Art Appreciation

I don’t expect to visit a museum anytime soon with Covid-Omicron raging, but that shouldn’t prevent me from putting into practice some lessons from How to Enjoy Art by Ben Street. I consider myself non-artistic and generally ignorant about art. It’s not something to proud of; if anything, I should educate myself a bit more. How do I do so? By reading. It’s what I do, out of habit, but also because that’s what I like doing – reading. This might not be the best approach, and I’m ironically learning this by reading a book. 

 

Fittingly, Street’s book is rather short and very different from the art history books I’ve perused with little memory or learning. That’s possibly because I wasn’t all that interested – I felt it was good for me to learn to appreciate art, but I wasn’t particularly motivated. Instead of history, Street exhorts the budding art appreciator to take time observing. In five brief chapters, he highlights five things to consider when looking at art: colour, scale, process, placement, and content. Note that content is last on the list. I would have gone for content first. Perhaps that’s my default scientist-training kicking in. Or maybe it’s my inner teacher-learner mindset. I’m here to learn. Teach me some content.

 

Street’s advice: look and see. Participate in the creative act of observation! Huh? I don’t know how to do that. Art speaks in a humanistic voice aimed at the person, unlike much of science education which seems aimed at a disembodied mind. Street has anticipated this, and I will quote (in italics below) three brief passages from his book, all on page 123. This analysis comes after he has spent some time asking the reader to take some time in observing the first four: colour, scale, process, and placement.

 

Treating history as a creative act is likely to prove a fairly unsettling experience. Turning away from a work of art with more questions than answers might frustrate some viewers, but it is the case that any deeply held piece of knowledge about a work of art can be teased at until its ambiguities become plain.

 

As an instructor of chemistry, I resonate with this. Learning to appreciating chemistry in a little more depth is, or should be, an unsettling experience. The invisible world of atoms and molecules coordinating a strange dance that give rise to a variety of substances with diverse properties is awesome but hard to grasp. It might frustrate some learners. Actually, from experience I know it frustrates many learners – myself included. But there’s a pleasure in delving into the details, and I personally find joy in uncovering the ambiguities. But it takes time and patience.

 

Students want their answers quickly in chemistry class. For things to made plain and simple, hopefully without too much hard work. Perhaps, I’ve been doing the same thing in my few museum visits. Before I do anything else, I first read the label. Habit, I suppose. Also, because I now have some appreciation of how much work goes into labels and other textual information in an art museum by listening to a friend while she was working on such projects. There’s a lot of thought that goes into the text you read in a museum, as minimalistic as it seems. Reading art history can be a stumbling block, or maybe a narrowing blinker. Here’s what Street has to say.

 

There is always wiggle room for creative interpretation, even when faced with a seemingly impenetrable wall of veneration around a work of art. A certain kind of inflated language creates a blockade that can seem to leave little room for the imaginative viewer seeking their own point of entry into the work. It can take some tenacity to find it, but without it works of art can only be famous objects, rather than springboards for imaginative possibility.

 

That’s not to say one shouldn’t read art history and that it should always be approached from a blank slate of ignorance. As an expert in my own area, I know that it can very much help me appreciate things related to my field in ways a non-expert has no access to, and won’t have access to even with deep contemplation. But I appreciate the interpretive wiggle room. In my introductory chemistry classes, the most interesting questions often come from the intellectually curious students with the least background. Their broad, seemingly simplistic questions, turn out to be very interesting – from my point of view as an expert. Over the years, my reading interests in chemistry have broadened considerably. I used to only read specific articles in my niche area, but now I roam more broadly and I can see the glimmers of creative interpretation that fleetingly spark my mind.

 

The most important thing about art appreciation that I learned from Street is to take the time to look and see. Focus on the art, and allow your senses some creative play. It’s not just about intellectual understanding. Street has something to say about history and authority about art, that to some extent has parallels in science.

 

The fact is that there is no right or wrong way to engage with a work of art, but it’s possible to not engage at all, and one way of doing that is to treat art-historical information as unshakeable fact. A work of art can become an illustration of art-historical work, even an illustration of the label’s text, rather than its own physical life and complex possibilities. This is not unusual – in fact, it’s very commonplace – but it is unfortunate, since it leaves viewers as nothing more than passive subjects, worshippers at the altar of data rather than creatively active participants in the making of meaning.

