Back in 200x, folks from the University of Plymouth installed a computer terminal in a monkey enclosure at the Paignton Zoo in Britain with a group of six macaque monkeys, giving the monkeys a good solid month or so to bang out some spec scripts.  The entire setup was monitored so researchers could watch the Infinite Monkey idea come to life before them.

"I can't believe these humans got a grant for this. Well, time to pee on the keyboard..."

So what happened?  What did the monkeys produce?  They produced my single favorite scientific result of all time, bar none — they mostly took big steaming dumps on the computer.  Fantastic!  From the press reports at the time:

after a month, the Sulawesi crested macaques had only succeeded in partially destroying the machine, using it as a lavatory, and mostly typing the letter “s”.

Gentlemen, start preparing next year’s grant application!  We’re going to induce a herd of emus to vomit on a Skype terminal!

Another favorite part of this story, for me, is the reaction of the Zoo’s scientific officer, Dr. Amy Plowman, who said (and I quote)  “The work was interesting but had little scientific value, except to show that the ‘infinite monkey’ theory is flawed.”  Theory?  Really?  It’s the theory that is flawed?  Of course, the simple rebuttal to this is that you didn’t let them type for a long enough time — after all, the “theory” does have the word “Infinite” in the title.  Expecting the monkeys to crap out Shakespeare (pun delightfully intended) after just a month is wildly optimistic.  In fact a real random-text generation spitting out random characters far faster than a pack of monkeys could, still would need far longer than a month to get anywhere near random generation of Shakespeare.  I also enjoy that she calls it a “theory” (probably confusing it with the terminology Infinite Monkey Theorem) — as if this were a behavioral ecology theory worked up by a field researcher in the Amazon rainforest.  “If only there were some way to test my theory, that if monkeys were presented with a working computer terminal, they would crap on it continually for a month…”

Pixel Monkeys – generate random images:   http://www.pixelmonkeys.org/#

http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/multimedia/2003/05/58790

Jesse Anderson

http://www.jesse-anderson.com/category/blog/million-monkeys-blog/

Dawkin’s Weasel program

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

First of all, many have pointed out that if you were somehow part of a very complex simulation (say in a computer program on the mainframe of a very advanced alien civilization), there may be no way you’d know.  The “Simulation Hypothesis” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_hypothesis) is the philosophical idea that what we perceive as a physical, concrete reality could simply be an elaborate virtual simulation, and we’re programmed not to notice.  After all, if we’re little self-aware subroutines in someone else’s computer, our programmer could simply program us to perceive the world as real – all our sensations tell us the world is real because we’re designed to feel that way.  (SEE PAUL DAVIES MIND OF GOD)

Now, hold onto your butt, because it’s going to get loopier.  There’s further philosophical points of view that any conceivable world actually exists in its own right.  Modal Realism is one version of this idea (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_realism) in which any possible world which can be dreamed up ipso facto exists, somehow, and is just as real as our own.  For example, if it’s theoretically possible to simulate a self-consistent world with laws of physics and self-aware little people, then that world therefore exists.  I’m by no means giving this idea justice, but the conclusion would be that any conceivable simulation that could give rise to self-aware conscious creatures does exist, and those creatures therefore feel alive and existing in their own world.

So… that brings us to Pi.  Presumably a full numeric encoding of ourselves is embedded in Pi somewhere, and further there must be a full numeric embedding of the entire universe, somewhere in Pi.  If these philosophical ideas are right, that means the “you” embedded in the numeric encoding does indeed exist, does feel as fully alive and real as you do, reading this.  So in a philosophical sense, we really are immortal in the digits of Pi.

Tegmark level 4

There’s a philosophical point of view that as long as some mathematical concept is “computable”, or is describable by math, it exists.

Even though this sounds crazy, Tegmark points out it’s kind of attractive, from a philosophy point of view — it helps explain why we have the universe we have, rather than some other universe.  In the grand scheme of things, anything that is *possible* mathematically does exist, so we are just one of an infinitely many possible universes.  Our universe appears to be describable mathematically, and therefore it has sprung into existence.  (Not like it leapt off the page of a math textbook, but more in the sense of one of our simulated dudes in a computer program — they “exist” within the program, and to them, they have no way of knowing they’re abstract entities not physically real things)

Relates to the “Mind of God” book

Relates to the Omega Point (Frank Tipler)

Simulated reality              http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_multiverse

 And Finally:  Experimental Verification   >> 

Remember my story of embarrassment on the soccer field, from the introduction of this article?  I managed to unintentionally kick a soccer ball straight up in just the right trajectory to land on my unsuspecting coach’s head.  While what I accomplished was astoundingly implausible, while it would be nearly impossible even for the most accurate soccer star to do intentionally, it didn’t violate the laws of physics.  As long as you don’t violate physical law, you can do all kinds of strange things if you wait around long enough.  That’s how you can be dealt a royal flush in poker maybe a couple times in your life.  Or you can bonk your soccer coach on the head (and presumably embarrass the hell out of your father) every once in a while.

