Posts Tagged ‘Arno Penzias’
“For what are myths if not the imposing of order on phenomena that do not possess order in themselves? And all myths, however they differ from philosophical systems and scientific theories, share this with them, that they negate the principle of randomness in the world.”*…
And we humans are, as Kit Yates explains, myth-making animals…
Unfortunately, when it comes to understanding random phenomena, our intuition often lets us down. Take a look at the image below. Before you read the caption, see if you can pick out the data set generated using truly uniform random numbers for the coordinates of the dots (i.e., for each point, independent of the others, the horizontal coordinate is equally likely to fall anywhere along the horizontal axis and the vertical coordinate is equally likely to fall anywhere along the vertical).
The truly randomly distributed points in the figure are those in the left-most image. The middle image represents the position of ants’ nests that, although distributed with some randomness, demonstrate a tendency to avoid being too close together in order not to overexploit the same resources. The territorial Patagonian seabirds’ nesting sites, in the right-most image, exhibit an even more regular and well-spaced distribution, preferring not to be too near to their neighbors when rearing their young. The computer-generated points, distributed uniformly at random in the left-hand image, have no such qualms about their close proximity.
If you chose the wrong option, you are by no means alone. Most of us tend to think of randomness as being “well spaced.” The tight clustering of dots and the frequent wide gaps of the genuinely random distribution seem to contradict our inherent ideas of what randomness should look like…
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… As a case in point, after noticing a disproportionate number of Steely Dan songs playing on his iPod shuffle, journalist Steven Levy questioned Steve Jobs directly about whether “shuffle” was truly random. Jobs assured him that it was and even got an engineer on the phone to confirm it. A follow-up article Levy wrote in Newsweek garnered a huge response from readers having similar experiences, questioning, for example, how two Bob Dylan songs shuffled to play one after the other (from among the thousands of songs in their collections) could possibly be random.
We ascribe meaning too readily to the clustering that randomness produces, and, consequently, we deduce that there is some generative force behind the pattern. We are hardwired to do this. The “evolutionary” argument holds that tens of thousands of years ago, if you were out hunting or gathering in the forest and you heard a rustle in the bushes, you’d be wise to play it safe and to run away as fast as you could. Maybe it was a predator out looking for their lunch and by running away you saved your skin. Probably, it was just the wind randomly whispering in the leaves and you ended up looking a little foolish—foolish, but alive and able to pass on your paranoid pattern-spotting genes to the next generation…
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This… is just one example of the phenomenon known in the psychology literature as pareidolia, in which an observer interprets an ambiguous auditory or visual stimulus as something they are familiar with. This phenomenon, otherwise known as “patternicity,” allows people to spot shapes in the clouds and is the reason why people think they see a man in the moon. Pareidolia is itself an example of the more general phenomenon of apophenia, in which people mistakenly perceive connections between and ascribe meaning to unrelated events or objects. Apophenia’s misconstrued connections lead us to validate incorrect hypotheses and draw illogical conclusions. Consequently, the phenomenon lies at the root of many conspiracy theories—think, for example, of extraterrestrial seekers believing that any bright light in the sky is a UFO.
Apophenia sends us looking for the cause behind the effect when, in reality, there is none at all. When we hear two songs by the same artist back-to-back, we are too quick to cry foul in the belief that we have spotted a pattern, when in fact these sorts of clusters are an inherent feature of randomness. Eventually, the dissatisfaction caused by the clustering inherent to the iPod’s genuinely random shuffle algorithm led Steve Jobs to implement the new “Smart Shuffle” feature on the iPod, which meant that the next song played couldn’t be too similar to the previous song, better conforming to our misconceived ideas of what randomness looks like. As Jobs himself quipped, “We’re making it less random to make it feel more random.”…
“Why Randomness Doesn’t Feel Random,” an excerpt from How to Expect the Unexpected: The Science of Making Predictions—and the Art of Knowing When Not To, by @Kit_Yates_Maths in @behscientist.
