Shoshin-Zazen

Today I talked with a fellow YEP (Youth Expedition Project) New Dawn participant about him being in Luang Prabang, a place where a team of us did a project in a village called Muang Kham. He told me all about the villagers who saw him in town and called him to joined them in drinking beers. I can almost visualise the old quaint town of Luang Prabang - its architecture, and its people. Food carts line up streets with litter and funny smells, and its beguiling night market filled with Karen wares and bags. I remember the village and how we managed to stay tried to live in a moment in a Laotian’s life - a hard life, if I might add.

As I now write this in my room in Stockholm, Sweden I find myself rather disconnected with the South-East Asian culture and places. I am far away from home, missing dearly local foods and delicacies. Home is in South-East Asia, a place that I can identify with straight-away.

I met a Thai student just a floor above me who just moved in. She was a student studying for her Masters in “Strategic Management” in KTH. With some anguish written all over her face, she complained about the cold - and it is only the end of summer now. I told her about Chiang Rai and it was also cold - just like this, now.

The Zen masters say a mind flows like water. My mind is just doing just that now; flowing here and there. So when I talked about Chiang Rai, I remembered my first project in an Aha village and lived in a  humble bamboo hut for two weeks. The nights could be very chilly, temperatures could drop to near zero celcius. We would always need a fire to keep our hands warm while we chat over hot tea in the evenings.

I cannot help but feel that the disconnect I feel between now in Stockholm and home in South-East Asia is largely due to simplicity of life that I came into contact with in Thailand and Laos. Rather, this “complication” does not really lie in the lifestyle but with the local people’s mindsets and thinking.

All these make too much thinking, I am going to eat my sandwich now.

Never thought that gout would hit people at a young age. Yet this kind of optimistic mentaility seems to be ubiquitious everywhere: you never fear something until its hits you - hard.

I had a friend who had a brush with gout a few weeks ago and he described it as excruciating pain in his ankles. My friend told me she only saw old, elderly people getting gout but never young and fit men in their twenties. Out of curiousity, I went unto the net to do some “shelock holmes” and this was what I found.

Gout is a disease created by a buildup of uric acid in the blood and this leads to uric crystals accumulating in the joints and causing very bad pain. It is also a common ailment often asssociated with diabetes and hypertension but it might be hereditary. It is also often caused by a high intake of protein diet which leads to a elevation of uric acid in the body.  There a few main propensities for gout to occur:

1. Hereditary
2. Defects in the kidney to process the uric acid
3. Diet (Gout is more prevalent in affluent societies)
4. Malfunctioning metabolic systems

Apparently, new research(1) has found that sugary drinks also increase the risk of gout.

The risk of gout increased with increasing intake of sugar sweetened soft drinks. The risk was significantly increased with an intake level of 5-6 servings per week and the risk was 85% higher among men who consumed two or more servings of sugar-sweetened soft drinks per day compared to those who consumed less than one serving per month.

It is no wonder that gout is on an increase now, as reported in the United States and other developed countries. We should expect that these “rich man” sicknesses to emerge. Man will just have to live and cope with it, with appropriate changes to their lifestyle and diet.

(1) BMJ-British Medical Journal (2008, February 1). Sugary Soft Drinks Linked To Increased Risk Of Gout In Men. ScienceDaily. Retrieved July 18, 2008, from http://www.sciencedaily.com­ /releases/2008/01/080131214539.htm

What makes science so amazing is its constant and unyielding power that draws people, scientists, young children and even lay-people alike. It has the ability to evoke a visceral sense of wonder.

I had an amiable chat with my 7-year-old cousin about two months ago. Our topic was on black holes, and I told him about getting spaghettified when one gets closer and closer to a one. You should see how his eyes sparkled. We laughed for differing reasons; for my cousin it was his childlike innocence, for me it was the way science excites the young mind.

Yes, science can be interesting (minus the math).

I can remember the day where my notion of the Newtonian world crumbled before me when I first encountered quantum mechanics. About three years ago, I held in my hand a book by John Gribbin (In Search of the Edge of Time), and wondered about the duality of space-time. I did not pity the demise of my Newtonian world; instead I fully embraced the meaning of the probabilistic nature of electrons and quarks. Even today as I read Brian Greene’s The Fabric of the Cosmos, I seem to revisit the wonder I had years ago.

