is still there. If atoms are not indivisible, what are their component particles made of? The current answer seems to be that they are made of little twists of energy and probability. I wouldn’t put money on that being the absolute last word on it though. Some people think that they are made up of vibrating strings.

All through history philosophy has been raising issues without any regard for whether or not the issues can be solved, or even put to the test. Science has been taking issues at the edges of philosophy and bringing some light to them. Philosophy has been taking issues at the edge of science and conjecturing on them. Often such conjectures are taken back by science and moulded into theory again. Very often the philosophers who conjecture are the scientists who theorise, as in famous scientists like Einstein, Schroedinger and Hawking.

The end result is that the realm of philosophy is reduced somewhat in some places and the realm of science is expanded to cover those areas. But the expansion of science suggests new areas for philosophy. To explain some of the features of quantum mechanics some people suggest that there are many “worlds” or universes rather than just the one familiar to us.

This is really in the realm of philosophy as it is, as yet, unsupported by any evidence (that I know of, anyway). There are philosophers/scientists on both sides of the argument so the issue is nowhere near settled and the “many worlds interpretation” of quantum mechanics is only one of many interpretations. The problem is that quantum mechanics is not intuitively understandable.

The “many worlds interpretation” at least so far the Wikipedia article goes, views reality as a many branched tree. This seems unlikely as probabilities are rarely as binary as a branched tree. Probability is a continuum, like space or time, and it is likely that any event is represented on a dimension of space, time, and probability.

I don’t know if such a possibility makes sense in terms of the equations, so that means that I am practising philosophy and not science! Nevertheless, I like the idea.

Cooking

cooked in this case. I'd like to try the raw v... — cooked in this case. I’d like to try the raw version even though this was good as is. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Most people have a hand in food preparation at some time in the day. Even those who subsist on “instant meals” will at least zap it in the microwave for the necessary amount of time. Some people however cook intricate dishes, for their own amusement or for friends and families.

Most people eat cooked food although there is somewhat of a fad for raw food at the present time. All sorts of diets are also touted as having some sort of benefit for the food conscious, all of which seem bizarre when one considers that many, many people around the world are starving.



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Cooking can be described as applied chemistry, as the aim of cooking is to change the food being cooked by treating it with heat in one way or another. All the methods treatment are given names, like “boiling”, or “baking” or “roasting”. In the distant past no doubt such treatments were hit and miss, but these days, with temperature controlled ovens and ingredients which are pretty much consistent, a reasonable result can be achieved by most people.

Chemistry Is What We Are (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’d guess that the first method of cooking was to hold a piece of meat over a fire until the outside was charred and much of the inside was cooked. However, human ingenuity soon led to spit roasting and other cooking methods. A humorous account of the accidental discovery of roasting a pig was penned by Charles Lamb. In the account the discovery came as a result of an accidental setting fire to a pig sty, and consequently, as the idea of roast pork spread this led to a rash of pig sty fires, until some sage discovered that houses and sties did not need to be burnt down and it was sufficient to hang the pig over a fire.

I’d suspect that while roasting may have been invented quite early by humans, cooking in water would have come along a lot later as more technology is needed to boil anything. That is, a container would be needed and while coconut shells and mollusc shells can contain a little water, and folded leaves would do at a pinch, when humans invented pottery, the art and science of cooking was advanced immensely.

Although the foods that we eat can pretty much all be eaten raw, most people would find cooked food much more attractive. Cooked food smells nice. The texture of cooked food is different from the texture of raw food. I expect cookery experts are taught the chemical reactions that happen in cooking, but I suspect that cooking breaks down the carbohydrates, the fats, and the proteins in the food to simpler components and that we find it easier to digest these simpler chemicals.



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Maybe. That doesn’t explain why cooked food smells so much nicer than raw food. If food is left to break down by itself it smells awful, rotten, and with a few exceptions we don’t eat food that has started to decay.

