Surprised It Actually Worked!

Though this is Bike to Work Week, the picture above is from a bicycle trip to our neighborhood grocery store Berkeley Finer Foods.  They had 40 pound packs of charcoal on sale, and we decided to buy one for grilling this summer.  I decided to try getting it on my bicycle.  It was easier than I expected.  With a few bungee cords and the pack balanced on my rear bike rack, I was able to bring coals, bike, and rider home safely.   It is a amazing what we can do when we are sufficiently determined to find a way.

Practical Benefits of Particle Physics #7

A particle accelerator named ALICE (not to be confused with the LHC experiment of the same name) is researching and developing an energy recovery technique.  It also may be able to generate infrared laser light that may be able to enable early diagnosis of esophageal cancer.

A Short Story: "Sam's Ending"

"Where are we, is this Heaven?" Jerome asked aloud before the wood beneath his back suddenly fell away and just as suddenly slammed back into him.  "Well, I sure hope Heaven doesn't have this many potholes," came a voice from the darkness.

As he stared into the light above him, he realized he was now lying down rather than standing before a firing squad with Maggie.  "Maggie!" He cried out and sat bolt upright so quickly that it made him dizzy. "I'm over here," she replied with a groggy voice.  He snapped his head over toward her voice and saw that they were both in plain wooden boxes; they would have been coffins had they been dead. The light looked like a dome light one would find inside a car. From the creaking and rumbling and what the light illuminated, he realized that they were in the back of a covered truck with a single dome light above their heads. Another sharp jolt proved that the voice had been right about the potholes.  Jerome could see Maggie slowly sitting upright next to him about a foot away.

She said, "how can we still be alive? I remember the guns firing, and look, I've got blood on my chest."  Indeed she did, and so did he; there were two holes in his shirt with blood dripping from them.  "I thought were were going to be with the Lord." She had been at peace with them dying for their faith for much longer than he had, but in the last few days even he had developed an unnatural peace, almost excitement, about facing the squad that would finally send them out of that wretched prison into the arms of Jesus.  So, he could understand why she sounded almost disappointed.

The voice in the darkness could not.  "You sound like you would rather be dead!  I risk my hide, not to mention other body parts, to save your lives, and this is the thanks I get?"  It was the voice of an older man near the back of the truck whom they could not see.  He did not sound angry as much as annoyed.   He also sounded familiar. "Who are you?" They asked almost in sync.  "Call me Sam," came the reply.  "What's on your chests are not wounds; they were produced by squibs."

They looked at each other very confused as to what a sea creature with ten tentacles had to do with their present situation.  "Squids?"  Maggie spoke for both the them.  "No, squibs," Sam said, emphasizing the b.  "A squib is a small explosive. Yours popped a plastic bag filled with fake blood; in this case, a mixture of corn syrup, red food coloring, and corn starch.  Also makes a surprisingly good ice cream topping."  Sam sounded like a professor who enjoyed lecturing about his subject a bit more than his students enjoyed hearing it.  He continued, "It also propelled a small needle into your chests, injecting you with a fast-acting anesthetic.  So, when the squad fired, you fell limp just as if they had actually executed you."

"So, they were shooting blanks?" Maggie asked.  "Correct."  She began to realize that the conspiracy necessary to keep them breathing must have been rather large.  As Jerome was examining the fake wounds, he found a slim book concealed beneath his shirt.  As he removed it, he also felt a small sting as he removed the needle Sam had mentioned.  It was hollow, with holes in both covers for the needle and the fake blood, but he could still read the title.

"Thank you.  I'm sorry that I sounded ungrateful, but this is all such a shock," Maggie said.  "Don't worry," replied Sam.  "I understand you must be terribly disoriented."  A look of surprise and realization came over he face.  "I recognize your voice; you were the doctor who examined us when we were checked in to the prison!"  "Indeed I am; that was months ago.  You have an excellent memory." He sounded genuinely impressed.