At the same time, I am also overwhelmed by many strange theories that do not make sense. For example, Special Relativity tells us that the speed of light is cno matter how you measure it, whether you are on a train or seating still on a chair. General relativity tells us that the warping of space-time means that if we travel fast enough, we can slow down time. Indeed, if we were to travel at the speed of light, time would stop but then again, we would not be able to have any mass.

This was only the tip of the iceberg that Einstein had proverbially dug up from his work at the patent shop. It paved the way for Neil Bohr and many other trailblazers to come out with a set of Quantum mechanic equations that they do not understand. Fortunately for those who are dumbfounded by Quantum mechanics’ implications, so was Einstein who was so taken aback by the weirdness of quantum mechanics that he said, “God does not play with dice”. Neil Bohr aptly countered the greatest physicist of the 20th Century, “Stop telling God what to do with his dice.”

We have all been deceived.

A nonsensical world – that was what physicists make of the world of quantum mechanics. It is a world so bizarre that it tears apart Newton’s classical world of simple and elegant machinery of clockwork precision. The elegance of quantum mechanics lies inherent in its validity of existence, proven over and over again by many experiments. The universe is not what it seems to be.

Sad to say, the reality that we know is nothing but a façade of order and high entropy. Kept hidden us is the true nature of reality, we are forced to accept a world that is seen and heard largely on common sense and our own intuition of understanding how the universe works.

There is one very simple experiment that I had always liked that demonstrates the idiosyncrasies of quantum mechanics. I had first encountered it in college a few years ago but only when I picked up reading Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan’s books that I truly understood the enormity of the effect of quantum mechanics has on the Cosmos. For that reason alone, the lecturer ought to be fired. (Nah, just kidding) But then, if school is just about getting As on the report card, then Mark Twain was astute in commenting, ” I never let my schooling get in the way of my education.”

Ok, back to the experiment.

Some call it the Double Slit Experiment or Young’s Experiment (after the scientist who first did it). A experiment can be called many names so it doesn’t matter what name you give it, what matters is its result which must of course be reproducible (read: cold fusion fiasco). Imagine spending some time at the beach and feeling bored you decided to play with some sand. You have a piece of hard plastic with two holes, big enough for sand to go in. The result would be something like this. (Figure 1.)

Let’s say you are very, very bored and decide to drop a grain of sand, one at a time on the plastic, in effect you would still get the same result.

Now here comes the fun part, instead of sand, we replace it with light. Here shows the experimental setup.

This is what you would see.

We see an interference pattern. Interference patterns can be generated using waves that are created when you throw a pebble onto a pond where there are peaks (highest part), troughs (lowest part) alternating like bands. What happens when waves cross paths with each other? The result is interference. When a peak of one wave and a peak of another wave cross, the height of the water will be greater and lower when a trough crosses with a trough. If a trough crosses a peak, their effects cancels out each other.

In short, this shows that light can act a wave, or to be more specific, an electromagnetic wave; when it passes through the two slits, it becomes two waves that interferes with each other to produce the interference pattern on the screen.

Here comes the very fun part. Instead of light, why not use individual, particulate electrons? What would we get? In 1927, Clinton Davisson and Lester Germer did just that and instead of the figure (sand), they produced an interference pattern characteristic of waves. Electrons = waves?

To make it more interesting, let’s reduce the number of electrons fired by the electron gun per minute to lets say, one electron per minute. We still get an interference pattern. We can change from electrons to molecules of water, iron oxide, but we still get a result that shows that individual particles like electrons, atoms can indeed behave like a wave.

What’s so astonishing about this, you ask.

Now, we just have to think deeper. If we were to fire the electron one every minute, how was the interference pattern be able to form? Remember, peaks and troughs that are defines waves creates interference. Yet, electrons are particles (like sand), is this a paradox?

If electrons are particles, it definitely has to pass only through one slit right? …. Right?! Wait, if electrons can act as waves, does that mean it passes through the two slits at the same time? Can such a nonsensical monstrosity be true?

Let’s say you are by now very irritated by this dilemma and want to determine once and for all, which slit does the electron pass through. So you construct an electron detector at each of the slits. Voila~ what do you see? There is no interference pattern, instead we get the result similar to figure 1(sand). By now you have already knew that some trickery is afoot, and you try to switch the detectors off. The interference pattern comes out again.