Maybe the organisms that rot food produce different simpler components, or maybe the organisms produce by products that humans dislike. Other carnivores don’t seem to mind eating carrion and maybe a rotting carcass smells good to them.

The rules of cooking, the recipes have no doubt been developed by trial an error. It is likely that the knowledge was passed from cook to cook as an aural tradition initially. After all, cooking is likely to have started a long time before reading and writing were invented. Since accurate measurements were unlikely to be obtainable, much of the lore or cooking would have vague and a new cook would have to learn by cooking.

However, once the printing press was invented, after all the bibles and clerical documents had been printed, I would not be surprised to learn that the next book to be printed would have been a cook book. I’ve no evidence for this at all though!

Cooking changes the texture of meat and vegetables, making them softer and easier to eat. Connective tissues in particular are released making a steak for example a lot more edible. Something similar happens to root vegetables, swedes, turnips, carrots and parsnips. These vegetables can be mashed or creamed once they are cooked, something that cannot be done to the rather solid uncooked vegetables.

Cooking is optional for some foods – berries and fruits for example. Apples can be enjoyed while raw when they have a pleasant crunch, or cooked in a pie, when they are sweet and smooth. Babies in particular love the sweet smoothness of cooked apple and for many of them puréed fruits or vegetables are their first “solid” foods.



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Chicken eggs are cooked and eaten in many different ways. The white of an egg is made partly of albumen and when this is cooked it changes from translucent, almost transparent, to an opaque white. Almost everyone will have seen this happen, when an egg is cracked into a frying pan and cooked until the clear “white” of the egg turns to opaque white of the cooked egg.

Many other items when cooked change colour to some extent, but the white of the egg is most apparent. When you pair that with bread which is slightly carbonised on the outside, covered in the coagulated fat from cow’s milk (butter) and you have a common breakfast dish – fried eggs on toast.

English: Two slices of electrically toasted wh... — English: Two slices of electrically toasted white bread on a white plate (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There’s a whole other type of cooking – baking – that relies at least partly on a chemical reaction between an alkali (baking soda or sodium bicarbonate) and an acid (often “cream of tartar” which is weakly acidic). When the two are mixed in the presence of water, carbon dioxide gas is given off, leading to gas bubbles in the dough. When the dough is cooked the bubbles are trapped inside the stiffening dough, give the baked cake the typical spongy texture.

Some cooking utilises biological reactions. When yeast, a fungus, is placed into a liquid containing sugar, it metabolises the sugar, releasing carbon dioxide, and creates alcohol. In bread making this alcohol is baked off, but it may add to the attractiveness of the smell of newly baked bread. In brewing the alcohol is the main point of the exercise, so it is retained. It may even be enhanced by distillation.



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I’ve just touched on a few highlights as regards the mechanisms of cooking (and brewing!), but I’ve come to realise as I have been writing this that there are many, many other points of interest in this subject. The subject itself has a name and that name is “Molecular Gastronomy”. A grand name for a grand subject.



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40 Years

Forty years, around 14,600 days, 350,400 hours, 21,024,000 minutes, or 1,261,440,000 seconds. In other words around 1.3 gigaseconds. That’s the amount of time that I have been married to my wife, Elizabeth, known to everyone as Matty. I don’t mean to imply that it seems a long time – it doesn’t! Far from it. But it has been a long time, and I am amazed. Firstly because it has been a long time and secondly because we have stuck together for that long.

In that time the earth has travelled 37,600 million kilometres, light from earth or the sun has travelled 40 light years, or 3.8 x 10^14 kilometres. There are around 2,000 known stars within 50 light years of earth, with 133 falling among the brightest 10%, and according to my calculations around half of them are less than 40 light years away. That means that there is little chance that any LGMs will have been blinded by the flash of the photographer’s camera.

