Universe

Let's try a thought experiment.

This one comes via Buckminster Fuller: imagine you have a length of nylon rope, which you splice into a length of cotton rope, then into another length of hemp rope. If you tie an overhand knot in the rope, and push it down, through all three kinds of ropes, the knot remains a knot. The material is irrelevant, because the knot is just a pattern that has a specific set of guidelines for itself. Fuller wrote that "a pattern has an integrity independent of the medium by virtue of which you have received the information that it exists." That is to say, if you push the knot all the way to the end of the rope, until it falls off the end, there's no more knot, but the pattern integrity of "knot" remains the same.

People, Fuller argued, are the same way: our cells constantly regenerate, leaving us rarely made up of the same stuff from one moment to the next. Our pattern integrity -- our identity, if you will, or our personhood -- never changes, even if the material substrate does: "every human is a unique pattern integrity temporarily given shape by flesh." I suppose this could be construed as a kind of "soul" for those who swing that way, but it's more fun to extrapolate it to technologies that even Bucky couldn't anticipate.

Computer graphics, for example. A cursor, as it circulates the operating environment, has no clearly definable boundaries: it is not a self-contained object. Rather, like the knot in Buckminster Fuller's rope, it's a pattern moving through an conducting material -- pixels, in this case. Every pixel has the potential to become part of the current embodiment of "cursor," but no specific set of pixels can be delineated as being solely "cursor." All pixels are potential, and every graphic element on a computer screen -- from text to YouTube videos -- has a patten integrity all its own.

We are habitually fooled by our computer screens into believing that the things we see on them are discrete objects. However, it's a necessary illusion: if we thought of our cursors as simply a set of pixels temporarily embodying the form of "cursor," and our screens as a flood of potential units, we wouldn't be able to see the forest for the trees -- just like when you pressed your nose up against the TV screen as a kid and saw it all as lines of red, green, and blue.

Thinking about this has led me to wonder if there is a future beyond pixels. Pixels, surprisingly, have an interesting past (did you know we were one smart neologist away from forever calling them "Bildpunkt"?), and they were a somewhat logical entrée into the world of computer graphics: "Little pieces making up a big picture? What, like the real world? OK, we can wrap our heads around that."

As our standards for realism demand more and more pixels, smaller and smaller subtleties, will we ever break through completely? Of course, we have vector graphics, which store image information as a set of scalable mathematical relationships rather than a simple assemblage of resolution-dependent pixels. Vector graphics, in style and substance, come closer to the Bucky Fuller approximation of "pattern integrity:" they literally store images as a set of patterns completely independent of their display, and amenable to any display. The image remains the same -- the pattern integrity remains the same, if you will -- regardless of the size, position, or resolution of the display.

Traditional (Raster) graphics, with their DNA of fixed pixels, can be zoomed into and seen, understood, in the same way we can zoom into objects in the real world and understand that they are made of atoms. This seems logical to us, correct. But it's the pattern-respecting Vectors that are truer to the nature of the "real" world, for they seem to have caught onto something more ephemeral and hidden about reality.

Still, these are just pixels used differently. What if screens moved beyond the pixel entirely, presenting images in a kind of infinitely subtle gradient of tones? At this point, the pattern integrity of "knot" (or "cursor") would remain the same, but what will have happened to the rope?

In a grand new tradition of using Universe as lodging for really interesting "supplemental material," I present to you the history (and mystery) of g-speak, an incredible new spatial operating environment, as told to me by John Underkoffler, chief scientist at Oblong Industries. Underkoffler designed the fantasy computer systems in Minority Report, then made g-speak, an almost frighteningly futuristic interface that will throw the proverbial brick through the computer screen. Check out the video above to get a sense of it in its full, dizzying glory.

My full article about g-speak is over at GOOD Magazine.

"We've built g-speak from the ground up to be a completely general computing environment -- the idea is that anything you might want to do with a computer can be done as a dialog between you and g-speak. The really interesting thing is that what it looks like on screen, what it feels like to your hands and your mind, is radically different from the GUI [Graphical User Interface] that you're used to."

