I picked up a couple of CDs the other day. In the mood for some nostalgia, I became the proud owner of a copy of The Ventures — Live in Japan 1965. I remember when the Ventures were hot stuff back in the early 60s. Even though the British invasion had just started (Beatles, Stones, Dave Clark Five, etc.), and even though the Ventures were strictly instrumental, you had to like them. There were four of them, just like the Beatles. And the songs were entertaining, with plenty of guitar twang and fast drumming. And you saw them on TV. I didn’t know anyone who made the Ventures their favorite group. But I didn’t know anyone who didn’t think they were cool, either.

Well, as to the Japan CD… quite interesting. Give the Ventures credit for playing to a place like Japan way back then. Japan was still very second rate at that point. Only twenty years before that concert they were a wayward enemy empire that the US Army and Navy were trying to defeat. Here were the Ventures playing tributes to California surfing and to space shots from Florida in a country that was still recovering from our nukes. If it were record sales that the group was after, you’d think that France or Italy or Australia would have been a better place to play, at the time anyway. (If the Ventures were still in their prime, I wonder if they’d do a night or two in Baghdad?)

The sounds on the album are … well, a bit thin by modern standards. There are three guitars and a drummer and that’s it. No synthesizer or mellotron or anything else to fatten-up the music, as we expect today. But put the volume up loud enough and this album starts to make sense. The songs do sound alike after a while (29 cuts on this album), but if you can get into it, that’s not a bad thing. There may still be guitar instrumentalists out there who put out good sounds, e.g. Joe Satriani and G3, but the Ventures were probably the last big act that could get away without saying anything.

PS, I checked out some Ventures web sites, and learned that drummer Mel Taylor died back in August of 1996. Mel looks pretty beat in the picture on the live album — he appears to have a black eye as if somebody popped him! But he did get around — before going with the Ventures, Taylor was the drummer on the early 60s hit song “Monster Mash” by Bobby Boris Pickett (you still hear it around Halloween), and during a hiatus from the group, Taylor formed his own band and went back to Japan for a tour. There was a big tribute concert in Japan after his death. But my own tribute was paid to Taylor years ago, along with millions of other 11-year olds riding school busses and banging their forefingers on their textbooks according to Taylor’s accented drum roll on Wipe Out. OK, I know that the Surfaris did it first, but I liked the Ventures version better.

(Interestingly enough, the Ventures still make appearances with Taylor’s son Leon on the drums … wonder how he sounds doing Wipe Out?)

I finally decided to make the pilgrimage to lower Manhattan, just about two years after that fateful Tuesday. And I’m glad to report that the site of the former World Trade Center has a sense of life about it, in contrast to the horrors of despair and death that held sway there for many months. The place has become a typically unique New York City artifact (ah, New York, city of oxymorons). I.e., a combination construction site, tourist attraction and wailing wall. There is life teeming on all four sides of it. People with cameras (like myself), bicyclists, young couples on dates, souvenir venders, people on official business, people passing through, etc. Hard to believe that our modern-day Pearl Harbor happened there some hundred odd weeks ago.

I don’t mean to disrespect the memory of the thousands who died that day or to trivialize the significance of what was once such an unimaginable event here on home soil. But I didn’t personally feel any sense of melancholy while I was there, nor did I detect it amidst the people who were out and about that weekend. No sense of awe, no sense of anything deep. Just New York City. Had something like that happened in Philadelphia or Cincinnati or Houston, it probably would have taken longer to regain a sense of normalcy anywhere near ground zero. Yea, if it had to happen anywhere — New York City, you are indeed one tough old town.

Anyway, here’s one of my pix, looking from the southwest corner.

Since it’s the start of the school season, it might be a good time to think about IQ. Just what is “intelligence”? Is it limited to one particular form of mental capacity, or are there many types of intelligence?

This is a hot question in the fields of psychology and sociology. The classic “psychometricians” say that their IQ tests are relevant indicators of a person’s thinking capacity. However, the sociologists say that the people doing the measuring are measuring what they think is relevant. In other words, the test is biased; it’s rigged to measure the things that are important to a certain group, i.e. the “American establishment”. The critics of IQ feel that there are many different types of intelligence, some of which aren’t appreciated here in the 21st Century USA, but may be important in other places or in other times. According to the sociological critics, standard IQ tests measure the mental skills that have been deemed most important to success within our modern American economy and culture.

