IdeaFestival

Taking off the Starshades

Writing in SEED Lee Billings (@LeeBillings on Twitter) points out how we might directly image planets in other solar systems. Although more than 400 have been discovered in the only the past fifteen years through a variety of techniques - and Kepler promises to turn up Earth-size worlds in the next couple of years - direct imaging of other bodies that might support life hasn't yet happened. Technology that would filter out the starlight that hides the accompanying bodies we know are there is, however, available and could be used in the next decade. It brings up this question.

How would direct imaging of a terrestrial world in a water-friendly orbit around its star affect those of us on this world?

Wayne

"Fractal forecasting"

With help from an orbiting meteorological spacecraft, scientists have found a atmospheric patterns that can be broken down into a series of cascading events, each of which in turn spawn smaller processes that follow "scale-by-scale simplicity."

If they are right, behind towering complexity lurks mathematical beauty.

Like some plants whose fronds contain ever smaller versions of the same overall leaf on a plane, atmospheric processes may unfold to reveal the the same process being repeated on smaller and smaller scales in three dimensions.

The result, according the article "Tomorrow's Weather, Cloudy with a Chance of Fractals," could be a dramatic improvement in very local forecasts and provide a valuable check on climate models.

Wayne

Image:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/richardcox/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Sensual reasoning

Can we simultaneously visualize sensory impossibilities, to see, for example, four spacial dimensions instead of three? David Hume famously described our imaginings as but faint impressions of the original sensation. Other schools of thinking, as Eric Schwitzgebel points out at the Splintered Mind, suggest that our visual imaginings are sourced somewhere in the mind, though this still leaves the central question unanswered.

Can we simultaneously "see" sensory impossibilities?

In one sense, yes. Repeated tests over decades show that at the quantum level, the physical world exists as unrealized probabilities, a factual world inaccessible to us until we interact with it through test and experimentation, or, far more enjoyably, in the arms of the people we love, or contentedly walking among the autumn colors in the woods. Improbable? yes. Impossible? no.

If that process remains a mystery except through experience, we know that through experience it might be reverse engineered through song and art. Artist Matthew Ritche has helped create an opera set in the quantum world. And here talks about The Morning Line, his effort to cross that "impossible" boundary, to "take drawing into the environment."

Wayne

Bruce Sterling: Augmented reality emerging as an industry

With newly emerging iPhone applications, augmented reality - overlaying real-time media with virtual data - is making its way to the consumer. Here, author and rich conceptualist Bruce Sterling applies the human imagination to a future of blended reality at the launch of the Layar browser.

Two thoughts: the key languages being used in this emerging media field are not English, as Sterling points out. Second, we can not only experience augmented reality, but contribute to it as well. How, for example, might a visitor tag Kentucky? How might they tag Kentucky during the IdeaFestival next month?

 

Video: Bruce Sterling's Keynote - At the Dawn of the Augmented Reality Industry from Maarten Lens-FitzGerald on Vimeo.

A Physics of Information?

If energy and information are two halves of the same whole, then why do we only have a physics of energy? What would a physics of Information look like? Somehow I think that Bob Berman, author of Biocentrism and speaker at the upcoming 2009 IdeaFestival, might have some thoughts on the matter. But why not ask him yourself?

All-access, day and individual event passes are on sale now.

Wayne

"Luxuriate in its beetle-ness, its daffodility" What's in a name?

Here is a lovely concluding meditation on what it means to name the world.

Just find an organism, any organism, small, large, gaudy, subtle — anywhere, and they are everywhere — and get a sense of it, its shape, color, size, feel, smell, sound... [M]editate, luxuriate in its beetle-ness, its daffodility. Then find a name for it. Learn science’s name, one of countless folk names, or make up your own. To do so is to change everything, including yourself. Because once you start noticing organisms, once you have a name for particular beasts, birds and flowers, you can’t help seeing life and the order in it, just where it has always been, all around you.

Do things retain their essence regardless of name, as Shakespeare wrote, or do we change the world and a little of ourselves in the process of giving the world's objects a name? I wonder what Harvard Shakespeare scholar Marjorie Garber - who will be speaking at this year's IdeaFestival - believes Shakespeare might say about this? Even better, what might he write?

Wayne

Tagging Kentucky

Augmented reality, the ability to pair current Web data with live video is being adapted for smart phones. See, for example, this video of an iPhone app. But as Fast Company reports, the technology might be about to take a leap forward, giving individuals the ability to add their own data, called tags, to real-world objects:

Metaio's code lets users leave AR notes, Tweets, images or even 3-D animations tagged to real world places, using a mix of geotagging, smartphone cameras and other Location-Based Service techniques. Other users, when viewing the world through a Metaio-enabled AR smartphone browser, would be able to discover the tag--and can even share it via a Facebook plugin.

Written down, this just sounds simplistic, useless and kind of geeky. Who'd want to tag a place with their picture or, as the video shows, a flapping dragon? Give it five to ten years, with more ubiquitous smartphone use, and I'd suggest the answer to that question is pretty much most people.

Watching this video, I wonder how would people tag Kentucky?

The music, in case you were wondering: Jean Michel Jarre - Oxygene

Wayne

Time before time

Cocktail Party Physics writes up a very nice summary of a panel of some of the world's top physicists discussing time at the recent World Science Festival in New York City, describing the differences between relativistic and quantum versions of time, why it appears to move in only one direction and what might have come before the big bang. Sean Carroll, who has a forthcoming book on the subject, was a panelist and had this to say on that:

Scientists have gotten used to the idea that when people ask us 'What happened before the big bang?' we give St. Augusta's answer: we say there was no such thing as before the big bang. But in very recent times, beyond Einstein, we're realizing that we have absolutely no justification for saying that that's true. We have to more beyond Einstein to understand what happened at the big bang. And the answer might be that the universe can into existence at the big bang: there's nothing before. Or it might not. There could be something before the big bang...cosmologists, people who are working on quantum gravity, are very interested in what we've learned since Einstein to answer these questions and go back and answer St. Augusta's question.

Incidentally, the World Science Festival was co-founded by former IdeaFestival presenter, theoretical physicist and a favorite author of mine, Brian Greene, who has a few words to say on the subject in The Fabric of the Cosmos. I highly recommend it.

Have a wonderful time if you're celebrating the Fourth of July this weekend!

Wayne

Cosmology, David Albert, Fotini Markopoulou-Kalamara, George Ellis, Michael Heller, Roger Penrose, Sean Carroll

Businesses could learn a lot from a seat at the Poker table

Via Creative Generalist, this Harvard Business Review article asks a particularly relevant question for businesses in an age of fluid markets and information ubiquity. If competitive advantages don't last long, if "hypercompetition" is the rule, the "skill of getting out of things" and refocusing an organization is just as important as being able to recognize opportunity in the first place. I wonder what businesses could learn from Poker pros about letting go of a once-solid position.

Wayne

Oblivion is unstable

Why is there something rather than nothing? Reporting on a panel of physicists at the World Science Festival, TierneyLab offers up my favorite answer to that famous philosophical question from Gottfried Leibniz in his 1697 essay “On the Ultimate Origin of Things”.

"Nothing," according to panelist and MIT physicist Frank Wilczek, "is unstable".

Wayne

physics