Tag Archives: Neil deGrasse Tyson

Einstein, Newton, Sagan: Science As Child’s Play

31 Thursday Oct 2013

Posted by in Science

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Albert Einstein

“We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited minds grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations. I am fascinated by Spinoza’s pantheism, but admire even more his contribution to modern thought because he is the first philosopher to deal with the soul and body as one, and not two separate things.”

Albert Einstein, in a quotation pulled from the first chapter of Max Jammer’s excellent Einstein and Religion: Physics and Theology.*

“The modesty of Sir Isaac Newton… arose from the depth and extent of his knowledge, which showed him what a small portion of nature he had been able to examine… a short time before his death he uttered this memorable sentiment:

‘I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.'”

Isaac Newton, as quoted by Sir David Brewster in volume II of his Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton.**

“We go about our daily lives understanding almost nothing of the world… Except for children (who don’t know enough not to ask the important questions), few of us spend much time wondering why nature is the way it is; where the cosmos came from, or whether it was always here; if time will one day flow backward and effects precede causes; or whether there are ultimate limits to what humans can know.”

Carl Sagan, writing in the introduction to Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time.

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Neil deGrasse Tyson: I’m often asked by parents what advice can I give them to help get kids interested in science? And I have only one bit of advice: get out of their way. Kids are born curious. Period. I don’t care about your economic background. I don’t care what town you’re born in, what city, what country. If you’re a child, you are curious about your environment. You’re overturning rocks. You’re plucking leaves off of trees and petals off of flowers, looking inside, and you’re doing things that create disorder in the lives of the adults around you.  

And so then so what do adults do? They say, “Don’t pluck the petals off the flowers. I just spent money on that. Don’t play with the egg. It might break. Don’t….”  Everything is a don’t. We spend the first year teaching them to walk and talk and the rest of their lives telling them to shut up and sit down.

So you get out of their way. And you know what you do? You put things in their midst that help them explore. Help ‘em explore. Why don’t you get a pair of binoculars, just leave it there one day? Watch ‘em pick it up. And watch ‘em look around. They’ll do all kinds of things with it.

For me at age 11, I had a pair of binoculars and looked up to the moon, and the moon wasn’t just bigger, it was better. There were mountains and valleys and craters and shadows. And it came alive.”

* I’ve hosted the PDF of the first chapter of Jammer’s book. For some context, however, the quote cited above occurs on page 48. Jammer follows it with the following clarification of Einstein’s theology:

“…Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein of the Institutional Synagogue in New York cabled Einstein, ‘Do you believe in God? Stop. Prepaid reply fifty words.’ Einstein replied, ‘I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.’ Rabbi Goldstein commented that this reply

‘very clearly disproves . . . the charge of atheism made against Einstein. In fact, quite the reverse is true. Spinoza, who is called “the God-intoxicated man” and who saw God manifest in all of nature, certainly could not be called an atheist. . . . Einstein’s theory, if carried out to its logical conclusions would bring mankind a scientific formula for monotheism. He does away with all thought of dualism or pluralism. There can be no room for any aspect of polytheism.'”

** Could Newton have possibly read John Milton’s Paradise Regained, which was published in 1671, when the former would have been twenty-nine?

In Book Four of the poem, Lines 327 to 330 read:

Deep verst in books and shallow in himself,
Crude or intoxicate, collecting toys,
And trifles for choice matters, worth a spunge;
As Children gathering pebbles on the shore.

The Function of Sleep

21 Tuesday May 2013

Posted by in Psychology, Science

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Giulio Tononi

“Among the open questions in neuroscience, I believe the function of sleep remains perhaps the most embarrassing. We don’t know why every night our brain needs us – and presumably itself – to sleep for several hours. There is every indication that sleep performs an essential function, if we only knew which one.

The indications are that sleep is, first of all, dangerous. Obviously you are made vulnerable to predators if you fall asleep and don’t respond to stimuli. It is pervasive; we do it from the cradle to the grave. It is universal: every animal that has been carefully studied does so – from fruit flies to ourselves. There is no single exception. It is also irresistible, as we all know. If you do experiments to keep animals awake – or humans awake, for that matter – there is no way that you can overcome the need for sleep. You can even use pain, shocks — at some point the animal will fall asleep. It is also tightly regulated, with a big portion of the brain stem, the hypothalamus, all kind of complicated connectivity being set up to put ourselves to sleep and then wake us. And finally, if you don’t sleep, or sleep too little, it is clear there are serious consequences. In fatal familial insomnia, after a few months of lack of sleep, you die. Rats die after two weeks. But the most obvious consequences are cognitive consequences. There are all kinds of problems. We become extremely bad cognitively. We make mistakes of all sorts, and we become extremely irritable…

The enigma of sleep function has been around for a long time. All kind of ideas have been proposed. The theory I propose is the synaptic homeostasis hypothesis, which is an attempt to understand what is the core function of sleep in every animal.

