Posts Tagged ‘Carnegie Science’
“It’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future”*…
It’s that time of year: predictions and forecasts and outlooks for 2026 on just about everything are everywhere. Scott Belsky‘s list is eminently worth a read…
From talent arbitrage and “proof of craft” to hardware moats, ambient listening, homegrown software, and the end of waste – what should we expect to see in the coming year? What are the implications?…
“12 Outlooks for the Future: 2026+”
For a bracing list of “black swan” possibliities in the new year, see “15 Scenarios That Could Stun the World in 2026.”
But in the interest of starting this year on as positive a note as possible: “1,084 Reasons the World Isn’t Falling Apart.”
* an axiom attributed to Niels Bohr and Yogi Berra, among others
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As we contemplate what’s coming, we might recall that it was on this date in 1902 that Andrew Carnegie filed the incorporation papers for what he called the Carnegie Institution of Washington– which we now know as Carnegie Science. The first of 20 not-for-profit institutions he founded (in addition to his other philanthropy, e.g., funding over 3,000 public libraries), Carnegie Science conducts fundamental research both directly and in collaboration with other organizations (mostly research universities). In its 120+ year history, it has contributed scores of foundational discoveries– e.g., the expanding universe, the existence of dark matter, transposons (“jumping genes”)– across multiple scientific disciplines. Its principals have won multiple Nobel Prizes (and myriad other awards) and have contributed to scientific and technical policy (e.g., Carnegie President Vannevar Bush) and to scientific education.
“I think the next century will be the century of complexity”*…
… and as Philip Ball reports, a team of scientists at Carnegie Science agrees…
In 1950 the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi was discussing the possibility of intelligent alien life with his colleagues. If alien civilizations exist, he said, some should surely have had enough time to expand throughout the cosmos. So where are they?
Many answers to Fermi’s “paradox” have been proposed: Maybe alien civilizations burn out or destroy themselves before they can become interstellar wanderers. But perhaps the simplest answer is that such civilizations don’t appear in the first place: Intelligent life is extremely unlikely, and we pose the question only because we are the supremely rare exception.
A new proposal by an interdisciplinary team of researchers challenges that bleak conclusion. They have proposed nothing less than a new law of nature, according to which the complexity of entities in the universe increases over time with an inexorability comparable to the second law of thermodynamics — the law that dictates an inevitable rise in entropy, a measure of disorder. If they’re right, complex and intelligent life should be widespread.
In this new view, biological evolution appears not as a unique process that gave rise to a qualitatively distinct form of matter — living organisms. Instead, evolution is a special (and perhaps inevitable) case of a more general principle that governs the universe. According to this principle, entities are selected because they are richer in a kind of information that enables them to perform some kind of function.
This hypothesis, formulated by the mineralogist Robert Hazen [here] and the astrobiologist Michael Wong [here] of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C., along with a team of others, has provoked intense debate. Some researchers have welcomed the idea as part of a grand narrative about fundamental laws of nature. They argue that the basic laws of physics are not “complete” in the sense of supplying all we need to comprehend natural phenomena; rather, evolution — biological or otherwise — introduces functions and novelties that could not even in principle be predicted from physics alone. “I’m so glad they’ve done what they’ve done,” said Stuart Kauffman, an emeritus complexity theorist at the University of Pennsylvania. “They’ve made these questions legitimate.”…
[Ball explains the origin and outline of Hazen’s and Wong’s conjecture, explores the critiques– among them, that it’s not clear how to test the hypothesis– and examines the resonant work on Assembly Theory being done by Lee Cronin and Sara Walker…]
… Wong said there is more work still to be done on mineral evolution, and they hope to look at nucleosynthesis and computational “artificial life.” Hazen also sees possible applications in oncology, soil science and language evolution. For example, the evolutionary biologist Frédéric Thomas of the University of Montpellier in France and colleagues have argued that the selective principles governing the way cancer cells change over time in tumors are not like those of Darwinian evolution, in which the selection criterion is fitness, but more closely resemble the idea of selection for function from Hazen and colleagues.
Hazen’s team has been fielding queries from researchers ranging from economists to neuroscientists, who are keen to see if the approach can help. “People are approaching us because they are desperate to find a model to explain their system,” Hazen said.
But whether or not functional information turns out to be the right tool for thinking about these questions, many researchers seem to be converging on similar questions about complexity, information, evolution (both biological and cosmic), function and purpose, and the directionality of time. It’s hard not to suspect that something big is afoot. There are echoes of the early days of thermodynamics, which began with humble questions about how machines work and ended up speaking to the arrow of time, the peculiarities of living matter, and the fate of the universe…
A new suggestion that complexity increases over time, not just in living organisms but in the nonliving world, promises to rewrite notions of time and evolution: “Why Everything in the Universe Turns More Complex,” from @philipcball.bsky.social and @quantamagazine.bsky.social.
See also: Benjamin Bratton‘s explantion of the work he and his collegues are doing at a new institute at UCSD: “Antikythera.” See his recent Long Now Foundation talk on this same subject here.
* Stephen Hawking
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As we celebrate complication, we might spare a thought for G. N. Ramachandran (Gopalasamudram Narayanan Ramachandran); he died on this date in 2001. A biophysicist, he discovered the triple helical “coiled coil” structure of the collagen molecule, among other remarkable contributions to structural biology.
Ramachandran was a master of X-ray crystallography, and with his colleagues, constructed space filling models of protein molecules. He devised the Ramachandran Plot, a method to diagram the conformation of polypeptides, polysaccharides and polynucleotides– which remains the international standard to describe protein structures.
