That the switch from newspapers to digital handheld devices – for the purpose of sourcing all my news – is limited only by my comfort-level with technology is telling of some shortcoming of the print industry.
The changing journalistic scene is a reflection of the way people engage publicly and of how public discourse has changed. Quoting Tocqueville,
A newspaper is an adviser that does not require to be sought.
Believe me, I still do seek out the newspaper to be certain on some matters, but I am also a dying breed. News has changed from page-long pieces to 140-character tweets, but the information we are getting has tripled. As Neil Postman argued in 1990,
Everything from telegraphy and photography in the 19th century to the silicon chip in the twentieth has amplified the din of information, until matters have reached such proportions today that, for the average person, information no longer has any relation to the solution of problems.
There is too much to read and to process. Today, people are quite likely to be discussing news over coffee, especially in light of the fact that almost all information tends to be “newsified”.
The power of the newspaper press must therefore increase as the social conditions of men become more equal.
My questions are, thus, two-fold. Do we live in a society that is increasingly unequal? Or have we transformed to become so individualistic that a common voice can no longer exist?
Alexis de Tocqueville
de Tocqueville addresses the newspaper, and the responsibilities of the Press by extension, in terms of their capacity to unite. In the same chapter, he also draws upon democracy’s tendency to leave individuals “very insignificant and lost amid the crowd”, the the responsibility to homogenize which lies with the newspaper.
While these notions may have coincided in Tocqueville’s times, the landscape of governance has changed vastly. For one, Tocqueville was writing in the 1830s, at a time when democracy itself was as new as the emerging print industry, when its spread and depth were both limited.
For another, for me to able to infer that the power of the newspaper is waning, I am also inferring that the newspaper must exist only on paper, that news cannot be delivered in other forms, and that all peoples must unite themselves under the light of one beacon, not any other. Are we right in thinking this?
So, while the newspaper – as an entity comprising words in ink and ink on paper – may be on the decline economically, the responsibilities of the paper are now in different hands. As for Tocqueville’s cautioning against the individualists, much is to be said.
In the execution of goals democratically, Tocqueville’s faith in which mires his thoughts, there will be opportunities to “wrong the people” by desiring an action that feels right personally. In other words, the French philosopher has not considered the evils of populism in vouching for the newspaper.
Today, however, technology enables so much that things work the other way round. Instead of firing up common beacons, discrete ones, classifiable in terms of social status, culture, financial needs, and personal desires, are lit, and people flock to them.
I concede, there is a barrage of news, but there is also democracy in news! I can finally get what I know I will use the most. Is that wrong? In fact, does it even suggest a conflict in any sense?
I must also concede that Tocqueville was right in championing the cause and function of democratic rule, but that it mandates representation above all else is something not to be forgotten.
In the ongoing version of the discourse between public policy and responsible journalism, individuals have the responsibility to cure more evils than they cause, individuals must hone their own moral framework, and individuals are tasked with interpreting democracy in a way that perpetuates its essence. Is this so bad?
Even if the newspaper has left us, the notion of news hasn’t, not in this “post-reporter era”.
Access to multiple sources of news over the internet increases aspirations corresponding to news consumption: readers don’t have to restrict themselves anymore to news that we or they think will be useful to them.
Consequently, news aggregators become more than that: they are now personalized news repositories from which news is consumed. With implementation of tags-based searching and use of metadata in posts, aggregators can be made to fetch information that they can algorithmically evaluate as being useful to us.
Last, aggregators are mostly automated, shrinking delivery time and removing it out of the equation.
Google News
RSS readers are largely meant to “keep up with” news as and when it happens. However, given the volume of information, which RSS readers were designed to handle in the first place, the lifetime of a news story is reduced to a few hours or even just a day. In other words, if articles in the aggregator are not consumed quickly, they will be replaced by more current ones.
Human-powered news aggregation has its most significant advantages with respect to the accumulation of digital property. Where a news aggregator would spit out numerically evaluated news, human curating serves to:
Cut down a lot of the riff-raff that inevitably arises out of mass-aggregation and make news-reading easier, therefore more pleasurable, especially when readers are being exposed to a broad range of writers and other readers
Maintain the value of “social currency” – especially when social media is shaping up to be the single-largest interface through which news is consumed, resulting in a large influx of data – in such an environment, being more accurate makes as much sense as clocking in first
There are some guidelines to keep in mind when working with aggregated news. The most important is that one must ensure citation leads to content, and the source of that content, without ambiguity.