Now let’s switch gears to thermodynamics.  Imagine a room full of gas, say the room you’re sitting in now as you’re reading this.  Chances are very good that the entire room is uniformly filled with gas – that you don’t have a pileup of air on the left side of the room, for example.  Because the little gas molecules are constantly jostling and bumping, they tend to spread out evenly to fill the entire room.  But there’s nothing to stop them from just happening to gather more towards one side of the room, just by random fluctuation.  It could just so happen that every molecule bounces just right, and all of the air in the room huddles down in the corner, leaving a vacuum in the rest of the room.  It’s so astoundingly unlikely that it’ll never happen in your lifetime (nor that of the universe), but it isn’t physically impossible.  In our experience we consider it impossible for all practical purposes, but that’s because we won’t live long enough for something that rare to happen to us.  But what if the universe were infinite?

In a universe filled with an infinite number of rooms filled with room-temperature gas, eventually you’ll stumble across that one room where some rare fluctuation does happen.  One of the trillions of rooms will be “one in a trillion” – in some room somewhere, all the gas will just happen to collect on one side of the room.  In an infinite universe, somewhere a coffee cup spontaneously unmixes the coffee from the creamer.  If our universe is infinite, then any event which isn’t physically impossible will eventually happen.  And so somewhere, out there in that infinite universe, there will be a set of stars that just line up to spell out your name.  Somewhere else, a bunch of random molecules just happen to gather in one spot to create a soccer ball, for a brief moment before dissipating.  And somewhere, out there, eventually, a working conscious brain will form, purely by just the right random fluctuation of just the right molecules.  In an infinite universe, somewhere out there is an exact copy of your brain, spontaneously appearing out of the void, intact with your memories and personality, but unfortunately for this copy, floating free and unprotected in the harshness of space.

So the chilling idea is that in an infinite universe, given enough time, random fluctuations will cause spontaneous appearances of just about anything – and what’s really chilling is that a rare few of those spontaneously appearing objects will happen to be conscious – the particles of matter just so happen to assemble together in just the right configuration to form a working brain (be it human, rodent, trilobite, alien, superintelligent computer, whatever).  Obviously the more complex the brain (or object whatsoever), the more rare the fluctuation to cause it, and the less likely it will be to appear.  But we’re talking about an infinite universe, so they’re bound to appear eventually.  These are called “Boltzmann Brains” (or also “Boltzmann Babies”, which I like much better), named for the famous physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, the father of thermodynamics.

Creeped out yet?  Feeling sorry for these poor duplicates of you, doomed to live their short existences out in the void, not safe and sound contained inside a nice warm body on a cozy planet, like you?  Poor random brains, they’re not “real”, like you.  In fact they may not even realize they’re not “real”, having been formed with memories just like yours – as far as they know, they’re real (until they fall apart or are destroyed in the harsh environment).  Don’t be so smug.  Lemmie give it to you straight – in an infinite universe, where anything that is physically possible will eventually happen, there are far more Boltzmann Brains out there than “real” brains – after all, it’s a lot easier for a random fluctuation to piece together a just working brain for a bit than to create an entire solar system that contains a planet that can support life.  And so… since all of these brains don’t know they’re not “real” brains, it’s more likely that you are a Boltzmann Brain, floating through space alone, than a “real” brain.  After all, you wouldn’t know, would you?

So here’s the creepiest problem, in a nutshell – in an infinite universe, it’s far more likely that you are a Boltzmann Brain, spontaneously formed from a random fluctuation of molecules moving just right and born with complete intact “memories” of the full history of your life up to this point, instead of actually being a living brain inside a body (as you believe).  “But wait”, you ask, “I remember my childhood clearly!  I didn’t just form a few seconds ago!”  Well, if you formed with those memories intact, then you would “remember” them as if they really happened, and you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.  And a few seconds from now when you dissipate, there won’t be any consciousness left to notice that you’re dissipating.

Why exactly would Boltzmann brains be much more common than actual “real” brains (as we envision ourselves)?  If we assume the universe is infinite in extent and has been around for a while, and entropy is always increasing, then the universe should be heading for a uniform “heat death” state of maximum entropy.  But when we look around, we see a strikingly low amount of entropy – stars, planets, beings like us all exist.  So, he presumed, perhaps we’re existing in a local bubble of lower-entropy fluctuation – throughout the universe, entropy is constantly fluctuating, on a global scale heading ever upward but locally free to dip downwards temporarily.  And larger dips in entropy are much more rare than small dips.  The magnitude of downward fluctuation in entropy needed to make a pocket big enough for our solar system to form, and to last long enough for life to start, is much less likely than a fluctuation big enough to give space for a self-aware brain to form (complete with false memories of a past).  Ergo, the small fluctuations that enable a Boltzmann brain to form are much more likely to happen than a large fluctuation needed to allow our visible universe to form.  So we’re much more likely to be a Boltzmann brain, hallucinating the observable universe we see, instead of actually physically existing the way we think we do.

