Frank Rill Chen: Science

Russian speakers get the blues

Wed, 02 May 2007 01:02:48 GMT

11:46 01 May 2007
NewScientist.com news service
Roxanne Khamsi

The language you speak can affect how you see the world, a new study of colour perception indicates. Native speakers of Russian – which lacks a single word for "blue" – discriminated between light and dark blues differently from their English-speaking counterparts, researchers found.

The Russian language makes an obligatory distinction between light blue, pronounced "goluboy", and dark blue, pronounced "siniy". Jonathan Winawer at MIT in the US and colleagues set out to determine whether this linguistic distinction influences colour perception.

The team recruited 50 people from the Boston area in Massachusetts, US, roughly half of whom were native Russian speakers.

Volunteers viewed three blue squares on a screen and had to indicate by pushing a button whether the single square on top matched the bottom right or bottom left square in terms of hue (see image for an example). In total there were 20 different shades of blue.

True blue

Subjects completed two types of tests: in one version, the three squares were of a similar shade, whereas the other test involved one square that was a markedly different shade - for example, distinguishing a dark blue from a light blue.

English speakers were no better at distinguishing between dark and light blues than they were at telling apart two blues of a similar shade.

Russian speakers, by comparison, were 10% faster at distinguishing between light (goluboy) blues and dark (siniy) blues than at discriminating between blues within the same shade category.

"This is the first time that evidence has been offered to show cross-linguistic differences in colour perception in an objective task," says Winawer.

Moreover, when Russian speakers had to memorise an eight-digit number while doing the colour task, they were no better at distinguishing between dark and light blues and those within of a similar shade.

Winawer believes that this is because the concentration needed to memorise the number interfered with their verbal brainpower – removing the extra boost that the Russian language gives in classifying light and dark blues.

Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0701644104)

Modern neuroscience is eroding the idea of free will

Wed, 20 Dec 2006 03:13:17 GMT

Liberalism and neurology

Free to choose?

Dec 19th 2006
From The Economist print edition

IN THE late 1990s a previously blameless American began collecting child pornography and propositioning children. On the day before he was due to be sentenced to prison for his crimes, he had his brain scanned. He had a tumour. When it had been removed, his paedophilic tendencies went away. When it started growing back, they returned. When the regrowth was removed, they vanished again. Who then was the child abuser?

His case dramatically illustrates the challenge that modern neuroscience is beginning to pose to the idea of free will. The instinct of the reasonable observer is that organic changes of this sort somehow absolve the sufferer of the responsibility that would accrue to a child abuser whose paedophilia was congenital. But why? The chances are that the latter tendency is just as traceable to brain mechanics as the former; it is merely that no one has yet looked. Scientists have looked at anger and violence, though, and discovered genetic variations, expressed as concentrations of a particular messenger molecule in the brain, that are both congenital and predisposing to a violent temper. Where is free will in this case?

Free will is one of the trickiest concepts in philosophy, but also one of the most important. Without it, the idea of responsibility for one's actions flies out of the window, along with much of the glue that holds a free society (and even an unfree one) together. If businessmen were no longer responsible for their contracts, criminals no longer responsible for their crimes and parents no longer responsible for their children, even though contract, crime and conception were “freely” entered into, then social relations would be very different.

We, the willing

For millennia the question of free will was the province of philosophers and theologians, but it actually turns on how the brain works. Only in the past decade and a half, however, has it been possible to watch the living human brain in action in a way that begins to show in detail what happens while it is happening (see survey). This ability is doing more than merely adding to science's knowledge of the brain's mechanism. It is also emphasising to a wider public that the brain really is a just mechanism, rather than a magician's box that is somehow outside the normal laws of cause and effect.

Science is not yet threatening free will's existence: for the moment there seems little prospect of anybody being able to answer definitively the question of whether it really exists or not. But science will shrink the space in which free will can operate by slowly exposing the mechanism of decision making.

At that point, the old French proverb “to understand all is to forgive all” will start to have a new resonance, though forgiveness may not always be the consequence. Indeed, that may already be happening. At the moment, the criminal law—in the West, at least—is based on the idea that the criminal exercised a choice: no choice, no criminal. The British government, though, is seeking to change the law in order to lock up people with personality disorders that are thought to make them likely to commit crimes, before any crime is committed.

The coming battle

Such disorders are serious pathologies. But the National DNA Database being built up by the British government (which includes material from many innocent people), would already allow the identification of those with milder predispositions to anger and violence. How soon before those people are subject to special surveillance? And if the state chose to carry out such surveillance, recognising that the people in question may pose particular risks merely because of their biology, it could hardly then argue that they were wholly responsible for any crime that they did go on to commit.

Nor is it only the criminal law where free will matters. Markets also depend on the idea that personal choice is free choice. Mostly, that is not a problem. Even if choice is guided by unconscious instinct, that instinct will usually have been honed by natural selection to do the right thing. But not always. Fatty, sugary foods subvert evolved instincts, as do addictive drugs such as nicotine, alcohol and cocaine. Pornography does as well. Liberals say that individuals should be free to consume these, or not. Erode free will, and you erode that argument.