The advent of social media has given rise to a “post-reporter” interface between the producer and the consumer, with “post-reporter” signifying a marked proclivity toward crowd-sourcing by producers. Instead of taking news to the people en masse, a social media interface works as an aggregator with in-built sharing (multi-dimension engagement) and cross-promotional (e.g., incorporate a button to Amazon when books are reviewed online; get a cut of the sale) capacities.
On a macroscopic level, social media renders news as a commodity: it can be engaged with in ways more than simply reading (liking, sharing, recommending, agreeing, dismissing, etc.), and this gives rise to the commoditization of information. Where a story was compressed into letters, the same story can now be conveyed without any such information-degeneracy.
For example, opinion pieces earlier marked a relationship between newspapers and their readers; now, they are springboards for public debate simply because social media platforms have enabled discussion around them. As mentioned, social media not only make crowd-sourcing easier but also more relevant.
Where a producer worked essentially as an employer/manager of reporters who in turn engaged with the news, we now have the option of producers moving ahead of reporters, getting news from the people, and working harder at the dissemination of localized stories. However, this results in a tendency to democratize news (giving people what they want), which could lead to populism.
Paul Broca announced in 1861 that the region of the brain now named after him was the “seat of speech”. Through a seminal study, researchers Nancy Kanwisher and Evelina Fedorenko from MIT announced on October 11, 2012, that Broca’s area actually consists of two sub-units, and one of them specifically handles cognition when the body performed demanding tasks.
As researchers explore more on the subject, two things become clear.
The first: The more we think we know about the brain and go on to try and study it, the more we discover things we never knew existed. This is significant because, apart from giving researchers more avenues through which to explore the brain, it also details their, rather our, limits in terms of being able to predict how things really might work.
The biology is, after all, intact. Cells are cells, muscles are muscles, but through their complex interactions are born entirely new functionalities.
The second: how the cognitive-processing and the language-processing networks might communicate internally is unknown to us. This means we’ll have to devise new ways of studying the brain, forcing it to flex some muscles over others by subjecting it to performing carefully crafted tasks.
Placing a person’s brain under an fMRI scanner reveals a lot about which parts of the brain are being used at each moment, but now we realize we have no clue about how many parts are actually there! This places an onus on the researcher to devise tests that
Affect only specific areas of the brain;
If they have ended up affecting some other areas as well, allow the researcher to distinguish between the areas in terms of how they handle the test
Once this is done, we will finally understand both the functions and the limits of Broca’s area, and also acquire pointers as to how it communicates with the rest of the brain.
A lot of predictability and antecedent research is held back because of humankind’s inchoate visualization of the brain.
My article on this interview and Dr. Soundararajan’s opinions appeared in The Hindu’s EducationPlus supplement on October 22, 2012 titled “It’s a mixed bag“.
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Dr. Kannan Soundararajan is a professor at Stanford University and the director of its Mathematics Research Center. He is a recipient of the Infosys Prize for the Mathematical Sciences, the Ostrowski Prize (both in 2011), the SASTRA Ramanujan Prize (2005), and the inaugural Morgan Prize (1995). Dr. Soundararajan’s research interests concern L-functions and multiplicative number theory.
Here are some excerpts from my interview with him (My comments appear in square-brackets).
You’ve been awarded the Infosys Prize in the mathematical sciences category in 2011 for your work in number theory. Could you explain the nature of your work?
I work with Riemann zeta-functions, which are used to encode properties of integers and prime numbers together [Bernhard Riemann observed about 150 years ago that the properties of primes could be studied with this function].
As the director of the Mathematics Research Center at Stanford University, may I ask what your responsibilities are?
I am responsible for administering funds received from the university. We also bring in 40 to 50 visitors every year to the department of mathematics for seminars.
Further, we encourage research collaborations by inviting and paying for researchers from outside the university. There are also lecture series, and the conduction of outreach activities for undergraduate and high-school students.
Do you think there’s sufficient encouragement for students to pursue a career in pure research? Have you seen this interest decline in the last five or so years?
There is lots of enthusiasm for students going from school to college these days. We encourage some of those students to take up summertime research with university professors. Moreover, our proximity to Silicon Valley helps because it draws in a lot of people interested in pure-mathematics research. There is also an increasing interest in the subject due to the export of problems from computer science.