In that time a lot has happened. We have had three children and shortly after that, moved half way around the world. The kids have grown up and we now have three grandchildren, who are also growing up fast. The youngest has been at school for a year now, and it seem only recently that her mother was just starting school herself. Thankfully the kids have not dispersed too widely and they and the grandkids will be lunching with us tomorrow to celebrate.



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I’ve been looking at the things that have happened and changed in that 40 years. Strangely I had thought that the moon landings had not finished when we got married, but in fact there was no overlap. The last moon landing (Apollo 17) happened in 1972, before we were married. (The first landing was in 1969). Weird!

While men have not been to the moon in the last 40 years, many man-made devices have been sent to other planets and even to comets, The Hubble space telescope has sent back amazing photographs of the depths of space and other such telescopes have followed suit.

One of the biggest successes in exploration of the solar system has been the Mars Rover Opportunity which has operated on the surface of Mars since 2004. It’s original planned activity period was scheduled to be 90 sols or Martian days (slightly longer than an Earth day). However Opportunity is still functioning and sending back amazing photographs much more than 10 years since it landed.

Many of Opportunity’s photographs and panoramas can be found on the NASA web site, which also contains stunning photographs, both modern and historical, of rocket and shuttle launches. It also includes astronomical photographs taken by many different telescopes and photographs taken on the moon and from orbit. I highly recommend it.

Of course many important happenings occurred in the last 40 years. One of the biggest was the rise of the Internet. The birth of the networks that formed the Internet happened in the 1970s, and the term “Internet” was used in a technical document in December 1974, four months before we got married!



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Most people spend a lot of time on the Internet using a browser and viewing sites and that aspect of the Internet, originally called “the World Wide Web”, originated in CERN in the late 1980s. At some time a lot later than that I downloaded a copy of the NCSA web server and create a “Hello World” web page. I then pointed a browser at it (probably an early version of Internet Explorer) and up popped my “Hello World” page! At the time I was thrilled and delighted!

Of course not all things that have happened in the last 40 years are so great. According to the WWF the Earth has lost half its wildlife. 40 years ago global warming had not become a topic of concern, although it was first mentioned by Svante Arrhenius in 1896.

Another notable event around 1975 was the first commercial flight of Concorde in 1976. It went out of service in 2003 having failed to become a commercial success. I worked for British Aerospace at one time, though not directly on anything to do with Concorde. I also worked for British Aerospace who made the Olympus engines for the Concordes.

In 1977 the Queen celebrated her celebrated her silver jubilee, and she is still going 40 years later! I don’t remember much of the celebrations but I do remember that it was a big thing at the time!



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While searching around for links for this post I came across this useful link from the Sunday Telegraph which lists events from the last 50 years. It’s amazing how many seem to be fairly recent and at the same time a long time ago. The first case of AIDS was diagnosed in 1980, for example. The Vietnam war ended in 1975. The first test tube baby was born in 1978. Her son was conceived naturally and was born in 2006.

So much that we take for granted today was not around when we got married. No Internet as above. No cell phones. According to the Sunday Times list above, the first British mobile phone call was made by the comedian Ernie Wise to Vodafone. The first mobile phones were small bricks and had battery lives which were very short. They were also rare and expensive. Facebook, Twitter and all the other “Social Media” sites were well in the future and the multifunction devices that mobile phones have become were almost unimaginable.



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So many things have changed that it is a wonder that anything has lasted. Our marriage has lasted, even though the concept of marriage itself has changed to include same-sex marriage, over the four decades. It seems that even same-sex marriage is becoming less popular, with couples often having children first and getting married later. That still seems odd to me, but it seems to work for many people.

We’ve made it through 40 years while all things have changed around us. I’m proud of that fact and hope that we can continue for many more. But we have a long way to go to beat my parents – they just recently celebrated 70 years of marriage.