I personally sympathize with the sociological approach. I’ve taken various IQ tests in my time, and they always indicate that I’m a little bit above average but nothing to write home about. Not quite MENSA material. Well! If those tests haven’t been able to detect my genius and brilliance, obviously something must be wrong!

But seriously, folks, those tests do focus on certain things to the exclusion of others. Perhaps the main thing they try to measure is quickness. Take an IQ test, an SAT, a LSAT, a GMAT, whatever, and the clock is running. You’ve got to be quick. Think fast. Time is money. I mean, is that really what intelligence is all about? Or is all this a reflection of modern social values stemming from our highly competitive economic system? I honestly think there’s another kind of intellectual capacity which these tests pass right on by, and that’s the ability to deeply understand a complex concept.

The typical IQ test question goes something like this: “Person A drives in one direction for 3 hours at 40 miles per hour. Person B starts out one half hour later along the same road from a point 200 miles away, heading towards person A. BLAH BLAH BLAH” You’ve got 30 seconds or whatever to fiddle with some math ratios and solve for a number. OK, that’s cool, but does that really mean that you’d be able to understand the social, economic and historical factors that led to the American Revolution or the Civil War? Does that mean that you will be able to work with quantum mechanics? Does that mean that you can write a beautiful and moving symphony? What I’m saying here is that the ability to understand something so deeply that it’s “down in your bones” might count for something too. But not on an IQ test.

The IQ critics and multiple-intelligence people have been able to identify a variety of mental abilities that are not captured by standard tests, but which are clearly part of human experience. These include social intelligence, spatial / design intelligence, muscle-body intelligence, etc. But the kind of intelligence I’m aware of (because I don’t have it) is political intelligence. Political intelligence is close to what is meant by the word “shrewd”. It probably correlates quite closely with what the standard IQ tests measure, given that shrewdness and political success often correlate with speed. Political intelligence is, in my opinion, the chief determinant of success as we know it today (i.e., fame and fortune, widespread acclaim, power, big money, that kind of stuff).

To make it in the USA today, whether in business or politics or academia or even sports and the arts, you have to have a fast mind, the ability to do some quick math, and a good memory. You need to be able to make a start at most any kind of problem that comes your way. Obviously, in sports and the arts, you also need the body and the talent, but lots of people have those things and never make it to the big leagues. To get anywhere in any field, you’ve got to be able to impress people. So, in addition to political intelligence, you’ve also got to be a good schmoozer (i.e., just enough social intelligence to open some doors) and have a lot of self-confidence. Oh, and it certainly matters what your body looks like. Certain types of faces and body shapes help get people to the top. Let’s face it, dumpy looking people (which I probably qualify for) generally don’t become CEOs or submarine commanders or super models or NFL quarterbacks or US senators. The rare exceptions prove the rule.

And then, finally, you need luck. At some point, how your life goes is determined by a shake of the dice.

I’ve been to the academy of political intelligence. It’s called law school. I didn’t do so well; I got thru with a B minus average. It never got me far in terms of “success”. But I did get to observe some law students who did go pretty far. I’ve also observed non-lawyers who have done quite well in life, and they usually have the same “shrewdness” and “brightness” that successful law students have.

Is this a bad thing? Well, it doesn’t have to be. Shrewdness could theoretically be used for good. Unfortunately, it’s usually used to make a good appearance so as to get whatever you or your client wants, even when the truth gets plowed under.

Truth, unfortunately, is the main casualty of our modern fixation with IQ and fast, shrewd minds. Truth and wisdom can’t be measured very well in a one-hour, one-hundred question multiple-choice test. The slower, “down in the bones” type of knowledge that I spoke of before doesn’t necessarily correspond with high IQ. A slow but inspired thinker may be able to dig deeper than a seemingly bright person. You know, the tortoise versus the hare thing. Thankfully, there are still lots of people who fall in love with the truth, professors and engineers and researchers and doctors and computer programmers and others who keep trying to better understand all the stuff they work with, despite all the pressure from their shrewd bosses to “keep things moving and keep the money rolling in”. Those are the people who generally don’t make the news and don’t get rich. To all of those impresarios of wisdom out there, fighting the demands of a sound-bite, profit-maximization world, my hat goes off to you. And to all of you kids still in school, wondering whether to go for the golden life or suffer some deprivation for the truth, well … at least you now know what your choice is.

