illuminating science

You may have noticed I’ve been absent for the last week or so (or not Following up the saga of my laptop being stolen, my desktop PC has been out of commission for the last week and half! I finally got it back yesterday, but it has meant that I’ve been basically computerless and internetless - so, no posting.

So, on that note: last week I attended a conference called From Stars to Brains. It was held in honour of Paul Davies, a physicist who has a strong interest is astrophysics, cosmology and, lately, astrobiology - the study of life in the universe, including its origins on Earth and the possibility of life on other planets. Celebrating his 60th birthday this year, it was decided to have a conference to explore his two main interests - crudely, stars and brains.

The first day of the conference was very interesting - Paul Davies himself did an excellent talk on how likely it is to find life in our universe. Of course, the answer is that it’s 100% certain - we’re here, so there definitely is life in our universe. You might think this is an awfully trite answer, but it really does get to the heart of the issue - our universe seems to be very precisely tuned to the existence of life. If the strength of gravity were just slightly weaker or stronger, or various other forces or constants were tweaked, stars (and hence planets) could never have formed, and it seems unlikely that any life at all could exist in a uniformly could soup of particles (although, of course, we can never know for sure!) Why should our universe be so precisely tuned this way? One explanation is the anthropic principle - in my paraphrasing, “It is, because we are” - which simply says the universe hsa to be perfect for life here, because otherwise we wouldn’t be here to comment on how perfect it is. In some ways, I find that an adequate answer, but it does beg the question - if there’s really just one universe, what are the chances it would have chosen just the right conditions at random? Squillions to 1? Short of introducing God into the equation, physicists are spending quite a lot of time looking for a scientific explanation of the parameters we see.

Perhaps I’ll write more on that, but suffice to say, Paul Davies gave a very interesting and entertaining talk. The rest of the day was taken upwith discussions about dark energy, evolution, emergent phenomena and other rather interesting topics.

The second day, however, started to delve more into the philosophy side of things. The first talk was a fascinating discussion about what drives our personalities and what role emotion plays in the brain (I’ll summarise this one later). The next talk was from David Chalmers, who gave the fabulous “Matrix as metaphysics” talk here at UQ recently. He gave quite a good talk about what steps we need to take in order to develop a science of consciousness - in particular, developing some quantitative way of recording our internal thoughts. No easy feat, but it was good to see a philosopher applying something concrete to their ideas and research.

Particularly because there was little enough of that for the rest of the day. Talks that stretched analogies from physics into overarching metaphors for our life seemed to me to border on quackdom (no offense…) and seemed to lack any sort of coherent or rational argument. There were talks about various poet’s attempts to understand the universe, or art which depicts modern physics, which were both kind of interesting but, to me, seemed to contribute limited knowledge to our understanding of either science or art.

On the whole, the philosophers lived up to their reputation (”What’s the difference between a mathematician and a philosopher? A mathematician only needs a pencil, paper and rubbish bin. A philosopher just needs the pencil and paper.”) with the exception of David Chalmers. What was amusing though, was the non-physics students who I spoke to afterwards and said what great talks they were - and how good it was to have some non-scientist speakers which they could understand. No comment.

On the more humourous note, I struck up a conversation with a woman from the Tibetan Buddist Society, who I thought would be fascinating to speak to - as I’ve mentioned, my experience has generally been that Buddists are quite open minded about science, and tend to be lovely people. Unfortunately, while she did seem to be the latter, she then proceeded to tell me how wonderful it was that science was failing to understand so much, and people would now start to see they needed to move towards a more “intuitive” understanding approach instead. “For instance, we don’t even really understand how a plane flies!” Normally, I just grin and bear it, but I couldn’t let that one pass. When I disagreed, her smile faultered, and she replied “Oh. Well, still, it doesn’t seem possible that something as heavy as that could fly. After all, through history anything that heavy has simply flown one way - down!” My response was that once you understood the physics of it, it was still surprising but by no means incomprehensible. Eventually, she went off to chat to someone a little less physics inclined.

Just a quick post, saying I’m successfully back from a really enjoyable week at camp, and with a rather old but very cool story - lemurs, those wonderful creatures from Madagascar (the movie or the place, take your pick) are actually a lot more intelligent than they might appear - even if they’re primarily motivated by food. Through computer games, the lemurs are able to count and remember sequences. Some will even finish another lemur’s sequence if it means they’ll get the treat instead!

Now, if they can just teach them to sing as well as in the movie, lemurs will be ready for their move to prime time!