You can imagine how disturbing this must have been to Boltzmann and other physicists of the time, when it was presumed the universe really was infinite.  Since Boltzmann’s time, we’ve made serious advances in understanding the universe – quantum mechanics, the Big Bang, etc.  And the idea of randomness still can imply very strange (yet not against the laws of physics) events can happen.  Quantum tunneling, for instance – it has been calculated that the likelihood that we would be instantly teleported to the surface of Mars is XXXX.  But we’re beyond believing that Boltzmann Babies could be real, right?  WRONG.  While it’s true that some of the assumptions underlying the original idea are now known not to hold (e.g. the Big Bang that started the universe), the uncomfortable idea of Boltzmann brains is still debated among the cosmologists – all related to the concept of entropy.  You can imagine the similar kinds of uncomfortable conclusions to be made about an infinite supply of universes in a multiverse theory.  In fact the debate rages on among cosmologists today about how to devise theories of the origin of the universe that don’t lead to a proliferation of Boltzmann babies.

“freaky observer”  http://arxiv.org/abs/0708.4077

 Next Up:   It Gets Really Weird   >> 

What if the universe is really really big?  Like, a lot bigger than what we can see?  The farthest out we can see is determined by how far light has traveled since the universe began – this so-called “Hubble Volume” is the bubble of space from which light has reached earth.  For anything out beyond the Hubble volume, the light hasn’t reached us yet, so we won’t know what (if anything) is out there until the light gets here.  Could it be filled with more stars?  Nothingness?  Muppets?  We just have to wait and see.  The Hubble Volume is currently about 4×10^26 m across, and grows by one light-year in radius every year.  (Incidentally, why has no one called the Hubble Volume the “Hubble Bubble”?  That’s a missed marketing opportunity if I ever saw one.)  So what does the universe look like beyond the Hubble Volume?  We have no idea if it stops 3 feet past where we can see, or if it keeps on going for billions of parsecs beyond.  I get the vague feeling that physicists generally believe the universe is finite, but the size is unknown, and could be infinite for all we know¹.

Let’s imagine that the universe goes on for infinity, looking pretty much like it does to us in our Hubble Bubble.  In this scenario, the universe goes on for so long, that coincidences are bound to happen – it goes on long enough that there are bound to be other solar systems with planets that look eerily like Earth.  Yes, the chances are slim, that another Earth could form independently, but the likelihood isn’t zero.  If the universe is infinite, there’s another you out there!  In fact, infinite yous out there.

Simply by working out the math, Tegmark estimates that your nearest identical copy is 10^10^28 meters away.  The nearest identical copy of our observable universe (an exact duplicate of our entire Hubble Volume) should be about 10^10^118 meters away.  These look like a nice tidy number, but that’s a helluva long distance away.  This is far larger than a googol, 10^100, which in turn is far larger than the estimated number of protons in the observable universe (about 10^80).  In fact we’re now entering the realm of large numbers like the googolplex, or 10^googol, which can’t be written down in long form on a piece of paper that would fit into the observable universe.  So your identical twin is quite a long distance away.

How the hell could Tegmark possibly figure these distances out?  These are not precise calculations, of course, but are rough order-of-magnitude estimate.  Here’s how he did it:  picture all of our Hubble Volume filled with subatomic particles, packed in as tightly as possible.  How many are there?  Turns out, about 10^118.  So there are about 10^118 slots that a particle could fill in our Hubble Bubble.  So any possible Hubble Volume can be made by just choosing whether each of those 10^118 slots contain a particle or not.  That means there are only about 2^10^118 possible universes!  So in an infinite space, you’re bound to repeat Hubble Volumes after a while.  This is probably not exactly right – if you were to try to do this for realsies, you’d no doubt have to account for the fact that there’s more than one type of elementary particle (so each “slot” is not just filled / empty), and there’s more information to specify each particle than just position – for example momentum.  But the point stands – if the universe is infinite or astronomically large, eventually it will start repeating itself, and you’ll come across another you.

And the doppelganger distances that Tegmark calculated are for the nearest perfectly identical  doppelganger.  There must be whole doppelgangs of similar but not identical “yous” that are a lot closer.  Say, a dude who is 5% different than you – if we allow for some variation, then the chances of finding that variant are a lot better, and so they must be a lot closer.

