This Will Make You Smarter

by John Brockman

  Astronomy and space science are intensifying the search for life on other planets—from Mars and the outer reaches of the solar system to Earth-like planets and super-Earths orbiting other stars. The chances of success may hinge on our understanding of the possible diversity of the chemical basis of life itself: “otherness” not among DNA-encoded species but among life-forms using different molecules to encode traits. Our 4-billion–year-old heritage of molecular innovation and design versus “theirs.” This is a cosmic encounter that we might experience first in our laboratories. Last year’s creation of JCVI-syn1.0—the first bacterial cell controlled completely by a synthetic genome—is a prelude to this brave new field.

  It is probably timely to ponder “otherness” and its wider meaning, as we embark on a new age of exploration. As T. S. Eliot predicted in “Little Gidding,” we might arrive where we started and know our self for the first time.

  Ecology

  Brian Eno

  Artist; composer; recording producer: U2, Coldplay, Talking Heads, Paul Simon; recording artist; author, A Year with Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno’s Diary

  That idea, or bundle of ideas, seems to me the most important revolution in general thinking in the last hundred and fifty years. It has given us a whole new sense of who we are, where we fit, and how things work. It has made commonplace and intuitive a type of perception that used to be the province of mystics—the sense of wholeness and interconnectedness.

  Beginning with Copernicus, our picture of a semidivine humankind perfectly located at the center of the universe began to falter: We discovered that we live on a small planet circling a medium-sized star at the edge of an average galaxy. And then, following Darwin, we stopped being able to locate ourselves at the center of life. Darwin gave us a matrix upon which we could locate life in all its forms, and the shocking news was that we weren’t at the center of that, either—just another species in the innumerable panoply of species, inseparably woven into the whole fabric (and not an indispensable part of it either). We have been cut down to size, but at the same time we have discovered ourselves to be part of the most unimaginably vast and beautiful drama called Life.

  Before “ecology” we understood the world in the metaphor of a pyramid—a hierarchy, with God at the top, Man a close second, and, sharply separated, a vast mass of life and matter beneath. In that model, information and intelligence flowed in one direction only—from the intelligent top to the “base” bottom—and, as masters of the universe, we felt no misgivings about exploiting the lower reaches of the pyramid.

  The ecological vision has changed that: We now increasingly view life as a profoundly complex weblike system with information running in all directions, and instead of a single hierarchy we see an infinity of nested and codependent hierarchies—and the complexity of all this is, in and of itself, creative. We no longer need the idea of a superior intelligence outside the system; the dense field of intersecting intelligences is fertile enough to account for all the incredible beauty of “creation.”

  The ecological view isn’t confined to the organic world. Along with it comes a new understanding of how intelligence itself comes into being. The classical picture saw Great Men with Great Ideas . . . but now we tend to think more in terms of fertile circumstances, wherein uncountable numbers of minds contribute to a river of innovation. It doesn’t mean we cease to admire the most conspicuous of these—but that we understand them as effects as much as causes. This has ramifications for the way we think about societal design, about crime and conflict, education, culture, and science.

  That in turn leads to a reevaluation of the various actors in the human drama. When we realize that the cleaners and the bus drivers and the primary-school teachers are as much a part of the story as the professors and the celebrities, we will start to accord them the respect they deserve.

  Dualities

  Stephon H. Alexander

  Associate professor of physics, Haverford College

  In the northeast Bronx, I walk through a neighborhood I once feared going into, this time with a big smile on my face. This is because I can quell the bullies with a new slang word in our dictionary, “dual.” As I approach the 2 train stop on East 225th Street, the bullies await me. I say, “Yo, what’s the dual?” The bullies embrace me with a pound followed by a high five. I make my train.

  In physics, one of the most beautiful yet underappreciated ideas is that of duality. A duality allows us to describe a physical phenomenon from two different perspectives; often a flash of creative insight is needed to find both. However, the power of the duality goes beyond the apparent redundancy of description. After all, why do I need more than one way to describe the same thing? There are examples in physics where either description of a phenomenon fails to capture its entirety. Properties of the system “beyond” the individual descriptions “emerge.” I will provide two beautiful examples of how dualities manage to yield emergent properties, and I will end with a speculation.

  Most of us know about the famous wave-particle duality in quantum mechanics, which allows the photon (and the electron) to attain their magical properties to explain all of the wonders of atomic physics and chemical bonding. The duality states that matter (such as the electron) has both wavelike and particle-like properties, depending on the context. What’s weird is how quantum mechanics manifests the wave-particle duality. According to the traditional Copenhagen interpretation, the wave is a traveling oscillation of possibility that the electron can be realized somewhere as a particle.

  Life gets strange in the example of quantum tunneling, where the electron can penetrate a barrier only because of the electron’s wavelike property. Classical physics tells us that an object will not surmount a barrier (like a hill) if its total kinetic energy is less than the potential energy of the barrier. However, quantum mechanics predicts that a particle can penetrate (or tunnel) through a barrier even when the particle’s kinetic energy is less than the potential energy of the barrier. This effect occurs every time you use a flash drive or a CD player.

