Alien Portrayal

Do you have arguments with others about whether aliens portrayed on the big or small screen are ‘realistic’? Most of them aren’t, but there’s a good reason. Earlier this month, I discussed a chapter in Ian Stewart’s book The Mathematics of Life about how life is defined on our planet. The next chapter (“Is Anybody Out There?”) discusses potential extraterrestrial life. I like Stewart’s argument for why many TV or movie aliens fit a narrow range:

 

“In those media, before computer graphics reached its current level of realism, aliens had to be thinly disguised human actors, insects magnified to gigantic proportions, or invisible presences that glowed in the dark, emitted sparks or disturbed the air and moved the curtains. Now they can be impressively detailed creatures that inspire terror, like… in Alien, or they can be cute and cuddly like the Ewoks… And that is what their designers intend, and it is why the aliens in the media mislead us about what real aliens might look like. Media aliens are invented in order to stimulate specific human emotions. This makes them hopeless parochial, and many of their features make no scientific sense at all.”

 

I’ll have to explain what Stewart means by ‘parochial’. He credits his biologist friend Jack Cohen for making the following distinction between universals and parochials. Parochials are specific features, accidents of nature contingent with other specifics shaped by the local environment. Universals relate to broader principles – you expect to see these general features because evolution is a general (universal) mechanism. Examples serve to illustrate this so I’ll quote Stewart once more.

 

“Five digits on a hand is parochial, but appendages that can manipulate objects are universal. Wings covered in feathers are parochial, but the ability to fly in an atmosphere is a universal. Daisies are parochial, but photosynthesis – obtaining energy from light – is universal... Universals are features that are very likely to evolve on other suitable worlds… but [this] does not mean that such creatures will exist everywhere, not even on every suitable planet. Flight needs an atmosphere, for instance, but we don’t expect every planet with an atmosphere to have flying creatures… Parochials, on the other hand, are local accidents, and we would not expect to see them elsewhere. The creatures of our planet, at any level of detail, are mostly parochial instances of universals.”

 

What Stewart is saying is that aliens portrayed in the media hew closely to the parochials of life as we know it. Perhaps that’s because too far a deviation from the parochial features we’re familiar with might lead us to not recognize an alien life form if we met one. Stewart then goes on to argue that when you think about aliens, you also need to consider that they “evolved in some environment elsewhere in the universe, and it would be adapted to that environment”. That takes more work. An oxygenic atmosphere as an energy source may not be widespread on alien worlds. Perhaps hydrogen-breathers outnumber oxygen-breathers. But then, maybe that prevents them for evolving into sufficiently complex multicellular organisms to exhibit intelligence.

 

Or maybe it should be called extelligence, according to Stewart and Cohen, which they define as “the ability to store cultural capital and know-how outside ourselves in a form that can be widely accessed”. Apes, dolphins, octopi, and other creatures are ‘smart’ in some sense. But they haven’t developed writing or libraries, generally speaking. Stewart argues that “brain structure is parochial” but that extelligence “ought to be a universal… offering clear evolutionary advantages” even though we have a sample size of one at the moment. Most TV or movie aliens that exhibit extelligence (not the ones that are just apex predators out to kill and eat humans) are portrayed remarkably like humans socially. The ones in the movie Arrival might be a rare case where their unlikeness is emphasized a little more. It must be difficult for the visitors to be on a planet so alien to themselves that they stay confined and for the most part inscrutable. Their otherness feels alien. Perhaps that’s as it should be. Every so often, we should be shaken out of our parochial anthropocentric point-of-view.

Second Exposure

A year ago, I watched Christopher Nolan’s Tenet for the first time as I was covering Entropy in my G-Chem II class. One of the students had told me I should watch it when we speculatively discussed entropy and the arrow of time. I found Tenet messy and confusing the first time, although I understood the overall gist of what was going on. This weekend, I decided to re-watch Tenet because once again we are in the entropy chapter of G-Chem II. While I noticed things I had missed the first time, I still think the story is not tight enough. Too many things going on, loose ends, some inconsistency (for reasonable cinematic reasons), and it’s still a bit of a mess. I think more editing was needed before the theatrical version was released. As my spouse perceptively said, it would be interesting to see a director’s cut with voice-over. (We haven’t done so.)