The idea here is, in short, that sleep is the price we pay for plasticity, which of course is a feature that is functional primarily when we’re awake, when we adapt to the external world.

In our brains, neurons either spike or they don’t — that’s how they communicate. Spikes are more expensive than non-spikes in terms of their synaptic consequences, in terms of the energy they use. So spikes should be reserved, and as far as we can tell they largely are, to signal important events — events that convey a lot of information. Now, when you need to adapt to a changing world — which is basically all the time, especially during development — what you need to do is shift strength of synapses or even add synapses to make sure you are firing for important events or important changes in the environment.

And every neuron does that, to make sure it signals important stuff downstream, in this complicated brain where every neuron is immersed in a sea of other neurons. It doesn’t know what it’s getting, or from where; it doesn’t know what it’s signaling, and it doesn’t know where it’s sending it.

So, in all of this uncertainty, for any learning system which is as complicated as a brain, there is a problem in the end, which is that neurons tend to strengthen to make sure they signal. But then that becomes biologically untenable, because stronger synapses consume more energy, occupy more space, require more supplies, and finally they saturate signal to noise.

Basically, then neurons start firing for everything, and that can’t be good. So there is a need for renormalization to make sure that total synaptic strength is constant.

And we think that that renormalization is not only essential, but it better happen offline, when you actually can sample in an unbiased way the environment of a neuron. And every neuron, by itself, does this in the course of a night’s sleep.

That’s what we think sleep is fundamentally for.”

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From Dr. Guilio Tononi’s recent talk on The Function of Sleep at the Allen Institute for Brain Science Symposium.

I had never before seriously considered this question of the purpose of sleep, or the sheer strangeness of the fact that we don’t yet have a firm understanding of its biological function. It’s nothing less than absurd to ponder what happens to me, to you, to everyone as we spend one third of our lives unconscious.

As Neil deGrass Tyson observed, “Aliens might be surprised to learn that humans must lay semi-comatose on cushions for nearly a third of every Earth rotation.”

Craig Raine, in his poem “A Martian Send A Postcard Home,” mimics the voice of a martian who is noting different facets of human life and reporting them back to his kind. These take the form of riddles, the last one being a coded reference to human sleep and dreaming:

At night when all the colours die,
they hide in pairs

and read about themselves —
in colour, with their eyelids shut.

Watch Tononi’s entire talk below.

Isaac Newton

26 Tuesday Mar 2013

Posted by in Interview, Science

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Isaac Newton

If you could meet and talk with any scientist who had ever lived, who would it be, and why?

“Isaac Newton. Isaac Newton. No question about it: Isaac Newton. The smartest person ever — ever to walk the face of this earth. You read his writings, the man was connected to the universe in spooky ways. The most successful scientists in the history of the world are those who pose the right questions… Newton, his questions reached into the soul of the universe, and he pulled out insights and wisdom that transformed our understanding of our place in the cosmos.

Someone said to him, ‘Isaac, why is it that planets orbit in these shapes you call ellipses, rather than circles? Why that shape?’ Newton said, ‘You know, I’ll get back to you on that.’ He goes away for a few months, comes back, and says, ‘Here’s the answer. Here’s why gravity produces ellipses for orbits.’

His friend asks, ‘Well how’d you figure that out?’

He says, ‘Well I had to invent this new kind of mathematics to do it.’ He invented calculus. Most of us sweat through it — for multiple years in school — just to learn it. He invented it practically on a dare.

He discovered the laws of motion. The laws of gravity. The laws of optics. Then he turned twenty-six.”

__________

Neil deGrasse Tyson’s response to the question, “If you could meet and talk with any scientist who had ever lived, who would it be, and why?”

Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night;
God said Let Newton be! and all was light.
– Alexander Pope’s intended epitaph for Newton’s tomb in Westminster Abbey.

Pick up the James Gaelic’s much praised biography Isaac Newton, then watch the Time Magazine interview below: