Advice to government ministers…

Travel around the Westminster village by bike, and have an intern run behind you carrying your red boxes and other detritus of public office in an 80-litre rucksack.

Radio, television, newspapers – in Britain there is currently no end of stories about Albert Einstein’s brain, and what we can learn about the physicist’s genius from prodding and poking at this mass of artificially preserved grey matter. There is a media obsession with Einstein’s brain, and one has to assume that there is some popular appeal in it too.

Why? Einstein was a great physicist, but his genius was no more than that of many scientists, artists and other accomplished individuals. Einstein himself was a slow starter whose school reports were pretty dismal, forecasting the idler he was to become in adult life.

“He will never amount to anything.”

Maybe those neurologists interested in the origins of genius should focus on the brains of idlers and loafers in general. Here’s my hypothesis, for what little it’s worth: Genius is an exceptional creative faculty aided by the capacity to think clearly and conceptually, either free of worldly concerns, or with the ability to put them to one side.

Einstein was a very intelligent man, but he was no mathematical prodigy. His skill in mathematics was acquired through grinding study at his polytechnic university, and later while pretending to work in the Basel patent office. Einstein acquired his mathematical skills through training, and applied them along with his creative potential to solve a number of physics problems ranging from the everyday to the cosmological.

We owe much to Albert Einstein, but in the end he vas just zis guy.

Of the seven candidate astronauts for China’s next manned space mission, two will be women. Going by the report from China Daily, the female ‘taikonauts’ have been selected according to some peculiar and politically incorrect criteria.

For example, to qualify as an astronaut in China, women must be married, have given birth naturally, and be without scars or body odour. And according to Pang Zhihao, deputy editor of Space International magazine,…

“They even must not have decayed teeth because any small flaw might cause great trouble or a disaster in space.”

Sensitive New Man Pang added, in true “Men are from Mars…” style, that female astronauts are…

“…keen and sensitive with better communication skills than their male counterparts.”

Does anyone remember Lisa Nowak? No complaints that I’m aware of concerning her dental condition or personal hygiene. Bit of a psychopath, though.

Maybe this is why the Chinese will soon be eating our lunch.

Lest we Europeans feel smug about our supposed eradication of the barbarity that is capital punishment, it is worth noting that judicial killing (you cannot call it “murder” when it is legally sanctioned) is still practised in one enclave of the continent.

More here, from a grieving mother.

Another theory of Lunar formation could be about to bite the Terran dust.

Take an interest in such things, and the chances are that you have read magazine articles and seen television documentaries which explain Earth’s moon as being the result of a collision around 4.5 billion years ago between our planet and a smaller body going by the name of Theia, after the minor deity of Greek mythology who was mother to Selene, goddess of the moon.

This cataclysmic event is known as the “Giant Impact Hypothesis”, with or without the dramatic capitalisation. For several decades it has been the most plausible explanation for the formation of the moon, and the 23.4 degree tilt in Earth’s axis of rotation which gives rise to the seasons.

The moon stabilises Earth’s axial tilt, raises ocean tides, and is gradually slowing the planet’s rotation, thereby lengthening the day. It is also slowly receding from Earth.

The giant impact hypothesis has survived numerous computer simulations, and its basis as a model of planetary formation is physically sound. As with any functional hypothesis, it leads to a predictive theory which can be tested against observation.

Numerical modelling of the Theia collision has shown that no more than 60% of the material in the impact debris which coalesced over time into the Moon can have come from Earth’s interior. The remainder must be from Theia, which we can reasonably assume was geochemically distinct from Earth’s mantle. The isotopic composition of the moon should reflect this chemical mix, and so far it has, according to our best understanding of the situation.

It appears now that Earth and Moon are identical to within 0.0004% in their isotopic compositions of the metal titanium. This comes from a paper by Chicago University geoscientist Junjun Zhang and others. It is not the first time that the giant impact hypothesis has been challenged. Studies of oxygen, silicon, chromium and tungsten have constrained but not been inconsistent with the Theia impact, but the latest results can most easily be explained by assuming that the moon formed almost exclusively from Earth’s mantle. This runs contrary to the Theia hypothesis.

