Potential

I keep wanting to tell parents this:

"Your child's potential is not a trained dog that it should be unleashed. It is the patient accumulation of skill and ability that can be made to do useful work over time. Children have no potential at birth; they have possible futures in which they accumulate potential."

It's the duty of parents and teachers to help them develop those futures so that they can build up the potential with which to do wonderful works — thaumaturgeia, as the Greeks might have said.

What I've been musing on is how the word 'potential', which used to mean 'power, authority or might' became twisted into 'possible use of power, authority or might' in the early 1800s, and now merely means 'possibility regardless of how silly it looks'. Everywhere, you read about 'unleashing potential' without really thinking about how this comes about.

It's more useful to look at the equally common 'developing potential', which actually has more meaning. You can't 'unleash potential' without accumulating some first. Anyway, 'unleashing' is more along the lines of Shakespeare's immortal line — "Cry 'Havoc!', and let slip the dogs of war!" It's as if you can train potential so that once you let its leash slip, it will automatically do what is right, useful, purposeful and wise.

Sorry, that's not how it works. Potential needs to be worked at, and then used wisely and carefully. And once it's gone actual or kinetic, it's gone.

Globalisation: In The Field

By now it should come as no surprise to anybody that my research area is within that widely-dispersed and contestable phenomenon (or, to the hardcore, 'presumed phenomenon') known as globalisation. It is indeed a fiercely contested phenomenon, because many heavyweights have attempted to define, counter-define, or redefine it; some have sought to rubbish it as just a convenient term to cover many other phenomena that just happen to interact across the globe.

But something from a recent paper by Susan Robertson resonated within me. And, as a former communications specialist, I realised how appropriate that metaphor was.

You see, globalisation is indeed a field. Like the many fields we encounter in physics, defining it is often based on empirical research concerning how it acts upon (or otherwise interacts with) other entities. In the case of a modulated radio-wave field, it induces a variable current in a conductor (or antenna), which we can convert to audible sound waves.

Similarly, globalisation is a field with many components. Some components can be measured by effects on entities (such as 'education sectors' or 'markets') and sub-entities thereof (such as 'schools' or 'businesses'). Some can be measured by less quantitative effects and other debateable phenomena such as human well-being and quality of life.

The lessons we learn from investigating the field of globalisation therefore depend very much on which instruments we use and what entities we observe interacting with that field. Since the primary observers, investigators and participants are all human, globalisation field theory is thus a human science, and can be treated as a multi-disciplinary area of expertise much as complexity theory.

But is globalisation a real phenomenon? Undoubtedly it is. It is real in the sense that it is not ideal, but actual; it is also real in the sense that discussing it as a phenomenon allows us to say it is one, since it is a human phenomenon. After all, we have no doubt that 'love' is a real phenomenon even though some people say it all boils down to oxytocin levels.

Fluid Movement

As a body travels through a fluid, turbulence may cause undesirable rotation. Consider an aircraft moving through... air.

If rotation occurs around the long nose-to-tail axis, this is called 'roll'.

If rotation occurs around the wing-to-wing axis, this is called 'pitch'.

And if the plane for some odd reason begins to spin on its vertical axis, this is called 'yaw'.

Ships have similar problems too.

Mass Production

What is this thing called mass? How is it produced? Why is it apparently an intrinsic property of some parts of the universe? Is it a dimension like space or time? After all, when discussing dimensionality of units, we tend to look at mass, length and time.

These thoughts flashed through my head as someone came up with the fateful words, "Do you teach physics?"

My first response, which fortunately I did not make aloud, was: "I don't think any physic would like to be taught by me."

My articulated response was, "Hmm. In a manner of speaking, yes."

Meanwhile, a massive sense of oppression, like that caused by the looming darkness of a thunderhead, began to build. Fortunately, good coffee metabolized it away.

Later in the day, the good coffee's metabolic powers led to a spate of mass production. Ho ho.

Zone

Zonë is 'girdle' in Greek — a sort of belt, a circumferential locus. When Robin Goodfellow says he will "put a girdle round about the Earth in forty minutes"[1], it gives us a base speed for the faerie folk — since the Earth's equatorial circumference is 40,000 km or so, Puck must travel at a thousand kilometres per minute, or just about 17 km/s.

The faerie, it seems, are not faster than light. Sound, on the other hand, travels at only 340 metres per second, or 0.34 km/s. Puck could hit Mach 50 on a good day — 50 times the speed of sound at sea level!

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[1]: From A Midsummer Night's Dream, Wm. Shakespeare, c. 1590, Act 2 Scene 1.

Kepler's Legacy

Early yesterday morning, I started reading John Banville's Kepler. It is a classically intense piece of biographical fiction which aims a heated spotlight on the life and times of Johannes Kepler, astrologer and mathematician, and his painful intellectual relationships with Nicolaus Copernicus (dead but whose ideas act like goads to Kepler) and Tycho Brahe (alive, but not for long).

While still in the first few pages, I glanced idly across the internet and discovered that, by some quirk of time and fate, May 23 was the day chosen by the Episcopalian church to commemorate the lives of Kepler and Copernicus. A skeptic would say that this was one of the many inevitable coincidences of life, only remembered because it was so randomly exact.

