Miscellany

The folks at 3 quarks daily have been on a roll lately, picking out all sorts of interesting things. I do want to comment about the essay by Robert Laughlin. But for the moment I am lazy, and will just grab a quote from a book review they link to on a completely different topic. The review is by Peter Beinart, and the book is Gilles Kepel’s The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West. Kepel argues that Islamism is not an ascendant ideology, but rather one that has turned to violence only because it is losing support overall. At least, for the most part; here’s an excerpt from the review:

The book’s argument is faint, and submerges during chapter-length digressions. But at its core The War for Muslim Minds tries to explain why al-Qaeda, contrary to the predictions in Jihad, is not fading. Although Kepel concedes that the organization has inherent strengths, he still assumes that if left to its own devices, it would fail to draw a mass following. The problem, he suggests, is that it is not being left to its own devices. Rather, the Bush administration’s war on terror — expressed in disastrous policies toward both the Palestinians and Iraq — is gaining for al-Qaeda an appeal it could never win on its own. In contrast to President Bush, who has responded to 9/11 with an audacious effort to redirect the course of Muslim history, Kepel implicitly calls for something far more modest: prudent management of a threat that — if we let it — can be beaten from within. The war for Muslim minds, Kepel suggests, will be won in Riyadh, Cairo, and the suburbs of Paris. In Washington it can’t be won — only lost.

I tend to agree with Beinart’s review, both in his agreement with the basic thesis about al-Qaeda, and also in where he disagrees with Kepel about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Kepel seems to want to blame American neo-cons for even more terrible things than they are actually responsible for; hard to manage, but not metaphysically impossible.

On the spur of the moment, we went to the Green Mill last night to listen to Patricia Barber. Longtime Preposterous readers already know that she is one of my favorites, but it’s worth saying again.

Barber is a pianist, composer, singer, and lyricist, who is accomplished and innovative in all these areas. You’d most likely classify her as a jazz musician, but she happily combines a pop sensibility (“Norwegian Wood” was one of last night’s highlights) with classically-influenced structures. She recently won a Guggenheim fellowship to develop Mythologies, a cycle of songs based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and we got to hear some of the pieces debut last night. It was startling to see these jazz musicians (Michael Arnopol on bass, Eric Montzka on drums, and guest Zach Brock on violin) suddenly pull out these elaborate pieces of sheet music to play the new songs — they were intricate formal arrangements, enlivened by spaces for improvization within the work.

It’s such a pleasure to hear music that is simultaneously gorgeous and challenging, that can be immediately appreciated while repaying close attention. Who says that we can’t be passionate and intellectual at the same time? The highlight of last night’s show was a rocking rendition of The Moon, from Verse, which starts with some avant-garde squeals and then gets funky.

should i leave Erebus
to his own device?
what Chaos when the curtain rises
and the houselights dim

with whitecake
on my face
the actress backstage
contemplates
laying a Universal egg

still a broken heart
is a broken heart
and Illumination
is in fact
Performance

in the dark
in the cold
in the sky
i can fly

i am old
but i can see
for miles
and miles

i am silver
i am gold
i am white
i am blue

i am rock
i am chaste
i am time
i am truth

when twilight falls
among the stars
i sit and tinker
with your moods
i hear your thoughts
i move the tides
i am your God
i am your Muse
i can be fire
i can be war
i am the daughter
of Zeus
but tonight
there won’t be light
cause I can’t shine
without you

but tonight
there won’t be light
cause I can’t shine
without you

You have to hear it, especially the insistent bass line, to get the full effect.

And tonight I will go hear Vonski. Have I mentioned that Chicago is the greatest city in the world?

So, the master plan is coming along nicely. First cut taxes down to the bone, turning a budget surplus into a truly alarming deficit. Then use that deficit as an excuse to slash goverment programs not directly tied to invading new countries. Science will not be spared. David Appell reports on the situation in high-energy physics:

Bush’s budget is shaping up to be a real disaster. A friend writes that outlays for high-energy physics are due to be cut from $736M (2005 est.) to $714M (2006 est.), a 3% cut in before inflation terms and therefore about a 5% cut in inflation-adjusted terms. What ever happened to the rich (who’ve received the bulk of the tax cuts under this administration) subsidizing good science? Or, failing that, simply American’s committment to cutting-edge and important research? Must all our money go to militaristic aims and tax cuts for the wealthy? How much more anti-science do we tolerate from this administration?

Meanwhile, in my email this morning I found an informational message from the American Astronomical Society about the House Science Committee Hearing on the Hubble Space Telescope.

Ranking member Bart Gordon echoed chairman Boehlert’s remarks and at the end of the hearing stated, “It was clear from the testimony of the witnesses at today’s hearing that there is consensus on the high scientific importance of Hubble. One had to come away impressed by the unambiguous consensus findings of a National Academies committee that included such noted space authorities from such diverse viewpoints. Hence, the burden of proof when it comes to saving Hubble must be placed on anyone who markedly disagrees with the National Academies’ conclusions.” […]

The President’s budget will be released on Monday and is rumored to contain no funding for any kind of Hubble servicing mission. As warranted, the AAS will release Informational Emails and Action Alerts on budgetary and policy issues of importance to our members.

