Author: Mike White

Genomes, Books, and Science Fiction

If the concept of entropy blows your mind, try quantropy

One of the eerie things about physics is that sometimes theories of very different phenomena end up having basically the same mathematical structure. Statistical mechanical probabilities arise from entropy maximization, and because of this weird analogy, perhaps you can think about quantum mechanical probabilities arising from some sort of maximization or minimization process. Except in quantum mechanics, you have to deal with complex numbers… what does it mean to maximize or minimize a complex number?

Go check out John Baez on the remarkable analogies between statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics and the idea of quantropy.

Why You Need to Read The Voyage of the Beagle Before You Die

In honor of Darwin’s Birthday, I lay out the case for The Voyage of the Beagle as great literature:

Sitting on a rickety homemade bookshelf in my living room are the fifty volumes of my Great-Grandfather’s Harvard Classics. Once a teenaged political refugee from the Russian revolutionary turmoil of 1905 and later an accomplished bacteriologist with Merck, my Great-Grandfather exemplified Harvard President Charles Eliot’s American middle class, “twentieth century idea of a cultivated man,” the kind of person for whom Eliot’s “five foot shelf of books” was intended. A respected Mr. among professional scientific peers of Drs., my Great-Grandfather was fiercely committed to self-education. I never met him, but I imagine that my Great-Grandfather would have subscribed to Eliot’s notion of individual and civilizational progress, progress that is the result of “man observing, recording, inventing, and imagining.” The Harvard Classics were selected to be a survey of how this process has played out over the millennia.

Eliot’s words, “observing, recording, inventing, and imagining,” describe several thousand years of human intellectual activity by invoking the process of science. This is appropriate because Eliot, and my Great-Grandfather, were living when the modern scientific view of the world was well on its way to world domination, becoming a new belief system with as much cultural heft as the major religions, and one whose conquest occurred even more rapidly than the spectacular rise from obscurity of Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam over the last two thousand years. Continue reading “Why You Need to Read The Voyage of the Beagle Before You Die”

Darwin and Melville in the Galapagos

A little preview from a forthcoming Darwin Day essay on The Voyage of the Beagle, here are the contrasting styles of Darwin and Melville in their descriptions of the Galapagos. Melville’s imagery is impressionistic and improvisational, while Darwin’s approach to imagery depends, naturally, on observational precision and tight organizations of his thoughts, which can be just as successful as Melville’s more consciously literary style.

Melville’s description of the Galapagos from The Encantadas: Continue reading “Darwin and Melville in the Galapagos”

Post-apocalyptic giant John Christopher passes away

Christopher Priest writes a brief obituary in the Guardian. Christopher (real name Samuel Youd) was one of the three giants of the excellent British school of post-apocalyptic fiction in the 50’s in 60’s, the others being John Wyndham and J.G. Ballard. Christopher, with his brutal The Death of Grass was somewhat of a transitional figure between the “cosier” Wyndham and Ballard’s dark novels.

h/t to io9.

Faculty of 1000 going arXiv

So Azimuth tells us:

In math and physics we have the arXiv, but nobody referees those papers. In biology and medicine, a board called the Faculty of 1000 chooses and evaluates the best papers, but there’s no archive: they get those papers from traditional journals.

Whoops—never mind! That was yesterday. Now the Faculty of 1000 has started an archive!

• Rebecca Lawrence, F1000 Research – join us and shape the future of scholarly communication, F1000, 30 January 2012.

I’m all for giving this a try, but I still have a hard time seeing how some type of arXiv thing would work in the life sciences, simply because the life sciences are so damn big. Life scientists in academic research make up more than one third of all academic scientists. There are more than twice as many academic life scientists as physical scientists, and more life scientists than all academic physicists, mathematicians, computer scientists, chemists, and earth scientists combined. As far as I can tell by my anecdotal observations, life scientists publish many short papers, as opposed to fewer and longer papers, which is the norm in other fields.