Because of these factors and some others, there has been an increase in the number of mathematics majors by nine times in eight yrs! Another important way for us to judge the interest of our students is through their participation in extracurricular activities.
As far as teaching the technical sciences is concerned, do you think there are any shortcomings in the education system – in the West and in India?
Classroom education is in a period of flux. Online education is changing things for the future.
The most successful model has been one that involved one-to-one interactions along with small class-sizes, but that is bound to change as classes grow bigger. Also, with an increasingly interdisciplinary nature of courses in the mix, balancing online courses with interactive sessions in the classroom is necessary.
I believe that this evolution will continue for the next five to ten years before it stabilizes.
With budget cuts by states around the world, big experimental physics has taken a hit. This isn’t to say theoretical research thrives – in fact, the public has always had trouble understanding the latter. So, in the current economic scene, what’re the ways in which the government can be convinced that advanced mathematics also deserves investment?
A good question.
A lot of solutions in various fields have spun out of advanced mathematics research. There is an increase in the number of problems being exported by computer science. Mathematics has for a long time been influenced by problems in physics, and vice-versa, but now, computer science has come to assume that mantle.
Further, advanced mathematics research has grown to become a huge field by itself now, and has come to influence many aspects of life. The give-and-take between fields continues to happen: as one grows, the other does, too. Pure mathematics now shares connections with other sciences, most recently with biology.
Although it might be difficult to see physical results of pure-mathematics research in the short-run, they will become visible with time. In fact, such benefits have always been hard to foretell, but they have been there all the same.
Do you think the Infosys Foundation and others like it are doing enough to offset this imbalance?
Science research in India is still funded in large parts by the government. Around the world, the trend has been toward using private funding for research, especially in light of the economic recession. For example, in the USA, the Simons Foundation has started to contribute for many research initiatives.
So, where public spending has gone down, foundations like Infosys’ are doing good work. The influx of private funding for science research is welcome.
In terms of your research, what’re you looking at next?
I am working on a couple of books, one on the Riemann zeta-function and the other on quantum unique ergodicity. Both are aimed at graduate students.
Some points generated during a discussion with a friend:
The Nobel Prizes used to be definitive of the orientation of scientific research in the past; however, staying on top of all recognition now is impossible as fields of research have diversified beyond Alfred Nobel’s, and the foundation’s, understanding and comprehension, respectively
The media’s attention on the prizes has rightly waned: with the diversification of research-investments worldwide, that a single institution’s decision on a $1.2-million prize is monumental is a naïve thought; even though putting together a consortium of institutions countermines the possibility of quick, consensual decisions, the Nobel Prizes are still only running on historical momentum
The time between conception and mass-production for various entities on the market are being reduced – this holds true for ideas as well; because of the delay between recording a “significant contribution” to humankind’s well-being and rewarding a Nobel Prize for it, the Royal Swedish Academy does nothing to add to the recognition of the recipient’s research efforts and all that it has made possible in the interim period
Before the Fundamental Physics Prize was set up by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner this year, the Nobel Prizes were the most lucrative academic prizes in the world; however, the average age of the laureates when they’ve received the prize is between 50 and 54 (for different prizes), by which time they already have established their retirement posses and on their way to concluding their institutional affiliations. Consequently, the question is what do the Nobel Prizes really get to mobilize? Of course, it is never too late, but…
Why have so few women received the Nobel Prizes? Is the gender-gap among laureates simply reflective of the gender-gap present in academic institutions and research labs? Or, prompting more cause for concern, is there a disparity between how many women-researchers publish significant papers and how many women are recognized by the institution?
Across six decades, the European Union has stressed repeatedly on the importance of democracy and human rights. In the process, it set up a system that offered great humanitarian, and therefore popular, benefits to nations willing to join it. In return, it asked for the nations to stop warring, start talking, and get voting.
Today, the European Union was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2012 for its continent-wide efforts.
At the end of the Second World War, Europe’s largest economies emerged greatly diminished. The divides between the ruling and the ruled, between the rich and the poor, and between the war-monger and the negotiator were at their most gaping. Germany and France were the most wounded.
