Time and the time: a belated wish for the New Year

This winter, trying to come up with something tangible that my husband could buy me for Christmas—all I ever really want is for the holidays to be over—I finally settled on a wristwatch.

I took to the Internet to find the simplest possible example. If not actually analog, my new watch had to strongly espouse analog-ness: a large, circular face, with clearly visible numbers and hands—nothing else. I just wanted it to tell me the time. Compared to my phone, which I had been using for that purpose, and which then lured me onto Facebook and Twitter and myriad other distractions every time I checked it, I expected a plain watch to be pure, sanity-restoring elegance.

But looking at one ultra-basic watch after the other dredged up a visceral memory: That Clock. The one I stared at beseechingly throughout my childhood, in 1970s and 80s public school classrooms, where rote, one-size-fits-all learning ruled the day. You probably know That Clock, too. Now sold on EBay, Etsy, and elsewhere as a “vintage” or “old-school school” clock, its current incarnations still preside over all manner of institutional spaces. It’s one foot in diameter, white with slightly-too-thick black numbers and two hands. The versions at my school didn’t even have second hands, because their continuous motion and/or ticking might have drawn attention. Instead, the minute hand lurched forward, presumably regularly, with a thunk.

The institutional clock denies the bored student, or the enmeshed bureaucrat, anything to gaze at or reflect upon. It thwarts distraction, sending its seekers reluctantly back to their work. This was exactly what I had wanted from my new watch, rendered sinister. In places where time feels most oppressive, most necessary to try to accelerate or halt, the anti-aesthetic institutional clock tells us: Don’t bother. The hours and the minutes move no faster or slower than they must. Do not beseech, do not wonder. Do not look up from your task. You will learn nothing more from this dullest of clocks than the time, which is simple, quantifiable, and instantly knowable.

And yet time—as opposed to the time—is anything but dull, simple, or knowable. As I’ve gathered from reading popular cosmology books, time remains a tantalizing conundrum. What’s it made of? How does it function? How might we alter its speed or trajectory? No one really knows. What we do know is that it’s closely related to entropy, the universal tendency toward increasing disorder that originated, in our universe, with the Big Bang. Objects break. Mountains wear down. We grow old, and we die. So far, the arrow has only ever pointed one way.

Time is everything falling apart. And while we realize disorder is inevitable, we have no idea how, or when, or (often) why it will occur. Time is in fact the opposite of the time, of what That Clock says and claims to know. Time is mystery, and surprise.

We humans resemble time—mysterious, surprising, often surprised ourselves. We don’t fully know what we’re made of. But, while disorderly, we’re curious, intelligent, empathetic, creative, and courageous. When things come apart, we can put them back together in new and better ways. And while we can’t yet stop aging (and we may not actually want to), inside we can slow down or speed up, or come at the world from different angles. We can imagine.

So here is my wish for this already advancing new year: Let us embrace time as entropy, not as order. However, I don’t mean we should completely reject That Clock. In fact, we can enlist it in our efforts. Whenever we see it, or any tool of numb officialdom, let’s remember to question its message of resignation. Let That Clock—in fact, any clock, our lovely new wristwatch, even the bewitching clock in our phone—remind us to look up, to dream, wonder, and reflect more often.

And let us imagine and work toward a world where everyone can do the same.

A toned-down rant on education, with bonus crackpot theory

So this is very cool.

It's TED Curator Chris Anderson's animated talk, "Questions No One Knows the Answers To." Are kids everywhere watching this? And adults as well? I hope so.

As I have mentioned, I went to an excellent public school and had a presumably excellent science education therein. Yet never, not once, did it dawn on me that the purpose of this education was to be able to answer questions that were as yet unanswered. In doing countless experiments that turned out either right (yay, you got the blue foam!) or wrong (you idiot, you made black sludge!), and taking lots of multiple-choice tests, I was given to understand that science was about confirming what was already known. The black sludge was simply an error, not a result of processes that were just as real, and just as interesting in their own way, as those that made the foam. Science was proving you could follow the directions.

