Life was more complicated in the old days. Not only were many things more difficult and tedious to accomplish, often you had to work out which of several methods you should use depending on what you really needed done. It’s much easier now. Really.
Here on the 100th birthday of General Relativity our science consultants were pondering why Relativity and Quantum Mechanics were so easy for them to accept but so hard for people a century ago. Certainly it’s not because we’re more insightful or brighter scientists–quite the opposite. Nor is it that we’re better at math; again the opposite is true, and these are highly mathematical subjects. We finally concluded that we’re comfortable with the theories because we were told the stories, word-descriptions of what the math means, from an early stage and so the theories never seemed impossibly strange. The stories are important. But it’s also important for both scientists and laymen to understand their limitations.
Fooling around with a certain bit of relatively recent technology prompted our photographer to ask the question: why are there so many pictures? Our main way of capturing reality, that great manifold of experiences, is still the two-dimensional image. Being a scientist he then sought an answer (where a philosopher might instead have fallen into existential doubt). It’s not so hard to work out, really, but does highlight something important about our memories, and how technology is changing them.
While attending to his regular workout in the Five Colors S&T exercise room, our astronomer was reminded of his High School geometry class. (We’ll explain the connection later; it has nothing to do with the angles at which his various muscles were applying force.) Everyone was required to take geometry (and pass it), and most were required to do the same with algebra. Yet it’s a truism that very few people actually use those subjects later on, and most forget them immediately. Why, then, do we bother with teaching and learning them? There are several possible answers, to which we’ll add one of our own.
We’ve just gone through the annual ritual of Falling Back, shifting our clocks by an hour to conform to Standard Time. It’s the regular opportunity for scientists to point out, with either smugness or exasperation, that all summer we haven’t really been Saving Daylight; that there is exactly the same amount of daylight regardless of what our clocks read. Sometimes they wander off into explanations of Local Solar Time, Standard Time Zones and, if not quickly stopped, bring up atomic clocks.
Here we will avoid that sort of thing. In the interests of understanding other people, or at least building character, we’ll look at time from the standpoint of non-scientists. It’s not the same time as we understand, and translation is in order.
Our photographic consultant is fond of pointing out to us, with the help of books and magazines, the different styles of great photographers. Clearly part of the variation in the final image is in the subjects they choose: Ansel Adams is famous for mountains and landscapes of the Southwest, quite a different thing from a New York City street photographer catching an instant among people. “But,” he says, “put in exactly the same place, facing exactly the same subject, they’d still come up with different pictures. They just see differently.” Which is true, and much more widely applicable than he meant. Even the same person looking at the same scene can see something entirely different at a different time. A simple exercise can show this.
Our astronomer has often found himself traveling on public transport and occasionally eating alone at crowded restaurants. This means he has overheard many a conversation, unintentionally to be sure (he lacks the gossip gene, or alternatively the instincts of the spy). Many of them have been very irritating to him, and at least he sat down to work out why.
Our chief consultant writes:
We’ve all had it happen: some unexpected, unusual occurrence, and someone asks: “What were the odds against that happening?” As an exclamation, an alternative to the pedestrian, “That’s unusual,” this is fine. Language should have flexibility and the freedom of metaphor. This becomes a problem, however, when the unusual event is taken to imply unknown laws of physics or perhaps sinister forces at work.
Actually working out probabilities in any but the simplest cases can be pretty tedious, and we’re not about to get into that here. But it’s easy to make basic mistakes in setting up this kind of question (respected scientists have done so); we present two rules to help keep you out of trouble, even if you’re not going to punch any numbers into your computer.
This week our photography consultant had the opportunity to watch as two young people developed their first rolls of film. Of course he enjoyed their excitement at actually using this unfamiliar old technology, and was reminded that his own first roll was a long time ago. (It’s still available in the archives, but is—understandably—not brought out for printing very often.) More important, though, are his observations on learning things, which is not the same as being taught.