Synesthesia

Who could resist a book subtitled “A Complete Guide to the Laws of The Universe”?

If you didn’t know that the author was Roger Penrose, you could be forgiven for assuming that The Road to Reality was one of the very many quasi-scientific, faith-based, wild-eyed polemics that appear each year under increasingly garish covers, but instead this tome sets out to be a comprehensive account of the physical universe and the essentials of its underlying mathematical theory.

Daunting? Absolutely. Weighing in at 1.4kg and 1100 pages the physical presence of this book sets a certain level of expectation. Beyond that, there’s no doubt about it, this book contains mathematics, lots of it. That in itself will put a lot of people off, as the author notes in the preface:

The reader will find that in this book I have not shied away from presenting mathematical formulae, despite dire warnings of the severe reduction in readership this will entail. I have thought seriously about this question, and have come to the conclusion that what I have to say cannot reasonably be conveyed without a certain amount of mathematical notation and the exploration of genuine mathematical concepts.

Yes, mathematics. Tricky one that. At school it was one of my favourite subjects, but somehow by the end of an engineering degree it was a subject that had carried on inexorably past the limits of my interest and ability. In engineering terms the sheer fun of making early micro-processors jump through hoops was more appealing, and away from the lecture-room and lab my technical nous was finding more practical applications in the challenge of applying sound and light to actors and musicians (with a healthy grounding in the social skills of working in teams and dealing with non-technical people thrown in for good measure!).

So why have I just invested full list price in such a book? Interest, yes, but also a sense of challenge, a feeling that maybe I could get to grips again with the mathematical, maybe, indeed, that I should re-capture the knowledge that I took so long to acquire a quarter of a century ago. I think there’s another root too - last year I attended a business strategy course that was heaviliy influenced by game theory. One of the other delegates was a professor of engineering from one of the best engineering faculties in the UK who, over coffee, waxed lyrical about the underlying mathematics (which the course had avoided) and how the same approach was used all the time in the design of complex control systems. Even though I didn’t know it then, at that moment, I think I was re-infected with some of that curiousity, and the first expression has been the serendipitous contact with this book in a 10 minute bookshop-browse snatched at the end of a mundane shopping trip.

Will I stick with it? Good question. I’ve just finished Chapter 2 which has skated lightly over the surface of Euclidean and hyperbolic geometries, and already I feel I am reading things of which I have no conscious memory (maths at my school was the so-called “New Mathematics”, so I’m not sure we ever touched anything so prosaic as geometry…). This is a book for digesting in small bites, and I know my track-record of grasshopper-brained bricolage is not necessarily the most obvious approach to this feast, but we shall see…

Technorati Tags Books, Mathematics, Science

…or, what if the things you believe are fundamental to keeping your society together are in some way linked to the negative effects that you see around you?

That might be the sort of question you ask after reading a study published in the Journal of Religion & Society which suggests that a high level of religious belief may harm a society.

As reported in the Times, the study, Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies looks at data across the first world Western democracies, and examines both the level of overt belief in God / disbelief in evolution and the occurrence of various societal measures such as homicides, early mortality, STDs, teenage pregancy and abortion. The paper finds strong correlations between the general level of religiosity in a society and high levels of these negative measures.

The author is clear that this is an initial study of the correlation between data sets, and does not hypothesise a causal link, however he does include a call to arms for social sicences to examine these issues more closely.

Ironically, the scientific method, which to-date has been shown to be the most effective way of exploring links between events “out there” and putative causes is, I suspect, likely to be the last thing that members of a highly religious society will turn to.

Print version of paper [PDF]

[ via Voidstar]

Technorati Tags atheism, creationism, evolution, rationality, religion, Science, secularism, Society, UK, USA

I’ve started reading [bliki]Freedom Evolves[/bliki] again - I’ve had the book on my shelf for a few months but had found it difficult to stick with before. I’ve noticed that one of the ways that I stop myself from finishing “stretching” books (even though I want to learn the contents) is by failing to take notes - I’m going to try to address that by using the Oddments space.

Technorati Tags Books, Philosophy, Science

The Periodic Table of Dessert - not just fun, has some logical structure too! [via Apothecary's Drawer via Dave Pollard]

Technorati Tags Humour, Science

Azeem points to this article in Nature from last summer that reports work by Adilson Motter and colleagues at Arizona State University.

The researchers traced the links between 30,000 English words in an online thesaurus. For example, the word ‘actor’ can be connected to ‘universe’ through two intermediaries. The thesaurus lists ‘character’ as a synonym for ‘actor’; ‘character’ is also equated with ‘nature’; and ‘nature’ with ‘universe’.
Moving from ‘actor’ to ‘universe’ in the network of words therefore takes three steps. To the surprise of Motter and colleagues, they found that the same was true of just about any randomly chosen pair of words in the thesaurus. The English language, in other words, enjoys just three degrees of separation.
[...]
The researchers think that the network structure of a language probably has its origins in the nature of cognition and memory. It is not surprising that language is highly clustered, as we remember things associatively - by grouping similar concepts together.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I’m in the middle of reading A Universe of Consciousness by Gerald Edelman and Giulio Tononi. In this they expound their dynamic core hypothesis of consciousness - that consciousness is an emergent property arising from the dynamic, short term (100s of milliseconds) existence of a functionally-interlinked set of neurons.

In applying this theory to specific subjective experiences (so called qualia) they put forward the idea of a multi-dimensional qualia space that maps the states this dynamic core can be in. They further suggest that subjective experiences that “feel close together”, e.g. different colours, represent adjacent states in this dynamic map.

I’m feeling a tantalising link between these two sets of ideas - one that words are closely linked, on the other that different subjective states represent “close” dynamic states of the neurons in the brain…

Technorati Tags Networks, Science

Sex-Specific Genes for Depression reports on work at the University of Pittsburgh.

Depression in women and men could have different genetic origins, a finding that underscores the complexity of depression…

Thanks to Rebecca’s Pocket

Technorati Tags Science

Article - in Science Guardian about research into the way things crumple - whether it’s a crisp packet or the metal skin of a car …

Technorati Tags Science