Today, conflict between Germany and France is unthinkable. They reside at the heart of the European Union, in mind and in body, and are largely responsible for maintaining order in the region. Their commitment to the cause of peace is vital to Europe’s commitment to the cause of peace. And because they have held on for so long, the smaller Central European nations and the Balkan states are now eyeing prosperity.
The Nobel Peace Prize, at the same time, comes at a crucial juncture. A grave economic crisis is prevalent across the region. Social inequality, as a result, is on the rise. Austerity measures are the order of the day, and industrial slowdown the mantra on the lips of many – both the employed and the jobless, in fact.
The Prize reaffirms the Union’s decision to abide by peace and unity, by its decision to pursue a common justice for all violators, by its assumption of democracy as the best mode of governance. However, this is also a time that has questioned the validity of a unified government that has to work with significantly different rates of growth and policy-perspectives from region to region.
These are not decisions that are influenced by any prize.
Essentially, the Nobel Prize does not address the seeming invalidity of the Union based on social issues and economic equality, but awards it only in recognition of historical work, work that was humanitarian in a bold break from tradition. What the Prize should have done is specified the Union’s particular roles instead of seemingly reaffirming the Union’s decision to stay united and rule united today.
Thus, only time will tell. Until then, one of the most significant developments of the 21st century will have been the bringing of peace to Europe. For this, the European Union deserves all consideration and congratulations.
Clicking on the link and opening the news-report, I see that it was a team of scientists led by one of Indian-origin who made the discovery. Moreover, the existence of supermassive black holes has been known for a long time now, so saying “Indian scientist discovers giant supermassive black holes” is misleading.
This tendency to focus on the nationality of the leading researcher behind the discovery is detrimental to science journalism. It seems as if the nationality had a bearing on the development being reported. What if the person’s nationality was unavailable? Would the development still have been reported? Is anyone responsible looking at if the development merits reporting? If so, why aren’t other similar developments being reported?
Further: this shouldn’t be considered an instance of science journalism at all. If there are any surveys out there looking at the ratio of science news in a newspaper or on the website against the total quanta of all the news that the publication reports, such articles shouldn’t be considered in the account of the former.
(Also, if you observe, the last three paragraphs have become a staple-insertion in most posts, articles, reports, etc., concerning the discovery of supermassive black holes.)
Symmetry in nature is a sign of unperturbedness. It means nothing has interfered with a natural process, and that its effects at each step are simply scaled-up or scaled-down versions of each other. For this reason, symmetry is aesthetically pleasing, and often beautiful. Consider, for instance, faces. Symmetry of facial features about the central vertical axis is often translated as the face being beautiful – not just by humans but also monkeys.
However, this is just an example of one of the many forms of symmetry’s manifestation. When it involves geometric features, it’s a case of geometrical symmetry. When a process occurs similarly both forward and backward in time, it is temporal symmetry. If two entities that don’t seem geometrically congruent at first sight rotate, move or scale with similar effects on their forms, it is transformational symmetry. A similar definition applies to all theoretical models, musical progressions, knowledge, and many other fields besides.
Symmetry-breaking
One of the first (postulated) instances of symmetry is said to have occurred during the Big Bang, when the observable universe was born. A sea of particles was perturbed 13.75 billion years ago by a high-temperature event, setting up anecdotal ripples in their system, eventually breaking their distribution in such a way that some particles got mass, some charge, some a spin, some all of them, and some none of them. In physics, this event is called spontaneous, or electroweak, symmetry-breaking. Because of the asymmetric properties of the resultant particles, matter as we know it was conceived.
Many invented scientific systems exhibit symmetry in that they allow for the conception of symmetry in the things they make possible. A good example is mathematics – yes, mathematics! On the real-number line, 0 marks the median. On either sides of 0, 1 and -1 are equidistant from 0, 5,000 and -5,000 are equidistant from 0; possibly, ∞ and -∞ are equidistant from 0. Numerically speaking, 1 marks the same amount of something that -1 marks on the other side of 0. Not just that, but also characterless functions built on this system also behave symmetrically on either sides of 0.
To many people, symmetry evokes an image of an object that, when cut in half along a specific axis, results in two objects that are mirror-images of each other. Cover one side of your face and place the other side against a mirror, and what a person hopes to see is the other side of the face – despite it being a reflection (interestingly, this technique was used by neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran to “cure” the pain of amputees when they tried to move a limb that wasn’t there). Like this, there are symmetric tables, chairs, bottles, houses, trees (although uncommon), basic geometric shapes, etc.