It seems that the electron does not want to be caught in act of traveling through the slit. Turning on the detectors forces the electrons to act as particles, turning them off allows the electrons to act like waves. Now that doesn’t make sense. How does the electron “know” that there is a detector there? When does it switch to an interference pattern?

Maybe you think you are more intelligent than an electron, so you change the experiment such that you fire an electron first and then switch on the detector just before it reaches the slits. Yet, somehow, the electrons know your trickery and no interference pattern forms.

The double split experiment shows the weird nature of the micro-cosmos. At the world of the small, probability rules – this is an inexorable recipe of quantum mechanics. There is no 100%, no probability of 1. This may seem counter-intuitive to some people. For example, is the moon up in the sky if you are not looking at it? Take the electron for example, if the electron does not exist in a particular point in space, and there is only an 85.99% probability that it is there, then where is the does the other 15.01% lie in?

In explaining the double slit experiment, physicists say that each electron’s probability wave does pass through both slits. Imagine it this way: Each electron itself has the potential and hence a “history” of passing through a left slit and likewise another history of passing through a right slit. These histories are summed up, and many electrons provide a “sum of histories” which gives the interference pattern. According to one of the most charismatic physicists of the 21st century, Richard Feynman, this is called the sum over histories approach to quantum mechanics. The interference pattern we see is just an average of histories of where each electron would have hit the screen. By measuring the electron (turning on the electron detector), we had eliminated the other histories of the electron and forced the electron to only one definite path, hence no interference occurs.

Since we are all having fun here, why not do a thought experiment right now. Einstein had always liken thought experiments to real ones, just that the limit is only one’s imagination. How about taking what we have discussed earlier on a grander scale of the cosmos?

Imagine a distant quasar (quasi-stellar radio source), an exotic far-away (the closest one is 1.5 billon light-years away) “objects” in the universe that spews radio waves. Only discovered in 1960s, they are so bright (some are a thousand times as luminous as our own Milky way galaxy) and powerful, that despite their stupendous distance away from Earth, our radio telescopes could still make out their signal in the sky – so powerful that it was once thought that it was a radio beacon of alien origin.

Let’s say some photons from the quasar departs for Earth. After a tremendously (and ridiculously) long journey, we earthlings decide to use these photons to do a double slit experiment. We would of course see the familiar interference pattern. If the earthlings get a little clever and deploy a detector, the interference pattern would disappear. Now the only peeve is that the photon has been already been made a long, long time before Earth was formed and the detector was built. Yet, when we make a measurement of the photon, we immediately condemn the photon to only one path; the photon acts as though they have been traveling along precisely one path.

Think again, has our actions (turning on and off the detector) caused a change in the history of the photon? Had we affected the motion of photons some billions of years earlier? If we had switched on/off the detector, we inadvertently influenced events that happened billions of years ago. Do I hear the music from Back to the Future?

The double slit experiment only scratches the surface of quantum mechanics. As exciting and daunting as it sounds to physicists, quantum mechanics is shocking. Neil Bohr had once said, “If it doesn’t shock you, you don’t understand it.” Yet, people do not shunt it because I do believe the human mind thrives on such mysteries. While we often ask ourselves, “Who can better comprehend the mysteries of the universe other than human beings?”, the ultimate question may lie in, “Are we humans capable of comprehending it?”

I want to be spaghettified.

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References

1. Green, Brain. (2004)The Fabric of the Cosmos - Space, time and the texture of Reality. Borzoi Books.
2. Tyson, Neil Degrasse. (2007) Death by Black Hole and other cosmic Quandaries. W.W Norton and Company.

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Recommended

1.Wheeler’s Classic Delayed Choice Experiment
Provides a more detailed explanation of the “Quasar thought experiment”.

2.The Elegant Universe
Provides an intriguing look into the Quantum World and String Theory. (Video)

3.Black Holes
Who issn’t interested about black holes? (Video)

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Bucket-wheel excavators are heavy equipment used in surface mining and civil engineering. They are among the largest vehicles ever constructed, and the biggest bucket-wheel excavator ever built, the MAN Takraf RB293, is the largest terrestrial vehicle in human history (Wiki).