* Stanislaw Lem
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As we ponder purported patterns, we might send carefully-discerned birthday greetings to a man who did in fact find a pattern (or at least a meaning) in what might have seemed random and meaningless: Robert Woodrow Wilson; he was born on this date in 1936. An astronomer, he detected– with Bell Labs colleague Arno Penzias– cosmic microwave background radiation: “relic radiation”– that’s to say, the “sound “– of the Big Bang… familiar to those of us old enough to remember watching an old-fashioned television after the test pattern was gone (when there was no broadcast signal received): the “fuzz” we saw and the static-y sounds we heard, were that “relic radiation” being picked up.
Their 1964 discovery earned them the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics.
“It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others”*…
For centuries, scientific discoveries have suggested humanity occupies no privileged place in the universe. But as Mario Livio argues, studies of worlds beyond our solar system could place meaningful new limits on our existential mediocrity…
When the Polish polymath Nicolaus Copernicus proposed in 1543 that the sun, rather than the Earth, was the center of our solar system, he did more than resurrect the “heliocentric” model that had been devised (and largely forgotten) some 18 centuries earlier by the Greek astronomer Aristarchus of Samos. Copernicus—or, rather, the “Copernican principle” that bears his name—tells us that we humans are nothing special. Or, at least, that the planet on which we live is not central to anything outside of us; instead, it’s just another ordinary world revolving around a star.
Our apparent mediocrity has only ascended in the centuries that have passed since Copernicus’s suggestion. In the middle of the 19th century Charles Darwin realized that rather than being the “crown of creation,” humans are simply a natural product of evolution by means of natural selection. Early in the 20th century, astronomer Harlow Shapley deepened our Copernican cosmic demotion, showing that not only the Earth but the whole solar system lacks centrality, residing in the Milky Way’s sleepy outer suburbs rather than the comparatively bustling galactic center. A few years later, astronomer Edwin Hubble showed that galaxies other than the Milky Way exist, and current estimates put the total number of galaxies in the observable universe at a staggering trillion or more.
Since 1995 we have discovered that even within our own Milky Way roughly one of every five sunlike or smaller stars harbors an Earth-size world orbiting in a “Goldilocks” region (neither too hot nor too cold) where liquid water may persist on a rocky planetary surface. This suggests there are at least a few hundred million planets in the Milky Way alone that may in principle be habitable. In roughly the same span of time, observations of the big bang’s afterglow—the cosmic microwave background—have shown that even the ordinary atomic matter that forms planets and people alike constitutes no more than 5 percent of the cosmic mass and energy budget. With each advance in our knowledge, our entire existence retreats from any possible pinnacle, seemingly reduced to flotsam adrift at the universe’s margins.
Believe it or not, the Copernican principle doesn’t even end there. In recent years increasing numbers of physicists and cosmologists have begun to suspect—often against their most fervent hopes—that our entire universe may be but one member of a mind-numbingly huge ensemble of universes: a multiverse.
Interestingly though, if a multiverse truly exists, it also suggests that Copernican cosmic humility can only be taken so far.
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The implications of the Copernican principle may sound depressing to anyone who prefers a view of the world regarding humankind as the central or most important element of existence, but notice that every step along the way in extending the Copernican principle represented a major human discovery. That is, each decrease in the sense of our own physical significance was the result of a huge expansion in our knowledge. The Copernican principle teaches us humility, yes, but it also reminds us to keep our curiosity and passion for exploration alive and vibrant…
Fascinating: “How Far Should We Take Our Cosmic Humility?“, from @Mario_Livio in @sciam.
* John Holmes (the poet)
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As we ponder our place, we might send carefully-observed birthday greetings to Arno Penzias; he was born on this date in 1933. A physicist and radio astronomer, he and Robert Wilson, a collegue at Bell Labs, discovered the cosmic microwave background radiation, which helped establish the Big Bang theory of cosmology– work for which they shared the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics.