A demonstration of V.S. Ramachandran’s mirror-technique
Natural symmetry
Symmetry at its best, however, is observed in nature. Consider germination: when a seed grows into a small plant and then into a tree, the seed doesn’t experiment with designs. The plant is not designed differently from the small tree, and the small tree is not designed differently from the big tree. If a leaf is given to sprout from the mineral-richest node on the stem then it will; if a branch is given to sprout from the mineral-richest node on the trunk then it will. So, is mineral-deposition in the arbor symmetric? It should be if their transportation out of the soil and into the tree is radially symmetric. And so forth…
At times, repeated gusts of wind may push the tree to lean one way or another, shadowing the leaves from against the force and keeping them form shedding off. The symmetry is then broken, but no matter. The sprouting of branches from branches, and branches from those branches, and leaves from those branches all follow the same pattern. This tendency to display an internal symmetry is characterized as fractalization. A well-known example of a fractal geometry is the Mandelbrot set, shown below.
If you want to interact with a Mandelbrot set, check out this magnificent visualization by Paul Neave. You can keep zooming in, but at each step, you’ll only see more and more Mandelbrot sets. Unfortunately, this set is one of a few exceptional sets that are geometric fractals.
Meta-geometry & Mulliken symbols
Now, it seems like geometric symmetry is the most ubiquitous and accessible example to us. Let’s take it one step further and look at the “meta-geometry” at play when one symmetrical shape is given an extra dimension. For instance, a circle exists in two dimensions; its three-dimensional correspondent is the sphere. Through such an up-scaling, we’re ensuring that all the properties of a circle in two dimensions stay intact in three dimensions, and then we’re observing what the three-dimensional shape is.
A circle, thus, becomes a sphere; a square becomes a cube; a triangle becomes a tetrahedron (For those interested in higher-order geometry, the tesseract, or hypercube, may be of special interest!). In each case, the 3D shape is said to have been generated by a 2D shape, and each 2D shape is said to be the degenerate of the 3D shape. Further, such a relationship holds between corresponding shapes across many dimensions, with doubly and triply degenerate surfaces also having been defined.
The tesseract (a.k.a. hypercube)
Obviously, there are different kinds of degeneracy, 10 of which the physicist Robert S. Mulliken identified and laid out. These symbols are important because each one defines a degree of freedom that nature possesses while creating entities, and this includes symmetrical entities as well. In other words, if a natural phenomenon is symmetrical in n dimensions, then the only way it can be symmetrical in n+1 dimensions also is by transforming through one or many of the degrees of freedom defined by Mulliken.
Robert S. Mulliken (1896-1986)
Apart from regulating the perpetuation of symmetry across dimensions, the Mulliken symbols also hint at nature wanting to keep things simple and straightforward. The symbols don’t behave differently for processes moving in different directions, through different dimensions, in different time-periods or in the presence of other objects, etc. The preservation of symmetry by nature is not a coincidental design; rather, it’s very well-defined.
Anastomosis
Now, if that’s the case – if symmetry is held desirable by nature, if it is not a haphazard occurrence but one that is well orchestrated if given a chance to be – why don’t we see symmetry everywhere? Why is natural symmetry broken? Is all of the asymmetry that we’re seeing today the consequence of that electro-weak symmetry-breaking phenomenon? It can’t be because natural symmetry is still prevalent. Is it then implied that what symmetry we’re observing today exists in the “loopholes” of that symmetry-breaking? Or is it all part of the natural order of things, a restoration of past capabilities?
One of the earliest symptoms of symmetry-breaking was the appearance of the Higgs mechanism, which gave mass to some particles but not some others. The hunt for it’s residual particle, the Higgs boson, was spearheaded by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN.
The last point – of natural order – is allegorical with, as well as is exemplified by, a geological process called anastomosis. This property, commonly of quartz crystals in metamorphic regions of Earth’s crust, allows for mineral veins to form that lead to shearing stresses between layers of rock, resulting in fracturing and faulting. Philosophically speaking, geological anastomosis allows for the displacement of materials from one location and their deposition in another, thereby offsetting large-scale symmetry in favor of the prosperity of microstructures.