Tegmark goes on to describe three more levels of infinite universes, one of which I’ll revisit later.  (This current idea about an infinite universe is what he calls “level 1”.)  Level

In Tegmark’s article, Level 3 infinite universe is from a quantum effect

 Next Up:   Boltzmann Babies   >> 

Footnotes:

1.  Tegmark says the evidence is in favor of an infinite (or at least very very very large) universe, much larger than the radius of the observable universe.  The Cosmic Microwave Background apparently suggests a flat geometry, which implies an infinite or extremely large radius to the universe.

Ever try to memorize the digits of Pi?  The world record is only 67,890 digits memorized – shouldn’t be hard to knock that one down, right?  What makes memorizing Pi so hard, of course, is that the digits seem to be completely random – there’s no apparent pattern to them.  It’s commonly thought that the digits of Pi are completely patternless, so that you can find any possible series of numbers you want in there somewhere.  For example, out at the 762^nd decimal place of Pi, you’ll find six consecutive 9’s (named the Feynman Point in honor of the great physicist Richard Feynman).

A number is said to be “normal” if its digits appear to be random – more technically speaking, if its digits contain all combinations of numbers equally¹.  For example, pick any string of 8 digits, for example “12345678” – then this string of 8 is just as likely to pop up, and pops up just as often, as any other string of 8 digits.  Of course, not every number is like this.  5, for example.  Or more specifically, 5.0, or even more specifically 5.0000000….  Clearly, this number is biased towards the digit “0”.  It is believed (though not yet proved) that Pi is normal, and so its digits contain every possible sequence of numbers you can think of, if you look far enough in the decimal expansion.

What this implies is that you can choose any string of digits you want, and it’ll be in the digits of Pi at some point.  Somewhere in there is your weight, your height, and your IQ.  You’ll also find your cholesterol score, today’s winning lottery number, tomorrow’s winning lottery number, the exact number of hairs on your head, every number stored inside your computer right now … you get the idea.

What’s more, anything that can be encoded into numbers can be found in the digits of Pi, as well.  That means any English text (which can be coded into integers) can be found somewhere.  Your name is in there, your parents’ names, your license plate are all in there.  A copy of every essay you wrote in high school is in there.  A copy of this essay is in there.  Are you now thinking what I’m thinking?  If you are, you immature deviant, check out my other article, the Search for Naughty Words in the Digits of Pi.  Wanna try this yourself?  Check out the The Pi search page, which lets you search for any number you want in the digits of Pi.  Or the Search Pi at NERSC page, which lets you search for any text (after encoding it into integers).

One wrinkle is that we don’t actually know if Pi definitely has this property of being “normal”.  So what if Pi doesn’t turn out to be “normal”?  What if someone proves that Pi doesn’t have this property of containing every possible number sequence?  No biggie – plenty of other numbers are known to be normal, so just take one of them.  Take Champernowne’s Constant — simply create a number where the decimal expansion is the whole list of all integers.  It’s been shown to be normal.  Or the Copeland-Erdos constant, which is the same deal using only prime numbers.  So we can keep on using Pi in our explorations of this crazy idea, safe in the knowledge that if Pi winds up being unusable, we can choose another normal number.  Don’t feel comfortable with this?  Well, I’m sure you can bang out the proof of Pi’s normality over your next lunch break.

Can we take this over the deep end now?

Now let’s follow this chain of reasoning into the Territory of the Weird, as we so often do on this site.  And let’s ask Dr. Cliff Pickover be our tourguide.  Dr. Pickover has taken this idea of information encoded in Pi to quite romantic conclusions.  He points out that since any information which can be encoded numerically must be found in Pi somewhere, there must be an encoding of ourselves in Pi.  A quote from his site:

“Pi almost surely contains the 1993 Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Moreover, it contains the Windows XP operating system. Moreover, it contains all your thoughts, coded in its digit string. You need not fear death or yearn for the woman you once loved but could never have. You have her in pi where you live forever.”

Imagine encoding the location of every atom in your body at this very moment into a numerical code – that code must be in Pi somewhere, a numerical spec sheet describing how to build an exact replica of you.  That same specification of you, encoded in digits, from every instant in your entire life must also be in there somewhere.  Furthermore, an encoding of your thoughts, every thought you’ve ever had, must be in there.  Dig far enough, and all of the information required to specify everything about you, precisely, must be found in the digits of Pi.  So in a sense, that woman of your dreams that you’ve lost forever, is still contained in the digits of Pi somewhere.

True, but Pi also encodes her dumping piping hot coffee in your lap because you called her fat.  While Pi may contain the correct answer to every question you could possibly ask, it also contains the wrong answer.   Lots of wrong answers.  In fact every possible answer, even nonsensical ones.   Mostly nonsensical ones.