Gaia would be extremely upset with us for using such unearthly (not to mention non evo-friendly) montrosities…

and dad, forget about that red lamborghini, can i test drive this one?

Someone once said, “To appreciate life, take a trip to the hospital.” Indeed, words like “happiness” and “good” are meaningless if they have no ying-yang opposites like “sadness” and “evil”. The world is such a strange place. Our mind has always tried to conjure up images of order, but underneath this illusion is there is much disorder and chaos. In the physical world, we yearn for simplicity and all things beautiful like a brand new BMW. Even gravity was such a wonderful example of keeping the cosmos together.

Nevertheless, it was too good to be true, as scientists and people soon found out with the advent of Quantum world and that its probabilistic nature was so strange and chaotic that we find it hard to accept. We struggle with chaos because it defies our common sense. To paraphrase Niels Bohr, does god ever play with dice?

This illusion of order is even weirder and maybe terrifying (to some) in the realm of the meta-physical; a truly enigmatic connumdrum called the human mind. While we have come far with physical theories since Newton, reached new technological heights (and threatened the survival of our species with a few thousand nukes), yet how much have we understood ourselves? This concerns, of course, the engimatic human mind which above all, sits like a crown jewel inside our protective skull. We have probed the outer reaches of the solar system with interstellar spaceships Voyager 1 and 2, yet for how long will we keep ignoring our brain - the apex of our consciousness? Are we reaching a new age of brain science or shall i put as “questioning the inquirer”?

Sigmund Freud(1856-1939), the famous but controversial neurological figure, once humbly said that there are 3 major revolutions in man’s modern history. The first was the Copernican revolution which shows that earth is only a piece of rock in the ocean of the cosmos. The second was the Darwinian revolution; Darwin has, to put it crudely, dethroned the almighty human figure to a mere monkey, though it is quite unfortunate that many fervent Creationist are still raving about it. The third was his(Freud) discovery that a central system of control or consciousness as most of us are familiar with, is false and illusory. He claimed that, “everything we do in life is governed by a cauldron of unconscious emotions, drives and motives and that what we call consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg, an elaborate post hoc rationalization of all our actions.”(Ramachandran, 1998) Nevertheless, Freud maybe totally wrong, and this is just rubbish. However, contrary to the development of medical sciences, it shows that we still have alot of learn about our brain and its functions.

For those who have yet to have accquainted with Freud, i would like to give an example a hypothesis of his. Indeed, the father of psychoanalysis has a penchant in giving sexual associations to explain mental disorders. Elucidating this is the Oedipus Complex developed by Freud to explain the puzzling behaviour of some patients who suffer from Capgras’ delusion; they claimed that their parents(or someone familiar) are imposters and that his real acquaintances are not there. Freud believed that as children we were sexually attracted to our parents. It might seem crude and barbaric to us, but Freud believed that somehow this deeply buried feelings were released and hence led to the Capgras’ delusion insofar that the patient finds his parents in his room sexually attractive. This, Freud explains, is very puzzling and shocking to him. Hence, he concludes the people in the room cannot be his parents. Freud’s explanation is no doubt interesting and make good arm chair reading however it fails to provide a conclusive scientific proof to Capgras’ delusion.

Today, brain science is taking huge strides in understanding such perculiar behaviour. Scientists will continue to probe deep into our thoughts and senses. I have no doubt that any answers will have deep and profound philosophical impact on us. The brain revolution is coming, maybe in my lifetime or the next, but it will sweep all humanity and change what we know and that something we often take for granted - our consciousness - and all life that is connected to it.

References
1. Ramachandran V.S , (1998) Phantoms in the Brain. Quill.
2. Answers.com. (2006) Retrieved from the World Wide Web: http://www.answers.com/Freud

Here’s another clip on Intelligent Design by Kenneth R. Miller, Professor of Biology at Brown University.

http://www.youtube.com/v/JVRsWAjvQSg

An excellent presentation about the flawed “idea” about intelligent design and how its proponents are trying to advocate it into America’s education systems. Here, R. Miller provides a huge stand behind evolution and the possible ramifications if intelligent design is assimilated into teaching material in America’s schools. The clip is 2 hours long, but it is highly enlightening and heartening to watch.