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Rants November 4, 2007

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Peace is bad for Business.

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1. Here’s a letter in response to my comments on silly replies that people give you when you ask a question. I’m humble@humblefarmer.com --- and if you’ve heard one of these silly replies lately, I’d like to hear from you. What time is it? You mean right now?

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2. You would think that I could come up with 12 interesting, educational, or humorous stories to pass along to you in between the music on this program. You would think that every week I’d be able to come up with 12 unique stories and that each one of them would be interesting, educational or humorous --- and I think I could --- if that was all I did all week. To get those 12 stories all I have to do is visit half a dozen friends and write down the first five minutes of their conversations. But --- please remember that besides collecting stories to entertain you I have to try to earn a living by mailing postcards to hundreds of meeting planners. Sometimes I have to get on a flying machine and go to Salt Lake City, Albuquerque or Minneapolis. This week Steve Dennison dumped half a ton of rich, black soil in my pickup truck and I spread that good black dirt on my rhubarb. And the blueberry guru Harvey told me to mow my blueberry field right down to the dirt with a lawnmower and he said that I shouldn’t burn it unless too much grass got in there. So I mowed my blueberry field with my bush hog and then Marsha’s lawnmower so I could bag all the bad seeds. And for the first time in the 37 years I’ve lived in this house I finally painted the cellar floor and the cellar walls to make it clean and bright down there in the washing machine area for Marsha. And then, of course, I have to answer the hundreds of emails I get from you, my friends, and I have to delete the thousands of emails I get from spammers. And if all that isn’t enough to keep me from writing a new script, I live with a person who greets me every morning with a list of chores that would have incapacitated Hercules. So this week I’m going to wing it. Please hang in here with me.

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3. Here’s a reply to my recent comments about the cops who picked up the guy who got chatting with his friends and left the store without remembering to pay for his coffee. Don’t you worry that some day you’ll also forget and that something similar to this will happen to you? I do. I’m getting more and more absent minded every day. This letter says: “During the April, 2007 rain-storm the outside pump card reader apparently did not process my card, and I drove home, which was only just around the corner. When I walked in the house the phone was already ringing, and it was the Bath Police Department. The officer said my card did not process, and would I go back immediately and "take care of it." So I walked back in the rain and went inside the store and handed my card to the clerk, who processed it again, and I signed the slip and went home. So now, I always go inside for a receipt, if the pump does not issue a receipt. I don't want to be driving down the road some day and see the COP's flashing red lights in my rear view mirror, only to have them send me back to the place where I bought gas with my debit-card. You know how it is in the convenience stores, you wait for five people in line ahead of you to buy their megabucks tickets before you can pay for your milk and eggs and gas.

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4. There are many aspects of modern physics which seem to violate our intuition. Starting at the beginning of this century, our physical theories began to include aspects which ran counter to that common sense. Fortunately, those of us who have been married for several years are able to understand how a train might be going in two directions at the same time.

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5. You’ve heard of backlash. You have also heard of cause and effect. I’ve been thinking about cause and effect lately and when I tried to read up on it --- this is what I learned. “The number of objects which have parameter A but not parameter B plus the number of objects which have parameter B but not parameter C is greater than or equal to the number of objects which have parameter A but not parameter C.” The relationship is called Bell's inequality and it is so complicated that I’m now sorry I mentioned it.

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6. And now. More on cause and effect. This part of the program gives you something to think about. What would have happened if Newton had been very hungry when the apple hit him on the head?

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7. I’m sorry, but because I’m hurting for material this week I’ve got to come back to Bell’s Inequality which I am going to try to illustrate. We read that Bell's original proof was in terms of hidden variable theories. His assumptions were: Logic is valid. Hidden variables exist. Hidden variables are local. The assumption of local hidden variables are very similar to the assumption of a local reality. Now --- may I illustrate this with a simple everyday example? First, if logic were valid, when your wife has cold hands, she would wear furry mittens when she goes to town. If she refuses to wear furry mittens to warm her hands, it is obvious that hidden variables exist. The same theory has a wide application when you consider he men who would freeze off their ears before they’d wear a wooly hat with earmuffs. This is local reality which defies common sense which we may equate with logic and obviously confirms the predicted Quantum correlations.