 

I don’t want my students to just be passive subjects. I want them to engage! It’s easy in science to worship the altar of data. And I haven’t quite grasped how a non-expert can participate in the making of meaning in chemistry research, but it’s something I should continue to ponder. Perhaps I can do that by spending some time engaging in observing and appreciating art. I don’t have to wait until going to a museum. Art is all around us in human structures and designs. I’ve started to notice colours more vividly since reading Street’s book, and as a chemist, I do think about scale. As an educator, I should be thinking more about process and placement. Teaching is an art, although it’s also a science. Sometimes, I concentrate too much on the latter. Seeing the artistic in art can help remind me what it means to learn and appreciate anything.

Relative Stability

I’ve been thinking about models and metaphors lately. Where do these show up in my field of chemistry? Well, everywhere! Why? Because in chemistry we’re trying to link tiny things we can’t see to the mesocosm that we’re used to experiencing. We try to conceptualize what we think is going on at the atomic scale by imagining objects that we can manipulate on our human scale. For example, we picture atoms as balls, and chemical bonds between atoms in a molecule as sticks connecting the balls. It’s a start, even though reality is nowhere as simple.

 

One crowning principle we emphasize at the G-Chem level is stability. Stable substances are those that we can macroscopically handle, touch, and taste. They stay around long enough to say something about their chemical properties, at which point we start imagining nanoscopically tiny balls and sticks of tiny things explain these properties. Now, when we say something is stable, we implicitly mean it is energetically stable. Thus, we quantify stability. As I tell my students, we don’t really know what energy is, but we can count it!

 

To make matters worse, something that is more stable has a lower energy, while something that is unstable is high-energy. Low is good, high is bad. That’s counter-intuitive to our other metaphors of high and low. Getting a high score on your chemistry exam is good. It’s good when your teacher thinks highly of you. In an argument or battle, you want to occupy the high ground. How you wish that the number following the dollar sign in your bank account was higher! Stable substances composed of stable molecules prefer the opposite. They want to be low. Low in energy. Sluggish. Sounds bad. But really, that’s where chemistry is headed. It’s thermodynamics!

 

Ah, but it gets worse! We often forget to emphasize that whenever we discuss something being stable, we mean it is relatively energetically stable to some reference state. So, if someone comes up and tells you that molecule X is stable, you should always ask: Stable relative to what? And there’s more. It will also depend on the environment your substance or molecule is in. That’s why we stress “standard conditions” in chemistry, and my students are treated to my broken record repetition of knowing what the reference state is.

 

What are some examples that we see in G-Chem? (Let’s assume non-changing environmental conditions of room temperature and pressure.)

 

Drawing “good” Lewis structures. Um, professor, what do you mean by “good”? Ah, that’s hard to say but we can use some rules-of-thumb to generate reasonable drawings of stable molecules: Follow the octet rule, don’t use large formal charges, if you do have +1 or -1 formal charges, try to match them with the less and more electronegative elements respectively, and if you can draw equivalent “resonance” structures, that helps too. (SO₂ is a good example to illustrate all of this.) The notion of resonance in itself is a confusing bugbear, so let’s avoid getting into it for the moment (see Kerber, R. C. J. Chem. Educ. 2006, 83, 223-227).

 

After drawing some simpler structures, at some point we get to ozone. It has a beautiful symmetric triangular Lewis structure that follows all the rules. But now we throw in VSEPR Theory and argue that the internal sixty-degree bond angles are energetically bad and electron-pair repulsion (due to the Pauli Principle, I stress, not electrostatics) must be taken into account. Okay, so now we can draw bent ozone. But ozone (O₃) ain’t all that stable. It decomposes into O₂, the form of molecular oxygen we love to promote as life-giving. We neglect to explain why. The explanation is trickier than it looks at first glance. Many of the hand-waving ones we professors are good at trotting out are what I call “just so” explanations (after the Rudyard Kipling stories) that wither under the attack of counter-examples.