"Every bit of the on-screen experience that we've all come to regard as basic or elemental over the last twenty-five years is predicated on one thing: the mouse. The whole semi-overlapping-windows scheme, and all the little gewgaws that come along with it (pulldown menus, little nubs you click on to close or bloat windows, sliders, scrollbars, etc.) were designed to accommodate the mouse. Once you replace the mouse with something vastly more capable -- i.e. unfettered human hands -- the stuff that's usually on screen is immediately inappropriate. One of the exciting breakthroughs for us has been to show that many of those artifacts are necessary because you can't see enough at one time: consider what a scrollbar does and why that's necessary. But if you can imbue the operating environment with a more fundamental way of navigating around, a way that's implicit in how you already interact with the world, then it's not like you replace the scrollbar with a gestural equivalent. You fundamentally don't need the scrollbar any longer."

"I'm afraid that I'm the Minority Report culprit. I'd been building human-machine interface stuff like this for years as part of my work at MIT (in the Media Laboratory), and when a kind of advance team (principally Alex McDowell, the brilliant production designer) showed up at the lab to "scout" technology ideas for the movie, the HMI [Human Machine Interface] work seemed to resonate. So I became the science advisor for the film and slightly adapted what I'd been building at MIT -- and that's what you see in the various scenes in which the characters are doing police forensics work on giant screens. The screens were blank for shooting (we didn't have time to actually build the system), but the actors really knew the gestural language, so when we shot the gestural scenes they weren't making anything up. In a way, they were genuinely operating a g-speak system. There's no question for me that that shows vividly when you watch the movie."

"Once the movie came out, we'd built g-speak twice: once in an academic lab, which has certain constraints and lacks others, and once in an extremely visible piece of popular media, which works a completely different way. Audiences really responded to those scenes -- you could tell, talking to people about it, that they felt like they'd seen something that either was real or should be. And since we're most of us engineers and couldn't stop building things if we wanted to, it was inevitable that we'd return to the lab and the workbench and build this stuff a third time. This time, though, it was clear it had to be in the context of a company making a commercial product. That's the only way to get the stuff out there into the world as broadly as we intend. We sincerely believe that the entire world will use their computers this way at some point down the line. Could be six years; could be ten; but it has to come. The interface we've been using for a quarter of a century just isn't keeping up, mainly because of the giant gap that's opened between what the computer (with its incredible processors, giant memory, profound graphics, and networked view of the world) can express and what the mouse and windows GUI allows us humans to express."

"For some information problems, there's no real alternative to g-speak. To comprehend and then be able (in real time) to act on such volumes of data takes more than visualization alone; eyes aren't enough. You have to enlist another giant chunk of the human brain, the part that deals with muscles and muscle memory and proprioception and all that. That chunk of brain knows as much about space as the human visual system does, and they're actually evolved to work together. That's why were all such experts at getting around and manipulating the real world. So it seems clear to us that computers should work the same way -- and that's what g-speak is. It engages both parts of your brain to let you get at digital information the same way you get at the real world. That means reaching into data; stretching it; pointing at it and poking it; spinning it around."

Science, as a discipline, is driven by the desire to understand everything. The immensity of such a project necessitates that science be undertaken not by one group of men and women in one time, but all men and women for all time. However, the final goal always eludes us: to understand this, we must first understand this, but to understand that, we must understand this, ad infinitum. In fact, the very notion of there being a final point in science has become so abstract as to be almost irrelevant; the more we know, the more we know that we do not know, and the end of the game is nowhere to be seen. And, perhaps, there is no end to the game.

Still, we seek out answers to questions. What is the Universe made of, and how did it come to exist? What is the difference between life and death? Where and how did life emerge? The bottom line: how can something come from nothing?

I think, ultimately, that "something from nothing" is the driving force behind most, if not all, human pursuits: art, reproduction, creation mythology, even the American Dream. It's also the question behind the famous Miller-Urey experiments at the University of Chicago in 1953.

