100 Years...

Exactly 100 years ago today Mr. Albert Einstein shattered our previous conceptions of time, space, mass, and energy by publishing "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies," the groundbreaking paper describing his theory of special relativity. One day I will describe this amazing theory in more detail, but right now I just want to give props where props are due to the scientist who revolutionized the way the world works by shattering our concepts of "absolute time."
In a similar vein, I will shortly be publishing a blog describing the recent works of Peter Lynds, a New Zealand man who in 2003 published an interesting paper on a new theory of time which seemingly solves most of Zeno's paradoxes of motion. Some hail him the new Einstein, while others think his theory is worthless and lacking an understanding of calculus. Nevertheless I have been studying his theory and have read his 2 papers detailing the theory and solving Zeno's paradoxes on multiple occasions. We will take a critical look at this new theory and its potential ramifications for our understanding of time.

$2.11 and 9/10 cents per Gallon?

Although I have thought about the absurdity of this before, today I thought about it again when I was filling up at my local gas station. Much to your surprise, I'm not talking about the outrageous price of $2.11 per gallon of gasoline (although that price may be a steal compared to where you live). My line of inquiry today revolves around the deceptive 9/10 of a cent per gallon "extra" that we pay at the pump. What again is the purpose of this? Does it really make a difference? It does seem to trick a lot of people into thinking, for example, that they are indeed paying $2.11 per gallon instead of rounding up to $2.12. You may not think this matters much, but here I will do some mathematical wizadry to show you that it does matter.
We will use my local gas station prices for this example, and also assume that this price remains static. I have a 2003 Dodge Neon with a 47 liter gas tank (47 liters = 12.4 gallons). Let's be conservative and assume I fill my tank to 12 gallons, once per week (I live very close to my place of employment). At $2.11 per gallon, every week I would pay $25.32 in gas. However, at $2.11 and 9/10 of a cent per gallon, I would pay $25.43 per week in gas. Thus I pay 11 cents more than I thought I would every single time I fill my gas tank, if I ignore the extra 9/10 of a cent like most people do. That's an extra $5.72 per year. Sure, that does not seem that much at first, however after 50 years of driving, that adds up to $286.00, just from that freaking extra 9/10 of a cent! You can tack on more to that sum total if you fill up more than just 12 gallons per week (which most of you probably do).

Maybe you're not impressed with this at all. But think about how the extra 9/10 of a cent per gallon affects the entire population of vehicles in the United States alone (an estimated 203 million). If all of these cars are operational, yet conservative as me (thus only being filled with 12 gallons of gasoline per week), then the total of all of these vehicles would pay an "extra" $1.16 billion per year if, for example, they are paying $2.11 and 9/10 of a cent per gallon as opposed to simply paying $2.11 per gallon (of course the actual price of the gas makes no difference in this calculation).
This proves a simple point that for a commodity such as gas, which we continue to consume daily for most of our lives, the extra 9/10 of a cent per gallon which nobody pays attention to adds up to quite a deal of money in the long run!

The Photic Sneeze Reflex

Have you ever sneezed as soon as you walk outside on a bright sunny day? I did today, and I have for just about as long as I can remember. This is a described human trait, occurring in about 1 out of 5 people. It’s called the photic sneeze reflex. It happens to me quite often in the summer, within seconds of walking outside from a building when I am suddenly exposed to sunlight. I then immediately sneeze 1-3 times.

The photic sneeze reflex was apparently described in the late 1970’s. It has also been called the Autosomal dominant Compelling Helio-Ophthalmic Outburst (also known as ACHOO). Scientists are unsure why such an optical stimulus as the sun would provoke a sneezing response, which usually occurs as a protective measure to some irritative nasal airway stimulus. I’m not quite sure if other people experience this, but to me it actually feels like something is in my nose, yet my nose may be completely clear. Apparently a lot of research has been done concerning this phenomenon since it was first discovered, and it is now known to have an autosomal dominant pattern of inheritance (meaning 50% of an affected person’s offspring will inherit the phenomenon). I guess I was one of the lucky ones.