 

The most interesting bit in the movie is to cinematically convey what it ‘feels’ like to go against the arrow of time. They didn’t film it and then run the reel backwards. It was filmed in the forward direction with the actors trying to play the part of moving backwards and forwards in the strange jerky motions we observed on the screen. It must have been utterly confusing for them, but I think they did a good job overall – the movie felt ‘kinetic’. The science itself is dubious. The difference between entropically inverted objects is mushed with the notion of anti-matter. The idea of having to carry your own oxygen tank is inconsistent with other things that you can interact with when you are making your way through an inverted world.

 

I was amused by the discussion about exothermic reactions turning into endothermic ones. I suppose my constantly admonishing students to pay attention to sign changes in thermodynamics is something my students will note if they watch the movie. While the second law of thermodynamics inexorably moves towards ‘disorder’, there is no problem with systems and subsystems within the thermodynamic universe becoming more ordered. This happens all the time in chemical reactions. Every time you burn a fuel to release energy in an exothermic reaction, the chemical substances are transforming from higher entropy to lower entropy (i.e., becoming more ‘ordered’) rather than the other way around. The heat released however increases the ‘disorder’ of the surroundings at a much higher magnitude, and thus the chemical reaction is ‘driven’ forward in one direction.

 

Having had my second exposure to Tenet made me think about students being exposed to chemistry. You don’t know what’s going on the first time, and maybe the second time you gain a little more understanding. But it might still be messy and things might not make sense. You sorta think you know what’s going on, but it may take a third exposure to disabuse you of that notion. That was certainly true for me. My first go-around of chemistry in secondary school, I had no idea what was going on. It felt like my weakest science subject. Physics and biology made more sense. In my second go-around (junior college / pre-university), it made more sense and I seemed to do better on exams. Only as an undergraduate did I fall in love with chemistry and things started to click – third exposure. And then in graduate school, the fog cleared even more. That’s my fourth time around if you’re counting. More murkiness cleared as I began to teach, and it’s only now that I can claim I have expertise in understanding and teaching chemistry.

 

In my G-Chem classes every year, inevitably a few students will thank me for helping them make sense of chemistry. These students often tell me what terrible teachers they had in high school, and that they didn’t understand anything, but now the material makes more sense to them. I’m glad I’ve helped clear up some conceptual things about chemistry, but their previous teachers may not have been terrible. It may simply have been first exposure to a challenging, confusing and the non-intuitive nature of chemistry. I’m glad they feel better about their second exposure, but when they take my exams, it reveals that several of them still do not have a good grasp. I try to tell them not to feel bad about it, and that I had a similar experience myself. I’m not sure they believe me.

 

Many, if not most, of my students, did well in high school. Academics, to some extent, came relatively easy for them, especially the ‘honors’ students. Now for the first time, they are encountering the academic struggle and it’s unnerving. (I experienced doing poorly in school before I entered university.) Some of them feel there’s something wrong with themselves, others are apologetic and even feel they are letting me (the instructor) down when they are doing poorly, and they tell me they are trying. I try to be sympathetic and say it’s okay to not be acing the class, and that the subject material is indeed difficult – but I think my words ring hollow. I need to work better at displaying empathy (it’s not something I’m naturally good at).

 

We’re not all geniuses when we see something for the first time. Maybe even the second time. Many things that we learn in school are not ‘natural’ and we humans haven’t evolved to learn them by osmosis. We need to work through it – the hard way. And that’s okay. But the pace of life has quickened, and it feels more urgent to the younger generation to be able to pick up something more quickly, otherwise they feel like failures. This, I don’t think is their own fault as individuals. They’re caught in an accelerating system, entropy inexorably moving forward, that makes life feel crazier, messier, and less comprehensible.

Cognitive Architecture and Critical Thinking

Over the years I’ve read dozens (if not hundreds) of papers on education learning on topics such as cognitive processes, creativity, and critical thinking. Readers of this blog know that I’m a proponent of Cognitive Load Theory. I find it a useful framework, and it seems to explain a number of puzzles in pedagogy about why some things seem to work and why other things don’t. Context matters in all these cases!