The Miller-Urey experiment is Frankenstein to the max: Stanley Miller and Harold Urey filled glass vials with materials present in primordial soup days -- water, methane, ammonia, hydrogen, and carbon monoxide -- and then they shot sparks at the whole set-up continuously for a week. By the end of the week, the vials were full of a brown sludge rich in amino acids, which are, of course, the building blocks of life. Check out the video above (an excerpt from the phenomenal Cosmos series) to see the experiment in action. It has become something of a classic, albeit dated, experiment simulating one possibility of the origins of life on Earth -- the possibility that life, as Charles Darwin wrote, originated from a "warm little pond."

A recent re-evaluation of the work after Stanley Miller's death has found handfuls of new amino acids in the now-dried, vialed, boxed-up remnants of the experiments; 22 amino acids, 10 of which had never before been identified. The experiment, which had lost relevance after the discovery of amino acids in meteorites suggested, exotically, that life might have come from elsewhere, has suddenly become relevant again.

There's something wonderfully alchemical about it; from nothing, something. From metal, gold. From slime, life. And still, after over 50 years, new ingredients for the potion.

For over six months, Veronica McGregor has been Twittering from Mars.

Of course, she's not living among the wind storms and dirt of the red planet herself, but she is the voice of MarsPhoenix, the strangely compelling, first-person, lonely robot Twitter feed that somehow became the official mouthpiece of NASA's Phoenix mission and has catalyzed an entirely new kind of public involvement in science.

MarsPhoenix is followed by over 37,000 people online, and provides daily updates on Martian weather conditions, scientific discoveries, as well as pithy observations about our role in the Universe. It's a rare feat of conviviality for an agency more known for its bureaucracy than its cunning P.R. moves, but such is the power of new media. Today, as the Mars Phoenix mission winds down, NASA's experiment in social networking is not going unrecognized: with recent accolades from Wired and Gizmodo, and a handful of "Twitty" awards under its, err, metal belt, MarsPhoenix is setting the standard for how government agencies like NASA can engage the public.

In conjunction with my most recent article for GOOD Magazine on the subject, I spoke to Veronica McGregor, the "real" MarsPhoenix, about the Internet, WALL-E, and the cinema of micro-blogging.

Universe: How long have you been writing Twitters for JPL missions, and how did they come about?

McGregor: We started the Twitter account in early May, about three weeks before we [the Mars Phoenix mission] landed. My office [the JPL News Office] was trying to do more and more with new media. We've been on iTunes for a while, and we have a channel on YouTube, and we're always trying to push out our material to all these venues. We started doing mission blogs on our own website, and they took up a lot of time -- for those writing it, and then there were the editors, and the web posters. It took three or four people to post one entry on a blog. Not very efficient. But it was very well received, and we got a lot of comments back on our blog.

So, when we got ready for the Phoenix landing, we started thinking about what venues we should use, and someone mentioned Twitter. That was one of my newer employees on staff, actually. She had started her own account, and she wasn't quite sure how to use it, but she mentioned it, and we looked into it. The thing that appealed to us the most about Twitter was that people could actually receive the updates on their mobile devices, and our landing on Mars was going to take place over the three-day holiday weekend, over Memorial Day. I knew from being a former journalist that during a three-day weekend, readership and viewership of news just plummets. People are on vacation, they're not paying attention. So one of the appeals of Twitter was the fact that we could actually post updates for the landing and people could get those anywhere they were, even if they were at a picnic.

Barack Obama's achievement of the American presidency is significant for an endless litany of reasons, but here's a few more.

The lives that will be saved due to his support of stem cell research. All those ideological, anti-science Bush cronies that are going to be booted off scientific advisory boards. The as-yet-unknown discoveries that will come from his promised investments in basic science research. The school kids that are going to get a huge boost in STEM education. No more wildly upsetting dismissals of science in policy speeches. No more censorship of climate change research. A new, demure space policy that encourages international cooperation. The restoration of the Presidential Science Advisor. The appointment of a Chief Technology Officer. Someone in the White House who knows what net neutrality means. The end of the war on science.