Continuing on my annoying pests trend, in tropical Queensland, in Australia, you’ve got a dilemma - the water is kind of chilly to swim in in winter. But in summer, the Box Jellyfish makes swimming in the ocean a somewhat worrying prospect. These jellyfish inject a powerful venom which can kill a human, particularly a child, very quickly.

The best protection is of course not to go swimming. Barring that, wearing a full lycra body suit will protect you (as well as being supremely fashionable, particularly amongst X-Men!) and swimming within nets that are often setup to keep the jellyfish out are other strategies. But I’ve got to say, a new treatment being developed in Queensland sounds like a pretty amazing solution if it pans out. Apparently, researchers have developed a cream that stops the jellyfish from stinging you. When coated with the cream, the jellyfish doesn’t recognise that you’re prey or predator, and so simply ignores you. Apparently. What’s most disturbing, however, is that they’re actually doing human trials, initially using just a coated finger, and then going “as far as we could” before being stung - so far, no-one has been stung once. (Again, apparently!) Makes you wonder how far you’d go in the name of science…

It may be some time before the cream is commercially available, and I’d be surprised if it becomes a sole protective measure (even with my faith in science, I’d be concerned about it washing off etc), but certainly it looks like a good start! I wonder if there’s any other applications this idea could be put towards? Australia’s certainly got enough deadly creatures to think about!

So tomorrow I’m heading off to be the “Scientist in Residence” at a camp run by Brisbane Boys Grammar. It runs from Tue-Friday, and is an opportunity for about 20 of their best Year 10 science students to be exposed to some of the more exotic areas of science that you don’t normally have the opportunity to find out about in high school.

I’m going to be running a variety of activities over the week, including workshops on Game Theory (how to win at Who wants to be a Millionaire? and the problems with nuclear proliferation being just two of the activities!), discussions on cosmology and what it would be like to journey into a black hole, and, of course, making the ultimate in gastronomic experiencies - liquid nitrogen icecream!!!

I’m not sure what the internet situation will be like - the camp is held at a wonderful property about an hour south-west of Brisbane (the field opposite is home to some of the worlds scariest cows…I kid you not. They tried to eat me a couple of years ago. …Why are you looking at me like that?) So, combined with my laptop being stolen (gah!), this trip and,oh, my PhD, my posting has been somewhat irregular. Hopefully, I’ll be back on track after this!

Oh, sorry, that should have been the other way around - if researchers from University of Queensland in Australia are successful, all toads will be male. Cane toads are one of Australias worst introduced species, originally brought in to eat the cane beetle that was destroying sugar cane crops but instead deciding they liked the taste of green tree frogs better instead. These ugly little suckers are often found squashed on the roads at night (often accompanied by swerve marks…) and toad hunts are quite popular in some parts (particularly near the rainforest areas, where on certain nights a bucket of toads can be swapped for a beer or two. Sometimes quit literally, actually - the beer comes out of the freezer and the toads go in! It might sound a little unhumane, but…) And despite some reports suggesting things aren’t quite so bad as we fear, there’s no doubt that cane toads are taking over many habitats originally reserved for native species.

The latest idea for disposing of these toads, however, is to genetically toads that will only give birth to male tadpoles. (Or rather, they give birth to both, but the female morph into males.) The idea would be that if enough of these toads were released, they would be pass on their genes to the rest of the population, eventually resulting in an all male toad population unable to find mates, which would then gracefully die out. Unhappily, I’m sure (”I guess that’s sad for the male cane toads,” says Prof. Koopman on their enforced celibacy), but better than some sort of mass poison. And before you comment about celibacy not being an inherited characteristic, I think it does work out - those males that do find a mate will pass on their genes, and so forth. The question, however, is whether they can dominate over the rest of the population ultimately, but I imagine with a large enough initial population combined with the fact that the modified toads produce twice as many males (since no females!) as their counterpart.

Anyway, seems I’m on a bit of a pest thing - first locusts, now cane toads! Not to mention balloon animals and burglars!

So this is only a short post - I’ve been burgled, losing my laptop, some PhD work, my ID, and who knows what else and so I’m a little distracted - but I couldn’t pass up this fantastic story about modelling locusts using statistical mechanics,a branch of physics which is more often used to describe particles of gas or molecules in a solid, than insects. They were able to reproduce the behaviour of locusts to gather and swarm apparently randomly until their numbers reach a critical mass - and then pow, they all attack en masse. Very cool!