It’s finally time for us bloggers to write our Warren Zevon tributes. The “excitable boy” has been swallowed up by the force that propelled his artistic career. I’m talking about death, Zevon’s leit motif. His first album was called “Wanted Dead or Alive”. His song titles include “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead” and “Life’ll Kill Ya”. There were lots of fatalities in his lyrics, lots of guns firing and bullets zipping about. One his final album, he recorded a cover of Dylan’s “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” (which includes the line “mama put my guns in the ground, I can’t shoot them anymore”).

I’ll miss Zevon. He was a true original. Perhaps he wasn’t making the hit parade anymore, but he never went out of style. He never became a parody of himself like Ozzie Osborne. (But give Ozzie credit for being an intentional self-parody, not an unintentional one like Elvis). Perhaps it’s appropriate that Zevon went out while still a force in the music world. Yea, it just wouldn’t have been right for him to have faded away like Bing Crosby or whoever.

Zevon died at home while taking a nap. He closed his eyes, fell asleep and never woke up. It makes you think about the refrain from Ozzie’s “Close Your Eyes”, i.e. “if I closed my eyes forever, would it all remain the same …”

Warren Zevon was the kind of guy who should have put a “don’t try this at home” sticker on his albums. Like a lot of rock stars, he burned out too soon. Most of them succumb to heroin, but Zevon was done in by something more traditional, i.e. cigarettes (via lung cancer). Warren Zevon’s image as a tough-guy had an appropriate ending, but Warren Zevon as a human being didn’t.

Was there a vulnerable side to Warren Zevon? Sure there was. Every album or two had a song that hinted at it. E.g. “Nobodys In Love This Year”, “They Moved The Moon”, “Accidentally Like A Martyr”, and “Desperados Under the Eaves”. The lines in Desperados about listening to the air conditioner hum in a Hollywood Hawaiian hotel are perhaps the best evocation of loneliness to be found in all of rock and roll. Zevon has finally checked out of that lonely hotel room. “Look away down Gower Avenue …” Good bye, Mr. Z. I ain’t in Los Angeles, but I know what you mean.

The God of the gaps: (No, not the clothing store). This thought seems like a good follow-up to my last post about the knots that string theory is getting tied up into these days. Ever since the days of Galileo and Newton and Darwin, theologians have been playing catch-up ball regarding how God fits in with what we know about the universe. Sometimes, when the scientists are in a especially triumphant mood, they tell us that there’s no room left for an all powerful and yet all loving God who watches over us and makes things go for or against us in our daily lives, in accordance with the ultimate meaning of it all (which we see but dimly through a glass, to paraphrase St. Paul, or only as shadows on a cave wall, in the Platonic sense).

A lot of scientists today seem to follow Einstein’s lead in asserting that there in fact is a “God” of sorts, but not a God with a mind and a free will anything like our human consciousness. The concepts of chance and randomness, so important to understanding the workings of the sub-microscopic quantum world, seem to rule out for them any “master plan” behind it all and any cosmic consciousness with the power to make choices. (Yes, I read Chance and Necessity by Monod).

The theologians have shot back at these ideas. One of their weapons is the “God of the gaps” theory. If I understand it correctly, the rationale is that science always leaves something unexplained, some shadow where a traditionalistic God can lurk. I was reading an article recently that disparaged the “God of the gaps” idea as rather lame and pathetic. And yet, a few days later I read that physicists today admit they still can’t answer many of the most obvious questions about the Universe (e.g., in what medium did the Big Bang come about). In other words, the more we humans know, the bigger the gaps seem to get.

The physics of our world are very messy and strange, without any grand patterns that apply against the largest scales (e.g., galaxies and galaxy clusters) and the smallest (photons and quarks). If the Universe was in fact designed by a master consciousness, that master was certainly not interested in organization and consistency. But then again, none of the great artists were neat and tidy. Any masterpiece is messy when you look at it up close; only when you step back and take in the whole do you sense the genius behind it. Scientists could tell us many things about a Rembrandt painting or a Michelangelo sculpture. But they would still leave many gaps, gaps where an artistic inspiration could reside. Ponder that, good atheist friends, next time you stroll down the aisles of a museum gallery. And as to you believers — I’d suggest that you spend a Sunday morning (or whenever you habitually pray) in an art gallery and rethink some of the articles of your faith. Perhaps there are things more strange and wonderful lurking in those shadowy “gaps” than your traditional beliefs would imagine.