In fact, you begin to erode all freedom. Without a belief in free will, an ideology of freedom is bizarre. Though it will not happen quickly, shrinking the space in which free will can operate could have some uncomfortable repercussions.

The Virtues of Failure

Sat, 23 Sep 2006 12:04:29 GMT

[Richard Zarel] http://www.stanford.edu/group/Zarelab/

I have chosen for the title of my talk , The Virtues of Failure . You might be surprised that I wish to speak about failure today . First , failure is no stranger to me . Second , I believe that innovative research is a mix of many failure and few successes . This fact may not be apparent to those of us outside science or to those students of the sciences who are just beginning , We read in newspapers and in scientific journals accounts that stress the accomplishments achieved . These articles give the impression that successes vastly outnumber failures . This false idea is often reinforced by oral presentations in which the speaker makes the research enterprise sound like it were effortless , consisting of one logical step after another . But this impression is misleading , as every researcher knows . Real research is a comedy of errors in which one thing goes wrong after another . To paraphrase Winston Churchill , research progress consists of staggering from one failure to the next with undiminishes enthusiasm.

If research is truly innovative , then little can be predicted ahead of time about what will happen and what will be found out . Innovative research is not activity of filling in the blanks in some form or in extending the boundaries of well-established knowledge . Such activity also has its place , but I do not call it innovative . One of the most important lessons to be learned by anyone beginning to do research is that experiments fail , and they do that rather regularly . Experimentation is not like a laboratory exercise that has been devised to work each time . No matter how well understood the theories upon which an experiment is based or how well designed the experimental plan , the results can often be nothing like what was first imagined . Experimental science delves into the unknown , so the planning beforehand is a best guess . Sometimes , these guesses turn out to be totally ill-conceived and a series of experiments seems to yield nothing of significance . Indeed , great discoverise surprise ue . Without some surprise these discoveries cannot be considered to have altered the way we understand the world .

The Virtues of Failure(2)

Fri, 22 Sep 2006 13:00:52 GMT

I believe that these sentiments are shared in many other fields. I note that writers of fiction often say, after the fact, that their characters took over the story and drove the story in unexpected directions. Similarly, writers of nonfiction often find as new facts tumble out that the story they thought they were telling turns out to be different.

Getting beginning researchers to accept failure and assume the risks of trying yet another approach is difficult but essential. A more seasoned investigator knows that failures are part of the creative process. What helps I find is to develop an attitude of what I call a contented schizophrenic（恬然自安的精神分裂症的, an attitude in which you are willing to believe in something and yet disbelieve in it, all at same time. Simultaneously, to believe passionately and to question critically appear to be contradictory activities, but such a mindset helps in seeking to understand nature. You must put forth you best idea how something may behave and then begin immediately to devise means of testing whether this idea about nature s behavior has beguiled and blinded you to what is taking place. Living with ambiguity is something that can be learned and even taught to others.

Science at its core is a subversive activity. We seem only capable of disproving things that seemed established. Only by exhaustive efforts of failed disproof do we gradually accept an assertion as likely to be so. That is the process that leads from hypothesis to theory to scientific law. And as we become wiser and more reflective, we find that even some of our most cherished laws only have limited scopes in which they are valid. Experimental work is often a series of failures punctuated by a few successes. A wise person learns from each failure and accepts that failures are nature s way of guiding us to what really works. It is human nature to be disappointed by these failures. But, learning from failure and learning to live with failure are truly key elements in becoming a successful researcher. Without nearly constant failure the few successes we experience would not be so sweet. The contented schizophrenic accepts failure as the only way to create innovation of real value. Failure does have its special virtues in encouraging us to unlock the mysteries of nature. In the research arena, failure is sure to be a nearly constant companion. The smart researcher uses failure as a powerful but often secret tool for finding success.

爱因斯坦在1934年说过“……当获得的（新）知识已经昭然若揭时，令人喜悦的成就看起来几乎只不过是一件理所当然的事情，任何一个聪明的学生都能不太费力地掌握它。然而，那多少年在黑暗中热切的寻觅、紧张的期待，信心不断交替起伏，以致筋疲力尽，直到最后光明出现——只有亲身经历过它的人，才能理解。”

The Fate of the Universe

Thu, 14 Sep 2006 13:55:44 GMT

a poem by Leslie C. McKinney, Ph.D

You physicists have become annoying
You can't seem to make up your minds
Did everything come from nothing
Or was nothing all there was to find?

What was that first singularity
And what made it start to inflate?
You say a vacuum is not really empty
As long as energy potentiates?

At time zero there was zero space
But fluctuation took care of that
Now there's space of an ill-defined shape
That's full of live/dead cats.