Anastomosis, in a general context, is defined as the splitting of a stream of anything only to rejoin sometime later. It sounds really simple but it is a phenomenon exceedingly versatile, if only because it happens in a variety of environments and for an equally large variety of purposes. For example, consider Gilbreath’s conjecture. It states that each series of prime numbers to which the forward difference operator has been applied always starts with 1. To illustrate:
2 3 5 7 11 13 17 19 23 29 … (prime numbers)
Applying the operator once: 1 2 2 4 2 4 2 4 6 … (successive differences between numbers)
Applying the operator twice: 1 0 2 2 2 2 2 2 …
Applying the operator thrice: 1 2 0 0 0 0 0 …
Applying the operator for the fourth time: 1 2 0 0 0 0 0 …
And so forth.
If each line of numbers were to be plotted on a graph, moving upwards each time the operator is applied, then a pattern for the zeros emerges, shown below.
This pattern is called that of the stunted trees, as if it were a forest populated by growing trees with clearings that are always well-bounded triangles. The numbers from one sequence to the next are anastomosing, only to come close together after every five lines! Another example is the vein skeleton on a hydrangea leaf. Both the stunted trees and the hydrangea veins patterns can be simulated using the rule-90 simple cellular automaton that uses the exclusive-or (XOR) function.
Nambu-Goldstone bosons
Now, what does this have to do with symmetry, you ask? While anastomosis may not have a direct relation with symmetry and only a tenuous one with fractals, its presence indicates a source of perturbation in the system. Why else would the streamlined flow of something split off and then have the tributaries unify, unless possibly to reach out to richer lands? Either way, anastomosis is a sign of the system acquiring a new degree of freedom. By splitting a stream with x degrees of freedom into two new streams each with x degrees of freedom, there are now more avenues through which change can occur.
Water entrainment in an estuary is an example of a natural asymptote or, in other words, a system’s “yearning” for symmetry
Particle physics simplies this scenario by assigning all forces and amounts of energy a particle. Thus, a force is said to be acting when a force-carrying particle is being exchanged between two bodies. Since each degree of freedom also implies a new force acting on the system, it wins itself a particle, actually a class of particles called the Nambu-Goldstone (NG) bosons. Named for Yoichiro Nambu and Jeffrey Goldstone, the particle’s existence’s hypothesizers, the presence of n NG bosons in a system means that, broadly speaking, the system has n degrees of freedom.
Jeffrey Goldstone (L) & Yoichiro Nambu
How and when an NG boson is introduced into a system is not yet a well-understood phenomenon theoretically, let alone experimentally! In fact, it was only recently that a mathematical model was developed by a theoretical physicist at UCal-Berkeley, Haruki Watanabe, capable of predicting how many degrees of freedom a complex system could have given the presence of a certain number of NG bosons. However, at the most basic level, it is understood that when symmetry breaks, an NG boson is born!
The asymmetry of symmetry
In other words, when asymmetry is introduced in a system, so is a degree of freedom. This seems only intuitive. At the same time, you’d think the axiom is also true: that when an asymmetric system is made symmetric, it loses a degree of freedom – but is this always true? I don’t think so because, then, it would violate the third law of thermodynamics (specifically, the Lewis-Randall version of its statement). Therefore, there is an inherent irreversibility, an asymmetry of the system itself: it works fine one way, it doesn’t work fine another – just like the split-off streams, but this time, being unable to reunify properly. Of course, there is the possibility of partial unification: in the case of the hydrangea leaf, symmetry is not restored upon anastomosis but there is, evidently, an asymptotic attempt.
Each piece of a broken mirror-glass reflects an object entirely, shedding all pretensions of continuity. The most intriguing mathematical analogue of this phenomenon is the Banach-Tarski paradox, which, simply put, takes symmetry to another level.
However, it is possible that in some special frames, such as in outer space, where the influence of gravitational forces is weak if not entirely absent, the restoration of symmetry may be complete. Even though the third law of thermodynamics is still applicable here, it comes into effect only with the transfer of energy into or out of the system. In the absence of gravity (and, thus, friction), and other retarding factors, such as distribution of minerals in the soil for acquisition, etc., symmetry may be broken and reestablished without any transfer of energy.