 

In fact, O₂ isn’t all that stable, despite its Lewis structure following all the rules. Why? It depends on what else is around and its double bond is anomalously weak. Anomalous? Compared to what? Well, compared to C=C or C=O perhaps. In fact, the reason why we can burn most organic compounds for energy is because the O=O bond is weak, and a thermochemical argument can be made that it provides the lion’s share of energy released or emitted in “combusting” a fuel (see Schmidt-Rohr, K. J. Chem. Educ. 2015, 92, 2094). O₂ is the “high-energy” molecule, the fuel much less so. (We’re assuming complete combustion to CO₂ and H₂O here.)

 

This leads to a distinction between kinetic and thermodynamic stability. O₂ may be thermodynamically unstable compared to other common substances in the atmosphere, but you don’t see cows spontaneously combust all the time, despite their methane output. But once again, that’s relative to what else is going on and what the environmental conditions are. And I sidestepped why the O=O bond is weaker than you might expect. Clue: It’s the Pauli Principle again kicking in at shorter bond lengths. Same reason why peroxides (compounds with O–O single bonds) are reactive, one might even say unstable, although you can draw good Lewis structures with no problem.

 

Knowing the relative strength of chemical bonds in molecules does allow you to predict thermodynamic stability. But in a chemical reaction, bonds are broken and bonds are formed. Both processes are going on. Breaking a bond requires energy input. It is costly (energetically). But what makes the chemical reaction thermodynamically favorable? New stronger bonds are formed, and therefore the overall energy “stored” in the bonds of the chemical system is now lower. You’re going from a higher energy situation to a lower energy situation. Remember, counterintuitively, that low is good.

 

Students instinctively think that making lower energy compounds with stronger bonds “stores” more chemical energy, but that’s wrong – at least if you think of chemical energy as a resource you can tap when you need to convert it to electricity or heat or work. It’s the higher-energy chemical substance with weaker chemical bonds that works as your chemical “store”. This metaphor gets us into trouble because we think of a store as having more. Yes, we have more energy, but that means weaker and fewer chemical bonds where possible. If I can get this through to the students, I consider it a great achievement. It’s so challenging conceptually because the metaphors we use are counter-intuitive to our picture in everyday life of perhaps grain stored in a silo as a resource. This is part of what makes understanding chemistry challenging. We need to use metaphors. And when we use them, they’re counter-intuitive. Can’t we come up with something more intuitive? I’d like to say yes, but reality is just that much more complex.

Time is Knowledge

I’ve been thinking about metaphors. I blame it on the philosophical tome that has taken me over two months to finish reading: Philosophy in the Flesh, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. I previously blogged about it when the authors got me thinking about how we navigate living in a mesocosm, and how we use metaphor not just in everyday communication, but to advance learning and knowledge.

 

Today’s metaphor: Time is Knowledge. In the higher education business, we have long used a proxy known as “seat time” coupled with grades to quantify learning. I will discuss both seat time and grades in a moment, but first let’s talk about why learning is quantified with such seemingly simple proxies. Before the massification of education, there was no need to reduce learning to a mere number. Everyone would quickly know if you’d learned something or not – ignorance is not so easy to hide in a smaller community where you all know each other. You can quickly figure out who is full of hot air and who is actually capable. That’s still true today: Think about the people you work with or the people you hang around – if you’ve known them for a while, you’ll know what I mean.

 

But in the modern era of increased mobility and the flattening of hierarchies (including entrenched ones), it’s not so easy to tell. Hence, the rise of credentialism and wanting to appear fair. Who should you hire? Who should be admitted to your prestigious program? Who should be awarded a merit scholarship? Do cover letters or references letters from people you don’t personally know help separate the wheat from the chaff? Do you even have time to read the mountain of text from an applicant’s materials? If only we had the impartial Goblet of Fire! Screening has even been outsourced to bots. I’m glad that didn’t happen back in the day I was applying to stuff. The short answer is that when faced with a mound of “data”, you use proxies as shortcuts. This is a very natural thing to do. We do it all the time, throughout our day, often without realizing it even from the simple act of speaking with metaphors we no longer notice.