To me, it was a sign to think a little deeper about what I was reading. Kepler was a Lutheran holdout in a time of painful religious and political change. Obsessed with the idea of divine mathematics, he routinely cast horoscopes and made predictions that came out right again and again. He ardently believed in the music of the spheres; he claimed to hear it every now and then.

It was his struggle with Tycho Brahe's data on the orbit of Mars that brought him to the realisation that the area swept out by a body in orbit remained the same at any distance for the same period of time. Nearly a century later, Newton was able to build on Kepler and show that this was a consequence of gravitational behaviour.

I have suddenly discovered that I am in possession of Banville's Doctor Copernicus and The Newton Letter as well. What wonderful distractions! I cannot wait to move out from under the burden of educational globalisation and back into the history of science. And somewhere between those points, I hope to enjoy tracing out that arc of my own orbit.

Mercurial Physics

From the late, great Freddie Mercury:

Oh, I'm burnin' through the sky yeah
Two hundred degrees
That's why they call me Mister Fahrenheit
I'm trav'ling at the speed of light
I wanna make a supersonic man out of you

I have no idea what it means. I have a sneaking idea that I know what it might mean. It might be all bollocks though, as the Brits say. And they should know. Or not. This is the genius of the late, great Freddie Mercury.

Aloofness

A very long time ago, as it now seems, Murray Gell-Mann named the quark after a curious line (one of many) in James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. Over the years, six quarks were discovered — the prosaic 'up' and 'down' quarks, the odd 'strange' and 'charm' quarks, and the elegant (and very large) 'truth' and 'beauty' quarks. They formed part of the 'Standard Model' of particle physics.

The properties of quarks became more and more interesting the more research was carried out. Quarks had colour — red, green and blue; they also had anticolours — antired, antigreen, antiblue (or cyan, magenta and yellow). If you added coloured quarks together so that their nominal colour was 'white', you'd get a meson, baryon or antibaryon.

Philosophically, some scientists were wondering if the Aristotelian model of knowledge would hold — would we find 'truth', 'beauty' AND 'goodness'? By the time the Standard Model was established, it seemed that there was no place for 'goodness' in the world. Besides, if you had seven quarks, it would seem oddly asymmetric, not to mention probably result in 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs' jokes of dubious quality and content.

The 'truth' quark alone was a beast, almost the size of a gold atom. With its partner 'beauty', some people already had visions of the Disney versions of old folk tales. Surely one had to be enough? The problem with the Standard Model, or Eightfold Path, was that it was too neat. Too tidy.

The antithesis to the Aristotelian view was of course the Zurvanite perspective, explicitly considered as a Sassanid response to Roman Christianity with its Aristotelian reasoning. If you had three quarks named 'truth', 'beauty' and 'goodness', then your Zurvanite antitrinity of quarks would be 'unimpeachability', 'passionlessness' and 'aloofness'.

Thank God that today's many interesting Large Hadron Collider news items haven't mentioned these new particles at all. Quarks with seven-syllable names just don't fit into the natural scheme of things. 'Aloofness' might just about pass.

Tough

This week has been really tough. I don't mean hard or inflexible; I mean that it has been difficult to get things done, to work out what I am thinking from the snarl of information spinning and twirling its way through my head.

So I went for a long walk, had lunch with Constantine, and picked up Book 4 of Planetary. Suddenly, everything makes sense: the job of the survivor is to save things, no matter what it costs. It is tough because it often seems paradoxical.

When the going gets tough, the tough are often hopelessly lost. It's like many of the substances I've played with in the lab before: the harder or faster you work (on, with) them, the more viscous they become, until you cannot work (on, with) them anymore. This is funny behaviour, but pretty common. Agglutination, it's called.

Sometimes, however, you need to work with time and resources as if they were dilatant, like pizza cheese or quicksand. With such substances, the more slowly and gently you work with them, the more viscous they are. This is why mozzarella stretches most when you slowly and gently pull on it, and snaps if you pull sharply. The same with quicksand: move quickly and in you go, deeper and to your doom — but move slowly and gently and you will be safe.

The problem is that sometimes you don't know about the bulk properties of what you're handling. With information, that's even more complicated. This is why some people say PhD stands for 'permanent head damage'.

The World is Not Flat

No, contrary to what many learned men have said, and others have frequently parroted, the world is not flat. With inequity and inequality of all kinds everywhere you look; with barriers to information, capital, services, and materials; the world is only flat looking down from Olympus. As Chesterton said so well, "One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak."

It is tempting to use the quote blandly as it is, without context. But the amazing story from which it comes, one of the finest detective tales of the entire English canon, was Chesterton's 'Hammer of God', in the collection The Innocence of Father Brown. It is a tale that bears reading, that demands you take the time to have a look.

The lesson in it is clear. Moral forces are as much part of the universe as physical forces. One may be tempered by conscience or thrown awry by the lack of it; the other seems immutable but may be misperceived. Both are incredible miracles when closely examined. But one is more of a miracle than the other.