Something to look forward to: There’s a good article in today’s New York Times about string theory. As you probably know, string theory is the biggest thing in physics since the Big Bang; it’s the leading candidate for the “theory of everything”, the grand theory that will explain all the forces and dynamics of the universe, from the quantum hijinks of sub-atomic particles to the whirling of black holes. Well, turns out that string theory is getting the physics people into some rough terrain these days. It seems to have a million or more different versions, any one of which could be right for all we know. To make things more difficult, it requires more than four dimensions.

Most string theories require ten dimensions. So where are the other six? Rolled up into little knots or something. Not exactly in service, as far as we are concerned. But one day that all might change. One of the biggest surprises of the past 10 years was the discovery that all the stars and galaxies in the universe are accelerating, speeding up as they spread apart from each other. Scientists had expected them to be slowing down from gravity. But no, something is still pushing them. Can string theory explain this cosmic acceleration?

Yes, it can. But if string theory is correct, the pushing and accelerating is a side effect of the other six dimensions being all rolled and wound up. And someday that’s going to change. Eventually (who knows when) the extra dimensions are going to start forcing their way back into the picture as they “unwind”. And at that point, things are going to change big time. The basic rules of physics that allow there to be atoms and molecules and planets and stars and galaxies and life as we know it will all go out the window. If there is any kind of life left at that time, no matter how advanced, it will probably not be able to survive.

Well, that could still turn out to be wrong. But one thing for sure, the astrophysicists are really in strange territory these days. Just when they thought the big picture was coming together, it all blows up. More and more brilliant scientists these days are being quoted as saying “we don’t know” (the more brilliant they are, the more honest they seem to be about this). Strange times these are.

“Never doubt that a small group of highly committed individuals can change the world; indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

Margaret Mead

That’s a good quote. You see it used by a lot of advocacy groups, especially the nice ones that espouse causes like children’s health and women’s rights and ecological protection. It’s so groovy that Martin Sheen used it during a West Wing episode recently to summarize the whole premise behind the show (i.e., a liberal Democratic President and his inner staff battling for truth, justice and the American way in a confused and greedy world filled with terrorists and Republicans).

But Dr. Mead was really talking about something that goes beyond the realm of suburban liberal niceness. Her theory is complex and even has a dark side. It rests on several motivating principles, including: “small group”; “highly committed”; and “change the world”. Yea, those are potent ideas all right. Not the ingredients of your usual boring day-to-day life. Also not your falsely stimulated existence fueled by some combination of youth, violence, drugs, gratuitous sex, thrill-seeking and money, a life headed for some sort of burn out or bad ending. Maggie Mead seems to be talking about something deeper and more sustaining. Something closer to what life and existence is all about, the primal force that underlies it all.

How does this all work? Is there a common blueprint that applies to small dynamic groups regardless of the subject matter, be it a community group working to revive a neighborhood, or an underdog sports team that innovates a bit and suddenly gets red hot, or a group of scientists who start thinking “outside the box” and come up with new ways of understanding things (perhaps like the Santa Fe Institute), a group of AIDS victims fighting for better care options, or a bunch of young nerds forming a company to sell an innovative computer device that they put together with soldering guns in a basement? One common element is that the group has to be small. The people involved have to know each other, they can’t be strangers. They have to communicate a lot. This can’t be a bureaucracy. Communications have to be quick and trust has to be high. Perhaps the biggest requirement is that the group has to be committed. Not just interested, but ready to make real sacrifices for the cause.

When you bring together these elements, magic occurs. The people involved suddenly wake up and feel alive. They walk taller, breathe deeper, laugh harder, stay up later. Life is more intense, more worth living. It’s almost like a drug.

But it ain’t easy to find your way into such a group. Yes, if you look around, there are plenty of small groups out there that are open to new recruits. But you’ve got to believe in them and commit yourself to them, sort of like a cult. So you have to be careful. Do you really believe in what they are all about? Or are you bending your own beliefs and values so as to be accepted? Most groups have a leader, someone with a lot of charisma, the spark plug, the person who got things going and is recognized as the boss. Is that person misusing the power that she or he has gained? Is it going to his or her head? Or are they staying humble and trying to keep things as democratic and open as possible?