 

Say I’m looking at an applicant’s file and trying to assess if he or she has requisite background knowledge, whatever that might be. A student’s measure of university learning (at least in most U.S. universities) is measure by seat time. I won’t go into the history of the Carnegie credit-hour, but suffice to say that it follows the expected evolution of a descriptive model self-reinforcing itself into a prescriptive model – a large topic for another day. Instead, let’s cut to the chase. Here’s my version of how to think about the credit hour in the natural sciences:

 

A three-credit-hour class, your typical “lecture” class meets three hours per week. There’s an assumption that you should be doing six hours of work outside of class to support your learning (the 2-to-1 rule of thumb) although my guess is few students actually do this unless you’re giving regular homework and problem sets that actually take a substantial amount of time. A one-credit “lab” course often meets once a week for 3-4 hours. Back in the day, when labs were more cookbook, there was little outside of class work, hence, it’s only worth about a third credit-wise. Nowadays, as lab and lecture courses are often taught separately by different instructors, there’s usually some outside of class work associated with the lab. (I personally favor a 1-to-2 rule of thumb: For a four-hour lab, students should expect to do two hours outside of class work to support their learning – and we should make the lab worth an additional half or one credit hour if one were keeping count.)

 

For example, in your G-Chem 1 semester-long course, we’ll count your time spent as 9 hours for the lecture and 6 hours for the lab per week. Thus, a semester long lecture is 9 x 15 = 135 hours, and a lab is 6 x 15 = 90 hours. Ignoring the physics and math requirements for the moment, a student majoring in chemistry might be required to take 10 lecture courses and 8 lab courses. The total time spent is 1350 + 720 = 2070 hours, which we can round down to 2000 hours. We award you a degree in chemistry if you took these classes (with passing grades) as a measure of your knowledge in chemistry. What did we do here? We substituted something that is not so easy to measure (knowledge, learning, etc) with something easy to quantify – the credit-hour seat-time proxy.

 

Going a little further, if you wanted to jive with the “10,000 hours makes you an expert” myth (which I don’t personally believe), you can think of a full-time job in chemistry (or perhaps graduate school) as spending 8 hours per day for 250 days per year (excluding weekends and holidays) which equals 2,000 hours per year. Do this for four years, add your undergraduate learning time, and ta-da – you’ve achieved your 10,000 hours!

 

But how well do you know your subject material? Are you (A) excellent, (B) good, (C) meh-okay, or (D) poor at it? We have another proxy: the letter-grade, which is usually determined (at least in the sciences) quantitatively from some total number of points spread across exams, homework, lab reports, and whatever else was in the syllabus. To put a finer point on it for the reader of your application who doesn’t know you personally, we’ve even computed a single number – the GPA or grade point average – to sorta quantify your knowledge. So there’s seat-time mediated by a quantitative proxy of quality, as oxymoronic as that sounds.

 

The current fad in education is to move away from test scores and “traditional” exams as assessments to something more “holistic”. This is for a variety of reasons – you’ll hear different ones depending on who you talk to. But the root of the problem has not been addressed: how do you differentiate the worthy candidate to hire, to admit, or to award – when you don’t know all or any of these people personally in a small community over a period of time. Every system of assessment has its built-in biases. Quantification tries in some way to reduce a number of biases, but it has its own biases which are not necessarily mitigated by qualitative approaches that introduce their own sets of biases that could well make the overall bias worse – if such a thing could even be measured on some sort of a scale, that sorta implies at minimum a form of quantification. See how slippery this topic can be!

 

I expect to continue giving final exams in my G-Chem and P-Chem courses as the main mode of summative assessment. Over the years I’ve given a lot of thought to the pedagogy within these courses, where the students are developmentally with regard to chemistry as a subject matter, and considered (and tried) various alternative assessments. My exams in these courses are primarily short-answer questions that sometimes require a calculation, and often ask the students to demonstrate they know something conceptually. The instruction to “explain” often accompanies the exam question. For other courses that I occasionally teach (e.g. special topic or elective courses, research methods), I use other modes of assessment depending on the course goals. I have yet to try a Reverse Final.

 

And yet after all that, how much have my students learned? Does their seat time and assessed grade capture the complexity of knowledge acquisition? Probably not. It’s a proxy. A metaphor. Time is knowledge, broadly speaking. The more time the students spend thinking about chemistry and struggling through the homework and getting the concepts to ‘stick’ in their minds, the more they have likely learned. But it’s a crude measure at best. So are letter grades and the GPA. And until the Carnegie system is overhauled, this metaphor will continue to reign. But will its successor be any less oppressive a system?