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8. We read that it has been suspected since long before Bell that Quantum Mechanics is in conflict with classical logic. For example, deductive logic is based on a number of assumptions, one of which is the Principle of the Excluded Middle: all statements are either true or false. But consider the following multiple choice test question:
The electron is a wave.
The electron is a particle.
All of the previous.
None of the above.
From wave-particle duality we know that both statements 1 and 2 are both sort of true and sort of false. You don’t have to know a thing about quantum mechanics to realize that it is possible to have statements that are sort of true and sort of false. Watch the political debates.

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http://www.upscale.utoronto.ca/GeneralInterest/Harrison/BellsTheorem/BellsTheorem.html

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9. I’m sorry that I got us into logic, but, as I said, I didn’t have time to get out and collect anything interesting for us to talk about today. We read on line that "A favorite example used by critics of the Method of Agreement is the case of the Scientific Drinker, who was extremely fond of liquor and got drunk every night of the week. He was ruining his health, and his few remaining friends pleaded with him to stop. Realizing … that he could not go on, he resolved to conduct a careful experiment to discover the exact cause of his frequent inebriations. For five nights in a row he collected instances of a given phenomenon, the antecedent circumstances being respectively scotch and soda, bourbon and soda, brandy and soda, rum and soda, and gin and soda. Then using the Method of Agreement he swore a solemn oath never to touch soda again!"

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10. Well, perhaps this little foray into Bell’s Theorem is not a complete waste. Listen to this quote. “People have long known that any measurement disturbs the thing being measured. A crucial assumption of classical sciences has been --- that at least in principle the disturbance can be made so small that we can ignore it. Thus, when an anthropologist is studying a primitive culture in the field, she assumes that her presence in the tribe is having a negligible effect on the behavior of the members. Sometimes we later discover that all she was measuring was the behavior of the tribe when it was being observed by the anthropologist.”

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11. We’ve been talking about John Bell who investigated quantum theory in the greatest depth and established what the theory can tell us about the fundamental nature of the physical world. So I thought it would be nice to learn what I could about John Bell. When Bell was 16 he was a year younger than the minimum age for admission to Queen's, the local university. Instead in 1944 he entered the physics department at Queen's as a technician in the teaching laboratory, where he greatly impressed the lecturing staff. The professors loaned John books and allowed him to attend the first-year lectures while still working as a technician. With savings from this year's salary, and help from other sources, Bell was able to enter the university as a student in 1945. His performance was outstanding and he graduated with first-class honours in experimental physics in 1948. But isn’t that typical of that old-time buraucracy? Here’s a genius who couldn’t get into school in 1944 because he was too young. Thank goodness that kind of foolishness of standardizing everything in education couldn’t happen in our schools today.

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12. The other day I was taking off my hat and coat when I felt a warm glow in my pants. You know that I am always cold. All this week I’ve been pulling up my pantleg and hobbling over to Marsha to say, “Feel my knee,” because I want her to know how miserable and cold it is in our house. Of course no matter how cold I am, Marsha is sweating, which is one more reason we are so compatable. But I felt this unusual warm glow in my pants so I stuck my hand down inside of my pants --- just like you would do --- to find out what was going on. I felt of my wallet, which lives in a pocket on the front of my pantleg just above the knee. And that wasn’t warm. So I felt the regular side pocket that is above that and it was remarkably comforting to the touch. So I emptied out my pocket and lo and behold --- there was a little square duracell battery in there that you could have dropped into a cup and boiled water. I had just come from a stage show for the literacy volunteers at the Strand Theater in Rockland and because I was planning to use my wireless mike, I was carrying the battery in my pocket. I was introduced about three acts before I was scheduled, so I never did get to put the battery in the mike and turn it on. So I didn’t think anything about it. But finally some metal in my pocket --– my nail clipper or my little jar of bag balm with the metal cap --- must have shorted out the terminals on that battery. I don’t know how long that battery would have to be shorted out in my pocket before you’d read about it in the newspapers, but I’m glad it didn’t burst into flame while I was standing on stage in the Strand Theater in front of dozens of people. You can be sure Marsha is never going to hear of this one. The last thing I need at 71 is a new nickname.

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13. You will be glad to hear that it also happened to me so listen closely. You have heard me wonder why, when you ask a person, “What do you do?” they seem incapable of answering the question without first repeating it: “What do I do?” I have marvelled at this for some time. But, yesterday, on Main Street in Rockland, I got out of my truck. And a man standing on the sidewalk said to me, “Where do you live?” And I said, “Where do I live?”

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