That's a good question

I listen to a lot of podcasts and many of them are on science. Science Talk by Scientific American, Science Magazine, Science at NASA, Science Friday by NPR, the Nature podcast, and the Naked Scientist, to name a few.

I like the way scientists talk to each other. I find that they are usually very respectful to each other, which is something I enjoy. They love turning a subject over and inside out and looking at it from all angles. They are very patient when people call in with questions, because at least when the questions aren't that great, they are an opportunity to teach and to explain how they themselves followed a line of thinking to get to the point they arrived. When the questions are really good, they almost always say "That's a good question."

When I noticed that this was a very common response, I was a little irritated by it. It sounded so patronizing. Sometimes it sounded derogatory, like they were patting the questioner on the head. Other times it sounded like a habitual dodge, a way to buy a few seconds while thinking of a response.

Then I started to realize what it meant. Sometimes it meant, "Oh yes, that direction of thought leads to many new and exciting or unexpected things." Other times it means, "that line of thought never occurred to me." The whole root of scientific discovery is asking the right questions. Sometimes asking questions means challenging preconceptions. Sometimes it means looking in new directions. It doesn't matter what the point of the question is, it's always an opportunity to turn the object of inspection over and look at it from a new angle, which is the best way to learn something new from it. Scientists welcome questions for the most part. They love being challenged and fleshing out ideas through rigorous inquiry.

Many people don't consider what scientific thinking is all about. If they did, I think they would practice it more, because it is fun. Imagine you go to an old mansion with tons of rooms. Let's say the place was abandoned fully furnished, with nothing disturbed. I'm imagining an enormous building with dozens of rooms, long corridors lined with doors. Can you imagine exploring such a place? Particularly if you found something of great value, say a drawer full of jewelry. Scientific discovery is like that. It's an awareness that there is a vast area of information that is just waiting to be uncovered. It's the thrill of the mystery - "What's behind this door?" And frankly, it's the search for treasure.

Most fields of knowledge are not straightforward. They have many facets and are continually branching out into multiple possibilities. I often wonder when I read about the history of scientific discovery if there aren't very interesting lines of investigation that were missed as we moved forward, waiting to be rediscovered. A science fiction short story I read a long time ago was about an alternate reality where science and magic were both developed into full fledged and useful applications. When I learned about Witta and Druidism years ago, I wondered if they were not on the verge of developing a society in touch with nature, and in some ways better able to take advantage of it. We still suspect that the ancient Egyptians and Aztecs were onto things that we have since forgotten. The Incas were able to fit enormous stoneworks together without mortar, a feat we still cannot repeat. Did someone know the secret of antigravity?

There is a theory in quantum physics called the multiverse model. It supposes that each instant of time has an infinite number of possibilities that can branch from it. Should you go to breakfast or go for a run? Will you turn right at the corner or go straight? Are you going to execute some random move in the middle of your day or suddenly blurt out something in the office with little thought or care? Any little decision can lead to a completely different outcome in your day. In the multiverse theory, every alternate possibility does happen. The universe is constantly cleaving into alternate universes where you did turn right, go straight, and all the other options, like suddenly jumping on your left foot and singing opera. Scientific discovery is kind of like that. The possibilities are endless, so you just keep following those branching corridors until you find something interesting. Then you do it again. There's no limit to the search. What else are you going to do with your life?

Intellectual Property

I think a lot about what sounds like such a dry subject.

Who owns information?

Can you own information?

Benjamin Franklin, America's first great inventor, believed that no one should own an idea. He thought that inventions should be introduced, and others should be free to take your idea and make immediate improvements on it. This way, society as a whole would get the maximum benefit from innovations.

The "American" Dream (as well as that of many others around the world) is to come up with some creation and get rich quick. It's an attractive dream, and not one to toss aside lightly. It goes against the grain of many to give up individual rights, freedoms, privileges, or prerogatives in order to provide possible benefits to society at large. Some would say that to take away intellectual property protections would kill initiative and take away America's advantage as a technological innovator.

Let's look at another aspect of intellectual property. The first thing that comes to my mind when I hear that phrase is patented inventions. Copyrighted material is also intellectual property. Literature, movies, and songs are copyrighted in order for their creators to make money off of them. We get upset when someone in China makes a copy of a movie and sells it without giving someone in Hollywood any royalty payments. Many people did not get upset when millions of people copied musical tracks and shared them on the internet without compensating the music industry or the performers.

I was looking on YouTube at some outtakes from The Office, one of my favorite shows. Several people had taken their favorite moments and made little highlight films of the series. When looked it up again later, to show my wife, there was a message that said that the content was protected and had been removed from the site. It actually wasn't, I got around the warning and the videos I had watched earlier were still there. It occurred to me that they should want and appreciate that these little videos were being put together. The YouTube people aren't trying to pass off the work as their own, in fact, they are paying tribute to it. NBC probably couldn't sell little highlight films, so it's not like they are taking away from NBC revenue. You could argue that they are adding to it. The more people talk about the show, the more viewers they might get. You could say the same thing about most literature and music, the creators, in their fondest dreams, envision that their work will be enjoyed by the masses, widespread and popular. They also hope to get rich off of it, or at least that someone else won't get rich while they make nothing (ask Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin and Hobbes if he gets any money off all the window stickers of Calvin peeing on something).