History of the World

It has been many years since I last played the epic boardgame Civilization. But to get the full experience you’d want the full complement of seven players and maybe ten hours. It would likely take thirty minutes to set up and teach new players. To get a similar but broader experience, there’s always History of the World. Easier to teach, faster to set up, and you’re looking at four hours for the epic experience. You don’t need the full complement although I think five players is the sweet spot.

 

Today’s post is an overview of the game, some of its features, and then several snapshots of a recent game so you get a sense of what an alternate world history might resemble. Replaying the tape allows you to explore these different possibilities! I have the old Avalon Hill version (no figurines) from 1993.

 

The game begins with the Sumerians, circa 2600 BC. Then it proceeds through seven epochs. Each player controls one empire in each epoch, for a total of seven empires throughout the course of the game. Each empire has a Strength (corresponding to the number of units you can use to expand), a Start Area, and sometimes a Capital city. Each player also has nine event cards to play throughout the game that may consist of temporary military strength, a minor kingdom you can control, fortifications, natural disasters to afflict your enemies, and so on. But once you play an event, you’ve played the event card. So you have to be strategic. But how? Especially when the main catch of this game is that you don’t know which empire you will be controlling in advance!

 

That’s the beauty of the game. Each epoch begins with the assigning of empires. The player with the lowest strength draws the first empire card, looks at it, and then decides whether to keep it or give it face-down to another player. If given a card by another player, you cannot look at it until all empires for that epoch have been assigned. The player with the next lowest strength draws the next empire and looks at it. If this player was given an empire card this turn, then the newly drawn card must be given away to a player who doesn’t yet have an empire. If this player doesn’t already have a card, there are the usual two options: keep or give away. This is the heart of the game and not only does it provide, a self-balancing mechanism, there is room for scheming and strategy.

 

After all players have received an empire, they are revealed one at a time according to chronological order. The controlling player expands the empire by placing units in the starting area and then expanding while possibly fighting battles. In Epoch 1, the empires are (in order) Egypt, Minoa, Indus Valley, Babylonia, Shang Dynasty, and finally the Aryans. If there are six players, all will eventually have their several hundred years of fame. If there are fewer players, not all these empires might show up. In Epochs 2-7, there are seven possible empires. Thus, even with the full six-player game, there is some uncertainty as to who will be the no-show. (If there are only two or three players, each gets to control two empires per turn.)

 

There aren’t many options during a player’s turn. Expand, fight, or build a fortress. Combat is handled with a simple die roll. There are some combat modifiers, but they are few and simple unlike your typical wargame; thus each turn proceeds quickly without too much fuss or muss. You score points for controlling capitals, cities, monuments (which you can build), and areas. The world map is divided into regions (as you’ll see in the pictures below) and you can score for having presence, majority control or full control of each area. The values change with the epochs. When you tally your score each turn, you count your control for not just your present empire but any of your past empires still on the board (if they haven’t already been wiped out).

 

And yes, that’s it to the rules. Now onward to some pictures to illustrate some moments in history! (I apologize in advance for my poor photo-taking skills.)

 

Figure 1: Epoch 1. The Babylonians expand their empire with advanced weaponry, overrunning the Hittite capital in Eastern Anatolia. The Sumerians are confined to the Lower Tigris, To the East, the Indus Valley civilization is thriving. To the West are the Minoans and to the southwest the glorious civilization of Egypt with a monument! (The Epoch 1 counters are supposed to represent a sling and a stone but I always think I’m looking at an amoeba!)

 

Figure 2: Epoch 3. The Macedonians expand to the south and east, controlling the Eastern Mediterranean, but they have to fight their way through in several costly battles. The old Egyptian empire is engulfed but the Persians still maintain much of their former territory. A Jewish revolt has established a kingdom in Palestine. In India, the Maurya dynasty has displaced the Vedic City States but the Indus maintain its capital of Mohenjodaro.

 

Figure 3: Epoch 4. The Tang Dynasty takes full control of China, expanding into the Mekong Valley. A remnant of the Vedic dynasty holes up in the Burmese highlands while a Malay state has been established to the south. The Guptas now rule most of India. To the west of China’s great wall lurk remnants of the Hsiung-Nu (the “White Huns”) in Mongolia, while Attila’s horde still controls most of the Eurasian Steppes.