"Why are you doing this?" She said as she pulled the same hollow book out of her shirt.  "Maybe I don't think I would be doing my job as a physician if I let two of my patients die needlessly.  Maybe somebody paid me.  Maybe I'm just a sucker for young lovers such as yourselves.  In any case, I'm not why my motivations matter to you.  They don't change the fact that you are alive while all your enemies think you are dead and that you are being driven to a nation where you will be safe."  Maggie would have blushed at Sam's final explanation if her skin were light enough; they were not actually lovers yet since they had been arrested before they were married.  Now, she realized, they might still have a chance.

Jerome, who tended to be more direct than Maggie, put her question more bluntly, "Are you a believer?  We prayed for our executioners before they fired, so we're obviously concerned about the state of your soul."  "Well," said Sam with just a hint of mischieviousness in his voice, "I'm afraid I'm going to leave the state of my soul a mystery for now."

Maggie had now had time to examine the strange book.  She smiled at the irony of it saving her life by making her appear dead.  Her smile quickly faded when she read the title. "Again, I don't mean to sound ungrateful for you saving our lives." She halted, obviously unsteady, "But, before I was arrested I was a librarian, so I have to ask.  Why did you destroy two perfectly good copies of Romeo and Juliet to do it?"

Sam answered as he stepped into the light, allowing them to see his face for the first time.  He was grinning with bright eyes.  He did not look somber or heroic as they had expected.  He looked like a middle aged man with a bad haircut who had just proudly pulled a marvelous prank. "I would think the answer to that would be obvious by now. I never liked the ending."

We Made Sushi!

We were blessed with the opportunity to learn how to make sushi recently!  It was a class called Just Roll It! given by I Wish Lessons; we had a Groupon.  The teacher was good, and it was really fun to learn how to make food that we both enjoy greatly but have never made.  The results were not always pretty, but they were all delicious.

I Voted on Tuesday...

...of all the candidates for whom I voted, only one won.  Such is democracy.

Spiritual Aspects of Neutrinos

I recently read The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis for the first time.  It is a profound, prophetic, and prescient book; it is truly stunning how much wisdom Lewis could place in such a thin volume.  I will attempt to comment only on a small segment of it here.  I think it best to introduce this segment with a passage from another of Lewis' works: a book in The Chronicles of Narnia.

     "I was a long way above the air, my son," replied the Old Man. "I am Ramandu. But I see that you stare at one another and have not heard this name. And no wonder, for the days when I was a star had ceased long before any of you knew this world, and all the constellations have changed.
     "Golly," said Edmund under his breath. "He's a retired star."
     "Aren't you a star any longer?" asked Lucy.
     "I am a star at rest, my daughter," answered Ramandu...
     "In our world," said Eustace, "a star is a huge ball of flaming gas."
     "Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of."

-- The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (Ch. 14)

When I originally read this passage, I found Ramandu's reply to Eustace stirring but rather cryptic.  In Abolition of Man, Lewis expounds on the concept of a physical object being more than its physical components.

Nature seems to be the spatial and temporal, as distinct from what is less fully so or not so at all. She seems to be the world of quantity, as against the world of quality; of objects as against consciousness; of the bound, as against the wholly or partially autonomous; of that which knows no values as against that which both has and perceives value; of efficient causes (or, in some modern systems, of no causality at all) as against final causes. Now I take it that when we understand a thing analytically and then dominate and use it for our own convenience, we reduce it to the level of "Nature" in the sense that we suspend our judgements of value about it, ignore its final cause (if any), and treat it in terms of quantity. This repression of elements in what would otherwise be our total reaction to it is sometimes very noticeable and even painful: something has to be overcome before we can cut up a dead man or a live animal in a dissecting room. These objects resist the movement of the mind whereby we thrust them into the world of mere Nature. But in other instances too, a similar price is exacted for our analytical knowledge and manipulative power, even if we have ceased to count it. We do not look at trees either as Dryads or as beautiful objects while we cut them into beams: the first man who did so may have felt the price keenly... The stars lost their divinity as astronomy developed... To many, no doubt, this process is simply the gradual discovery that the real world is different from what we expected, and the old opposition to Galileo or to "body-snatchers" is simply obscurantism. But that is not the whole story. It is not the greatest of modern scientists who feel most sure that the object, stripped of its qualitative properties and reduced to mere quantity, is wholly real. Little scientists, and little unscientific followers of science, may think so. The great minds know very well that the object, so treated, is an artificial abstraction, that something of its reality has been lost.
...
Is it, then, possible to imagine a new Natural Philosophy, continually conscious that the "natural object" produced by analysis and abstraction is not reality but only a view, and always correcting the abstraction? I hardly know what I am asking for. ... The regenerate science which I have in mind would not do even to minerals and vegetables what modern science threatens to do to man himself. When it explained it would not explain away. When it spoke of the parts it would remember the whole. While studying the It it would not lose what Martin Buber calls the Thou-situation. ... Its followers would not be free with the words only and merely.