I can think of a number of reasons I got this message. One is that I was an extraordinarily rule-oriented child (I am only a little less so as an adult). After all, I also didn't get that art was about "expressing yourself," so much as properly rendering what you saw in front of you. So I may have simply missed the part about how we were learning scientific techniques through these repetitive experiments, so that we could later use them to make new discoveries. It may also be that my own teachers either didn't know or didn't think it important that science was about discovery. Their emphasis on mastery of the known might have reflected their own experiences and philosophies.

Or there may have been an even larger purpose behind this kind of teaching. The system cannot function if everyone in it is constantly innovating. Nothing would get done. In truth, we need people--lots of people--to implement known processes and principles. Maybe that's what this education was about: because most people will (by choice? by necessity? whose choice? whose necessity?) be implementers rather than visionaries, they must be trained as such.

Was there such a governing philosophy behind education? Is there one now? All the standardized testing going on now suggests that the answer to the second question is yes. Even if that is not the stated purpose of the testing, it will assuredly be a pronounced effect. Is that intentional on some deep, unacknowledged level? Or am I just being paranoid, or unrealistic? Should I just be grateful for the conscientious training of drones? I'm one, also, most of the time.

Revising from something rather than nothing

So I've been revising novel #2 for a week. Maybe two weeks. I've lost track. This thing is a mind-sucker. Keeping track of all the details of the murder mystery, like who knew what, and when, and who believed what, and why, and how the investigation got all screwed up but plausibly so...and I'm not even into the string theory section. Yes, really. I DON'T KNOW WHAT I AM TALKING ABOUT.

Still, it's going well. And once again I must attribute it to my new practice of (relatively) rapid prototyping, i.e. getting *something* down and moving on and not worrying too much about anything until the whole draft is done. Because, here's what I keep discovering, to my eternal astonishment: You just need something to work with. That something need not be good; it need not even have that much to do with what you now understand your story to be.

Years ago, when I thought I was a visual artist, I used to go through the process of gessoing canvas. Gesso is that white stuff you put down first, to keep the paint from soaking into the canvas; I understood that the tedium of stretching the canvas and gessoing it was supposed to be meditative or something, but I was usually really impatient to just get started, and I turned to writing because I thought there would be less laborious prep and you could just, you know, do the thing. Joke's on me! Turns out the first draft is the gesso. You still have to do it, but the good news is that the second draft almost entirely covers it up. The first draft is really not much more than a layer to put the revisions on.

You just need something, rather than nothing. That's all.*

*Speaking of something rather than nothing, Sean Carroll at Cosmic Variance posted a very interesting discussion of that question--Why is there something rather than nothing?--a few years ago. It's worth reading the whole post to follow the reasoning, but the overall point is that it's actually not a good question. Our "experience" tells us that the presence of "something" is somehow significant, and less "natural" or "simple" than the state of nothingness. In other words, we assume that the presence of "something" has to be explained (i.e. by the existence of a god or similar). But according to Carroll, there's no reason why nature itself should "prefer" nothingness. It's not necessarily a simpler state, so the presence of "something" does not necessarily demand a special explanation.

What's a mystery?

While I'm on the subject of mystery, which I have been a lot lately, even though it may not technically be a "subject" as such because we don't, by definition, know what it is...here's a perspective from Leonard Susskind:

[I]n the past few years the science sections of newspapers have been reporting that cosmologists are mystified by two astonishing "dark" discoveries. The first is that 90 percent of the matter in the universe is made of some shadowy, mysterious substance called dark matter. The other is that 70 percent of the energy in the universe is composed of an even more ghostly mysterious stuff called dark energy. The words mystery, mysterious, and mystified get a very thorough workout in these articles.