I wonder if this is what it felt like in the final days of the Roman Empire. Bread and circuses, anyone?

This humble blog offers congratulations to the New England Patriots, who were simply the better team today than the heroic Philadelphia Eagles. Same time next year, guys?

This humble blog also counts its blessings that it is no longer based in Boston, whose sports fans can be insufferable even when they are suffering through decades-long losing streaks. The mind reels at how they must be dealing with success.

Everyone knows what it’s like to experience the hallucinations that accompany certain kinds of drug use (among other mind-altering contexts) — if not from direct experience, at least from depictions in movies and literature. We’ve seen the colorful, swirling patterns, or the illusory tunnels stretching before us. It turns out that hallucinations are by no means random; there are certain recurrent patterns reported by people who experience them. These patterns were studied by Heinrich Kluever in the 1920’s and 30’s, and classified into four different structures: spirals, spokes, honeycombs, and cobwebs. Subsequent work has suggested more complicated hybrid forms, such as that portrayed here, but the basic types seem to be robust.

Here’s the good part: the appearance of these particular hallucinations can be explained by physics! I know this because I’m sitting on the thesis committees for two students, Tanya Baker and Michael Buice, working with Jack Cowan of the math department. Cowan is a pioneer in mathematical neurophysics, developing sophisticated physical models of the behavior of neurons in the brain. He is a co-originator of the Wilson-Cowan equations to model neural behavior, and his students and collaborators have been thinking recently about hallucinations and other emergent properties of the brain.

The cerebral cortex of the human brain is basically a thin crumpled sheet, about three millimeters thick and one square meter in area. Naturally, physicists are going to think of it as a two-dimensional problem. The visual field, as observed by our eyes, maps smoothly (but with distortion) onto an area called V1, the primary visual cortex. (I’m glossing over details, including the fact that we have two eyes and our brain has two hemispheres. This is because I don’t really know what I’m talking about, and will try to limit what I say to stuff in which I am confident.) So if we see two parallel lines, it activates a set of neurons that describe two non-intersecting curves in the physical layout of our visual cortex. How do we know the map from the visual field to the cortex? Well, it involves monkeys, or sometimes cats, and electrodes, and noble sacrifices in the name of science. We won’t dwell on the details.

The brain is complicated, so we begin by making approximations. There are enough neurons that we don’t worry so much about the discreteness of cells, but model the cortex as a smooth plane. At each point is a neuron, which can be either be activated or deactivated, or any value in between. The complication comes in when we consider the stimuli to which the neurons respond. These include not just the color and brightness of the point in the visual field to which it corresponds, but also interactions with other neurons, near and far.

These interactions allow the neurons to be sensitive to nonlocal features of the image, such as spatial or temporal frequencies in the brightness pattern, or the presence of correlated orientations within the image. This last capability makes us sensitive to the existence of straight lines — so much so that our brains fill them in when they aren’t even there, such as in the triangle illusion illustrated at right. The space of features of visual stimuli to which neurons are sensitive is not only high-dimensional, it can even be topologically nontrivial.

So as physicists (or applied mathematicians) we want to come up with a mathematical model describing the state of the neurons as a function of the input stimuli and the state of all the other neurons. We end up with an equation of the schematic form

da(x,φ,t)/dt = -a(x,φ,t) + I(x,φ,t) + ∫ dx’ dφ’ f(x-x’,φ-φ’)a(x’,φ’,t)

Here, a(x,φ,t) represents the state of the neuron — either activated, deactivated, or in between. The variable x is the position on the cortex, t is the time, and φ represents all of the things to which the neurons can be sensitive — brightness, spatial frequencies, color, orientation, and so forth. On the right-hand side, the first term -a(x,φ,t) is just minus the current state of the neuron, which makes an unstimulated neuron decay back to the deactivated state. I(x,φ,t) represents the direct stimuli received from the optic nerve, whatever they may be. The interesting part is the final term, an integral representing the interaction with other neurons in the visual cortex. The function f(x,φ) tells us how sensitive the neuron is to the states of other neurons a certain distance away, which can be different for different features of the visual field (frequencies, orientations, etc.). This function typically has a “Mexican Hat” form — it is positive for short distances, negative for intermediate scales, and goes to zero far away.

Okay, the previous paragraph may or may not have made any sense to you. But here is the punchline: patterns of hallucinations reflect normal modes of the neurons in the visual cortex. By “normal modes” we mean the characteristic patterns of vibration, just as for a violin string or the head of a drum. The idea is that a drug such as LSD can alter the ground state of the visual cortex, so that it becomes excited even in the absence of stimuli. In particular, certain oscillating patterns can appear spontaneously. Generally these would take the form of different configurations of straight lines in the cortex itself; however, due to the distortion in the map from our visual field to the brain, these appear to us as spirals, tunnels, and so on. Indeed, Cowan and collaborators have shown that these normal modes can successfully account for all of the basic forms of hallucination classified by Kluever decades ago.

