Socrates, Spinoza, and the Buddha

Spinoza has been lurking in the background of my life.  Someone I need to read at some point.  It all stems from that famous quote of Einstein's about god and how he believes in a Spinozian concept of god.  Lots of folks I respect seem to value Spinoza.  Well, I haven't made the time (or maybe I have at some point and was overwhelmed by the opaqueness of his writing, I honestly am not sure).

Attributed to Socrates, my favorite pithy saying has long been "The unexamined life is not worth living".  I considered it a metaphor for why one should pursue knowledge and understanding over the material things in life.  But I have never unpacked it more than that.

So, imagine my surprise when I came across a random youtube video (bet you've never done that before!) about Spinoza and encountered this masterful unpacking of my attaction to the Socrates saying:

"The difference is between a man who is led only by an affect or by opinion, and one who is led by reason. For the former, whether he will or no, does those things he is most ignorant of, whereas the latter complies with no one's wishes but his own, and does only those things he knows to be the most important in life, and therefore desires very greatly. Hence, I call the former a slave, but the latter, a free man.' "

So there it is, those living the unexamined life are slaves to their own subconscious or, worse yet, their blindly internalized values inserted into them by the societies into which they were born.  Thank you, Spinoza - I understand myself a little bit better now.  (A little less of a slave to my inner, opaque mechanisms?)

Another thing lurking in my life is an attraction to Buddhist meditative practices.  Once again, my fascination with meditation has never been central features of my life in a way I would aspire it to be.  I'm attracted to the idea of separating from my emotions.  Acknowledge them but not be owned by them (one of the many reasons I love the Bene Gesserit's "Fear is the mind killer" mantra):  Let them pass through me. Lazily however, I just sort of admire Buddhist meditative practices as goals 'out there'.  I'll get around to being serious about it after I read some of Spinoza's works or something...

And, then, in the same video, I got hit with another Spinozian truth-bomb that elucidates this, other, interest of mine in a sophisticated way:

'If we separate an emotion-affect from the thought of an external cause and join it to other thoughts, then the love or hate toward the external cause is destroyed, as is the mental instability arising from these affects."

AI art

Einstein, you may be a pretty smart guy, introducing me to the idea that Spinoza may have something to say!

Son of Etari

Etari was a short, ancient-looking man when I knew him.  If you were not paying attention, you might think him frail, but actually he had a disproportionate, wiry strength.  When I worked with him at the winery in the late 90’s, he was fond of me.  My uncle said that was a badge of honor; Etari did not approve of most people.  He almost never talked about himself or his family, but one day, out of the blue,  he said something like, “You know I brought my son from Morocco to work with me here, many years ago.” Surprised and interested, I started to pepper him with questions.  He winced as if he had let something slip he’d rather have kept inside.  He waved vaguely at my uncle and said “He, he can tell you…” as if it would be too exhausting to answer my pesky questions.

On the drive home, my uncle obliged by telling me the tale.

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AI generated art

Etari’s son was tall and handsome.  Etari would look up at him with pride, a sparkle in his eye.  This would be in ‘78 or ‘79.  In those days we did the payroll in cash.  None of the workers had bank accounts.  So, during the harvest, there would be 17,18 men working a 60 hour week and that would be a lot of cash to make payroll.  A dangerous amount of cash. Each week, we would go to the bank at a different time and on a different day, taking a different route each way.  There would be three of us in the car.  With guns.  You know we have a lot of bandits here in Corsica, or at least we did in those days.  Now that can make more money off of the tourists, so it is better.  Anyway, we took precautions and we were never held up.  

One time though, the second year Etari’s son was working with us, the bandits figured out which day the workers got paid.  They waited until all of us white men had left and then they came out in force and encircled around the Moroccans and demanded they give up their cash.  These were serious men, armed, and with ski masks pulled over their faces.  A few Moroccans complained and said they would have nothing to send back to their families that week.  A few shots were fired in the air and the Moroccans reluctantly began to offer up their envelopes.  Etari’s son, with the indignity of youth, aggressively stepped forward and threateningly said “You have no right.  We worked hard for this money.”  When the Corsican bandits laughed at him, he made the fatal error of lashing out and pushing the closest bandit back, hard.  And so they shot him.  They shot him dead right in front of his father.