  Most people assume that the conduction of electrons in a metal is a well-understood property of classical physics. But when we look deeper, we realize that conduction happens because of the wavelike nature of the electrons. We call the electron waves moving through the periodic lattice of a metal Bloch waves. When the electrons’ Bloch waves constructively interfere, we get conduction. Moreover, the wave-particle duality takes us further, predicting superconductivity: How it is that electrons (and other spin-half particles, like quarks) can conduct without resistance?

  Nowadays, in my field of quantum gravity and relativistic cosmology, theorists are exploiting another type of duality to address unresolved questions. This holographic duality was pioneered by Leonard Susskind and Gerard ’t Hooft, and later it found a home in the form of the AdS/CFT (anti-de-Sitter space/conformal field theory) duality conceived by Juan Maldacena. This posits that the phenomenon of quantum gravity is described, on the one hand, by an ordinary gravitational theory (a beefed-up version of Einstein’s general relativity). On the other hand, a dual description of quantum gravity is described by a nongravitational physics with a space-time of one lower dimension. We are left to wonder, in the spirit of the wave-particle duality, what new physics we will glean from this type of duality.

  The holographic duality seems to persist in other approaches to quantum gravity, such as loop quantum gravity, and researchers are still exploring the true meaning behind holography and the potential predictions for experiments.

  Dualities allow us to understand and make use of properties in physics that go beyond a singular lens of analysis. Might we wonder if duality can transcend its role in physics and enter other fields? The dual of time will tell.

  Dualities

  Amanda Gefter

  Books & Arts editor, New Scientist; founder and editor, CultureLab

  It is one of the stranger ideas to emerge from rec
ent physics. Take two theories that describe utterly dissimilar worlds—worlds with different numbers of dimensions, different geometries of space-time, different building blocks of matter. Twenty years ago, we’d say those are indisputably disparate and mutually exclusive worlds. Today, there’s another option: Two radically different theories might be dual to one another—that is, they might be two very different manifestations of the same underlying reality.

  Dualities are as counterintuitive a notion as they come, but physics is riddled with them. When physicists looking to unite quantum theory with gravity found themselves with five very different but equally plausible string theories, it was an embarrassment of riches—everyone was hoping for one “theory of everything,” not five. But duality proved to be the key ingredient. Remarkably, all five string theories turned out to be dual to one another, different expressions of a single underlying theory.

  Perhaps the most radical incarnation of duality was discovered in 1997 by the theoretical physicist Juan Maldacena. Maldacena found that a version of string theory in a bizarrely shaped universe with five large dimensions is mathematically dual to an ordinary quantum theory of particles living on that universe’s four-dimensional boundary. Previously, one could argue that the world was made up of particles or that the world was made up of strings. Duality transformed or into and—mutually exclusive hypotheses, both equally true.

  In everyday language, “duality” means something else. It connotes a stark dichotomy: male and female, east and west, light and darkness. Embracing the physicist’s meaning of duality, however, can provide us with a powerful new metaphor, a one-stop shorthand for the idea that two very different things might be equally true. As our cultural discourse is becoming increasingly polarized, the notion of duality is both more foreign and more necessary than ever. In our daily cognitive toolkit, it could serve as a potent antidote to our typically Boolean, two-valued, zero-sum thinking—where statements are either true or false, answers are yes or no, and if I’m right, then you’re wrong. With duality, there’s a third option. Perhaps my argument is right and yours is wrong; perhaps your argument is right and mine is wrong; or, just maybe, our opposing arguments are dual to one another.

  That’s not to say that we ought to descend into some kind of relativism, or that there are no singular truths. It is to say, though, that truth is far more subtle than we once believed, and that it shows up in many guises. It is up to us to recognize it in all its varied forms.

  The Paradox

  Anthony Aguirre

  Associate professor of physics, University of California–Santa Cruz

  Paradoxes arise when one or more convincing truths contradict each other, clash with other convincing truths, or violate unshakable intuitions. They are frustrating, yet beguiling. Many see virtue in avoiding, glossing over, or dismissing them. Instead we should seek them out. If we find one, sharpen it, push it to the extreme, and hope that the resolution will reveal itself, for with that resolution will invariably come a dose of Truth.