MB radiation is something that anyone old enough to have watched broadcast (that’s to say, pre-cable/streaming) television) has seen:
The way a television works is relatively simple. A powerful electromagnetic wave is transmitted by a tower, where it can be received by a properly sized antenna oriented in the correct direction. That wave has additional signals superimposed atop it, corresponding to audio and visual information that had been encoded. By receiving that information and translating it into the proper format (speakers for producing sound and cathode rays for producing light), we were able to receive and enjoy broadcast programming right in the comfort of our own homes for the first time. Different channels broadcasted at different wavelengths, giving viewers multiple options simply by turning a dial.
Unless, that is, you turned the dial to channel 03.
Channel 03 was — and if you can dig up an old television set, still is — simply a signal that appears to us as “static” or “snow.” That “snow” you see on your television comes from a combination of all sorts of sources:
– human-made radio transmissions,
– the Sun,
– black holes,
– and all sorts of other directional astrophysical phenomena like pulsars, cosmic rays and more.
But if you were able to either block all of those other signals out, or simply took them into account and subtracted them out, a signal would still remain. It would only by about 1% of the total “snow” signal that you see, but there would be no way of removing it. When you watch channel 03, 1% of what you’re watching comes from the Big Bang’s leftover glow. You are literally watching the cosmic microwave background…
“This Is How Your Old Television Set Can Prove The Big Bang“
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is equivalent to magic”*…
In the 1930s, ATT was rolling out dial phones to the American public…
This short subject newsreel was shown in movie theaters the week before a town’s or region’s telephone exchange was to be converted to dial service. It’s extremely short—a little over a minute, like a PSA. The film concisely explains how to use a dial telephone, including how to dial, how to recognize dial tone, and how to recognize a busy signal…
For a look into the then-future (the now present), fast forward just over 50 years, to the early 90s and to ATT’s predictions…
More in ATT Tech Channel.
[TotH to @BoingBoing for a pointer to the first video]
* Arthur C. Clarke (a 1976 interview with whom is in the Tech Channel trove)
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As we ponder progress, we might send , ATT-related birthday greetings to Robert Woodrow Wilson; he was born on this date in 1936. An astronomer, he detected– with Bell Labs colleague Arno Penzias– cosmic microwave background radiation: “relic radiation”– that’s to say, the “sound “– of the Big Bang…. familiar to those of old enough to remember watching an old-fashioned television after the test pattern was gone (when there was no broadcast signal received): the “fuzz” we saw and the static-y sounds we heard, were the “relic radiation” being picked up.
Their 1964 discovery earned them the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics.
“It is unnatural in a large field to have only one shaft of wheat, and in the infinite Universe only one living world”*…
NASA’s top scientists have a provocative message for the scientific community: that they need a plan in place for if — or when — we find evidence of extraterrestrial life…
James Green, the agency’s chief scientist, coauthored a new article, published in the journal Nature, urging researchers to create a framework for reporting evidence of aliens. In it, the authors stressed the importance of clearly communicating any findings of extraterrestrial life, as well as establishing clear expectations for the public for when it occurs and accurately expressing ambiguity in early evidence.
“As life-detection objectives become increasingly prominent in space sciences, it is essential to open a community dialogue about how to convey information in a subject matter that is diverse, complicated and has a high potential to be sensationalized,” read the paper.
Green and his co-authors propose a confidence of life detection (CoLD) scale to help evaluate any evidence that might be discovered. The scale itself contains seven different levels like a staircase. Each level is a benchmark that must be met before we can proceed to the next step.
For example, level one would be discovering life signatures such as biological molecules. The second level would be ruling out that the sign of life is the result of contamination from Earth. Eventually, the CoLD scale ends with the final step: scientists declaring that they’ve confidently discovered evidence of extraterrestrial life.
“Having a scale like this will help us understand where we are in terms of the search for life in particular locations, and in terms of the capabilities of missions and technologies that help us in that quest,” Green said in a NASA news release.
The paper’s authors stress that the scale is merely a starting point for a larger conversation with scientists and science communicators about the best ways to proceed if and when we discover evidence of alien life.
It also comes in the context of the upcoming launch of the powerful James Webb telescope, along with the Perseverance Mars rover searching for life on the Red Planet, meaning that such a finding might become a reality sooner rather than later.