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“Did they ever catch anyone for the crime?”

“No.”

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We drove home in silence and, the next day, when I saw Etari, I didn’t know what to say.  He saw the pained expression on my face and he sighed and said “Yep… and so… it’s like that…”  and turned away and got to work.  We never spoke of it again, but I remember.  I remember your son whom I never met, Etari Ahmed. *

* I am writing his name phonetically because that's what my uncle did for Etari could neither read nor write. Check out the link at the top for more stories about him from my winery days.

Sometime, They Surprise You

I've been out sick this week.  At our school, we often just post a note on the door telling students the class has been canceled.  When it is my turn to post a note for another teacher, I have my usual joke: "Oh the students were distraught at the cancellation!"  A kind of Dad joke for teachers if you will.

So imagine my surprise as the tables are turned on me by my astronomy students TH and IW (photo credits: BK):

Not to fear, intrepid astronomy students, I'm on the mend and will return shortly!

Arbitrarily Positive about Labels

I have known the basics ever since I was in high school myself:  What we call positive and what we call negative is arbitrary; the truth is that electrons and protons must be oppositely charged but who wears which hat is just historical baggage; Ben Franklin is somehow the origin of this decision.

But today, while teaching about this in physics class, I speculated how the details of Franklin' glib macroscopic choice got translated into specifically assigning the microscopic negative to the electron and microscopic positive to the proton years later.  In the moment, I guessed it was Rutherford's fault for discovering the nucleus with alpha particle and thereby assigning it a positive charge.

Well, I was close but not quite right.  Here's a timeline based on an hour of internet sleuthing:

circa 1750 Ben Franklin proposes calling an excess of electric fluid "positive" and the lack of it "negative".  Somewhat arbitrarily, he determines which direction this hard-to-detect 'fluid' is moving with his experiments isolating charge in Leyden Jars.

Leyden Jars

1799 Alessandro Volta, looking to disprove's Galvani's proposed elettricità animale (from twitching frog legs), invents a primitive battery.  In confirming the flow of current with his electrometer, he conforms to Franklin's idea of positive charge flow. 

Voltaic Pile

Volta's Electrometer

1820 Hans Oersted noticed a deflection in a compass needle during a demonstration involving current during a lecture.

In this way, the direction of forces on conventional current (positive charge movement) in a magnetic field are determined. 

1879 William Crookes discovers that cathode rays from his eponymous tube are deflected the opposite way of conventional current, hence cathode rays must be negative.

Crookes Tube

1897 J. J. Thomson discovers that these cathode rays are made of electrons

 

In 1911 Ernest Rutherford discovers the nucleus and knows that it is positive by its deflection of alpha particles (which he discovered where positive by 1908 by their deflection in the same direction as conventional current!) But the deal was already sealed in 1897 so I was off by a couple of Nobel prizes (1906 Thomson; 1908 Rutherford)

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the TL;DR version:

Electrons are negative because they deflect opposite of current in a magnetic field and current is the movement of positive charges because Franklin said that what was moving in and out of his Leyden jars. 

The irony is, of course, that rather positive charges moving in and out of his jars, Franklin was really noticing negative charges moving out and in.  No big whoop, we had to start labelling those charges at some point and it was always going to be arbitrary.

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Bonus Fact:

Franklin used the terms Positive and Negative because their original meanings were "placed" and "denying" respectively.  Makes sense if you are thinking about an electrical fluid accumulating or lacking.  

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P.S.

If you think the plus and minus stuff is surprisingly arbitrary, wait to you find out what physicists did when they had to name the three-charge system for the strong nuclear force (1973):

Red Green and Blue Quarks and Gluons

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P.P.S.  1964 Gell-Mann named the constituents of neutrons and protons, in part, from a line from Finnegan's Wake:

"Three quarks for Muster Mark!
Sure he hasn’t got much of a bark
And sure any he has it’s all beside the mark."  

-James Joyce

Beyonce, Gravity, and Wandering off the Trail

Yesterday, in class, after returning the previous quiz, and after gently (?) chiding the class for the frequent sin of omitting to multiply mass by the gravitational strength 'g' in order to get an actual force when calculating torque on a seesaw (many student just multiplied the mass in kg times the lever arm and called it a torque, ahh the follies of youth...), my mind did one of those Rideout non-sequiturs.  