Many hypotheses exist as to what exactly provocates the sneezing response to sunlight, but the leading theory says that it is a congenital "mix-up" of nerve fibers which result in a connection between the 1st cranial nerve (the optic nerve) with the 5th cranial nerve (the trigeminal nerve). The trigeminal nerve is involved with sneezing. Thus visual stimuli, which are transmitted by the optic nerve, trigger the trigeminal nerve, resulting in a sneeze reflex. Perhaps one day I may test this hypothesis by having affected subjects walk outside in the summertime after being indoors (for a specific amount of time), wearing a black blindfold over their eyes. If a large number of them still sneeze, the photic sneeze reflex is most likely not due to a mechanism involving optical stimulation. Although I am unsure of other people’s experiences with this phenomenon, it does not appear to occur with sudden exposure to other bright lights, but only with exposure to the sun. As well, I do not have to directly look at the sun in order for the reflex to occur. Thus there may be some other component of sunlight which initiates this reflex.
As you can see, the photic sneeze reflex is more of a nuisance, but nevertheless interesting. Perhaps it is just an anomaly? It would appear not to endow humans with some sort of adaptive ability or survival advantage if they had inherited it. In fact, due to it’s potential dangers, would-be pilots who have the photic sneeze reflex are not allowed to fly combat jets, for fear they would sneeze when exposed to the sunlight through their cockpits. As well, some people have reported car accidents due to this reflex! Nevertheless, perhaps in the future this unusual phenomenon will shed light on how neural circuitry develops from the code contained within our inherited genetic material.

The Fear of Animals

Wild animals are instinctual creatures. Nature (or God, depending on your viewpoint) has given them instincts to survive the harsh elements of this planet, and particularly to escape other predatory creatures that stalk the land, sea, and air. These instincts are even present in man, although to a degree that they can be controlled and overridden by conscious thought. As well, some of these instincts, through the process of constant bombardment of repetitive stimuli, can undergo a process of extinction whereby the instinctual response becomes less and less after repeated stimulation.
Given these natural instincts of animals, I will here maintain the observation that the worst thing you can do to a wild animal is to make it afraid. When a wild animal encounters a stimuli that is either shocking, sudden, or novel (perceived as a threat), its body undergoes an automatic process which scientists refer to as the “fight or flight” response. This is a natural response to some sort of external stressor. It involves a rapid release of energy-gathering substances within the body, including the familiar hormone epinephrine (also known as adrenaline), as well as other catecholamines. These hormones produce a body-wide systemic response that allows the animal to fight off the offending stimuli, particularly predators, or flee to avoid death. The effects of this response include dilation of the pupils, an increase in heart rate, blood pressure, and respiration (which results in increased oxygenation to muscles), and constriction of blood vessels close to the skin so that if an injury is sustained, blood loss is attenuated.
The “fight or flight” response is present in humans as well. Have you ever had a person jump from behind something suddenly and scare you? It does not feel that good. The sudden release of the catecholamine hormones can mainly be described as anxiety-producing (similar to a short-lived panic attack), although some people describe it as a “rush.”
The response is the same in a wild animal. Making an animal afraid is even worse than when somebody scares you. Humans can adjust their stress response consciously, and, because of our high level of intelligence, threats are perceived very differently than animals. To a wild animal, if the stress response is initiated, the particular stressor is almost always perceived as life-threatening.
Think of a deer that stares straight at your headlights on the highway while you are speeding straight at it at 55 MPH. The stress response is paralyzing. Again, try to get within 5-10 feet of a squirrel or other small wild animal. Especially if they have never seen a human being in their lives, they will perceive you as a threat to their life and try to flee. Even worse is when a wild animal is captured.
Luckily, repeated exposure to humans and other threats attenuates this response, evidenced by deer and other animals that are walking around towns in the middle of the street without fear. They have adapted their stress response due to the process of extinction. The domestication process is a good example of how animals can genetically lose the stress response when exposed to humans, but there are only a handful or so of these species.

So the next time you encounter a wild animal, be careful about how you approach it. The “fight or flight” response is a very powerful natural instinct. On one hand, it is a good thing, because it aids survival of the species as a whole. But to that individual animal, they perceive you as a threat, and thus they think they are going to die. It is a shame that most people do not think about this nor do they care when they frighten a poor animal. Hopefully after reading this, you will. Please remember that other forms of life live on this planet as well. We should, as Albert Schweitzer says, have a “reverence for life.”