I have to admit I find neither discovery all that mysterious. To me, the word mystery conveys something that completely eludes rational explanation. The discoveries of dark matter and energy were surprises but not mysteries. Elementary-particle physicists (I am one of them) have always known that their theories were incomplete and that many particles remain to be discovered. The tradition of postulating new, hard-to-detect particles began when Wolfgang Pauli correctly guessed that one form of radioactivity involved an almost invisible particle called the neutrino. Dark matter is not made of neutrinos, but by now physicists have postulated plenty of particles that could easily form the invisible stuff. There is no mystery there--only the difficulties of identifying and detecting those particles.

Susskind goes on: "The real mystery raised by modern cosmology concerns a silent 'elephant in the room,' an elephant, I might add, that has been a huge embarrassment to physicists: why is it that the universe has all of the appearances of having been specially designed so that life forms like us can exist?"

As Susskind's book is called The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design, we can be sure that for him (as for me), the answer "[A] god did it" is neither helpful nor interesting. The book, which I am just now starting to read, promises to untangle the seemingly simple (and seemingly wrong) "anthropic principle." I thought I had finally understood this thing awhile ago, but now guess I don't.

Anyway, it does seem worth considering what we really mean when we use the term "mystery." By this definition, a murder mystery really isn't one. It's a...oh, hell, Rumsfeld is a prophet after all..."known unknown."

Now, once more into the cosmological breach.


Shop Indie Bookstores

Consciousness and character

It seems the whole consciousness thing is as tough a nut to crack as the whole what-is-the-universe-made-of thing. Over at 13.7, Alva Noë suggests a different way of approaching consciousness:

For a while now I've been arguing that we shouldn't look for consciousness in the brain. We haven't found it there, and we won't. Not because consciousness happens somewhere else, in the soul, say, or in the environment, or in the collective. But because consciousness isn't something that happens; it is something we do or make. And like everything else that we do, it depends both on the way we are constituted — on our brains and bodies — but also on the world around us.

Sidestepping the actual question of what consciousness is, I think this discussion has implications for fiction writers. (Well, everything has implications for fiction writers.)

Literature and literary characters give us more direct access to other minds than we have in everyday life. At least we seem to have access, in the form of other people's interior thoughts. On the other hand, this access is limited to what can be expressed in verbal language; and the other people are, at least to some extent, fictional.

I won't wade into the morass of how much language itself creates or forms consciousness. But we do experience a sort of merging of consciousnesses when we read. The author's words steer our minds in directions they might not otherwise go. Her language, for a time, becomes ours, though what we see and feel through that language can't be exactly what the author saw and felt when she was writing. We're drawn in by generalities, a shared language and similar broad-strokes experiences (love, loss, fear, ecstasy). But it's the edges, where the differences are negotiated, that give art life.

About character specifically: It seems to me we could think of characters as consciousnesses, by which I mean ways of seeing and being in the world, which overlap in general ways but not in specifics. I think I've too often pictured my own characters as different, atomized mixtures of my own consciousness (which I'm sloppily eliding here with personality): That one has more of my prickliness and less of my confidence; this one embodies my secret desire to become a hairdresser. But I haven't thought enough about how these guys relate to each other as consciousnesses.

In other words, just like us real people, characters should be aware that others have minds, and be equally aware that they can't quite reach them. They are as alone, and as connected, in their world as we are in ours. And moments when consciousnesses seem to touch and interact--as when an author suddenly shows us an entirely new way of seeing--should be as amazing for characters within the novel as they are for us on the "outside."

Review of The Hidden Reality on The Millions

My review of Brian Greene's new book is now up at The Millions.

Wind

Yesterday was windy.

Years ago I read a wonderful book called Wind: How the Flow of Air Has Shaped Life, Myth, and the Land by Jan DeBlieu. Naturally I can't find my copy now, but from the Amazon review: "Jan DeBlieu lives on North Carolina's Outer Banks, where 'wind is culture and heritage... Wind toughens us, moves mountains of sand as we watch, makes it difficult to sleepwalk through life.'" At one point, I remember, she says that she feels strange in places that aren't windy like the Outer Banks--not just breezy, but what many would probably call blustery.