These dynamic small groups come in a lot of different flavors. They might be out to make money; they might be out to get someone elected; they might be out to change a larger group or organization. They might be out to promote a new idea. They might religious or spiritual. They might be trying to make the world better, or they might be concentrating on a small chunk of it, say a neighborhood or a housing complex. Sometimes they are open to the big picture, and sometimes they focus so narrowly that they disregard the side-effects of what they do (e.g., a group trying to stop a factory from polluting at all costs might cause a lot of people to lose their jobs, probably people who sorely need them). And, to be honest, there have been and probably still are some dynamic groups that are doing the wrong things. The Ku Klux Klan probably started out meeting Dr. Mead’s definition, as did the Nazis and the Bolsheviks. And let’s not forget Al Qaeda. Human enthusiasm sometimes takes a wrong turn. But the thrill of being part of a dynamic group often keeps its participants from seeing the mistake.

Whether such groups wind up changing the world in a good or bad way, they are indeed very effective. Most historical revolutions probably start out in the context of a small movement where everyone knows each other. The American Revolution would qualify. Microsoft and many other big corporations were also once just a handful of people working day and night to make money off of some idea or vision. But once the group succeeds, things change. The group eventually expands into a bureaucracy. Things get formalized. Lawyers and accountants get involved. Perhaps the original firebrands are still around, but they are outnumbered by scores of people who are 9 to 5 employees, people who just want a decent day’s pay for a decent day’s work. Eventually, the dreamers disappear and the organization becomes just another agency or non-profit or school or corporation or religion. And that’s not necessarily such a bad thing. Stability is also good. And it’s not impossible for a new group to form within a stuffy organization with the aim of bringing about change internally. But after a few years or decades, most successful movements settle down, get old, and become stodgy and close-minded.

I myself worked in an organization that had been formed about 30 years ago by a motivated group looking to better the lives of poor people within a certain city in the Eastern US. Unfortunately, the group was too successful and their movement grew up into a large bureaucracy. The “big daddy” of the group is still around, and he expects you to act like you’re still one of his original “highly committed individuals”, even though he treats you like a slave employee. So, it wasn’t exactly an edifying experience. I’m sorry that I wasn’t there back in the 70’s when things were smaller and more exciting (and big daddy wasn’t such a tyrant). They certainly did change the world, probably for the better. But many of us who got involved after the charismatic flames died out wonder if the big bloated bureaucracy that resulted from it is still serving the world in a net positive manner.

Yes, Dr. Mead is right. Small groups do change the world. The question that needs to be asked is, in the long run, do they always change it for the better?

Do you ever ponder the ultimate questions, such as what life is all about? What is the worth of an individual human being? Does it all really matter? Why are we doing this?

Most of the time I don’t wrestle with such humongous issues. Got enough other stuff to think about. But over the past week or so, those questions have trampled their way into my mind. And I haven’t come up with any good answers.

One thing that caused me to think about this is my mother. She’s in her eighties now, and has entered the “really old” stage of life. She can’t walk anymore, her memory fades in and out, one of her eyes is going, and she sleeps more than half the day. Every month or so she gets a little bit weaker, needs more help, and can no longer do something that we take for granted. You can just see her life being taken away in little pieces, bit by bit. And yet she doesn’t seem ready to quit yet. She gets cranky, but she’s not depressed. That in itself amazes me sometimes.

Another thing that inspired such weighty thoughts in me was a recent visit I made during work hours to the Homicide Unit. I had to talk with a chief assistant attorney about something, and since I’m not a prosecutor but just a lowly administrative munchkin, I had to wait 10 minutes while the attorney in question jabbered on the phone with someone, partly talking about murder cases, partly about the furniture in her living room. I spent my waiting time just looking around the room, watching detectives and attorneys and clerks working and wandering about and drinking coffee. The Homicide Unit can be a pretty intense place, but I found it in a relatively peaceful state that afternoon, with the sun shining in through the windows. And for a moment or two I got that feeling, that sensation that you get when you’re on the edge of a cliff staring down into the chasm. What is a life? What does it mean? Why do we feel this way about it?

Well, I caught my balance and the attorney finally talked to me. It wasn’t too important, so I was out of there pretty quickly. She got on to the next murder file and I got on to the next monthly cost report. What is it all about? I still don’t know. But it has something to do with our ability to ponder such questions and to feel dizzy when on the boundary of life and death. If you’ve never thought about it, you’ve never really lived. “Study death, learn to live” — I saw that line in a New York Times movie review the other day. The movie in question was “The Battle of Shaker Heights”. The reviewer didn’t really like the movie. Wonder how the Times would review a movie about our Homicide Unit, were someone to make such a movie?