 

Today’s post highlights a summary article (available here), that’s relatively short and easy to read, by John Sweller, one of the “founders” of Cognitive Load Theory. It is titled Some Critical Thoughts about Critical Thinking and Creativity. In this article, Sweller highlights the analogy between evolution by natural selection (the creativity of nature!) and human cognitive architecture (which may have something to say about the creativity of humans). Both can be considered as Natural Information Processing Systems. There’s a nifty table highlighting the analogy.

 

Sweller also defines and distinguishes biologically primary versus biologically secondary knowledge. The former is acquired unconsciously for the most part, and can be quite complex. Examples include learning to understand and speak one’s native language, negotiating basic social interactions, and using means-end analysis to solve a problem. The latter must be acquired consciously – you have to do some work to learn the stuff! Examples include learning to read and write, push symbols in math, and most things you learn in school classrooms.

 

Where does the teaching and learning of “critical thinking” and “creativity”, popular topics in education, come into play? The crux of the article is that there is little evidence for teaching very-generalized strategies to help students think more creatively or critically. The key ingredient that presupposes those desired abilities is to have domain knowledge in the area. The more, the better, and the easier it is to think critically.

 

Think about a hobby you have. You might have read a lot about it, spent lots of time thinking about it, went out of your way to learn as much about it as you can, talked to people about it, and even had arguments with others where you’ve been able to hold your own because you actually knew something about the topic at hand. You can think critically and creatively around it. You may have learned it all “on your own” but if you think about it, your knowledge is owed to other experts who wrote things you’ve read or provided useful information you didn’t know when you were just starting out.

 

Humans have evolved to be efficient at providing information to each other socially (even mediated through the pages of the book or the internet). That’s what (hopefully) happens in classrooms. Teachers tell you things you would otherwise have trouble grasping on your own. We do this by pre-digesting the material and thinking about how to facilitate your learning it in bite-sized pieces so your working memory can handle it and then transfer it to long-term memory (your information store). The hope is that you can then apply it to related situations that provides feedback for you to learn it better! That’s what homework, quizzes, and tests are for! Evolution does something very similar, as you can see from the table, except in education we skip the inefficient first step of random generate-and-test. That’s only for completely novel situations where you have no background knowledge and you’re forced to come up with something.

 

While there is continual hoopla about teaching “critical thinking” or “creativity”, these are often vaguely defined. Sweller cuts to the chase that you mostly don’t have to worry about that part if you teach students how to acquire and use information in a particular domain. Providing examples is a great way of doing that – it’s a particularly efficient way to transmit domain knowledge and skills. Requiring students to practice what you want them to learn is another well-honed educational pedagogy. It’s not new and fancy. We’ve been doing it for a long time.

 

The information in the article wasn’t new to me, but if you’re intrigued (or you disagree) with some of what I’ve said above, I suggest reading the full article because I’ve glossed over many things I’ve learned in this area from my reasonably extensive reading. That being said, three things that jumped out at me from reading this were:

·      I should consider asking students to specifically tell me one hobby or area of expertise they have. (Some of them tell me this as part of their “intro” but sometimes they tell me other factoids instead.) Not only will I get to learn a bit more about them, but I can use this as a springboard for a discussion about learning chemistry.

·      It made me notice that for some particularly challenging concepts in chemistry, students think they know something but only in a rather vague way – and when I ask follow-up questions in office hours, the missing links are often content/knowledge they don’t remember or didn’t know well to begin with.

·      As I get older and I expect to experience some cognitive impairment decline (seeing what’s happening to older relatives), it’s made me think about ways I can trigger long-term memory. I sometimes do this when talking to an older relative by picking a topic they have expertise in to facilitate conversation, but I’m starting to muse about how I can do this for myself as I will at some point (probably) face a similar decline.