Wait just one goddamn minute here…

This leads to one major philosophical problem with this romantic idea of worlds contained in Pi.  These ideas view the digits of Pi as sort of an information storage mechanism – any info you want is in there somewhere, so all you need is its “address” — the digit where the info starts.  So you want to store the entire works of Shakespeare?  Great, all you need is one number!  Of course that number might be long… might be longer than the entire works of Shakesepeare, in fact.  While in principle the information is perfectly preserved among Pi’s digits, in practice it is unimaginably difficult to retrieve.  Over at my other article on Finding Naughty Words in the Digits of Pi, I found that it was immensely difficult to find any words longer than five or six letters in the first fifty million digits of Pi.  The entire works of Shakespeare likely appears at some astronomically huge decimal place within Pi.  So while it’s true that any information you want is found in there somewhere, in practice it might be more difficult to retrieve it from Pi than to simply recreate the information in the first place.  So buck up and ask that woman out for coffee.

And let’s get to another problem with this admittedly beautiful idea, that the digits of Pi are discrete integers.  While the number Pi itself is a real number (not an integer), the digits of pi written out in decimal notation are all integers.  So when we go searching for some number in the digits of Pi, we’re necessarily stuck hunting through integers.  And there are probably limits to the kinds of information that integers alone can encode.

One example is the value of Pi itself, which must be embarrassing for Pi.  Does Pi contain a copy of itself somewhere?  Nope – because Pi is an infinite, nonrepeating irrational number, you can’t use simple integers to represent it.  Being irrational means that Pi can’t be represented by the ratio of two integers.  So that’s one bit of information that most assuredly isn’t found in the digits of Pi, nor any other normal number.  Even if I grant you the freedom to not be stuck with just integers, by allowing you to throw a decimal point wherever you want in the digit string that encodes your information, you’re still out of luck.  Because irrational numbers can’t be perfectly represented by any terminating or non-repeating decimal number, no irrational numbers can be perfectly encoded in the digits of Pi.

No big deal, you think?  What’s the problem if we chuck a few exotic irrational numbers?  Well, there are far more irrational numbers than rational numbers (those that can be represented by the ratio of two integers).  Integers are “countably infinite”, while real numbers are “uncountably infinite” – in a nutshell there are far more irrational numbers than rational numbers.  So there’s the concern that for encoding random things from the real world, you might need to avail yourself of irrational numbers here and there, and therefore these ideas may not be representable in the digits of Pi.  You could live with approximate representations, I suppose – for example you could encode a JPEG compressed image of the Mona Lisa and find it in Pi somewhere.  But if for some reason specifying the real Mona Lisa requires irrational numbers, then you’d be out of luck encoding it perfectly.

Why would we need irrational numbers to represent anything numerically?  Well, it looks to all appearances that in our universe physical quantities can take on any real-valued number – position, velocity, wavelength, etc. are all allowed to have any old value, not necessarily a rational-number value.  If so, that means that most physical measurements take on irrational values from time to time – and since irrationals are much more common than rationals, most of the physical states of the universe might require irrational numbers to encode as numeric information.  (Note that the quantum nature of the microscopic realm doesn’t necessarily mean some quantities can’t take on continuous values, nor that the quantum states of a discrete state have to be rational numbers.)  So if you want to precisely specify the Mona Lisa exactly, you’ll need to record the exact coordinates of every single elementary particle in the entire painting, and to do that you may need irrational numbers.

Next Up:   Our Infinite Universe   >> 

Footnotes:

1.  Another example from mathematics of shitty nomenclature.  (That would be a great band name, “Shitty Nomenclature”.)   We don’t mean these numbers are “ordinary” or “not weird” — we mean a very specific technical property when we call them “normal”.  I personally hate it when plain english words that already have other meanings get carjacked to become mathematical jargon, because then you tend to confuse the plain-english meaning with the intended mathematical meaning.  At best, the word simply fails to convey what you want it to about the mathematical property.  At worst, it kicks up clouds of unintended meaning to the layperson — see “imaginary numbers”.  OK, rant over.

How the hell did that happen?  I couldn’t do that again if my life depended on it!  Punt a soccer ball straight up in the air, just right so it headed straight down on the head of someone walking a dozen yards away?  Someone who is walking, mind you, not standing still.  How in the world did that happen?  The answer is, sometimes shit happens.  Random astounding coincidences are extremely rare, but not impossible.  The theme of this timeblimp article is the potential of infinity — if you have access to infinite (or astronomically large) numbers of combinations, you can find weird stuff eventually.  Let’s read about a few of these weird things!