Learn more about President-Elect Barack Obama's plan for science here.

And welcome to the future.

Maybe it's the upcoming election and the potential change that it portends. Or perhaps it's the Large Hadron Collider, bogged down with electric failures, that has ceded the science-news space to other subjects. In any case, the last week has seen a slew of exciting, weird, and prescient science news too exciting to ignore, and too varied to all discuss in depth.

For one, the impersonal blackness of space welcomed a new nation as the Chinese launched their much-anticipated Shenzhou VII spacecraft, manned with three "taikonauts" trained for the country's first spacewalk. Technologically speaking, it's not a huge deal -- Russia and the United States conducted their first spacewalks in 1965 -- but for a country that has never dabbled in space exploration before, it's kind of like going from zero to hero. It's a beautifully symbolic, albeit dated, gesture; during the Cold War, space exploration was a status venture, and planting a flag on the moon (which the Chinese plan to do) an iteration of national strength. It's apt that a post-Olympics China is now rediscovering these cachet-earning gestures. I genuinely hope that the Chinese discover the same side effects of national space exploration as we did back in the sixties: awe, fear, hope, and the humility of seeing our tiny pea of a planet from space. We need a good dose of that these days.

On Earth, however, Japan is cobbling together an entirely more ambitious plan, and perhaps one which will eventually eclipse rockets and flag-planting altogether: they are seriously considering building the world's first space elevator. I've written about space elevators before (hey, Brian!), but it seemed like such a theoretical, dreamy concept then ("the space elevator is concrete, as though humankind were reaching its own tentative arm into the great beyond"); now the Japanese are looking at the idea with characteristic pragmatism, talking carbon nanotubes and shuttle payloads, throwing around ideas like "bullet train to space." This is something to watch, scouts.

Meanwhile, NASA is just bungling everything, as usual.

In other exciting news, longtime readers of this website will know that Universe has had several manifestations, both in print and online, as a mutable science column. I'm especially proud to announce that a new such version has arisen (this may explain the recent silence at this URL) over at GOOD magazine's website, where I've been doing a syndicated mini-Universe for the better part of a month, on subjects like commercial space travel, aquanauts, and the Large Hadron Collider. I'm really excited about this collaboration, and I encourage everyone to visit their well-designed website and travel through all the consistently awesome content (and toss a few "GOODmarks" my way).

It always tickles me when people email me to ask my opinion of pressing science issues, and I've decided to start posting selected exchanges for the benefit of all my readers. Remember, if you have any questions, concerns, or just want to jaw at me about all things science, feel free to write.

On Sep 9, 2008, at 4:39 PM, Christian Oldham wrote:

Hi Claire,
I'm wondering what your opinions are on the whole idea of the Large Hadron Collider and the possibility of the creation of miniature black holes.

<5,
Christian Oldham

On Sep 9, 2008, at 4:53 PM, Claire Evans wrote:

Hi Christian,

How awesome of you to ask me.

I think that the LHC is the most important and exciting thing to happen in science since quantum mechanics. I think a lot of enthusiastic things about it, but I definitely don't think that it's going to cause any miniature black holes. Tens of thousands of scientists all over the world wouldn't support something so whole-heartedly if there was the remotest chance it might destroy the entire planet, and billions of dollars would not have been spent. Human beings don't normally do things this extravagant in large numbers, working together in spite of war and economic recession, if they think they're going to kill us all. Obviously, right? But I guess I understand the romance of doomsday; it was pretty fun to get all worked up about Y2K, too. But, like, the Earth isn't flat, and we need to take a big step into the unknown every once in a while if we're going to find out about this Universe of ours.

I for one feel incredibly blessed to have been born when I was, so that I would the age that I am when this is happening.

Besides, the whole point of the LHC is to recreate an environment like that of the Universe mere moments after the Big Bang. If a black hole is what happens when that environment is created, then we wouldn't be here in the first place. Feel me?