 

In the meantime, I’m still a voracious reader and trying to learn as much as I can about so many interesting things! I hope I’m moving some of this into long-term memory, although I’m starting to see occasional hiccups in retrieving that information. I hope I will continue to be able to think critically and creatively for as long as I can! But human cognitive architecture also has its limits. And mortality is our gift. Why, I cannot say.

Procrastination and Perfectionism

Reading through The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien has been more fascinating than I expected. Even though I am a Tolkien fan, I had not gone through this because for a long time I was much more interested in the fantasy world of Middle-Earth, and I’d never seen the appeal of reading letters of deceased (famous) people. But since I enjoyed Kreeft’s book, and noticed his many quotations from Letters, I finally borrowed Letters from the library.

 

I’m about a third of the way through, approaching the year 1950. The bulk of the letters I’ve read so far come from the 1940s during WWII. Tolkien’s son Christopher is serving in the military and stationed in South Africa (the country of J.R.R.’s birth). Christopher, as enthusiastic reader and provider of critical feedback, is one of the motivating factors that J.R.R. is writing the behemoth Lord of the Rings, the sequel to the well-loved Hobbit published back in the 1930s. There are many interesting tidbits about both books. One that jumped out at me is that Sam Gamgee could well have become Sam Goodchild, if not for Christopher’s insistence that Gamgee be kept. Of the four hobbits, I’ve always found Sam the most interesting of the four – and there are hints that J.R.R. may have thought so too.

 

As an academic, it was interesting to read Tolkien’s application for a faculty position, specifically a Professorship at the University of Oxford, in 1925. It is a single letter of five main paragraphs, where Tolkien describes his potential suitability for the position, very briefly mentioning his qualifications, his experience, and what he could bring if selected. That’s it. Unlike the massive packets of materials requested of today’s candidates for faculty positions, Tolkien’s letter was polite, to the point, and whimsical. (He got the job.)

 

The biggest surprise to me was reading Tolkien’s letters to Stanley Unwin, publisher and owner of the company that published The Hobbit. Readers were interested in the sequel, and although Tolkien had been “working” on it for over a decade and was “making progress”, he still hadn’t finished. His letters are full of “excuses” as to why he has not made as much progress as he would like. He continues to hope they would be interested in the book nevertheless, and it certainly helped that Unwin’s son, Rayner, loved the world that Tolkien had created. Tolkien’s excuses included his teaching, his university duties, falling ill, having to tend to the house and domestic things, a friend dying, getting stuck in part of the story, writer’s block, financial constraints, not enough paper (wartime shortage), his typewriter giving problems, and not being able to hire an assistant to help because of money shortages. Maybe that worked in the 1940s where the pace of things was much slower, but it would never fly today.

 

Was Tolkien a procrastinator? I don’t know. He certainly had other things going on, and he was writing lots of letters (primarily to family members and friends) which must have taken a long time because some of those published in the book were drafts. I’m not sure I have ever written a draft letter – I write it in one sitting and then I send it (before e-mail and the Internet). Yes, he had teaching and other university duties. Yes, he was working on writing other things (including some poems, stories, and things of a more academic nature). Was Lord of the Rings the side-hobby? I’m certainly glad that Unwin had the patience to wait for Tolkien.

 

Was Tolkien a perfectionist? I don’t know. But I do get the impression that he worked and re-worked drafts until he really felt he got things “right”. The level of detail and the care in which he took to devise entire languages (he was a philologist after all!), cultures, and the richest world in fantasy I have ever encountered, might suggest that he was something of a perfectionist. He certainly took into account comments from his test readers, not just Christopher or Rayner, but also his drinking buddies and fellow academics – the group known as the Inklings. I suspect that my enjoyment of Tolkien’s world stems from him sweating the details to get things right. The depth of his world is astonishing, and now that I’ve read more fantasy and sci-fi, I still think his Middle Earth is the most immersive.