   “Normal Numbers” — I have seen the Infinite Monkey, and it is us

If you’ve read anything on this website without thinking to yourself, “whoever wrote this is gonna get a hell of a swirly from me”, then you’re just nerdy enough to be familiar with the number Pi, an irrational number that (when written out in decimal form) goes on forever without repeating itself.  Even more interestingly, those digits of Pi appear to be random.  And they go on forever.  So sooner or later, you ought to be able to find some interesting things in the digits of Pi, purely by chance…

>>>   READ ON

   The Infinite Majestic Universe and crap

What if our universe was infinite?  Just planets, stars, and galaxies, on and on forever.  If it were really infinite, then our universe ought to contain, just by chance, other planets that happen to look a lot like Earth.  Could an exact replica of Earth appear somewhere else in the universe?  Sure, the chances of it happening at random are astronomically low.  But if the universe were infinite, then astronomically rare events will inevitably happen…

>>>   READ ON

   Boltzmann Babies

Every so often, a cloud in the sky will look kinda like a rhino.  Or some sticks in the forest will sorta kinda spell out a name.  Structure can sometimes appear out of randomness.  What are the chances of something physically meaningful forming purely by chance?  And what is the most disturbing physical object that could be created by such a random event?

>>>   READ ON

   The Computational Inevitability of Consciousness

Wow, I need to improve that title

>>>   FLAME ON

   Experimental Verification

Let’s stop talking in hypotheticals and start talking in actuals. Actual monkeys. Actual poo-flinging monkeys. What if you gave a real typewriter to a real monkey?

>>>   READ ON

Howdy

Footnotes:

1.

This book covers thirteen cutting-edge topics that straddle the line between “big breakthrough” and “wait, that isn’t real”,  ranging from fascinating stories that are shamefully under-reported (such as the “Wow!” signal, a possible one-time SETI detection that was disappointingly never confirmed) to been-there-done-that-rolled-eyes-at-it pseudo-science (such as the possible chemical basis of homeopathy and structured water).  I cringe a bit at the serious attention paid to a couple of these topics, such as cold fusion or homeopathy, which I’d bet serious money don’t turn out to be real.  But I understand this comes with the territory — while some of these topics aren’t likely worth the serious writeup they get in this book, others wholeheartedly deserve more attention.  Overall Brooks’ tone is decently impartial — even when I disagree with his suggestion to pay more attention to the possibility of “structured water”, I kept reading because he earned my attention with credible and reasonably skeptical reporting about each topic. He generally gives a good overview about why each strange solution to a given problem is worthy of our attention without overselling the scientific claims.

Rather than going through all 13 Un-make-sense-able ideas, I’ll touch on a couple of my favorites here:

The Pioneer Anomaly

For a while, astronomers have been monitoring the Pioneer satellites as they head out of the solar system, and have noticed they seem to be moving oddly compared to what our calculations would expect.  After working out all the math, the geeks determined both spacecraft were slowing down more than we’d expect, as if being pulled by an unknown force.  After apparently ruling out all other sources of experimental error, physicists began to consider whether the satellites were really experiencing some novel as-yet-undiscovered force — could our theories of gravity be incorrect?  It seems preposterous to suggest overthrowing our well-tested theories just because of some strange data, but on the other hand we had never sent a man-made object that far away from planet Earth before.  Could it be there was some subtle gravitational effect we hadn’t discovered yet?  It was puzzling enough to include in a list of the 13 most puzzling unsolved questions in science — as topic # 2 in this book, to be precise.

Unfortunately for this book’s author, the Pioneer Anomaly has apparently been solved, so knock one of the thirteen off the list.  Turns out it was due to the spacecraft’s uneven emission of heat — they emit slightly more on one side, which is enough to (over time) deflect the trajectory from what we’d calculate from first principles. It’s actually a shame, and its not just anomaly-chasers like me or Michael Brooks that feel the disappointment. Even mainstream scientists would have liked to stumble across a new discovery, especially in a well-trodden area like celestial mechanics.  Unfortunately for us, anomalies like this usually fade away under the harsh light of rigorous experimental process. I can count a handful of times a science blurb appeared saying something like “Scientists Discover Fifth Fundamental Force”, only to never see anything mentioned about it ever again.

Free Will

What would you say if I told you that despite what you may think, you don’t actually have free will?  That even though you feel in complete control of your own actions, your consciousness is merely along for the ride — you feel as though you’re in executive control, but your consciousness is only a figurehead with the illusion of free will.  What would you say?  I knew you’d say that — after all, you don’t have free will.  Topic # 11 in this book discusses a fascinating area of neuroscience research dealing with free will, by measuring electrical activity in the brain while subjects do various tasks purely of their own volition (or so they think).

Here’s the deal — there’s a particular electrical signal in your brain (called the readiness potential, or Bereitschaftspotential ) that slowly builds in intensity leading up to an intentional movement. Thinking about getting up off the couch? Your readiness potential signal is building up in anticipation, right up to the moment that some of your motor neurons fire to get your butt up off the couch. It is theorized that it represents just what it sounds like — your brain getting ready to do something. Specifically, it seems to be kind of an ambient signal of activity in the motor cortex as it plans out your upcoming movement. Neuroscientist Benjamin Libet was doing some experiments measuring this electrical signal in human volunteers, and found something surprising — the readiness potential was already well on its way before the subject decided to do something.