- The Abolition of Man (Ch. 3)

The idea that even inanimate physical objects can have properties beyond those discernible by science is one I had not considered deeply in a long time.  However, I think God is using these passages from Lewis' writing to reactivate this line of thinking in me.  Phrases like the elegant Universe, the God particle, and the handwriting of God may be echos of the great minds that Lewis mentioned.

Many poets and artists have pondered what a star is beyond its energy and plasma, so I thought it would be a good exercise to ponder the possible spiritual aspects of the particles I study: neutrinos.  Neither Lewis nor anyone alive when Abolition of Man was published in 1944 knew that neutrinos existed; they were not discovered until 1956.

Neutrinos are electrically neutral and very weakly interacting.  Trillions of them pass through your body and mine every second of our lives, but since the almost never interact with the matter of our bodies or this planet, we never notice them.  It is only the development of intense neutrino sources combined with very sensitive and very large detectors that allows scientists to study them.

Despite their ghostly qualities, they are necessary to several physical processes that are important to life on Earth.  Without neutrinos, the sun could not shine as it does.  With out the sun, the existence of life would be impossible. Nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons could not function as they do.  Most of the energy of exploding stars called supernovae is carried away as neutrinos.  Supernovae create and disperse many elements (such as iron and iodine) that our bodies require to function.  Neutrinos are found throughout the Universe in great quantities.

Three kinds of neutrinos exist, and a neutrino produced as one kind can be detected in a distant location as another kind.  It is like shipping a semi trailer full of Old Milwaukee from Milwaukee to Duluth only to open the door in Duluth and find a trailer full of Amstel light!

That summarizes their physical aspects, so what are their spiritual aspects?  I believe, that like all created objects, the reflect some characteristics of their Creator.  They demonstrate that he is able to create things that are ubiquitous extremely important yet invisible and nearly impossible to detect in any way.  They are a reminder to me that such important particles can be invisible and thus a reminder that there may be many other important things in Creation that I cannot see.

"Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. For by it the people of old received their commendation. By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible."

 - Hebrews 11:1-3 (NRSV)

The Price of My Information

Via Facebook, I found a story in the online New York Times Magazine on the data mining Target does with the information it collects when we buy its products using a credit card, coupon, or anything else that identifies us as the purchaser.   Their data analysis is so good that they can determine, with a high level of confidence, whether a shopper is pregnant and when she is due.  According to the story, they were even determined that a teenage girl was pregnant before her father did!

Similarly, Google's new privacy statement has raised concerns about how much information we, sometimes unconsciously, give to them.

I don't think these companies are doing anything illegal or even necessarily unethical.  We and they are participating in a business transaction; in effect, we sell all of this information about ourselves for the price of credit card rewards, coupons, e-mail, internet searching, online documents, other services and benefits, and even this blog.  If I want, I can simply stop participating in many of these transactions, as an article in Forbes suggests, by paying mostly (on only) in cash.

I am beginning to realize that I have not been sufficiently conscious of this transaction even though I have thoroughly participated in it.  I have not stopped to ask the question, "How much is my information worth?" Certainly I have implicitly decided its price, but is that the right price?  Does that price reflect its true value?  I am asking these questions now, and I am not sure what the answers will be.