 

Figure 4: Epoch 4. The Arabs under Omar launch their expansion. All of North Africa falls to their advance, except they leave in peace an old fortified kingdom of allies in the upper Nile. The Arabs expand as far as Iberia in the west, but their eastern advance is severely hampered by the Persian-Sassanid alliance. To the northwest the Byzantines control the Mediterannean waterways while old Rome’s waning might still hold sway over parts of Southern Europe.

 

Figure 5: Epoch 7. The French launch their conquest starting with the Inca Empire where they take heavy, heavy losses. But along with their Spanish allies, they are able to control all of South America. The Aztec empire still holds Central America and Mexico, while the Russians control the the eastern half of North America.Their eastward conquest of northern Europe is more successful, but they run out of steam before reaching the Baltics and Eurasia. Remnants of the Holy Roman Empire still persist, and ancient kingdoms in England and Scotland hold their own. (Area scoring table is in the lower left.)

 

Figure 6: Final scores with Purple having the highest score (175 points) while having the lowest total strength (67). Purple controlled four kingdoms on the Indian subcontinent and having that controlling stake brought in a raft of points.

 

In this game, Russia turned to overseas expansion in North America and in sub-Saharan Africa, leaving the Huns in control of most of the motherland. North China is stilled controlled by the Mongols while being held off in the south by the Ming dynasty. The Manchurians are no-shows. Another notable no-show: the Ottoman Turks. Thus at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Arabs still control north Africa, Crusader states hold Palestine but have also ravaged Mecca. Remnants of the Persians, the oldest empire, still exist with a fortress in the Anatolian highlands. France has a colony in Madagascar. Remnants of the Tang and Sung dynasties control Mekong and the East Indies respectively, untouched by the European powers.

 

And that’s a wrap! Or at least it’s one version of the History of the World.

The Matrix Resuscitated

I remember exactly where I was when I first encountered The Matrix. I was in Old Town Pasadena trying to decide whether to watch a movie at the AMC Cineplex or at United Artists across the street. It was twilight. I know this because I’m cheap, and the twilight showing (the movie that’s just before 6pm, even lower priced than a matinee) has the cheapest seats. UA, at $4.50 per twilight ticket, was slightly more expensive than AMC, but there wasn’t anything that sounded interesting at the AMC. That left The Matrix which I didn’t know much about except it was sci-fi-ish. I had not seen any previews nor read any reviews. Friends hadn’t told me about it.

 

After the movie, I walked out in a daze. It was day when I entered the cinema but night when I stepped out. Normally, I would take the free Old Town bus back to a stop close to my apartment, but instead I decided to take a half-hour walk back just to clear my head. I had never seen anything like it. Mind-bending. Stylish. It was awesome. Well, except for the final minute telephone booth scene before Neo flies away. But then, the Wachowski’s likely didn’t know they would have a sleeper hit and that tons of money would be thrown at them to make their sequels, so I can see how they stuck that scene in for “closure”.

 

By the time the next two sequels were released, there was plenty of pre-buzz. I had seen previews. (You couldn’t avoid them.) Hype was plentiful. The Wachowski’s were already famous. In my opinion, the sequels are progressively less satisfying than the original. For one, the novelty is lost – that cannot be avoided. But Reloaded made up for it with some very clever bits. We saw Zion for the first time. The short fight scene between Neo and the Merovingian’s exiles is superb. The freeway vehicle chase scene is among the very best. The story-telling arc of the final mission to get Neo to the core is artful and clever. There are some neat surprises throughout the movie. I still greatly enjoyed it.

 

Despite being poorer overall story-wise, Revolutions was still a fitting end to the trilogy. The last stand at Zion with the battle mechs. The tense ride to machine city. And while the final fight was weak in the narrative arc, there was still good drama and tension interspersed throughout the movie. Redeemable. I still enjoyed it even though (or perhaps because) I had correctly anticipated that it would be weaker than its predecessors. Still, it had some skill, as the Merovingian might aptly say.