So, the next time you have a near-death experience, and see a tunnel stretching before you leading to a beckoning light, it’s not Jesus calling you into the afterlife. It’s just some characteristic jiggling of the neurons in your weakened brain. Which, to my mind, is much more interesting.

Remember when I gave a bad review to Fahrenheit 9/11, criticizing Michael Moore for cheap theatricality, such as scoring political points by squeezing tears from a woman whose son was killed in action in Iraq?

So, just to be clear, it’s not any better when the President does it.

Sir Paul McCartney is an Eagles fan.

I understand that this is not nearly as cool as, say, having John Lennon be an Eagles fan. Or George Clinton, even better. But we’ll take what we can get.

Here I go again, stepping well outside my sphere of competence. On two separate occasions in March I’ll be giving talks on literature and science. The first time will be at a conference at the KITP in Santa Barbara on Science, Theatre, Audience, Reader: Theoretical Physics in Drama and Narrative. I’ll be giving a short talk with the grandiose title of “From Experience to Metaphor by Way of Imagination: How Science Can Lead to Literature.” (I’ll also be participating in a panel discussion on writing cosmology and another one on Einstein, but those are actually in my domain of expertise.) Then on March 20th I’ll be giving a Literary Lecture in association with the performance of Charlotte Jones’ Humble Boy at Chicago’s Remy Bumppo Theatre.

I do have a tiny idea of what I want to say. I’m not so interested in how we can actually talk about science in a literary setting, at least not in a way that tries to teach scientific concepts via works of fiction (although that is interesting in its own right). Instead, I’m thinking about how scientific ideas can be useful to literature as raw material for metaphors. The idea is that science, in looking at the world and trying to understand it, is driven to invent dramatic ideas (the uncertainty principle, curved spacetime, chaos theory) that imagination alone would never have hit upon. (To paraphrase Sidney Coleman, a thousand philosophers working for a thousand years would never have come up with quantum mechanics.) It’s the interplay in science between theory and experiment that forces us to conclusions we would otherwise have never reached. In turn, these concepts can be used in literature as powerful metaphorical tools.

A simple example is The Congugation of the Paramecium. The poem looks at first to be very non-metaphorical, just a straightforward description of what happens. But there’s that little bit in the middle about “when / the paramecium / desires renewal / strength another joy” — that’s not literal, you know. The paramecium doesn’t actually desire another joy. But Rukeyser is elegantly using the exchange of bits of nucleus as a metaphor for human interaction. That kind of move is something that science can quite consistently offer to literature.

What I need is a better set of examples. So, anyone have any? Again, I’m not so much interested in direct discussion of science in a literary context, as examples of when scientific concepts are put to use metaphorically. Any suggestions are welcome. (Let’s make this blog thing actually be useful.)

Andrew Hill demonstrates a typical pose of the University of Chicago graduate student in its native environment.

In the comments to the last post, Jeff Harvey points at an interesting article in today’s New York Times. It’s an essay by Cornelia Dean about her experiences as Science Editor for the Times. My favorite part:

I encountered the attitude again shortly after I became science editor, taking up a position I was to hold from 1997 to 2003. I went to the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a convention that attracts thousands of researchers and teachers. My name tag listed my new position, and the scientists at the meeting all seemed to have the same reaction when they read it: “You’re the new science editor of The New York Times!?”

At first I was deluded enough to think they meant I was much too delightful a person for such a heavy-duty job. In fact, they were shocked it had been given to a woman.

This point was driven home a few weeks later when, at a dinner for scientific eminences, a colleague introduced me to one of the nation’s leading neuroscientists. “Oh yes,” the scientist murmured, as he scanned the room clearly ignoring me. “Who is the new science editor of The New York Times, that twerpy little girl in short skirts?”

Dumbfounded, I replied, “That would be me.”

A few weeks after that I was in another group of scientific eminences, this one at a luncheon at the Waldorf. The spokeswoman for the group that organized the event introduced me to one of the group’s most eminent guests, a leading figure in American science policy.

“Oh,” he said kindly but abstractedly, “you work for The New York Times. How nice.” The spokeswoman explained, again, that I was the newspaper’s science editor. “An editor,” he said. “How nice.” The woman explained again, but again he could not take it in. “Oh, science,” he said, “How nice.” At this point the spokeswoman lost patience. She grabbed the honored guest by both shoulders, put her face a few inches away from his and shouted at him – “She’s it!”

Not long after, I answered the office telephone, and the caller, a (male) scientist, asked to speak to several of my colleagues, all male and all out. “May I help you?” I inquired. “No, no, no,” he replied. “I don’t want to talk to you, I want to talk to someone important!”

Even at the time, I could laugh at these experiences. After all, I was a grown-up person who could take care of herself. (I informed the caller that all the men he wanted to talk to worked for me, and then I hung up. As for Dr. Twerpy, he should know that he was not the first man to refer to me professionally as “that little girl.” I reported on the doings of the other one until he was indicted.)

“Until he was indicted.” Doesn’t get much sweeter than that.