 

Perfectionism and Procrastination: do the two go hand-in-hand? Are the perfectionists always delaying things because they’re constantly thinking and tweaking and unsatisfied until a hard deadline forces the output to be finally revealed? It seems plausible. I’ve been thinking about this connection because of a talk I was giving to graduate students at the neighboring research university. During the Q&A, I was asked about time-management and how I got things done efficiently without being a workaholic. I’m not a procrastinator (most of the time). I don’t like waiting until close to a deadline, I like to be ahead of the game. I’m very efficient – which isn’t always a good thing. I’m also not a perfectionist. Good enough is good enough. This makes me very different from the typical academic since we are trained to be careful and critical, and pushed to produce work of the “highest standard of excellence”. Instead, I’m quick at getting stuff done and my work passes muster. It’s good enough. But perhaps it will never be great, and I’m not in line to win any academic prizes anytime soon. The thought doesn’t bother me in the least.

 

Should I be taking more time to do better work? Possibly. And that’s what reading Letters has made me ponder. Should I be less quick about finishing my work? Should I strive for excellence? Are my expectations for my students the same as for myself? It took me just under an hour to hammer out this blog post. And I’m not going over it again carefully. It will take time if I want to change my speedy habits. Maybe I’m procrastinating about it because I’m not interested in perfection.

Is Flame Alive? Balrog Version

I’ve almost finished reading The Mathematics of Life by Ian Stewart. Most of the book discusses things I’m familiar with in the history of science and mathematics. But I personally find it pleasurable to read and be reminded of these vignettes. Chapter 17 asks the perennial question “What is Life?”. Stewart thinks that focusing on structure is less useful than asking the question about process: “What is Living?”

 

He has a list of “features of life” which I’ve reproduced below.

 

·      Possessing an organized structure;

·      Regulating internal behavior in response to short-term changes in the environment;

·      Maintaining both the above by extracting energy from the environment;

·      Responding to external stimuli, say by moving towards a food source;

·      Growing – in a way that does not merely accumulate more and more stuff while doing nothing with it;

·      Reproducing;

·      Adapting to long-term changes in the environment.

 

Stewart emphasizes the distinction between reproduction and replication. Because I’m reading his book digitally, and this blog is being published digitally, could it be that I’m replicating the 0’s and 1’s that constitute his text? (I did not cut and paste, but made a copy by retyping.) Well, not exactly. The font is different. And I allowed to stand the auto-correct of my word processor that switched British to American spelling and auto-capitalized the first letter of each bullet point. The underlying digital structure is different, but you’re reading the same words. Is the meaning or the semantics therefore replicated? I suppose it depends on how we understand or comprehend each of those bullet points.

 

One might ask: What does it mean to be “organized”? What constitutes “short-term” environmental changes? For that matter, what is the boundary between the organism (the organized structure and process!) and its environment? I like his clarification of growing, and I’m in agreement with how he describes the importance of energy extraction – since this is one of my research foci. Stewart is careful to couch his list as “broad-brush”, a useful rule-of-thumb. Then he provides a useful example to illustrate the difficulty of such definitions. I’ll quote his paragraph below.

 

“Flames have a definite physical structure. They change their dynamics in response to their surroundings, growing in the presence of fuel and oxygen, dying down if these are absent. They extract chemical energy from the reaction between fuel and oxygen. They invade adjacent sources of fuel. They grow. They reproduce: a forest fire starts as a single flame. But the chemistry of flames today is the same as it was a billion years ago, so they fall at the final hurdle. With a vivid imagination, you could invent plausible aliens that were complex systems of flames. If their chemistry could change over long periods of time, depending on what the environment can provide, they might evolve. In a way, we are like that… an internalized flame… an exothermic reaction…”

 

This made me think of Balrogs. According to Tolkien, these are powerful spirit-beings (Maiar) that take on the physical form of flames – or at least that is their most distinctive characteristics – and thus they are referred to as fire-demons. Tolkien didn’t draw any, and was generally vague about their physicality although there are hints in his books that they are large (compared to humans) and move like bipeds and wield weapons in their arms. Our image of them is heavily influenced by Peter Jackson’s movies which came from John Howe’s illustrations. (And now we think they must be winged.) They may not be all-flame, but they do seem like living flame, at the very least.

