Truth Awaits

I have been meaning to write a note in memory of Peter Ware Higgs who passed away in April. My surname is his middle name, and that is pure coincidence, no family connection except maybe half way back to Eve. Higgs predicted the existence of the Higgs boson (the God Particle) in 1964, the year I finished university. Back then I was busy starting a family and a career, and bosons went unnoticed. Now that I have some time to spare, I am wondering what all that was about.

Indulge me for a moment while I reflect on a book I am reading, "Waves in An Impossible Sea: how everyday life emerges from the cosmic ocean". The author, Matt Strassler, has set out to make the Higgs Field (an obscure aspect of cosmology responsible for mass) accessible to fools like me. By the end of chapter five, I am not convinced he will succeed. However, I notice the parallel between his surprisingly lucid explanations and my own thoughts about the origins of meaning.

Because we experience the physical world through limited senses and imperfect thinking, we want to keep things simple. If we look closer, we find things are not so simple. So it is with mass which is experienced, for example, as the difference in weight of an apple and a watermelon. Simple. 

Strassler explains how to look closer, that what we mean by the word mass is actually three distinct things: gravitational mass, inertial mass, and rest mass. They are different as shown by the fact that a photon has gravitational and inertial mass but no rest mass. That their names share the word mass may betray a family connection going back to the beginning of everything. 

Have I lost you? If so, you'll have to read the book. I'll race you... slowly. The faster we go, the heavier it gets. (That's a joke about relativity.)

Meanwhile, where does meaning come from and how sure can we be that we understand? To make it simple, meaning comes from limited experiences through abstraction and analogy, attending to relevant similarities and ignoring what seems unimportant. As we gather experience, on closer examination, what seemed irrelevant becomes important. Heaven and earth are reimagined as a universe united by gravity, and I am assured that if I keep reading, mass will emerge from the Higgs Field. 

Maybe we shouldn't worry about the Higgs field, but it shows so clearly how we trust our simple ideas until we find them inadequate.

Understanding progresses...
slowly,
while truth awaits.

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The Higgs Boson's Most Captivating Puzzle Still Remains: Big Think
Don't read this. You and I don't think that big. I'm going to try chapter 6 of "Waves in an Impossible Sea". Wish me luck.

Pass the Kleenex

The last time I visited the doctor, she asked me to walk a straight line. I knew I was about to fail the test but I gave it a try because that was what I was there for. She reassured me that my wobbly gait was about normal for my age...meaning I'm about to join the geezers wearing bibs and falling asleep while watching talk shows.

I'm sort-of normal at the moment, but that does not mean things are OK. At some point I will probably be in trouble, and by then, whatever I do, it won't help much. Today's news says I should quit ultra-processed foods because they aren't good for the brain. Maybe chips. But chocolate? Normal ain't so bad ! Pass the chocolate.

I'm getting more normal day by day, which makes this the perfect metaphor to distinguish our discomfort with the way things are from our anxiety that we might put a foot wrong going forward.

The climate emergency is like that. Although there is good information available from a variety of reliable sources, all of it is somewhat uncertain. The uncertainty should not be reassuring. There is a chance things will be much worse than the most likely predictions, and we should make efforts to improve the odds of a better future while preparing for the worst as we stumble into trouble. 

The climate emergency is due to us people willfully ignoring the long term cost of our actions just because we can. Now, to survive, we have to pay the price of a century of GHG emissions, which have increased globally from 1922 to 2022 by a factor of five. Going forward, we are adding more than 50 billion tonnes of GHG (as CO2 equivalent) to our outstanding debt every year. We are simply unable at present to undo the damage that continues to accumulate. As a result, the new normal is more wildfires, droughts, monster storms, heat domes, bleaching of coral reefs, loss of biodiversity, famine, coastal flooding, conflict, mass migration.

So, how can we do the right things now to improve our chances in the future?

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35 Plausible Threats: Peter Simonjic, CBC News, May  21, 2024

Global Economy or Climate Emergency: Just Have a Think, May 12, 2024

Igniting the Great Global Transformation: David Suzuki and Ian Hanington, April 18, 2024

Carbon Capture and Storage: Just Have a Think, January 2024.

Emissions Gap Report for 2023: UNEP

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Didn't want to know all that. Maybe I'll give up something. But just now, it's time for a nap. What's on, Barrymore or Winfrey? Pass the Kleenex. We got drool here.

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Seriously, let's give up something.

Stay Woke

Lianne Rood has No Time For Tim's: (CBC News). She doesn't like the cup lids used to replace single-use plastic lids at Tim Horton's. Really? Is she so concerned about her coffee comfort that she will raise it as an issue in parliament? 

Actually, I think she was aiming at a larger target,  the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and government efforts to deal with the problem of plastic pollution. She is arguing against do-good liberalism in favour of common sense conservatism. 

About doing good, here is a quote about hope from Wendell Berry (the New Yorker): 

"... [I have] become more careful in [my] use of the word “hope”: ... If we do the right things today, we’ll have done all we really can for tomorrow. OK. So I hope to do the right things today.”

Doing right things today implies knowing what we are doing so we can predict outcomes. We get limited information from direct experience like the feel of a cup on the lips. We get the most reliable information from those who have examined more methodically and in detail the way things are going and how they might be improved. 

On the other hand, according to Lianne Rood, the common sense attitude seems to be that any initiative interfering with her comfort today is bad (woke, liberal). She ignores and disparages information presented by the experts. She doesn't want to know that since 1950 the global cumulative production of plastic is more than one tonne per person alive today, and it continues to accumulate at an increasing rate, 460 million tonnes per year at present. That's about 58 kg per person per year.

If we are a bit woke, we might switch to a reusable cup or quit the coffee habit altogether. Then there's plastic bags and yoghurt containers and peanut butter jars and fast fashion and lots of other issues needing attention, because we hope that doing the right thing today will improve things in the future. 

Stay woke.

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What has worked and what hasn't: Emily Chung, CBC News, May 7, 2024

The new front in the culture war: Aaron Wherry, CBC News, May18, 2024