 

I just watched Resurrections. It was a mess. My expectations were not high, but it still came in below par in my book. I was cheap, watching it through HBOMax which came gratis with my home internet package. Instead of coming up with something original and clever, it felt like themes from the first two movies were repackaged, then compressed into a single movie. The narrative was rushed. Perhaps it should have been The Matrix Retreaded. It still could have been pulled off by a new generation of young faces. But the story bogged down by hanging on to the old. The fresh-faced actors might be talented but they suffer from the weight of their forebears: Laurence Fishburne is Morpheus and Hugo Weaving is Smith. And Carrie-Anne Moss is severely under-utilized. Even the poor Merovingian is reduced to a gibbering vengeful nutcase. An empty shell.

 

They tried to bring back the dead. But resurrection wasn’t achieved. Resurrection is what you get when the perishable old is raised imperishable into new glory. Or so says a wise old glorious book. What we got was resuscitation. A temporary reprieve from lying in the grave in a death state to briefly experiencing a living state. But it’s an old living in an old body with one foot in the grave. What we got was The Matrix Resuscitated.

 

There were some clever parts to the latest movie. I liked how programs could instantiate themselves in the “real” world. Thinking about how machines and humans cooperate from more explicit examples to seeing imagined hybrid visual tech was interesting. But otherwise there wasn’t much meat. The video game idea was not mind-blowing or even spoon-bending. All you’re left with is action sequences. But they feel empty without a sufficiently supporting story arc. “Am I living in a simulation?” is no longer an interesting question after the first movie. “What does Resurrection entail?” could have been an interesting question to tackle. But all we get is Resuscitation. And we should be profoundly dissatisfied.

 

P.S. Cham & Whiteson tackle the question “Do We Live in a Computer Simulation?” in their latest book. They quote Neo in The Matrix. Their analysis is also less than satisfying.

 

P.P.S. In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the so-called Resurrection Stone doesn't do any better.

FAQ: Universe Version

I enjoyed Jorge Cham and Daniel Whiteson’s previous book We Have No Idea. They still have no idea, but have new questions to ponder in Frequently Asked Questions About The Universe. I’m finding it to be a drag, a sure sign when I start to skim to find an interesting nugget or two. Maybe it’s because I’ve read most of this physicky speculation before in some form or another. 

 

About two-thirds through the book, I found a few nuggets. Nothing ground-breaking, but interesting to ponder nonetheless. In “Will time ever stop?” the authors ask if Time will end at, well… some point in time. If time stops for everything, would we even notice? Probably not. You can’t tell if you can’t take note of any change. For that matter, we don’t really know what Time is. The authors do make the usual allusion to entropy (which my students find very fascinating when I mention this possible connection in my classes). But their more interesting and basic idea is that we assume time flows. We can’t imagine what it would be like for it not to do so. I hadn’t thought of that before, although I’ve seen “static” space-time block arguments.

 

In “Is An Afterlife Possible?” the authors mull the physics of heaven (or hell). They consider three “key elements that define a traditional afterlife”:

·      There’s a you that can outlive your physical body

·      That you is captured and transported to another location

·      You exist in that other location, still able to experience things forever

 

After dispensing with the purely materialist argument, they suggest that the you that can be “captured and transported” is information. This suggests that you can reduce the essence of you into bits and bytes. I have my doubts since I’m coming around to the idea that reductionist physics is a subset of non-reductionist biology rather than the other way around. Anyway, even if you could reduce your essence into information, the compression problem remains so you’ll have to cut out some stuff. Is an “average” you sufficient to rebuild future-you? And quantum entanglement suggests that in making future-you, past-you will likely be irreversibly changed. Then again, if no quantum information is ever ultimately lost, maybe a reasonable rebuild is possible and you can live forever. Sort of.

 

This of course brings us to the question we could exist in a simulation? Or if we’re living in a simulation right now? I’ll pause on that post until after I’ve watched The Matrix Resurrections, just released. (Reviews don’t bode well.) Instead I will briefly mention also enjoying their chapter on the strange nature of mass and its connection to energy, similar to Wilzcek.

 

P.S. See here for my previous post on FAQs, unrelated to today’s post.

Sanitizing Science

Teaching science is an inherently different activity from doing science. At least it is so today under the auspices of ‘mass education’, a phrase I heard in my younger days as a student but is hardly ever used today. Is this because almost all education ‘systems’ today inherently assume efficiently getting students up-to-speed on the basics? We don’t require students to re-discover scientific truths and theories. It would be painstakingly slow as they muddle their way through a morass of knowledge. No, what we do is package the knowledge in relatively quick and digestible chunks so they can potentially consume and internalize this knowledge.