You’d think that if your conscious alert thinking part of your brain were in charge, the order of events would go like this: 1) decide to pick nose, 2) readiness potential starts growing, 3) motor neurons for the index finger start firing, and 4) nose picking commences. Instead, Libet found that the readiness potential launched its countdown before the person consciously made the decision to nose-pick — so something deep in the unconscious brain was actually making the call to commence nose-picking, and the conscious brain was not actively involved. The implication? Even though you think you’re in control, you ain’t! You think you just decided to move your finger, but somehow your motor cortex knew about the upcoming movement before you “decided” to move.

So this is a pretty remarkable finding in neuroscience, and has of course spawned great debate about the nature of free will. Some have even decided that free will simply doesn’t exist, and the illusion that our consciousness is in control is merely another of many strategies our genes have evolved to survive. That’s a pretty heavy conclusion to put on one experimental result, and I for one am skeptical about the ability to measure the timing precisely enough. Libet claimed the readiness potential was ahead by about a third of a second — but how do you get someone to tell you when they decided something, to sub-second accuracy? Particularly when the act of telling you is itself another voluntary movement, the very thing you’re trying to time.  I’m not the first to raise this objection though — Brooks cites experimental tests that supposedly showed that delays in the volunteer announcing their decision time can account for part but not all of the 0.3 second gap.  Still, I’m not ready to declare that free will is dead until more experimental work confirms this effect.  If true, though, it means our unconscious brain is much more in the driver’s seat than we think.

Gettin’ It On

Wouldn’t things be easier if we could just reproduce asexually, say by budding off a mini-me from an elbow or something?  Amirite fellas?  *hand slap*  Quite a lot of effort & energy go into sexual reproduction — is it really worth the bother, evolutionarily speaking?  We hear in introductory biology class that sexual reproduction helps “mix up” the gene pool, putting together novel combinations of genes that might have a selective advantage out in the Big Bad World.  Topic numero ten in Brooks’ book has to do with the mystery of sexual reproduction — apparently the case for its evolutionary superiority is not as clear-cut as we hear in high school biology class.  Supposedly some experimental and simulation work suggest that asexual reproduction might out-compete sexual reproduction in some situations.  However, we all know (don’t we?) that evolution can be a capricious thing — not all strategies chosen by evolution have to be universally optimal (though many are), they merely have to be “locally” optimal (i.e. more optimal than the other strategies they evolved from and/or compete with).  Furthermore it may be too hard to switch horses midstream from one strategy to another — too much machinery would have to be junked for humans to evolve our way over to asexual reproduction.

Brooks’ section on sexual reproduction incidentally contained what is my new favorite little chestnut to use in casual conversation — he mentions what is by far my favorite term for a scientific concept.  The Red Deer, like other hooved mammals, uses head-to-head combat among alpha males to compete for breeding rights with the females.  But often while two alpha males are engaged in an antler-to-antler duel, shouting “come at me, bro!”, the beta males will sneak off to mate with the females.  Bypassing the dangerous and (from an energy perspective) expensive activity of fighting for breeding status, these lower-status males nevertheless do quite well, often out-competing alpha males in spreading their genes.  John Maynard Smith observed this phenomenon in nature, and so got naming rights.  And he didn’t disappoint — he called these beta males “Sneaky F*ckers”.  Outstanding! This is an actual honest-to-goodness scientific term, mind you, not a nickname used in the bar after the conference is over.  Smith has created a bit of scientific jargon that forces stuffy evolutionary biologists to unleash an F-Bomb when they want to talk about his theory.  Well done, JMS, well done…  You sneaky f*cker!

That’s right, mo-fo’s!  We got the Mythbusters on the list, with a total Erdos-Bacon-Sabbath Number of 11!  Check this out…

The Details

Bacon and Sabbath Numbers

From Ross, over at the Erdos Bacon Sabbath Project:  “Both have a Bacon number of 2 from their appearance in The Darwin Awards and a flimsy Sabbath connection via Discovery Channel’s I Love the Whole World ad campaign. Adam may have a stronger claim to a Sabbath number from his w00tsock song performances with Paul and Storm.”

The albeit-flimsy Sabbath link through the Discovery Channel’s commercial links them to Stephen Hawking (according to the wikipedia entry).  Stephen Hawking is of course the leader of EBS number holders, and so we can use his Sabbath Number of 2 to declare Adam and Jamie have a Sabbath number of 3.