Love,
Claire L. Evans
Universe

Dear readership,

As far as I know, I have never used this website as a political platform. I have weakly festered under the steely gaze of a particularly anti-science American administration without uttering much of a peep, but this, however, I cannot let stand.

The Arecibo telescope is the world's largest radio telescope and currently the source of all the data processed and used by various (and already much-maligned) SETI projects, particularly SETI@home. Currently, it's facing massive budget cuts that will effectively end its ability to continue the search for life beyond Earth. The decision to ensure full funding currently rests upon votes in Congress on Senate Bill S.2862 and House Resolution H.R. 3737. These bills, understandably ignored in the midst of pressing social issues and an upcoming election, desperately need more support.

Arecibo is, for all intents and purposes, our eyes and ears to the cosmos. The data it provides is enormously important in all kinds of astronomical science, and to the search for intelligent life in the Universe, which in my opinion is the most significant and noble of the scientific quests, and has far-reaching ramifications for all of humanity. To give up on Arecibo because of benign funding issues is to swaddle our entire race in a cloak of anthropomorphic narcissism, to cease to care if there is anyone else out there, to be so content in our self-serving and destructive worldview as to stop looking for other answers. This is such a huge issue that should never be in the half-assed hands of the U.S. Congress. It's insane.

Please spend ten minutes visiting the SETI@Home site, printing out a letter, and posting it. It's a ridiculously mild expenditure of your time considering the issue at hand. This isn't even politics! It's the HUMAN RACE and our place in the COSMOS we are talking about.

Without the error-correcting machinery of science, we are lost to our subjectivity, to our chauvinism, to our longing to be central to the purpose of the universe. One of science's alleged crimes is revealing that our favorite, most reassuring stories about our place in the universe and how we came to be are delusional.

-- Carl Sagan

More information about SETI (Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence):

SETI Institute
SETI@Home
SETI League

Earlier this year, I attended a "Star Party" at the MacDonald Observatory in Fort Davis, a venerable institution perched on a hill in the far west Texas desert. The skies out there are, understandably, crushingly big and so teeming with stars that the astronomers guiding the public stargazing events need to aim high-powered laser pointers at the sky in order for anyone to tell one star from another. On the evening of my attendance, our guide was giddy with the news that the International Space Station, formerly an invisible blip in the night sky, had recently been expanded to the point that it might now be visible from Earth. His calculations showed it scheduled for a fly-by that evening, so he ushered a group of us outside to the parking lot and commanded us to look at the horizon. Suddenly, a point of light slightly larger than a star emerged from the night.

There it was.

It shot across the sky in a graceful arc, growing larger as it flew directly above us. No one said a word. It seemed incomprehensible that men and women were up there, in that tiny point of light, swallowing beads of floating water and conducting esoteric experiments. I felt inexplicably proud of this achievement, glad to be implicated in it by virtue of my membership in the human race. Despite the thrill, however, it was humbling: here was a minute dot of light, speeding across the sky as it encircled the Earth. From their vantage point, the astronauts aboard the ISS saw dozens of sunsets a day, saw the world in all its complexity as a blur of browns and blues, felt safe and massive in their technological warren; but from Earth we could see them as they really were, one blip among millions, a hunk of metal shining among massively powerful stars and the vastness of space.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

On an unrelated note, now would perhaps be an appropriate time to announce the soft launch of a new project, Space Canon. I will be reading every important science fiction book ever written and blogging about the process, and it might take years. Any other heads are welcome to follow along in my journey, provide suggestions, and make comments like "After reading Neuromancer, I too think the Wachowski brothers should be sued for plagiarism!"

Although I've read a great deal about the fantastically oblique heraldry and insignia of the purported "black world" of the U.S. military -- namely in the (recommended) work of Trevor Paglen -- I've never come across it in the flesh, er, vinyl decal. Imagine my joyful surprise at discovering a treasure trove of mission stickers, identifiers, and decals at the small-aircraft annex of the Portland International Airport this week. Apparently pilots of all stripes pass through and leave their mark. Decode at will, and read more here.