Ramachandran, inspired by the ancient Syaad Nyaaya (doctrine of “may be”), also explored artificial intelligence. He developed the Boolean Vector Matrix Formulation which has important application in writing software for AI.
“A time will come when men will stretch out their eyes. They should see planets like our Earth.”*…
Not long ago the search for extraterrestrials was considered laughable nonsense. Today, as Adam Frank explains, it’s serious and scientific…
Suddenly, everyone is talking about aliens. After decades on the cultural margins, the question of life in the Universe beyond Earth is having its day in the sun. The next big multibillion-dollar space telescope (the successor to the James Webb) will be tuned to search for signatures of alien life on alien planets and NASA has a robust, well-funded programme in astrobiology. Meanwhile, from breathless newspaper articles about unexplained navy pilot sightings to United States congressional testimony with wild claims of government programmes hiding crashed saucers, UFOs and UAPs (unidentified anomalous phenomena) seem to be making their own journey from the fringes.
What are we to make of these twin movements, the scientific search for life on one hand, and the endlessly murky waters of UFO/UAP claims on the other? Looking at history shows that these two very different approaches to the question of extraterrestrial life are, in fact, linked, but not in a good way. For decades, scientists wanting to think seriously about life in the Universe faced what’s been called the ‘giggle factor’, which was directly related to UFOs and their culture. More than once, the giggle factor came close to killing off the field known as SETI (the search for extraterrestrial intelligence). Now, with new discoveries and new technologies making astrobiology a mainstream frontier of astrophysics, understanding this history has become important for anyone trying to understand what comes next. But for me, as a researcher in the field of technosignatures (signs of advanced alien tech) – the new face of SETI – getting past the giggle factor poses an existential challenge.
I am the principal investigator of NASA’s first ever grant to study signatures of intelligent life from distant exoplanets. My colleagues and I are tasked with developing a library of technosignatures or evidence of technology-wielding life forms on distant planets. Taking on that role has been the culmination of a lifetime fascination with the question of life and the Universe, a fascination that formed when I was a kid in the 1970s, drinking deep from the well of science fiction novels, UFO documentaries and Star Trek reruns. Early on, as a teenager reading both Carl Sagan and Erich von Däniken (the author of Chariots of the Gods), I had to figure out how to separate the wheat from the chaff. This served as a kind of training ground for dealing with questions facing me and my colleagues about proper standards of evidence in astrobiology. It’s also why, as a public-facing scientist, I must work to understand how people not trained in science come to questions surrounding UFOs as aliens. That is what drove me, writing a recent popular-level account of astrobiology’s frontiers called The Little Book of Aliens (2023), to stare hard into the entangled history of UFOs, the scientific search for life beyond Earth, and the all-important question of standards of evidence…
[Frank explains the efforts underway, their history, and the rigor being applied in sifting for credible evidence…]
… With the giggle factor receding for the scientific search for life, where does that leave UFOs and UAPs? There, the waters remain muddied. It is a good thing that pilots feel they can report sightings without fear of reprisal as a matter of air safety and national defence. And an open, transparent and agnostic investigation of UAPs could offer a masterclass in how science goes about its business of knowing rather than just believing. In The Little Book of Aliens, I even explained how such an investigation might be conducted (the recent NASA UAP panel and the Galileo Project are exploring these kinds of options). But if my colleagues and I claimed we’d found life on another world, we’d be required to provide evidence that meets the highest scientific standards. While we should let future studies lead us where they may, there is simply no such evidence surrounding UFOs and UAPs that meets these standards today. In fact, at a recent hearing conducted by NASA’s UAP panel, it was revealed that government studies show only a small percentage of reported sightings failed to find a reasonable explanation. Many of the remaining cases did not have enough data to even begin an attempt at identification. The sky is simply not awash in unexplained phenomena.
In the end, what matters is that, after thousands of years of arguing over opinions about life in the Universe, our collective scientific efforts have taken us to the point where we can finally begin a true scientific study of the question. The next big space telescope NASA is planning will be called the Habitable Worlds Observatory. The name tells you all you need to know. We’re going all in on the search for life in the Universe because we finally have the capabilities to search for life in the Universe. The giggle factor is finally history.
How UFOs almost killed the search for life in the universe: “Alien life is no joke,” from @AdamFrank4 in @aeonmag.
For more on a related field, see Astrobiology (@carnegiescience)
Also apposite (and typically for him, both informative and very amusing): John Oliver on UFOs
* the foresightful Christopher Wren
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As we look up, we might recall that it was on this date in 1930 that Pluto was announced to be the name chosen for the newly-discovered ninth planet (previously known as Planet X) by Roger Lowell Putnam, trustee of Lowell Observatory, Flagstaff, Arizona, (and nephew of the late Percival Lowell who had established the observatory and initiated the search there for the ninth planet). Pluto had been located there on in February of that year at that institution by Clyde Tombaugh.
Putnam was quoted on the front page of the New York Times, saying, “We felt in making our choice of a name for Planet X, that the line of Roman gods for whom the other planets are named should not be broken, and we believe that Dr. Lowell, whose researches led directly to its discovery, would have felt the same way.” Pluto in mythology was the ruler of the underworld, regions of darkness. “P.L.” is also Lowell’s monogram.
While it’s still known as Pluto, in 2006 the International Astrophysical Union demoted it from a “planet” to a “dwarf planet.”
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