Time waits for no man

English: Text: "You can't stop time... bu... — English: Text: “You can’t stop time… but you can turn it back one hour at 2 a.m. Oct. 28 when daylight-saving time ends and standard time begins.” (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It’s approaching the equinox, that time of the year when the day and the night are of almost equal length. It’s the vernal or spring equinox here in the Southern Hemisphere, and the autumnal equinox in the Northern Hemisphere. For a number of reasons, the day and night are not of exactly equal length, and alternative definition is the time when the plane of the earth’s equator passes through the centre of the sun.

At around this time of the year many countries adjust their clocks to take advantage of the increasing daylight in the evening. Most countries who do this change their clocks forward in spring and back in the autumn, hence the mnemonic “spring forward, fall back”.

The reasons for the usage of “Daylight Saving Time” are debatable. The original intent was to align working day more accurately with the daylight hours while leaving more daylight time at the end of the day. Without Daylight Saving Time, people rose in the morning after an hour of usable daylight had occurred. It was during the two World Wars that “Daylight Saving Time” was first practised extensively in many countries.

Nowadays we are accustomed to “Daylight Saving Time”, and naturally there are dissenters who believe that it is unnecessary or counter productive. A farmer may point out that his cows don’t practise “Daylight Saving Time” and so the changes in the clocks are of no benefit to him, and can even cause him inconvenience.

“Daylight Saving Time” is around one hundred years old, so it is a fairly recent invention. Indeed the synchronisation of clocks, even in a single country, is a recent phenomenon. Now we have clocks synchronised globally.

Computers have clocks. Indeed the very functioning of a computer requires a very accurate clock, so it should be no surprise that we take advantage of this requisite to extend computer clock usage outside of the computer itself.

In the early days of computers, the clocks were not synchronised between computers. In fact that synchronisation had to wait for the development of networked computers. The people who used these isolated computers had to set the clocks manually, which was acceptable when computers were rare, but became a chore when computer usage started to climb and more desk had computers on them.

In a computer there are two sorts of clocks, a hardware clock and a software clock. The hardware clock is the fundamental clock in a computer system and it ticks thousands of times per second. If you’ve ever browsed the specs of a computer system you will likely have noticed the clock specification, the (these days) gigahertz rating. This is closely related to the clock speed, and the number of operations that the computer can perform in one second.



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The original computers had speeds rated in kilohertz, so today’s computers are of the order of one thousand million time as fast as the old klunkers.

The software clock is related to the hardware and takes the clock information and translates it into a human usable date and time. It can’t do that without reference to the outside world as the hardware clock consists merely of a stream of “ticks” and doesn’t understand the concept of seconds, hours, days, months and days of the week. There is no weekend in the hardware clock’s world.



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The reference to the outside world in the early days of computing meant the operator typing in the time, and the software clock relating that to a tick of the hardware clock. From then on the software clock just counts ticks and works out the human usable date and time from that.

As computers started to be networked together, a problem arose. Computer A’s and computer B’s clocks will have been set by a human to as close as the human can manage, but they may be several seconds apart, a lifetime in computer terms. This can cause issues like money appearing in bank accounts before the money disappears from the sending account when the transaction is automated. All transactions are automated these days.

At the same time as computers got networked, some far seeing people decided to set up a network of atomic clocks. These clocks are much more accurate than computers hardware clocks which can “drift”, because not all computer clocks tick at exactly the same rate. As a service this service is provided on the Internet and this has almost universally been adopted.

Your computer will contact a local time source, which contacts a less local time source, and so on until one of the top tier time sources is connected. Thus they all synchronise with the top tier time source. All the top tier sources synchronise with each other so eventually all computer clocks are synchronised.

A computer synchronises with its time source by basically sending a packet of data to its time source and the time source replies. The computer compares the times and repeats the process a few times to get an average, and then, since the packet has to go out and back, halves the average and estimates the time at the time source as the time sources knows it. Then it sets the hardware clock to match. It continually does this, constantly updating its clock as necessary, which gives a very accurate value for the local time.