I thought of this yesterday, watching the giant redwood at the top of a hill in our neighborhood swirling its branches like some multi-fronded sea creature. My life is largely a still affair, with lots of sitting at desks and staring at words, which may create imagined movements in my head but don't engage in a whole lot of activity on their own. I sit in cars or planes and watch the world pass alongside or beneath me. I am not buffeted, except by psychological currents. In other words, I tend to think of wind as something wrong--as in, it was a beautiful day, but windy.

Wind is strange to me. The air, which normally I just walk through and don't notice, is coming after me, insisting I feel and respond to its presence, affecting the way I move. But why should this be bad? Sure, no one wants to get hit with a trash can lid or a falling tree limb while out on one's daily stroll, but apart from certain hazards, wind's strangeness--for the suburban knowledge-worker, anyway--is psychological. It's a reminder that things are changing all the time. And not just changing all around us, but within us and through us. We're one of those things the wind blows around.

Since I've been immersed in cosmology books lately, the wind also reminds me that we are always in motion, whether we feel it or not. The earth is turning and revolving around the sun; we (the earth, the sun, our solar system) are riding roller-coaster like around the galaxy; we (now expanded to include our galaxy and its compatriots) are shooting along to who-knows-where on the constantly expanding fabric of space-time. That's relativity for you.

I'm not as anchored as I think. Or, rather, I must think of being anchored differently.

But Watson isn't gracious

I have never been a big fan of Jeopardy!, mostly because I feel that memorizing gazillions of facts and spitting them out on cue is not an especially good use of human brain power. (Also I can't do it.)

So I had never heard of Ken Jennings or his amazing 2004 winning streak, up until this whole kerfuffle about Watson. If I had, I would probably have assumed (ungraciously) that he was a sort of stunted character, having funneled all his life force into the dubious goal of being a game-show champion.

But his article on Slate about losing to Watson is a truly lovely piece of writing. In the first place, he gently reminds us that Watson is not the plucky underdog in this story. The real winners last night were IBM shareholders. In other words, Corporate America, in one of its most behemoth-like incarnations. Innovative as Watson is, that vaguely androgynous purr is the voice of global capitalism lulling us into a charmed sleep. (This is me going off here; Jennings doesn't take the point this far.)

Reading Jennings's piece, I realized I had in fact come to think of Watson as the underdog, after watching PBS's "Smartest Machine on Earth" the other night. In fact, Watson's pluckiness really belongs to its engineers, who worked constantly for four years to bring a seemingly impossible dream to reality (a dream set in motion by watching Jennings). That's how the show frames the story, anyway. We even see how hurt one of the engineers is when the practice Jeopardy! host, a comedian hired by IBM, makes fun of Watson. The engineer's kids were hurt by the mockery when they watched the practice rounds; the engineer says, without irony, that "Watson is defenseless." So I found myself rooting for Watson to beat the humans--which is a pretty amazing bit of jiu-jitsu by IBM and NOVA. While I really do admire the engineers' accomplishment, it's important to remember on whose behalf it was accomplished.

Jennings takes his defeat with a nuanced dose of humility and humor. He uses it as an occasion to reflect on his own experience of winning, something Watson, of course, could never do:

Indeed, playing against Watson turned out to be a lot like any other Jeopardy! game, though out of the corner of my eye I could see that the middle player had a plasma screen for a face. Watson has lots in common with a top-ranked human Jeopardy! player: It's very smart, very fast, speaks in an uneven monotone, and has never known the touch of a woman. But unlike us, Watson cannot be intimidated. It never gets cocky or discouraged. It plays its game coldly, implacably, always offering a perfectly timed buzz when it's confident about an answer. [....]