ANOTHER INTERESTING THING: I haven’t done all that much yet with the StarLogo simulation program that I downloaded (available to all on the MIT web site). I did get a chance to look at some of the example programs they give you. It is amazing what those little pre-programmed independent agents can do. Organized behavior appears to just happen out of nowhere, even though all of the little things are acting on their own, totally disorganized.

But what if you try to program StarLogo to simulate intentional cooperation? I tried something fairly simple — I set loose a bunch of independent little boxes (“Turtles”, as they call them) to drift around randomly. Each box has a certain assigned characteristic, really just a number from 1 to 8. However, each box wants to be close to another box with the same number. If a box bumps into another one having that characteristic, the two boxes will “fall in love” and will randomly drift as one, till death do them part. I allowed for chaining, i.e. couples could become threesomes, threesomes could become foursomes, etc. The immediate results weren’t all that interesting — things eventually clump together into a handful of big groups. What was interesting was what happens to the program itself. StarLogo itself starts getting tapped out by all this love. The program gets slow and can’t keep up, such that the groups are constantly spreading out and trying to regroup. Sometimes strange things happen that shouldn’t, like a member on one end of a group “falls in love” with a member on the other end, and starts the group moving in a constant direction, chasing its tail in effect. The problem is that the program is being overwhelmed and isn’t calculating fast enough. Thus, important steps sometimes happen out of sequence. If you put in additional programming steps to insure that things happen in the proper sequence, it eats up even more program power, and things get really slow.

What does this all mean? Well, perhaps it shows that love isn’t easy. You can see why nature depends on getting organized results from disorganized agents who just follow rules and stick to their own little zones and don’t look at the big picture. When you start thinking about what a loved one is doing and you try to coordinate with that, and they in turn try to coordinate with you, and back and forth like that, it burns up a whole lot of energy. At some point the coordination process drains the both of you, and things just don’t go right.

Anyone who is or has been married knows what’s up with that.

Well, the other day I printed out the Web version of that recent article regarding “Zenos Paradox” and the nature of time by Peter Lynds, the college dropout who’s got a lot of physicists and philosophers all riled up these days. (Sorry, I forget the site, you can find it by doing a Google on Peter Lynds). Some people call Lynds a modern Einstein, and some say he’s just restating the obvious. My old mind can’t quite keep up with either physicists or the philosophers any more, but they still interest me. So I tried to read the “lite version” of Lynds paper (you have to buy a copy of some physics journal to see the long version).

I was trained in basic calculus and physics long ago, so at first I couldn’t really see what the problem behind Zenos Paradox is. Zeno himself obviously didn’t know calculus; they didn’t have it when he came up with the problem. But if he did know calculus and the concept behind it, i.e. that time and space can be cut into infinitesimally tiny segments, usually called “dx” and “dt”, his problem would drop away.

(Zeno’s paradox involves the logic of motion and how it relates to time. It’s a thought experiment about a tortoise and a fast guy who decide to run a race. The tortoise is promised a head start, and thus accepts the challenge. This is a thinking man’s tortoise, but he still doesn’t know calculus. He figures that the runner will never catch him. Why not? Because by the time the runner reaches where Mr. Turtle was when the starting gun went off, Mr. Turtle will have moved forward an inch or so. By the time the runner closes that inch, Mr. Turtle will have moved another eighth of an inch. By the time the runner closes that eighth of an inch, … and so forth. In sum, the runner will get closer and closer, but will never pass the struggling terrapin.) (This reminds me of those brain-puzzler things, which usually start off like this: Three guys are looking for a hotel room one night, and finally find a place. The guy at the desk says $31 for the night. One guy puts in $11, the second guy ….)

In the lite article, Lynds explains Zeno and gives the calculus answer to his paradox. But then Lynds says that there’s still a problem. And that’s when he loses me. Actually, it seems as though he knows that he will lose me, because after that he keeps on repeating his conclusion. (When you hear the punch line repeated, you know the joke wasn’t all that good). The Internet article was supposedly meant to be a “Lynds’ Time for Dummies”, but it actually doesn’t do a very good job of explaining things. In one of the footnotes on the article, Lynds in effect tells you to shell out a few bucks and buy the main article if you don’t get it … another 21st Century huckster.