One might question the necessity of this accuracy. Isn’t it being a bit pointless to set clocks with such nit-picking accuracy? In a news story which I can’t now track down, a financial organisation lost millions, maybe billions of dollars because they did not handle a “leap second” accurately. Automatic stock market trading programs made thousands of trades in the few milliseconds that the company was out of sync with the rest of the world. But to you or I, doing our “online banking”, it won’t matter.

It’s worth remembering that the world-wide time system is pretty new. In these days we are accustomed to be able to contact someone on the other side of the world and to know what the time is with the contactee. But this is new.

It used to be the case that the local time was a sort of local consensus and did not rely on clocks. Then when clocks became more common the local reference time source was the clock in the spire of the church. Time was still local as the church clocks were not synchronised.

As time keeping became more important, the local time zone might expand to cover a time or a city. Clocks could be synchronised in a small area by use of travelling clocks or watches, and really accurate clocks and watches enabled the explorers from Europe to travel the world.

The advent of long distance travel (by the railways) and of telephonic communications resulted in the need for consistent time information across countries and across continents. However, standard time was only legislated in the United States in 1918, and this subsequently spread to the parts of the rest of the world that were not using Greenwich Mean Time.

A plate indicating the Greenwich meridian in S... — A plate indicating the Greenwich meridian in Stidia, Algeria. Photo taken in July 2005 by François Noël. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

10 fingers and 10 toes

[Ooops! Late again.]

The seed pod of milkweed (Asclepias syriaca) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Most living things come from seeds or eggs. A fertilized egg or seeds has all the information in it to generate the organism that springs from it. All the organs of the organism are implicit in the egg or seed, but minor details, like freckles or fingerprints are not encoded in the egg.

The environment and chance play a part in the final shape of an organism. A seed may fall in a good environment or it may fall in a less favourable environment and the shape of the organism can be totally different in the two environments, to the extent that an unwary botanist may categorise them as two different species.

This property of plants was used by the writer of the Christian gospel in the Parable of the Sower (Matthew 13:3-23). Interestingly this comes just before the part where the Gospel writer expounds on Jesus’ reasons for teaching in parables.

Some plants and animals change significantly as they mature. Lancewood is so different as a mature plant from its juvenile form. The juvenile leaves are narrow and spiky while the mature leaves are broader and softer, and while there are competing theories as to why this is, my favourite theory is that the juvenile plants had to discourage browsing by animals, and in particular the extinct bird called the Moa. Since the Moa is extinct this theory cannot be tested!

Japanese horticulturists have used this feature of organisms to fit themselves to the environment to create miniature trees in a pot. Basically the tree is grown in a small container which obviously can’t maintain a full sized tree and as a result a perfectly formed miniature tree can be formed with care, sometimes over long periods of time.

It would seem obvious that you can’t produce bonzai human beings, but in fact this can be done. Whenever a drought or famine hits a country the children who grow up there are small and underdeveloped (as well as having other deficiency problems.

When researching this topic I came across an article on the Internet which discusses this topic, and the authors state in part:

Therefore, by coding for proteins, genes determine two important facets of biological structure and function. However, genes cannot dictate the structure of an organism by themselves. The other crucial component in the formula is the environment.

This overstates the role of the environment a little, I feel, as in most cases the organism’s structure is determined in the most part in its genes, so that it looks much like any other member of the species. It is only when the environment is unfavourable (as in the case of the bonzai trees) that the gene expression leads to significantly differently formed individual. Droughts and poor soils will also leads to significantly differently formed individuals, but those are deficiency effects.

Early succession on poor, sandy soil at Øer, D... — Early succession on poor, sandy soil at Øer, Djursland, Denmark. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This is more clearly true in the case of organisms like humans. Unless the environment in which a human grows up is very extreme, there is actually little difference between individuals, and those differences, race, eye colour, hair colour and things like the tendency to myopia are almost certainly genetic.