During my 2004 Jeopardy! streak, I was accustomed to mowing down players already demoralized at having to play a long-standing winner like me. But against Watson I felt like the underdog, and as a result I started out too aggressively, blowing high-dollar-value questions on the decade in which the first crossword puzzle appeared (the 1910s) and the handicap of Olympic gymnast George Eyser (he was missing his left leg).

So Watson may make game-show contestants obsolete, as Jennings, not entirely humorously, predicts. But Watson will never win or lose as graciously, and with as much subtle intelligence, as Jennings demonstrates in this essay.

So the humans are still winning, if you ask me.

Over my head in Cantor dust

This is the sort of thing I've been trying to get my head around for my new novel. Below is information from Wikipedia on the Cantor set, which is also, rather more poetically, called the "Cantor Dust." (It may only be "dust" when it's in 3D.)

The Cantor ternary set is created by repeatedly deleting the open middle thirds of a set of line segments. One starts by deleting the open middle third (¹⁄₃, ²⁄₃) from the interval [0, 1], leaving two line segments: [0, ¹⁄₃] ∪ [²⁄₃, 1]. Next, the open middle third of each of these remaining segments is deleted, leaving four line segments: [0, ¹⁄₉] ∪ [²⁄₉, ¹⁄₃] ∪ [²⁄₃, ⁷⁄₉] ∪ [⁸⁄₉, 1]. This process is continued ad infinitum, where the nth set is

The Cantor ternary set contains all points in the interval [0, 1] that are not deleted at any step in this infinite process.

The first six steps of this process are illustrated below.

An explicit formula for the Cantor set is

The proof of the formula above is done by the idea of self-similarity transformations and can be found in detail.^[7][8]

Yeah, no, I can't read these equations at all. But the basic idea is that the set, as James Gleick explains in Chaos, "the points that remain are infinitely many, but their total length is infinitely small." That concept is the basis for fractal geometry; it's the infinitely large AND infinitely small concept that I am really interested in. Just look at the picture! It's amazing! The universe we live in!

But this is all just to say, I am in way over my head here. At some point I am going to need a real mathematician and/or physicist to read this thing. Also I'll need a psychiatrist, although you probably guessed that already. If you know anyone who'd like to help (probably a few months down the road), please email.

Thoughts on teaching well

I'm thinking about the interview with Brian Greene on Fresh Air, and why I believe his books are the best--by far actually--science books for non-scientists that I've ever read. Obviously being in love with your subject, and enthusiastic about explaining it from scratch, over and over, while always seeking new and better ways to explain it, are all critical.

But Greene also shows a tremendous faith in his audience. I think it's this attitude that makes the work of explaining far more enjoyable for everyone. Witness this exchange with Terry Gross, as Greene is explaining the basics of string theory as opposed to the standard (particle) model:

If we change that idea and envision that these particles are actually not little tiny dots but little tiny loops, little loops of string, a little piece of string that can vibrate at different frequencies, that change from a dot to a string is able to cure the mathematical inconsistencies between general relativity and quantum mechanics at least on paper. We haven't tested. We have not been able to test these ideas yet. That's the big issue. But at least on paper, that modest change from a dot to a loop cures the problem.

GROSS: How does it cure the problem?

Prof. GREENE: That's a very interesting and difficult question, but I'll...

GROSS: Yeah, I figured it would be difficult.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Prof. GREENE: I'm absolutely willing to give it a shot.

GROSS: Okay.

Prof. GREENE: So first let me just give you what the problem is in a touch more detail...

This little exchange, which I've bolded, says so much. How often does it happen that some sage (on a stage) is explaining some complex concept, and the non-specialist listener says or thinks something like "this will be too difficult for me." (If you listen to the audio, you can hear a note of defeat in Gross's voice, a note that's pretty familiar to any non-expert talking to a specialist--as is the laughter.)