While Theia could have been compositionally similar to Earth, only a few of the known meteorite groups are sufficiently similar in oxygen isotope balance. The new data also rule out an icy Theia with its origins in the far reaches of the solar system. Unless, that is, Theia’s rocks contributed less than 2% to the proto-moon.

Another question concerns the rate of exchange of material between Earth and the accreting impact disk. This could over the aeons have led to the erasure of all remaining isotope differences, but only if the post-impact Earth system cooled exceptionally slowly, or large-scale turbulent mixing was unrealistically large.

Further reading

Zhang et al., “The proto-Earth as a significant source of lunar material”, Nature Geoscience (2012)

As a British citizen, Asma al-Assad cannot be denied entry to the UK, even with an EU travel ban in place. But, given that Syria’s first lady is a mass-murderer’s moll who in recent weeks has publicly defended her husband, she must surely be liable to arrest on criminal charges.

The Assads’ world is ever shrinking.

I have never entered a branch of Starbucks, partly out of fear of the reaction I might receive in asking for a “cup of coffee”. That is about the limit of my knowledge of the subject. Also, I find distasteful the kind of consumer culture embodied by Starbucks and similar retail chains.

That said, I have no problem supporting such corporate behemoths when they take a moral stand on topical issues. In the case of Starbucks, it is the company’s declared support for gay marriage, which, going by a statement to staff, is perfectly rational…

“This important legislation is aligned with Starbucks business practices and upholds our belief in the equal treatment of partners. We are deeply dedicated to embracing diversity and treating one another with respect and dignity, and remain committed to providing an inclusive, supportive and safe work environment for all of our partners.”

For this, Starbucks has been attacked by the so-called National Organization for Marriage, which, with the backing of its 4,000 members, has pledged to boycott the popular coffee seller.

In reaction to the boycott of Starbucks, the über-virtuos 99%ers in SumOfUs.org are calling on supporters of gay marriage to sign a thank you card, which will be delivered to Starbucks’ corporate HQ once the first 40,000 electronic signatures have been received.

Anyone want to buy my physics PhD? It’s clearly wasted on me!

Hat tip: Snoopy the Goon

Long before the invention of the PC, mobile phones and the Interwebs, physicist Rolf Landauer showed that a loss of information inevitably results in the dissipation of heat. You should resist the temptation to liken this to the hot air generated in online debate.

The increase in entropy associated with information loss is as fundamental as the conservation of energy in more tangible mechanical and electrical systems. That is, energy can be converted from one form to another, but it cannot be destroyed, and with energy conversion there is an increase in disorder that defines an irreversible arrow of time. Thermodynamics, with its origins in the study of steam engines, is arguably the most robust physical theory ever devised.

Half a century following Landauer’s theoretical demonstration, we now have experimental verification of the principle involved. Augsburg physicist Eric Lutz and others have, with a laboratory setup comprising of a single microscopic silica bead held in a light trap created by a laser beam, demonstrated the intimate link between abstract information theory and real-world thermodynamics. In doing so, they have highlighted the physical limit of irreversible computation.

You can destroy information, but only at a cost. Maybe Google will use this as an excuse for not complying with court orders to remove online evidence of Max Mosley’s sexual shenanigans.

Further reading

Bérut et al., “Experimental verification of Landauer’s principle linking information and thermodynamics”, Nature 483, 187 (2012)

Today is the the vernal equinox, the first day of spring. From where I sit it appears to be a lovely sunny afternoon, so I’m off out for a quick 30 kilometres on the bike along the banks of two of southeast London’s largely forgotten rivers.

My imminent mid-afternoon outing follows a few hours of background reading on the cultural history of physics, during which I chanced upon the following quotation from Károly Simonyi…

“[L]ogical thought is the well-worn path that leads with utmost certainty and without a trace of ambiguity from one quagmire to another.”

As sure as spring follows winter, and it describes scientific progress to a tee.

More on Simonyi another time.