Continuing on you tell us
That we're here cause CP ain't conserved
I never thought of myself as a leftover
This is becoming absurd.

But the universe is here now
At least part of it, I guess,
How is it you can't find the dark matter
To account for the missing mass?

And what is this dark energy
Permeating like a fog?
Einstein was shamed by his fudge factor
But you've brought it back in vogue.

The news from Canada is distressing
There are too few neutrinos from the sun
But physicists aren't constrained by facts
They'll make three neutrinos from one.

So the Standard Model is in danger
It's time for a paradigm shift,
Well paradigm shift, shmaradigm pfffft,
Will you guys please get over it.

Any idea how the story will end?
Big crunch, cold death, lost souls?
Or a slipper slide to a new universe
Through a slimy little worm hole?

Which confirms my general suspicion
That reality is just theory for this bunch
Waves are particles, particles are strings,
And the universe is the ultimate free lunch.

New Concepts of Matter, Life and Mind

Wed, 06 Sep 2006 13:22:32 GMT

by Ervin Laszlo
Author, Founder of Systems Philosophy

In light of the current, revolutionary advances in the natural sciences and in the study of consciousness, the concepts of matter, life, and mind have under-gone major changes. This paper outlines some basic aspects of these changes, taking in turn the emerging concept of matter, of life, and of human mind and consciousness.

The concept of matter

The Western common sense view has held that there are only two kinds of things that truly exist in the world: matter and space. Matter occupies space and moves about in it and it is the primary reality. Space is a backdrop or container. Without furnished by material bodies, it does not enjoy reality in itself. This common sense concept goes back to the Greek materialists; it was the mainstay also of Newton's physics. It has been radically revised in Einstein's relativistic universe (where spacetime became an integrated four-dimensional manifold), and also in Bohr's and Heisenberg's quantum world. Now it may have to be rethought again.

Advances in the new sciences suggest a further modification of this assumption about the nature of reality. In light of what scientists are beginning to glimpse regarding the nature of the quantum vacuum, the energy sea that underlies all of spacetime, it is no longer warranted to view matter as primary and space as secondary. It is to space or rather, to the cosmically extended 'Dirac-sea' of the vacuum that we should grant primary reality. The things we know as matter (and that scientists know as mass, with its associated properties of inertia and gravitation) appear as the consequence of interactions in the depth of this universal field. In the emerging concept there is no 'absolute matter,' only an absolute matter generating energy field.

The concept of life

The subtle relationship between the material things we meet with in our experience and the energy field that underlies them in the depth of the universe also transforms our view of life. Interactions with the quantum vacuum may not be limited to micro-particles: they may also involve macroscale entities, such as living systems. Life appears to be a manifestation of the constant if subtle interaction of the wave-packets classically known as 'matter' with the underlying vacuum field. These assumptions change our most fundamental notions of life. The living world is not the harsh domain of classical Darwinism, where each struggles against all, with every species, every organism and every gene competing for advantage against every other. Organisms are not skin-enclosed selfish entities, and competition is never unfettered. Life evolves, as does the universe itself, in a 'sacred dance' with an underlying field. This makes living beings into elements in a vast network of intimate relations that embraces the entire biosphere itself an interconnected element within the wider connections that reach into the cosmos.

The concept of mind

In the on going co-evolution of matter with the vacuum's zero-point field, life emerges out of nonlife, and mind and consciousness emerge out of the higher domains of life. This evolutionary concept does not 'reduce' reality either to non-living matter (as materialism), or assimilate it to a nonmaterial mind (as idealism). Both are real but (unlike in dualism), neither is the original element in reality. Matter as well as mind evolved out of a common cosmic womb: the energy-field of the quantum vacuum. The interaction of our mind and consciousness with the quantum vacuum links us with other minds around us, as well as with the biosphere of the planet. It 'opens' our mind to society, nature, and the universe. This openness has been known to mystics and sensitives, prophets and meta-physicians through the ages. But it has been denied by modern scientists and by those who took modern science to be the only way of comprehending reality. Now, however, the recognition of openness is returning to the natural sciences. Traffic between our consciousness and the rest of the world may be constant and flowing in both directions. Everything that goes on in our mind could leave its wave traces in the quantum vacuum, and everything could be received by those who know how to 'tune in' to the subtle patterns that propagate there. This assumption is borne out by the empirical findings of psychiatrists such as Stanislav Grof. They confirm the insight of Vaclav Havel: it is as if something like an antenna were picking up signals from a transmitter that contains the experience of the entire human race.

Societal implications

That people in all parts of the world search for a deeper awareness of their own subconscious mind may not be accidental: at this critical juncture of our sociocultural evolution it may be part of the survival dynamics of the human species. A greater awareness that all that goes on in our mind is accessible to others, and that all that goes on in the mind of others is accessible to us, would prompt us to develop greater empathy and solidarity with each other. Such felt relations are vital not only for our personal growth and development; in our interdependent and crisis-prone world, they are vital also for our collective survival and development.