The world is not flat. It is capable of both rotation and revolution as an oblate spheroid that moves in space. And this is true both morally and physically.

A Thousand Ships, A Thousand Stars

I remember I was still a small boy when I found myself a copy of Marlowe's Faustus in the corner of my literary aunt's house. It was a tattered old Penguin book, with a simple brown cover. The worms had been at it.

And then I found these lines:

Was this the face that launched a thousand ships,
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?

(Skipped some soppy stuff here)

O thou art fairer than the evening air,
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars
Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter...

For a small boy brought up on classical myths and astronomy, the imagery was astounding. I could not imagine what kind of beauty the woman possessed, but I could imagine it was something I could not quite imagine, an intensity equivalent to that of a supernova, a nebula, a galaxy of stars.

As the years went by, I met many women, even some Greek ones. I found myself wondering whether these were faces that could launch a thousand ships or not. Of course, I was not the first in this endeavour; I wonder who it was who first considered the implications of the verse and deduced that if a Helen could launch a thousand ships, a millihelen was sufficient to launch one.

But then I did high school math, physics and chemistry. It became clear to me that Marlowe was describing an energy-related phenomenon; Helen's beauty was related to the impulse sufficient to launch a thousand ships, the energy transfer rate sufficient to consume the towers of Troy, the luminous intensity of a thousand stars and a brightness greater than that of Jupiter.

And in my final pre-university year, it finally clicked. Wow, I said to myself, she must have been one HOT chick! :D

Word of the Day: Birefringence

What a wonderful word! I first encountered birefringence in Physics lessons. Its etymology reveals that it is best explained as 'refraction in two different ways'. In other words, a birefringent material is able to take a ray of electromagnetic radiation and split it into two parts, each part emerging in a different direction.

In some more specialised disciplines (e.g. gemology), this can refer to a property that some crystals have of producing two different polarisations or even two different apparent colours when viewed with a single light source. Sometimes, birefringence is taken to be the maximum difference between the two refractive indices in the material.

But you know what made me remember the word? Norse mythology, of all things. The Bifrost Bridge, which links Asgard of the Norse gods with Midgard where we mortals dwell, is also called 'The Rainbow Bridge'. It's not such a large optical leap between birefringent and Bifrost, between a two-way split and a full spectrum, is it?

Ring Around The Sun

Today, the Tailor came running into the office. "Look! Up in the sky!" And he ran out again. Suddenly, infused with the spirit of the Beatles (as seen in A Hard Day's Night), I felt moved to get up and run out as well. Several others followed.

Behold, there was a ring of rainbow light, a halo around the sun. Of course the Tailor, as a physicist, knew what caused it. But although we knew why it appeared that way, we were all engulfed in the wonder, the splendour, the glorious beauty of it all. Yes, the upper air was filled with tiny ice crystals. Yes, refraction does occur and its effects are seen as a circular locus visually centred around the sun (which approximates a uniform source at that distance). But physics aside, this was pure poetry.

I've seen haloes around the moon before, but seldom in broad daylight and hardly ever at noonday. This was a particular, spectacular moment of meteorological grace.

Physics

I'm still looking through my archives. I've always been a bit of a packrat, an inherited trait — my mother is a teacher of English and Literature; Dad teaches History (indeed, he has even taught a certain Elvish historian before). I visited Dad at his office on Monday; as always, it was amazing to see the range of his current reading. He conspiratorially and with a glint in his eye confided to me that he had another roomful of books stashed away in a corner room. My estimate is that he must have around 12,000 books.

My parents have always been precious to me, and in these autumnal years, even more so. I feel more fortunate each day to have them. Although on occasion quirky, their advice has always been sound. They have always been supportive: sometimes tacitly, sometimes overtly, sometimes subversively. And they have never ever made me feel like the child of a lesser god.

But, back to my digging around. Here's a poem written on 10 May 1985. I cannot remember what I was doing that day.

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Physics

Let us take a rod, light and extensible;
Place it between the masses, and watch it stretch.

Kill for us the cattle on a thousand hills;
Count and label, care not what it is we make.

Trace the light fantastic and insensible;
Mark the needle tracks of every human sketch.

Suspend a man: on him hang a thousand ills;
At this turning moment does his body break?

Hawking

Introduction

An electron has four quantum numbers,
A human being made of dust has five:

Friendships - number and degree, deception;
Hardships - in sense of quality and weight;
The will - to live, or die, or vegetate;
Strangeness - of the inner mind's perception;
Magnetism - attractive kinds of state.

These are the things which keep our songs alive,
Distill the stuff of dreams from our slumbers,
Make sense of both pre- and post-conception.

Deduction

Given that electrons exist
Here is a little human list:

Humans can be bond-paired
Humans can be non-bonding
Humans can be so very scared
When other humans are responding

Humans can be lone-paired
Humans can be radical in bent
Humans can be startlingly shared
By what seems a human accident

Reduction

I realise I am a singularity
I look out of a window which cannot be:

And I see at once with blinding clarity
Electrons are fortunately not like me.