Here I am with Spectra. She’s the main character for a comic book I’m illustrating.

Kerry with Spectra (2009)

Here I am with the Spectra’s evil nemesis, “Ms. Alignment”. She stars with Spectra in an upcoming comic book that I’

WHY IS THE UNIVERSE INTELLIGIBLE?

There are two very important questions raised by the quest of theoretical physics theory to find explanations for the origins of the universe:

1. What is implied about the meaning of human nature that we should desire so strongly to explore these questions?

“Why should our cognitive processes have tuned themselves to such an extravagant quest as the understanding of the entire Universe? Why should it be us? None of the sophisticated ideas involved appear to offer any selective advantage to be exploited during the pre-conscious period of our evolution. … How fortuitous that our minds (or at least the minds of some) should be poised to fathom the depths of Nature’s secrets.”

—John Barrow, “Theories of Everything: The Quest for Ultimate Explanation,” p. 172 (1991)

2. What does it mean that the universe is ordered enough to lend itself to such explorations?

“The only incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.”

—Albert Einstein

Earlier this afternoon, when I was casually and uninterestedly perusing a recent paper on T-cell biology, I heard a knock on my office door. Turning around, I found my advisor being let in by Steve, the post-doc who shares my office. My advisor, naturally quite excitable, seemed jumpier than usual. We students were still confused, when he said, “Guys, I just found out a piece of scientific history that I never knew existed”. It went as follows.

Until now, I (like most others) had commonly assumed that the first mathematical analysis of Brownian motion was worked out  by Albert Einstein in one of his five celebrated 1905 papers. Or at least, that’s what most physicists think. The basic result that Einstein derived was that the width of the uncertainly in displacement of a particle subject to random fluctuating forces and viscous drag in a fluid grows linearly with time at long times

It turns out (and I notice that even Wikipedia mentions it) that a french mathematician named Louis Bachelier arrived at this result through a similar analysis 5 years before Einstein did. However, what is interesting is the context in which he did so – it was finance, not physics theory! Apparently, he was attempting the first ever stochastic analysis of the  stock market in the history of finance.  The variable in Bachelier’s case was the deviation of the stock price from its mean value.

It also turned out (as my advisor mentions) that Bachelier’s work was finally resurrected by Paul Samuelson*  here at MIT around 1975 who corrected some apparent fallacies in the original reasoning that would lead to negative prices in Bachelier’s model, by a transformation of variables.

A little more than a hundred years since Bachelier and Einstein wrote their respective works, we know that physicists are a fairly well behaved lot . Clearly ahead of his time, I am however intrigued  as to whether Bachelier would have even foreseen the coming of investment banking. Oh by the way, any guesses to what his thesis was titled? 

*who is better known in many circles for being the author of the most popular introductory textbook on Economics than for his Nobel Prize

I don’t know if you can see this. It is not dark-and-white. It is a soft blue. Note if you can the 51
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….Sb
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..Antimony

Tin, the moon is in front of you. My initials are “S.B.” My name appears on the Periodic Table of the Chemical Elements some five to ten times, depending on how you count it. The people who put it there did know they were doing that; how could they? Prior to the introduction of this chart, prior to science as we know it, in the Middle Ages, in Egypt, in Arabia, alchemists had the Emerald Tablet. This new one, thanks to Mendeleev, is much improved.

I wouldn’t listen to Incubus if you paid me. They’re idiots. What’s an incubus, Wiki? Uh-huh. I see. An evil spirit, has sex with women while they’re sleepin’. The word of the day on dictionary.com is immure, to enclose within walls. Recondite is dealing with very profound, abstruse, or difficult subject matter. I got that one from Kunstler’s blog. Incubus and immure both start with an “I”.

trimble s6 series
w/ trimble tsc2 data collector
& carbon fiber prism pole
DiNi digital level
w/ bar code rod
RTK GPS

This is $100,000 worth of stuff.