So I am arguing that genes result in the major characteristics of any organism, except in certain rare cases. Somewhere in the human genome the number of fingers and toes are coded for, and only rare individuals with genetic variations have more or less digits. We don’t all speak the same language, but that is not a genetic trait, though the ability to learn and speak a language may be genetic.

Genes are interesting things. As mentioned in the article, genes can code for structural proteins or for enzymes which affect the chemical reactions in the cell. I suspect that the line between the two is pretty blurred as building the structure of the cell is after all a chemical reaction.

Of course, not only must a cell’s genetic mechanism build and maintain its own organisation, but a cell is part of a tissue, and in, for example, the liver, a cell must maintain itself as a liver cell. Similarly for cells in other organs.



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It appears that, as the genetic material is identical across the whole organism, that there must be some way for a cell to “know” that it should develop as liver cell and not as a brain cell. This is done by switching genes on and off, but I don’t understand how this happens in multi-cellular organisms. It seems that there are environmental influences within the organism and within the tissues that determine this.

It’s likely that these environmental influences are based on something like chemical gradients. Otherwise, when a bone is created there would be no way of telling the process of bone creation when to stop. It is evident that it is an approximate influence because fruit flies have different numbers of eye cells between left and right eyes (about 1000). If it were an accurate influence then the number of eye cells would be the same in both eyes.



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Apparently scientists do not know exactly how it work either. In this web page, “10 Questions Still Baffling Scientists“, the claim is made that not even the experts know. Of course these Internet lists of things may or may not be accurate, but it is an interesting link.

Of course fractal generation programs can be used to generate pretty good imitations of the structures of trees, and changing a few parameters fed to the fractal generation programs can change the shape of the “tree” from a bushy structure to an extended poplar type structure.

Some similar mechanism might be involved here. Fractal programs are simple, can produce a wide range of shapes. The trouble with fractals is that there is usually no way to stop the shape generation, so any stopping mechanism is probably not part of any possible fractal method for generating. Some other method for stopping the growth of an organ once it is the right size and shape most likely exists.

From the link above it is possible that this mechanism is not yet known, but it does appear that organ growth and shape is encoded in the genes, and is effected by switching genes on and off. Some fractal type mechanism might be involved.

English: Apprentice. Man and boy making shoes. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Computers and cells

(Oops! One day late this week!)

A computer has some similarities to living organisms. Both produce something from, well, not very much. A computer program has data input from various sources, and produces output to various sinks or targets. A living organism takes in nutrients from various sources, and produces branches, leaves, fur, bones, blood and other organs.

Of course there are differences. A computer is much, much simpler than a living being, even single celled organism. A computer in general only has a relatively small number of parts, but the “parts” in a living organism number in the billions. And of course, living organisms reproduce, but that may change in the foreseeable future.

Some animals are sentient, but I’m not going to discuss that here. Maybe in another post.

A computer has hardware, software and operates on data. The data is either part of the software or read from buffers in the hardware. It stores its calculations in “memory”, which is special hardware with particularly fast access speeds.

The computer produces results by placing data into buffers in the hardware. This results in things happening in the real world, such as printing a letter or number on paper, or more frequently these days, on some sort of screen. It may also do many other things, such as control the flow of water by moving a valve or other control mechanism.

Computers communicate with other computers, by placing data in an output piece of hardware. The hardware is connected to a distant piece hardware of the same sort which puts the data into a buffer accessible to another computer. This computer may be a specialised computer that merely passes on the data. Such computers are called routers (or modems, or firewalls).

Computers, specialised only in their usage, are found in washing machines, cars, televisions, and we all these days have multi-functional computers in our pockets, our cellphones. It would be hard to find a piece of electronic equipments these days that doesn’t have some sort of computer embedded in it. Very few of these computers are completely isolated – they chatter to one another all the times by various mechanisms.