Just what is Lynds’ conclusion? That there does not exist an exact instant in time, e.g. precisely 10:00 PM. In reality, Lynd sez, all that exists are little intervals. Just how little are the intervals? Well, that depends on what you are using to measure time with. With a good watch, maybe you know time down to the hundredth of a second. With an atomic clock, maybe it get it down to a billionth or something. But you never get the uncertainty down to zero. Why? Well, Lynds doesn’t say this, and at one point even seems to deny it, but the ultimate limitation appears to be related to quantum mechanics. At some incredibly tiny point, you can’t split a particle any further. There is a fundamental quantum length, below which you can’t go. Since measuring anything is a function of seeing it (whether by regular light or by some other electromagnetic force), at some point you can’t get any more accurate than to say that there was an event that triggered a photon to be shot out, that the photon reached you, and you saw a little flash from it.

Let’s say that your eyes let you know exactly where this photon hit you, but because of Heisenberg and his darn Uncertainty Principle, you can’t perfectly know both the exact position and exact momentum of the photon. In our case, you know position, and thus you are a bit unsure about momentum; momentum is proportionate to wavelength, and wavelength determines what color you see. Thus you aren’t 100% sure about the photon’s wavelength. You think you know, but any good quantum physicist would tell you that you can’t be 100% sure that the color isn’t really off a little. Thus you don’t know exactly how long the waves are.

Therefore you are a little bit unsure as to exactly where that photon was sent from and thus how far it traveled. (I believe that you can tell where the photon was along the wave when it hit your eye based on how bright it seemed – thus the “wave phase” of the photon is not the problem; the problem is that you can’t know the exact wavelength, which you need given that the distance to the starting point is some multiple of it, with a slight adjustment for the “wave phase” of the photon when when it hit your eye). You can take measurements and narrow this down, but there is still a range of possible places, however tiny that range is, where the event took place that launched the photon (remember, you need other photons to make those measurements – they also have uncertainty). You know the speed of light for sure, but you don’t know exactly how far the photon went before it hit your eye. Using statistical techniques, you can get a 99% range, or even 99.999% range of distances. But that means that you will get an earliest time and a latest time when the event took place, relative to your seeing the photon that it launched. You’re stuck with an interval, in other words. You can’t do any better than that. Just no way.

Another approach to this is to remember that a photon acts according to a probability wave (under the wave-particle duality theories), which means you could have seen the photon in a different place, even given identical starting conditions; and conversely, that different starting conditions could have sent a photon with the same wavelength to the same spot where it hit your eye. You could never know for sure. The event could actually have happened a little bit earlier or a bit later, given the differences in distances that would have been covered, and you wouldn’t have known the difference. Thus, you’re a bit uncertain as to when or where the event actually took place. And you can never do any better, no matter how hard you try.

Therefore, you don’t and can’t exactly know anything. If you fire a cannon, your physics professor could give you some equations that will tell you how far away the cannonball will be at, say, 5 seconds after you shoot. But Lynds would say THERE IS NO “FIVE SECOND POINT”. Depending on how good your watch is, you DO know something about a little time interval that surrounds that hypothetical 5 second point. Therefore, all you can know about the cannonball is that it is somewhere between the two points where the physics equations say that the cannonball should be at the lower and upper limits of the 5 second mark (e.g., 4.999 and 5.001 seconds from shooting, if your watch is that accurate). If you can somehow come up with a quantum watch, your interval is a whole lot smaller — but there’s still an interval, not a perfect instant in time.

In sum, motion is really a blur, as any photographer suspects. Take a picture of anything moving, and the thing is a little blurry. Use a 1/30th shutter time and you really notice the blur. Set the shutter to 1/1000th and it looks a lot better. But there is still a little bit of blur. That’s just the way things are, if I read Lynds correctly.

Or maybe it’s just that Lynds is himself a bit blurry (it ain’t easy to think in his terms; but philosophers and physicists sometimes demand that we think in ways that hurt). Well, this all doesn’t mean that you can throw out your calculus and differentiation and integration lessons. You still gotta do your homework. Calculus is still a darn good and useful approximation of how things work. But at some point, reality is lumpy and bumpy. And I think that this is what Lynds is ultimately getting at. Now, as to whether that’s a better way to deal with Zeno and all that, I’m not sure. Calculus ultimately agrees with Zeno’s presumptions that you can keep dividing up a space into an infinite number of pieces (but then says that Zeno got the rules of calculus wrong). Lynds seems to say that you can’t keep on dividing time or space into smaller and smaller bits; at some point you can’t go any smaller, you have to use the smallest “mosaic piece”, and that piece puts the runner out in front of the turtle. And the race is won!

But of course, I could be wrong here.