 

I refer to this as “sanitizing science” – to borrow the phrase from John Ziman’s Real Science, a thoughtful meditation on the relationship between science and society. This sanitizing comes in two aspects: (1) We clean things up. Most of the messiness of science is not discussed. We present “just the facts”, leaving out human and social foibles. We sanitize the story. (2) We preserve the sanity of ourselves and our students. By packaging the story efficiently, we avoid the potential insanity of the strangeness of science and the nuttiness of the scientific endeavor. We normalize science. We’ve done such a good job with packaging, that science has come to be seen as the bedrock of knowledge – the uber-normal. That’s certainly the story for the past couple of centuries. And even now, with ‘backlash’ against scientific authority, the establishment paints the rebellion as a minority, abnormal view.

 

Secondary school science education has done this so successfully, that my students come to my introductory chemistry courses primed to “get the right answer”. Ambiguity frustrates them. It’s inefficient and messy. Some of the academically strongest students are the most resistant to the ambiguity. They’ve become very efficient at training their sights on the right answer that yields a high score on their exams. My college-level chemistry classes aren’t vastly different in one sense – there’s still a canon to be learned and while some ambiguity is introduced, what we ‘cover’ in class is still well-sanitized and streamlined – especially at the introductory level courses which serve as pre-requisites to more advanced courses. Chemistry education is very hierarchical in structure.

 

I try my best to convey to students that science is strange – with its highly constrained processes and its (often) surprising results. What we understand scientifically is to some extent far removed from the practical and useful folk-science way of understanding and interacting with the natural world. In general chemistry, we encounter this very quickly when discussing the structure of the atom with its massive yet tiny (in size) nucleus surrounded by a cloud of electrons we can’t quite pinpoint. Several such stories are sprinkled throughout the semester, but I still spend most of our class time streamlining the scientific knowledge I want the students to acquire. It’s still mostly sanitized, for good or ill, to maintain the efficiency of the process within the ‘system’ (where I’m purposefully evoking the industrial factory metaphor).

 

Do I hark to the medieval days of apprenticeship? No thank you. Even my graduate school experience didn’t have that feel. My research/thesis adviser would make interesting suggestions here and there, but for the most part I was left to my own devices to make headway on my research projects. That being said, teaching at a liberal arts college with only undergraduates often results in an apprenticeship model of sorts being applied to undergraduate research. I don’t have many students so I meet with each one individually every week. I perform a process and they mimic it. Then they get practice on their own repeating the process over and over again for different starting “materials and molecules”. I pose questions to get them to take increasing ownership of the project and to help them think like scientists. I’m deliberate in doing this. (Looking back, I’m not sure my graduate adviser did this, but I learned a lot from observing and listening to him – and it has clearly influenced some of my own idiosyncracies as a faculty member.)

 

Efficiency in education isn’t necessarily a bad thing – although it can be. From the perspective of advancing scientific knowledge, I see it as mostly a good thing. It’s hard to stand on the shoulders of giants if it takes you an entire lifetime just to claw your way up to their shoulders. By sanitizing and repackaging the core knowledge that allows one to (hopefully) build on that foundation, and then quickly reach the frontier, we can learn new things we didn’t know before. It would be nice if I had fewer students to teach so I could give more individual time to each – but that’s unlikely to become a reality soon, unless I start my own boutique outfit that’s aimed at a niche population of ‘elites’ willing to pay the money for their children to be educated in such an environment. A part of me finds this idea attractive, but another part of me desires to spend my time in ‘mass education’ and have a broader impact (narrowly construed).

 

Sanitizing science will continue to be part of my practice, but I hope to do it more thoughtfully. Over the years I have slowly ditched textbook materials for my own. I’ve rearranged material, cut some things from the canon, and introduced other things that were traditionally considered peripheral and left out. But I still find myself constrained by the system that I’m part of, and so this progression (if it even constitutes ‘progress’) moves along slowly, in fits and starts. Little changes here and there punctuated by the occasional overhaul. My own sanity is also at stake.