“The search for life beyond Earth requires broad participation from the scientific community and many kinds of observations and experiments,” Mary Voltek, co-author of the study and head of NASA’s Astrobiology Program, said in the release. “Together, we can be stronger in our efforts to look for hints that we are not alone.”
“NASA Says We Need a Plan for When We Discover Alien Life,” from @futurism.
As to what we’ll do with that knowledge, a complicating factor: “94% of the universe’s galaxies are permanently beyond our reach” (if the speed of light remains an upper limit on travel).
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As we search far and wide, we might send enduring birthday greetings to Sir Hermann Bondi; he was born on this date in 1919. A mathematician and cosmologist, he is best remembered for developing the steady state model of the universe with Fred Hoyle and Thomas Gold as an alternative to the Big Bang theory. In an attempt to explain the paradox: how can the stars continually recede, yet without disappearing, they audaciously proposed an unproven hypothesis: that the universe has an eternal existence, with no beginning and without an end. Further, they argued, the universe is continuously expanding, maintaining a constant density by continually creating new matter from energy. Their model was rendered obsolete when, in 1965, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson detected a background microwave radiation from all directions in space, as predicted by the “Big Bang” theory of creation that is now accepted. [See here for more on Penzias’ and Wilson’s discovery.)
Bondi also contributed to the theory of general relativity; was the first to analyze the inertial and gravitational interaction of negative mass; and the first to explicate correctly the nature of gravitational waves.
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards”*…
If you wanted to hear the future in late May, 1968, you might have gone to Abbey Road to hear the Beatles record a new song of John Lennon’s—something called “Revolution.” Or you could have gone to the decidedly less fab midtown Hilton in Manhattan, where a thousand “leaders and future leaders,” ranging from the economist John Kenneth Galbraith to the peace activist Arthur Waskow, were invited to a conference by the Foreign Policy Association. For its fiftieth anniversary, the F.P.A. scheduled a three-day gathering of experts, asking them to gaze fifty years ahead. An accompanying book shared the conference’s far-off title: “Toward the Year 2018”…
“More amazing than science fiction,” proclaims the cover, with jacket copy envisioning how “on a summer day in the year 2018, the three-dimensional television screen in your living room” flashes news of “anti-gravity belts,” “a man-made hurricane, launched at an enemy fleet, [that] devastates a neutral country,” and a “citizen’s pocket computer” that averts an air crash. “Will our children in 2018 still be wrestling,” it asks, “with racial problems, economic depressions, other Vietnams?”
Much of “Toward the Year 2018” might as well be science fiction today. With fourteen contributors, ranging from the weapons theorist Herman Kahn to the I.B.M. automation director Charles DeCarlo, penning essays on everything from “Space” to “Behavioral Technologies,” it’s not hard to find wild misses. The Stanford wonk Charles Scarlott predicts, exactly incorrectly, that nuclear breeder reactors will move to the fore of U.S. energy production while natural gas fades. (He concedes that natural gas might make a comeback—through atom-bomb-powered fracking.) The M.I.T. professor Ithiel de Sola Pool foresees an era of outright control of economies by nations—“They will select their levels of employment, of industrialization, of increase in GNP”—and then, for good measure, predicts “a massive loosening of inhibitions on all human impulses save that toward violence.” From the influential meteorologist Thomas F. Malone, we get the intriguing forecast of “the suppression of lightning”—most likely, he figures, “by the late 1980s.”
But for every amusingly wrong prediction, there’s one unnervingly close to the mark…
Those uncannily-accurate predictions, and their backstories, at “The 1968 book that tried to predict the world of 2018.”
* Søren Kierkegaard
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As we ponder posterity, we might send static-y birthday greetings to Robert Woodrow Wilson; he was born on this date in 1936. An astronomer, he detected– with Bell Labs colleague Arno Penzias– cosmic microwave background radiation: “relic radiation”– that’s to say, the “sound “– of the Big Bang. Their 1964 discovery earned them the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics.
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