But then Greene says "I'm absolutely willing to give it a shot." He takes that difficulty upon himself as a challenge, because his listener is obviously interested and willing to take on her part of the challenge. He reduces the listener's sense of intellectual inferiority by recognizing that he has to do something hard here, as well--explain this complex topic clearly. And he goes on to do so surprisingly well.

Brian Greene on Fresh Air

On Monday Terry Gross did a great interview with Brian Greene about parallel universes (the subject of his new book). You can listen and read an excerpt here. Apparently there's a difference between an infinite universe, and infinitely many universes. Both are possible.

My physics fantasy

I want to be a physicist! Physics is so cool! Why am I not a physicist?

Oh, yeah. For two reasons.

• One: I was always very, very nervous around numbers. Also symbols, like sigmas and such. I took calculus in high school and again in college, and did OK, but the very thought of those classes (particularly the college one) causes my esophagus to seize up. Actually a secondary fantasy of mine is to take calculus again but in some setting where there are no tests. Or no-pressure tests. Like, I would take a test if I knew that if I screwed it up I could take it again till I got it right, because isn't the point, really, in the great scheme of things, to learn math, not to be made to feel like a moron who will never understand anything just because you didn't catch on the first time?
  
  
• Two: I forget what two was.

But anyway, at some point during high school (it had to be), some enlightened teacher--and I'm terribly sorry, I've forgotten who you were, sir--took us to a lecture on cosmology, which I think was at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. Out came this guy with a bushy brown beard, who paced back and forth on the stage for an hour and showed slides of curved space with grid marks on it, and a little picture of a spaceship riding the curve. And he said that ship could travel to a whole new universe, or our universe at another time, or... And that was SO COOL! And then in college I took Astronomy for Non-Majors (or whatever it was called) with Robert Kirshner, and that was SO COOL TOO!!

So I've always gobbled up books and TV programs about physics and astronomy in particular. In a way, I can't understand why anyone thinks of anything else: this is what the universe is made of. Where it came from. What it is. Why would a person spend their time, I don't know, writing stories and fucking around on the Internet when there is physics??

My favorite popular physics writer, as of about three weeks ago, is Brian Greene. Greene as a writer is a recent discovery. I was not a huge fan of the TV version of The Elegant Universe. Now, it's not awful. There are far, far worse things on television, even on PBS. But it seemed to be aiming a little too hard for the attention-impaired brains of adolescents. Lots of CGI thingies zipping and zooming around, and--worst of all--every scientist interviewed appears in front of a strange assortment of glowing, blinking panels, which seems to suggest that what they're saying is too boring just to, you know, listen to, so you must instead be flashed and strobed to the brink of epilepsy. If you are looking for the successor to Cosmos as the awesomest intro to the universe ever, I recommend Brian Cox's shows--the recent Wonders of the Solar System, and a couple of earlier Horizon shows, both from the BBC. Cox tends to eschew CGI and create models using rocks and lines drawn in sand, which is both more charming and more effective. (Of the physicist-Brians with one-syllable last names, we must mention in passing Brian May, who, like Cox, is a [former] rock star.)

But back to Greene. I just finished reading The Fabric of the Cosmos, and in terms of explaining really complex stuff, really clearly and engagingly, this blows away everything. Sorry, S. Hawking et al! I now *get* why nothing can travel faster than light speed, why time slows down when you travel close to that speed, and a whole bunch of other stuff that I've heard before but had to just accept, because there was no explanation forthcoming. Greene's particular gift is for anticipating exactly what the non-expert reader will be wondering about after an initial explanation, and then filling in the gaps with really effective analogies (though his fondness for The Simpsons is maybe a bit too cute).

I'm almost done raving, but I'll just say that somehow I came upon this book at exactly the right moment for my new novel. I wanted to say some things about time and order and uncertainty, and this book just poured itself into all the gaps. I'm now making my main character a physicist--though a troubled one, of course.


Shop Indie Bookstores