(Incidentally, I came across a bizarre example of connectivity of things the other day – a wifi teddy bear. Say you are sitting in the lounge and you want to send a message to your child who is in her bedroom. You pick up your tablet and send a message to a “cloud” web site. This sends a message to your child’s tablet which is in her bedroom with her. The teddy bear, which is connected to the child’s tablet by wifi, growls the message to the child. No doubt scaring her out of her wits.)

So in the current technological world everything is connected to everything else. Much like all the cells in a living being are connected to all the other cells in the organism, directly or indirectly. So how far can we take this analogy, where the organism is the network and the individual cells as the computers. (Caveat emptor – I am not a biology expert, so don’t take what I might say from here on as gospel).



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A computer consists of hardware, software, and operates on data. A cell is sort of squishy, so “hardware” can only be a relative term, but a cell does have a relatively small number of organelles, such as mitochondria. The nucleus, which contains most of the genetic material, acts as the control centre of the cell, much as the CPU is the control centre of a computer.

The function of the nucleus is to maintain the integrity of these genes and to control the activities of the cell by regulating gene expression—the nucleus is, therefore, the control center of the cell.

In the cell, the genetic material is in some sense the software of the cell. It contains all the necessary information to create the cell itself or more interestingly the information needed to cause the cell to split into two identical daughter cells. This information is generally encoded in the DNA of the chromosomes.

The cell also contains, within the nucleus, an organelle called the nucleolus. This organelle (which is part of the nucleus organelle) seems from my reading to mostly relate to RNA, while the rest of the nucleus mostly relates to DNA, very roughly. RNA and DNA perform a complex dance called protein synthesis in organelles called ribosomes.

Cells produce chemicals, which can be consider analogous to computer outputs and receive chemicals from other cells, and so cells communicate, in a sense, with each other. Since all cells are equal genetically, it follows that a cell’s type, liver, skin, lung or brain neurone is determined by factors in its environment.

The model of an artificial neuron as the activ... — The model of an artificial neuron as the activation function of the linear combination of weighted inputs (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This only loosely true as each cells is the daughter of another cell and inherits its type, but in the early days of an organism’s life, before organs are formed cells do differentiate. Just as when computers were new, they were all very similar, keyboard, monitor, and beige case.

As the computer-sphere evolved, special types of computer evolved, such as routers and modems, and firewalls. Not to mention phones. Computers became specialised. Similarly cells become differentiated, some going on to become liver cells for example, and others brain cells (neurones).

When an organism is young and a cell divides both cells are the same type, but when the organism is very young there is no differentiation. The DNA in the cell contains the necessary information to determine the cell type and tissues and organs are created in the more complex animals.

This process obviously can’t be random, otherwise cells of the various tissue types would be all mixed up. It seems to me, maybe naively, that while the “program” for creating cells is in the DNA, some factors in the environment convey such information as how old the organism is, and what type of cell needs to be created.

an example of a Program (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We know from investigations into fractals that a simple equation can result in the creation of an image that looks very much like a tree or grasses and that small changes to the equation can lead to different tree or grass shapes. It is tempting to think that a similar process takes place in organisms – a general rule is given which results in the right sort of cells being produced in the right places.

The problem with the fractal idea is that it only creates simple shapes. An arm with fingers, skin and so on is beyond the capabilities of a fractal process so far as I know. Fractals don’t stop. Again, so far as I know there’s no way to iteratively create a tree structures with leaves.



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So the “software” of the cell, the “program” embedded in the DNA doesn’t appear to be analogous to a simple computer program that draws fractals. Of course that doesn’t mean that we can never describe a simple organism completely in fractal terms, and create analogous distinct individuals.

It seems that a long as the analogy is not pushed too far, computers in a distributed network are reasonably similar to living organisms. Please note I am note referring to the fractal type computer programs, but am talking about the way that computers themselves in a network are somewhat analogous to living organisms. Primitive ones!

Sample oscillator from hexagonal Game of Life. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

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