The simplest example of this is of a water droplet floating around. If a small globule of water breaks away from a bigger one, the bigger one becomes spherical quickly; when the seditious droplet joins with another globule, that globule also reestablishes its spherical shape. Thermodynamically speaking, there is mass transfer, but at (almost) 100% efficiency, resulting in no additional degrees of freedom. Also, the force at play that establishes sphericality is surface tension, through which a water body seeks to occupy the shape that has the lowest volume for the correspondingly highest surface area (notice how the shape is incidentally also the one with the most axes of symmetry, or, put another way, no redundant degrees of freedom? Creating such spheres is hard!).
A godless, omnipotent impetus
Perhaps the explanation of the roles symmetry assumes seems regressive: every consequence of it is no consequence but itself all over again (self-symmetry – there, it happened again). This only seems like a natural consequence of anything that is… well, naturally conceived. Why would nature deviate from itself? Nature, it seems, isn’t a deity in that it doesn’t create. It only recreates itself with different resources, lending itself and its characteristics to different forms.
A mountain will be a mountain to its smallest constituents, and an electron will be an electron no matter how many of them you bring together at a location. But put together mountains and you have ranges, sub-surface tectonic consequences, a reshaping of volcanic activity because of changes in the crust’s thickness, and a long-lasting alteration of wind and irrigation patterns. Bring together a unusual number of electrons to make up a high-density charge, and you have a high-temperature, high-voltage volume from which violent, permeating discharges of particles could occur – i.e., lightning. Why should stars, music, light, radioactivity, politics, manufacturing or knowledge be any different?
With this concludes the introduction to symmetry. Yes, there is more, much more…
The first answer is “No”. I mean, whatever you’re writing about, the onus is on the writer to break his subject down to its simplest components, and then put them back together in front of the reader’s eyes. If the writer fails to do that, then the blame can’t be placed on the subject.
It so happens that the blame can be placed on the writer’s choice of subject. Again, the fault is the writer’s, but what do you when the subject is important and ought to be written about because some recent contribution to it makes up a piece of history? Sure, the essentials are the same: read up long and hard on it, talk to people who know it well and are able to break it down in some measure for you, and try and use infographics to augment the learning process.
But these methods, too, have their shortcomings. For one, if the subject has only a long-winded connection to phenomena that affect reality, then strong comparisons have to make way for weak metaphors. A consequence of this is that the reader is more misguided in the long-term than he is “learned” in the short-term. For another, these methods require that the writer know what he’s doing, that what he’s writing about makes sense to him before he attempts to make sense of it for his readers.
This is not always the case: given the grey depths that advanced mathematics and physics are plumbing these days, science journalism concerning these areas are written with a view to make the subject sound awesome, enigmatic, and, sometimes, hopefully consequential than they are in place to provide a full picture of on-goings.
Sometimes, we don’t have a full picture because things are that complex.
The reader is entitled to know – that’s the tenet of the sort of science writing that I pursue: informational journalism. I want to break the world around me down to small bits that remain eternally comprehensible. Somewhere, I know, I must be able to distinguish between my shortcomings and the subject’s; when I realize I’m not able to do that effectively, I will have failed my audience.
In such a case, am I confined to highlighting the complexity of the subject I’ve chosen?
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The part of the post that makes some sense ends here. The part of the post that may make no sense starts here.
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The impact of this conclusion on science journalism worldwide is that there is a barrage of didactic pieces once something is completely understood and almost no literature during the finding’s formative years despite public awareness that important, and legitimate, work was being done (This is the fine line that I’m treading).
I know this post sounds like a rant – it is a rant – against a whole bunch of things, not the least-important of which is that groping-in-the-dark is a fact of life. However, somehow, I still have a feeling that a lot of scientific research is locked up in silence, yet unworded, because we haven’t received the final word on it. A safe course, of course: nobody wants to be that guy who announced something prematurely and the eventual result was just something else.
Disgusting things are broken, unnatural manifestations of beauty in an otherwise beautiful world. If anything, isn’t it the symmetrical and the alluring that we must fear for their full mastery over chaos?
Disgusting things are defeated things.
With our fear comes the baleful regard we credit them with, the attention of our minds. They don’t deserve it, those weaklings. Promise ourselves not to look upon their world as we are walking, or they will all gather at the feet of our attention; no!
Trample them if we must, ignore them if we can.
One day, there shall be no screams, just a hollow silence, the memories of fear long dissolved into the flesh our feet. That day, we will be Masters of the Diseases, and their reckoning!