 

Are Balrogs exothermic? How do they keep aflame? Assuming oxygen is in plentiful supply to drive the exothermic reaction, somehow the Balrog must draw in physical material that will combust with oxygen. Perhaps the bodies they take on are hydrocarbons after all – these would certainly lead to highly exothermic combustion. But other elements (in the periodic table) could qualify just as well. The burning of metals can be very exothermic – magnesium is a great example and well-utilized visually in chemistry lab demos and in movies when you need a fuse that leads to a big explosion. Do Balrogs grow and reproduce? I don’t know. Science has made little progress in the behavior of spirit-like beings, for good reason – their immateriality makes it difficult to test, repeat, and confirm scientific hypotheses.

 

Stewart, the mathematician doesn’t go into this, either. He briskly moves along to the story of Ulam’s automaton, Von Neumann’s hypothetical replicator, and Conway’s Game of Life. He does also mention Kauffman’s pithy definition of life: “life is a complex system that can reproduce, and can carry out at least one thermodynamic work cycle”. Students in my second semester General Chemistry class are ankle-deep in thermodynamics now. We’ve covered various forms of enthalpy (and my discussion board prompt next week will be about how to keep all these organized in your head!) but there’s still much more to come. We’ve spent some time evaluating the exothermicity of different fuels and some practical considerations in choosing a fuel. I haven’t brought up Balrogs yet, but maybe there’ll be an opportunity somewhere!

Spacetime

Over the years, I’ve read a number of “popular” physics books aimed at a general audience who are not physicists. I usually learn something new from the book I’m reading, or at least I think I do. Several years later, I read another book that discusses the same topic and sometimes I skim because it just sounds the same. But on occasion, I start to realize that what I thought I learned is now superceded by a better explanation. This is the case with why does E=mc²?by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw. 

 

The crux of the story is why mass exists and the equivalence of mass and energy via Einstein’s famous formula. While that’s not new to me, how they narrate the story is enlightening. Instead of a historical derivation, they begin with the conversation of momentum augmented by the need to use special relativity so that all observers agree on the reference frame. This frame is done by combining space and time into four-dimensional spacetime, a blocky and seemingly static Parmenidean picture – but with the advantage of allowing for conservation or un-changing-ness. Beautifully, the law of conservation of energy pops out from this story. This was my Ionian Enchantment moment. The authors promised me that it would come, and they delivered!

 

Unlike other pop physics texts, there is some math in this one. Not too much to turn you off, but enough for me to appreciate the power of their approach. There are a number of figures in their book (mostly two-dimensional graphs) and I found them particularly helpful in appreciating the difference between Pythagoras and Minkowski, and why spacetime diagrams are often pictured as two cones with pointy ends touching each other. The authors also clarified for me why being at rest means roaring forward at the cosmic speed limit of c, and that this definition of c is more general than thinking of it as the speed of light. They also shed light on why massless photons speed off at c from any observer’s reference.

 

In my quantum chemistry class, I briefly make reference to E=mc² and distinguish rest mass from relativistic mass by its “enhancement factor”. Cox and Forshaw derive this same factor in more than one way, thus highlighting its significance. They also make a useful approximation that combines Einstein’s formula with the standard expression for kinetic energy of ½mv², which was very useful in thinking about the whole baffling problem of clocks running differently for observers traveling at different speeds relative to each other. So although this book was aimed at the story of the origin of mass, what I learned from it was how to think about spacetime.

 

The origin of mass story is interesting in its own right. I learned a little more about interpreting Feynman diagrams, and now I have some appreciation for the parts of the equation in the standard model that describe the Higgs field. I still have trouble thinking in terms of fields – perhaps that’s why I’m a particulate-thinking chemist rather than a physicist – but I now know a tiny bit more why gauge symmetry is important. If much of what I’ve written in the last few paragraphs sound like science gobbledygook to you, I recommend Cox and Forshaw’s book. It takes a little more work to digest (at least for me it did), but I got more out of it. Perhaps the moral of the story is that I need to put in the work to reap the reward. And yet, there is so much more to learn. The authors couch their story with a sense of wonder, and it leaps off the pages in their book. It’s motivated to do better in my teaching – to improve the clarity of a complex topic while maintaining its enchantment!