Erdos Number

(Credit to January First-of-May and myself to working these links out)

-> Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman to Nicole Waguespack

Making a point: wood- versus stone-tipped projectiles
Nicole M. Waguespack, Todd A. Surovell, Allen Denoyer, Alice Dallow, Adam Savage, Jamie Hyneman and Dan Tapster

-> Nicole M. Waguespack to Paul Jeffrey Brantingham

Global archaeological evidence for proboscidean overkill
Todd Surovell, Nicole Waguespack, P. Jeffrey Brantingham
Journal: Proceedings of The National Academy of Sciences – PNAS , vol. 102, no. 17, pp. 6231-6236, 2005

-> Paul Jeffrey Brantingham to Patricia L. Brantingham

Crime Attractors, Generators and Detractors: Land Use and Urban Crime Opportunities
J. Bryan Kinney, Patricia L Brantingham, Kathryn Wuschke, Michael G Kirk, Paul J Brantingham
Journal: Built Environment , vol. 34, no. 1, pp. 62-74, 2008

-> Patricia L. Brantingham to Peter B. Borwein

The social impact in a high-risk community: A cellular automata model
Vahid Dabbaghian, Valerie Spicer, Suraj K. Singh, Peter Borwein, Patricia Brantingham
Journal: Journal of Computational Science , vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 238-246, 2011
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877750311000512

-> Peter B. Borwein to Tamas Erdelyi

Peter B. Borwein (http://www.cecm.sfu.ca/~pborwein/) is a well-known mathematician who has been shown to have an Erdos number of 2, over at the Erdos Number Project site, via Andras Kroo.

So that’s Erdos = 6:   Mythbusters -> Waguespack -> Paul Brantingham -> Patricia Brantingham -> Borwein -> Kroo -> Erdos

Dr. Lawrence Krauss

Dr. Lawrence Krauss is a well-known physicist whose public profile has really exploded in the last few years.  He’s the author of “The Physics of Star Trek” and has become an in-demand lecturer, essayist, and public intellectual figure along the same lines as my personal man-crush Neil Degrasse Tyson.  In other words, this is a dude we need to get on the EBS list.  My friend @NotMattBellamy suggested him as a potential candidate, and we’re thrilled to announce that he is indeed on the list.  And this is fresh off the press (as of late March 2013), as he gets on the list thanks to starring in a feature documentary called “The Unbelievers”, which nets him a Bacon number of three.  @NotMattBellamy pointed out that he’s also been involved in music, such as performing with the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra, which gets him a Sabbath number of six.  As a working theoretical physicist, his Erdos number is a slam dunk — January First-of-May over at the Erdos-Bacon-Sabbath Project found the shortest link so far of length four (though I bet with some digging we could get that lower).  So for now, Dr. Krauss has an Erdos-Bacon-Sabbath Number of thirteen!

Dr. Krauss also happens to be the prime architect of one of my favorite scientific theories of all time – that we may cause the end of the universe by observing the universe.  Read more about it over at my article on “Science Destroys The World”.

The Details

Erdos number, thanks to January First-of-May

Lawrence M. Krauss to Francesco Iachello:

Spin-dependent scattering of weakly interacting massive particles in heavy nuclei

Francesco Iachello, Lawrence M. Krauss, Giuseppe Maino

Journal: Physics Letters B – PHYS LETT B , vol. 254, no. 1-2, pp. 220-224, 1991

Francesco Iachello to Raphael D. Levine

Algebraic Theory of Molecules

Francesco Iachello, Raphael D. Levine, R. Stephen Berry

Journal: Physics Today – PHYS TODAY , vol. 49, no. 3, 1996

Raphael D. Levine to Peter Salamon

A geometrical measure for entropy changes (Citations: 2)

Tova Feldmann, R. D. Levine, Peter Salamon

Journal: Journal of Statistical Physics – J STATIST PHYS , vol. 42, no. 5, pp. 1127-1134, 1986

Peter Salamon to Paul Erdos

THE SOLUTION TO A PROBLEM OF GRÜNBAUM

PETER SALAMON, PAUL ERDŐS

The paper characterizes the set of all possible values for the number of lines determined byn points forn sufficiently large. For(2) (n- k),the lower bound of Kelly and Moser for the number of lines in a configuration with n – k collinear points is shown to be sharp and it is shown that all values between M mn (k) …

For a total Erdos number of four.

Bacon Number

Excellent timing!  Dr. Krauss recently released a documentary called “The Unbelievers” which co-stars many big celebrities who have Bacon numbers of Dos, including Cameron Diaz, Woody Allen, and Ricky Gervais.  This gives him a Bacon number of three.

Sabbath number

He performed with the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra, narrating a performance of Gustav Holst’s “The Planets”. The Cleveland Symphony Orchestra, in turn, performed with a drum ensemble called D’Drum, who in turn have collaborated with Stewart Copeland. According to the Black Sabbath game website, Copeland then ought to be traceable to Sabbath via “Sting (Sting, solo) B.J. Cole (Trapeze) Glen Hughes”, for a total Sabbath number of 6. He also apparently was nominated for a Grammy for writing liner notes for an album, though I’m on the fence as to whether that should count…