Well, my non-sequiturs are really just stream of consciousness associations that make perfect sense in my own head... just... you know... not to other people.  So, for me it went like this: 'you should've put a g in there' to 'Sounds a little like Beyonce's 'you should've put a ring on it'.  Feeling like there was something there in the moment, I spent about 1.5 seconds on trying to make it work.  Feeling old and defeated but nonethwless slightly inspired, I shared my idea with the class "You know, I feel like there's something here; "If you wanted to weigh it, you shoudda put a 'g' on it... a la Beyonce, you know?"  The class looked at me slightly askew and politely waiting for me to shrug my shoulders and move on to the next problem.

Later in the block, which they were transition to a lab, I got an email from CM (with a consult from SM (she insisted she played a critical role)) containing the following:

if you weigh it then you gotta put a g on it

If you weighed it then you shoulda put a g on it

Don't be mad once you see he took points off it

If you weighed it then you shoulda put a g on it

So good, amirite?  I knew there was something there.  Reminder to self:  Someone is always listening, no matter how far off the trail you wander (actually, maybe students listen extra close when you go off the trail?).

Ai art, prompt: "Beyonce weighing things and doing physics"

Dune, Cell Phones, and A Sense of Self

Fresh off of seeing Dune 2 at the Imax theater.  Explaining to the kids where the tragic story of Alia Atreides goes in the book series.  Then I am struck with the parallel of her story and some thoughts I've had about the current youth being raised with the internet piped straight into their laps from childhood onwards.

Warning: mild spoilers about the Dune (both the movie and the book) regarding Paul's sister.

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Alia became self-aware at the same time all her ancestral voices are awoken in her while she is still in her mother's womb as her mother undergoes the ritual of becoming a Reverend Mother.  Hence, she is referred to as the "Abomination."  She is born self aware and completely aware of everything going on around her as if she were a well informed adult.  Unfortunately, she never had an opportunity to develop a sense of self and eventually is overcome by the interior voices of her ancestors.  This drives her crazy with dire consequences for her, her family, and, possibly, the entire human race.

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  Current adults grew up without cell phones and without the ubiquitous entertainment-on-demand that is the internet at your fingertips.  So, while we may walk around like zombies glued to our screens and fritter away hours of everyday on social media or binge watching Netflix, at least we grew up making social bonds and forming a sense of self the old fashioned way (that is to say slowly, clumsily, and with a very small peer group - with plenty of alone time to discover what your own independent thoughts actually are).  But I worry about the kids growing up today.  When do they get that formative alone/undistracted time to form a strong sense of self?  

I don't think of myself as a doomsdayer, but I do think society has been overly glib about the unknown effects this will have on the future adults of society.  Will we be facing a generation of Alia Atreides one day? Probably not, but still, I worry...

AI art. Prompt: "kids with cell phones have a lack of identity"

Incompetent

 Today, I had to interact with the world as it was the state Science Olympiad tournament in Boston.  

Shortly after arriving, the lady checking us in said to me "I love your hoodie, I'll have to buy my husband one!".  I was wearing my "I am Kenough" hoodie. So, trying to make small talk in a conversation way like I think normal people do, I say "Oh, is your husband's name Ken too?"  She looks confused and says "No..." Awkwardly, I try to recover and supply a handy "Oh, he's just a big fan of the movie?"  and she says, after a long and uncomfortable pause "No, he's never seen it."  I'm beginning to realize I'm in over my head but she takes pity on me and supplies a weak "But I really liked the movie".   I make one last attempt to engage: "Oh, I get it - you'll be able to enjoy seeing the hoodie on him when he wears it!"  She quickly looks to check in the next team and I move on, defeated once again with the impossible intricacies of small talk.

Later on in the day, my partner-in-crime (fellow physics teacher and Science Olympiad "Coach" LK) and I are navigating our way to an event we are scheduled to help out with.  We come up on an elevator.  A device with a summoning mechanism I feel myself to be familiar with:

So I quickly and confident press the summoning button:

Oh, shoot, it doesn't even depress.  It's clearly a fake so I start to walk further down the hall to look for a proper summoning interface.  At this point, as I flail in confusion, LK begins to laugh at me and resolves the issue nicely with deep insight:

Really, they shouldn't let me leave the house...