Discover Magazine has a list of 10+1, which where I come from is just called 11, rules for time travellers. They’re not rules of the legal sort (i.e. suggestions) but physical laws which determine what you can and cannot (possibly) do. For example:

0. There are no paradoxes.

This is the overarching rule, to which all other rules are subservient. It’s not a statement about physics theory; it’s simply a statement about logic. In the actual world, true paradoxes — events requiring decidable propositions to be simultaneously true and false — do not occur. Anything that looks like it would be a paradox if it happened indicates either that it won’t happen, or our understanding of the laws of nature is incomplete. Whatever laws of nature the builder of fictional worlds decides to abide by, they must not allow for true paradoxes.

1. Traveling into the future is easy.

We travel into the future all the time, at a fixed rate: one second per second. Stick around, you’ll be in the future soon enough. You can even get there faster than usual, by decreasing the amount of time you experience elapsing with respect to the rest of the world — either by low-tech ways like freezing yourself, or by taking advantage of the laws of special relativity and zipping around near the speed of light. (Remember we’re talking about what is possible according to the laws of physics theory here, not what is plausible or technologically feasible.) It’s coming back that’s hard.

Rules for Time Travellers [Discover Magazine]

I don’t even have time to post much, so this is a quick rundown of life…

My physics theory teachcer (the class I’m failing BTW) said all my late work had to be in by tomorrow…I haven’t even started, I have a shit load to do, fuck me.

Seth has a blog, its really cool to read someone elses blog for once, especially when they have interesting things to say for once (I’ve read horrible blogs).  I think more of you guys should blog, its really exciting…

Anyway I’ve already wasted too much time, I’ve been working like very second possible since I found out…time to get back to that *cries*

P.S.  Check my facebook for all my new fun pictures from a random day at school plus pics of my house in some sick nasty lighting, haha

Most people have no idea that Albert Einstein and Leo Szilárd invented a refrigeration mechanism with no moving parts, requiring no mechanical compressor. The range of designs (conceived between 1926 and 1933) were an alternative to the those devised by Baltzar von Platen and Carl Munters in 1922. A number of the ‘Einstein Refrigerator’ designs were subsequently purchased by Electrolux (assignees of the Platen-Munters designs) in order to secure their market position. 

Szilárd, Einstein’s former student, went on to work in many other significant collaborations, most notably, the Manhattan Project.

Bill Jay, a very important writer and historian of photography as well as a photographer in his own right passed away last week in his sleep. Among the many books he wrote, Occam’s Razor was by far my favorite and one that any photographer young or old should read. Many of his writings are directed at young photograhers just starting out, appealing to them to find and follow their own path and not get caught up in all of the art  marketing and academic overkill that has been the trend in photography for the past twenty years. Come to think of it that is longer than I have been a photographer. How long does a trend last?

In one of my favorite essays in Occam’s Razor. Mr. Jay asks young photographers to list what they are passionate about and from that list cut out anything that is not visual and then from that shortened list cut out anything that is impossible for you to do for whatever reason (access, practicality, whatever), so on and so on until you are down to one or two items. The last culling is a consideration of the audience; which ideas would be more appealing to the photographic audience you are trying to reach. At the end you will have an idea of what you should be photographing!

I did this exercise in my head while riding the train into New York. What I came up with jived with my academic background (BA in Psychology and half of an MA in Anthropology). I am interested in perception and a lot of my photography has to do with perception; hence the name for this blog “Force of Seeing”. I am also interested in people. I am an avid people watcher but above all I am interested in physics theory and the nature of reality.  The ideas of psychology and physics theory sort of meld in my image making.

The triptych below is part of my current efforts. There are 3 images in panorama fashion, but each panel is of a different time. They are different time canvases (interesting phrase, I may have to utilize it as a title!). I like the way the pigeons form a chaotic Bell Curve. 

By the way, William of Occam was a Franciscan Monk who had some heretical ideas which led to some trouble for him. He believed that reality exists solely in individual things (one of the guiding principles of my life). He also came up with a principle dubbed Occam’s Razor. Of any two explanations for a phenomenon the explanation that is less complex is to be preferred. In other words keep it simple!