Moving Through Space and Time

In this particular article, I will be detailing some rather abstract concepts. My intention is not to confuse you of course, but to highlight some ramifications of the theory of special relativity, which was developed by Albert Einstein and published in 1905 as “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies.” I will not explain the entire theory here, but I wish to simply illustrate a point on the nature of time and space which I think I can easily explain and will offer you a new way to think about “moving through space and time.”
A primary tenet of the theory is that our universe consists of 4 dimensions: 3 spatial dimensions and 1 time dimension (although the newer string theories developed in the past 20 years say there actually may be 10 or 11 dimensions, though string theory cannot be proven in a scientific sense). The concept of this 4-dimensional space-time continuum is relatively new to the 20th century, although fascinatingly, the concept was first described by H.G. Wells, explained in the first chapter of his classic, “The Time Machine”: “’Clearly,’ the Time Traveller proceeded, `any real body must have extension in four directions: it must have Length, Breadth, Thickness, and--Duration. But through a natural infirmity of the flesh, which I will explain to you in a moment, we incline to overlook this fact. There are really four dimensions, three which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time. There is, however, a tendency to draw an unreal distinction between the former three dimensions and the latter, because it happens that our consciousness moves intermittently in one direction along the latter from the beginning to the end of our lives.'“ This book was actually written 10 years before Einstein published his theory of special relativity, quite amazing for a novelist!
Although I will not explain all of the theory of special relativity at this time, it is important to know a few concepts. Einstein said that there was a relationship between space, time, and the motion of objects. This was based on the constancy of light within a vacuum, which was only confirmed several years before Einstein developed his theory. Einstein imagined what it would be like to be a particle of light, and how simultaneity of events would differ if a light source were moving. The classic example of this is a moving train.
I will not go into details here as they are pretty complex (I will devote a whole blog to these concepts later), but Einstein basically said that as objects move, relative time slows down. As objects in motion approach the speed of light, their “internal clocks" get slower and slower, with time completely stopping if the speed of light is reached (although the speed of light can never be reached because it requires an infinite amount of energy to do so, thus, the universe has it’s own “speed limit”). In the same vein, distances also shrink as an object is in motion. Thus, motion has an effect on relative time and space. You can think of each object or particle having their own “internal clock,” and thus his theory abolished the concept of a “universal time” which applies to every object. This basically shattered thousands of years of thinking about how time worked, as events which at first appeared to occur simultaneously, no longer occurred at the same “time.” 10 years later, in 1915, Einstein published his general theory of relativity, which among other things described that gravity had the same effect on time and space as did motion.
This concept is relatively difficult to grasp for some, and I have only begun to scratch the surface of this amazing theory. However, I will try here to explain a unique tool for visualizing how this works. Imagine a graph with an X and Y axis. On the X axis we will plot Time, and on the Y axis we will plot Space. Now we will play around a bit with objects at rest, objects moving at the speed of light, and objects in motion at a velocity somewhere in between these two.
How would you describe an object at rest on this graph? First, we must simplify things, because really there is no such thing as an object at absolute rest. We must speak of relative rest and relative motion. I am sitting at what appears to be at rest at my computer desk, although I am only in relative rest to the earth. Relative to the sun, for example, I am actually in motion, since the earth is rotating, and revolving around the sun, and I am located on the surface of the earth (as well, the solar system is moving, galaxies are moving away from each other, and the universe itself is expanding, so we can never really be at absolute rest).
So imagine I am at relative rest to the earth. How would a line plotted on our graph look? Well, we are always moving through the time dimension (except in one special circumstance which we will get to shortly!), which is the X axis of our graph. But in this case we would say that if I am at rest I am not moving at all through the space dimensions. Thus, a plotted line representing an object at rest will appear as a horizontal line on the graph, because it is only moving through the dimension of time, and not moving through the dimensions of space.
Now let us imagine that I am an object moving at the speed of light (ignore the fact that this is impossible, for illustrative purposes). According to Einstein’s theories, if an object indeed could travel at the speed of light, it would be moving only through the space dimensions, and not through time at all, since relative time stops for objects moving at the speed of light. Now how would this scenario look on our graph? A plotted line representing an object moving at the speed of light will appear as a vertical line on the graph, because it is only moving through the dimensions of space, and not moving at all through the dimension of time.
Given these two scenarios (a vertical line for objects moving at the speed of light, and a horizontal line for objects at rest), any object which is in motion at a velocity somewhere in between rest and the speed of light will appear as a diagonal line on our graph, with the slope increasing as we move faster and faster towards the speed of light (imagine the appearance of this like an arm of a clock moving from 3 to 12). The slope of a horizontal line (object at rest) is 0, whereas the slope of a vertical line (object moving at the speed of light) is 1. Thus our graph can be used to easily illustrate the concepts of special relativity.
Now imagine I start at rest (the horizontal line on our graph), and then I start to move. Our line will begin to shift upwards at increasing slopes as I move faster and faster. Can you see what is happening? As an object’s velocity increases faster and faster, it is actually traveling more and more through the space dimensions, and less and less through the time dimension. It is as if in order to move through space, we must give up some of our time! At the speed of light, we cannot move through time at all, and at rest, we cannot move through space at all! As you can see, I find this pretty amazing. It illustrates that time and space are inextricably linked. The more we travel through space, the less we travel through time, and vice versa. In the future, I will explain more about this amazing theory, but for now, this explanation will hopefully suffice to help you begin thinking about the nature of our universe, and the implications of special relativity. It completely changed how we view the universe.