  History is replete with examples, and with failed opportunities. One of my favorites is Olber’s paradox. Suppose the universe were filled with an eternal, roughly uniform distribution of shining stars. Faraway stars would look dim, because they take up a tiny angle on the sky, but within that angle they are as bright as the sun’s surface. Yet in an eternal and infinite (or finite but unbounded) space, every direction would lie within the angle taken up by some star. The sky would be alight like the surface of the sun. Thus, a simple glance at the dark night sky reveals that the universe must be dynamic: expanding, or evolving. Astronomers grappled with this paradox for several centuries, devising unworkable schemes for its resolution. Despite at least one correct view (by Edgar Allan Poe!), the implications never really permeated even the small community of people thinking about the fundamental structure of the universe. And so it was that Albert Einstein, when he went to apply his new theory to the universe, sought an eternal and static model that could never make sense, introduced a term into his equations which he later called his greatest blunder, and failed to invent the Big Bang theory of cosmology.

  Nature appears to contradict itself with the utmost rarity, and so a paradox can be an opportunity for us to lay bare our cherished assumptions and discover which of them we must let go. But a good paradox can take us further, to reveal that not just the assumptions but the very modes of thinking we used in creating the paradox must be replaced. Particles and waves? Not truth, just convenient models. The same number of integers as perfect squares of integers? Not crazy, though you might be, if you invent cardinality. “This sentence is false.” And so, says Gödel, might be the foundations of any formal system that can refer to itself. The list goes on.

  What next? I’ve got a few big ones I’m wrestling with. How can the second law of thermodynamics arise, unless cosmological initial conditions are fine-tuned in a way we would never accept in any other theory or explanation of anything? How do we do science, if the universe is infinite and every outcome of every experiment occurs infinitely many times?

  What impossibility is nagging at you?

  Hunting for Root Cause: The Human “Black Box”

  Eric Topol

  Professor of translational genomics, Scripps Research Institute; cardiologist, Scripps Clinic

  Root-cause analysis is an attractive concept for certain matters in industry, engineering, and quality control. A classic application is to determine why a plane crashed by finding the “black box”—the tamper-proof event-data recorder. Even though this box is usually bright orange, the term symbolizes the sense of dark matter, a container with critical information to help illuminate what happened. Getting the black-box audio recording is just one component of a root-cause analysis of why a plane goes down.

  Each of us is gradually being morphed into an event-data recorder by virtue of our digital identity and presence on the Web. Not only do we post our own data, sometimes unwittingly, but also others post information about us, and all of this is permanently archived. In that way, it is close to tamper-proof. With increasing use of biosensors, high-resolution imaging (just think of our current cameras and video recording, let alone our digital medical imaging), and DNA sequencing, the human event-data recorder will be progressively enriched.

  In our busy, networked lives, with constant communication, streaming, and distraction, the general trend has moved away from acquiring deep knowledge of why something happened. This is best exemplified in health and medicine. Physicians rarely seek root causes. If a patient has a common condition, such as high blood pressure, diabetes, or asthma, he or she is put on a prescription drug without any attempt at ascertaining why the individual crashed—certainly a new chronic medical condition can be likened to such an event. There are usually specific reasons for these disorders, but they are not hunted down. Taken to an extreme, when an individual dies and the cause is not known, it is now exceedingly rare that an autopsy is performed. Doctors have generally caved in their quest to define root cause, and they are fairly representative of most of us. Ironically, this is happening at a time when there is unprecedented capability for finding the explanation. But we’re just too busy.

  So to tweak our cognitive performance in the digital world, where there is certainly no shortage of data, it’s time to use it to understand, as fully as possible, why unexpected or unfavorable things happen. Or even why something great transpired. It’s a prototypic scientific concept that has all too often been left untapped. Each person is emerging as an extraordinary event recorder and part of the Internet of all things. Let’s go deep. Nothing unexplained these days should go without a hunt.

  Personal Data Mining

  David Rowan

  Editor, Wired magazine’s UK edition

  From the dawn of civilization until 2003, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt is fond of saying, humankind generated five exabytes of data. Now we produce five exabytes every two days—and the pace is
accelerating. In our post-privacy world of pervasive social-media sharing, GPS tracking, cellphone-tower triangulation, wireless sensor monitoring, browser-cookie targeting, face-recognition detecting, consumer-intention profiling, and endless other means by which our personal presence is logged in databases far beyond our reach, citizens are largely failing to benefit from the power of all this data to help them make smarter decisions. It’s time to reclaim the concept of data mining from the marketing industry’s microtargeting of consumers, the credit-card companies’ antifraud profiling, the intrusive surveillance of state-sponsored Total Information Awareness. We need to think more about mining our own output to extract patterns that turn our raw personal data stream into predictive, actionable information. All of us would benefit if the idea of personal data mining were to enter popular discourse.

  Microsoft saw the potential back in September 2006, when it filed United States Patent application number 20,080,082,393 for a system of “personal data mining.” Having been fed personal data provided by users themselves or gathered by third parties, the technology would then analyze it to “enable identification of opportunities and/or provisioning of recommendations to increase user productivity and/or improve quality of life.” You can decide for yourself whether you trust Redmond with your lifelog, but it’s hard to fault the premise: The personal data mine, the patent states, would be a way “to identify relevant information that otherwise would likely remain undiscovered.”