VSI

Wow, I just spent 30 minutes trying to find where I had mentioned Cory Doctorow's novella "Shannon's Law."  Clearly something is not right with that.  I had tagged the episode with his name.  Does the site search not look at the tags?

In any case, my family and I bugged out of the Science and Buddhism conference once it started snowing up on the mountain.  There were 10 questions (or possibly 14) that the Buddha refused to answer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteen_unanswerable_questions

I've always found it ironic that those were exactly the things that people continue to ask about.  At this conference to some extent, too.  Personally, I'm perfectly comfortable saying, "I dunno," and moving on.  But it's exactly that obsessive quality that solves hard problems, that creates the technology that allows us to see things we could not even imagine before.

In Epidsode 12 I mentioned "Shannon's Law" (which you can hear for free on Escape Pod) in the context of pointless bar arguments, which is where many scientists would place those issues.  My son and I  listened to that story again on the way home from the conference today.  It's funny, which he liked, and it touches on these issues of trying to reconcile science and art, which he didn't care about and ignored.

Shannon Klod (named for Claude Shannon, of information theory) is the local internet service provider for Bordertown, a limbo between our physical earth and the realm of Faerie, where physics is based on aesthetics.  Magic works in Bordertown, and Shannon treats magic empirically.  In other words, he uses it the way most of us use technology, without understanding or particularly caring about any of its underlying theory (I sure don't understand quantum mechanics, but I can plug in and type on a computer).  When he wants to expand his network into Faerie, he can no longer just pretend that his own theoretical framework is adequate.  But he doesn't understand the other theoretical framework, and the explanations he hears about expanding his brain into other dimensions don't help much, and has no giant insights.  He just starts an experiment to see if he can transmit messages across the mystic barrier between B-town and Faerie.  He has confidence in the power of failure and persistence.

That story is a fanciful treatment of the real problems I saw people struggling with at the conference.  A physicist described once again the classic photon uncertainty experiments, where the act of observing the particle of light seems to change its path, only this time done with light paths around a galaxy, so you can add time to the mix.  If observing a photon which left its star long ago changes the path it spent years and years traversing, haven't you changed history to some tiny extent?  Several people listening to that talk immediately jumped to exactly the same metaphorical level that Cory Doctorow did, making the impersonal personal and magical and thus more interesting to those parts of our brains that want to hear stories.  They started talking about rewriting people's personal histories of tragedy by simply agreeing at a deep unconscious level on a new version of the facts.  Now I don't agree with that interpretation, but I also don't understand quantum mechanics mathematically, so I do agree that all we can really do is muddle along, trying, failing again and again, until we  come up with metaphors that do work.

We also listened to another playful reference to quantum uncertainty called "Schrodinger's Cat Lady."

Two conferences in two weekends have put me two episodes behind on the podcast (one reason I referenced the earlier episodes, if you haven't heard them all yet, and plugged my favorite science fiction podcast again).   Maybe it will snow enough to cancel classes this week and I can catch up, but probably not.  I did meet some people who would make good interviews, but those will have to wait.  This week we'll finish up with hyena biologist Kay Holekamp, talking about how to get that particular job.

Right now, the snow has reached Greensboro, and I need to leave the library and get on home.