So I have very mixed feelings about this. I don't like paying $20 for a music CD, but I don't think musicians should give away their craft for free. I would love to invent something someday and make a fortune off of it. On the other hand, if someone could invent the 100 mile per gallon engine and someone else could buy the patent and sit on it, depriving me of this useful invention, I would not be pleased. And I find it incredibly stupid that people are applying for patents for genes that the find in some organism, as if they invented it themselves. That's crazy - am I supposed to pay a royalty every time my pancreas secretes an enzyme just because some geneticist found it in the lab? More likely, the geneticist would work for some megacorp with a battalion of lawyers that is quickly applying for patents for everything the poor underpaid geek in the lab sees through his spectrograph.

When the U.S. went to war in WWII, they were hailed as out producing their enemies and supplying their allies to such a degree that we overpowered them and won the war. What a lot of people don't understand is that the government adjusted the rules of intellectual property during the course of the war for the good of the country (and world) as a whole. Aircraft designs, particularly engine designs, were freely copied between the various aircraft manufacturers. They were more than willing to do this at the time because there was more than enough work and profits to go along, as well as the fact that they wanted to win the war. This special circumstance would be worth studying to see if any of the lessons might be applicable to the broader issue of intellectual property.

Sometimes government and universities come up with knowledge that is then made available to the general public. Sometimes this is simply because they do not have an immediate commercial application for the new knowledge, but other times it is because the person making the discovery is not a financial person, but a scientific one. There will always be those that love to figure things out, just as there will always be those obsessed with how to make a buck off of it. Scientists tend to publish their discoveries in journals, such as Science and Nature, where the ideas are peer reviewed for validity, but also widespread to like minded individuals. On the world's stage, this has led to an ever widening sphere of shared knowledge that accelerates technology, innovation, and future discoveries.

I love this pure exchange of ideas, the innovation incubator that our universities have become. We have to somehow find a way to make ideas available widespread without having these commercial and financial concerns stifle development.

Conflict Resolution

Sometimes everything seems so clear.

I was listening to an odd podcast about logical thinking, and the podcaster made an interesting point. He was talking about how stories (on TV in his example, but this also applies to movies and literature) need to have some kind of conflict in order to hold people's interest. If a story just blandly describes a typical day where someone got up and went about their normal routine, no one would be interested. He went on to say that normal every day life doesn't typically have that much conflict in it, so these stories are not typical of life, but are typical of entertainment.

I don't really enjoy watching sporting events, which is pure ritualized conflict. With the popularity of sports in college and on TV, it seems to me that I am in a small minority. I wonder why anyone cares what any particular team does on any particular occasion. It doesn't change anything. Next season everyone will be at zero again. A great deal of the public would probably disagree with me, but I've just never seen the sense in it. For me it's a huge waste of time. I feel that getting really upset when your team loses is a waste of emotion. Again, I'm out of sync with the majority and I expect that most people would disagree with me.

But thinking about our love of conflict, that would explain a love of sports. You set up an artificial conflict and everyone gets to be entertained by it. I suppose it beats fighting a war out of excitement seeking, or something like the gladiatorial games in Roman arenas. At least in modern sports, no one is supposed to die.

But there is another popular entertainment genre out there that also appeals to a great deal of people, which I believe is much closer to what I like and how I think. You could call a program that has a riddle or solves a problem a Mystery. The rise in popularity of the CSI series (except for Caruso on CSI Miami - he's just an overacting buffoon) is an example of this other category of entertainment. Whether it's figuring out what's going on, solving for the unknown, or societal or scientific discoveries, I've always loved this type of story. How did it happen? Who did it? What's next?

It's like education or research in science. Life is a cosmic Easter egg hunt, all those hidden goodies just waiting to be discovered, opened up, and appreciated. The fun thing about unearthing knowledge is that there is no limit. Each mystery "solved" spawns questions that generate more mysteries. Every time we think we are at the end of scientific discovery, some new field pops up.

I think religion follows the conflict outline. It deals with God vs. the Devil, good vs. evil, right vs. wrong, moral vs. immoral. Unfortunately, people that are fixated on conflict see everything else in terms of conflict. This is why religious people are threatened by and rise in opposition to scientific progress, new ideas, and progressive thinkers. Scientists mostly don't care about the bible, and if they have religious beliefs, they mostly assume that scientific discoveries fit into God's scheme. Religious people assume that scientists are setting out to disprove God or the bible and that they are under attack from scientists. This is ridiculous, but by the time you realize this is going on, it's too late. Devout people assume that if we discover that the earth is 4 billion years old, that disproves the entire bible. They assume that if people believe that we descended from apes that they will reject the Adam and Eve story and therefore conclude that the everything in the bible is completely in error.

Religious people don't understand something very basic about scientific people. We don't root for one side or the other. We aren't interested in conflict, we are interested in conflict resolution. Nothing is written in stone, you can always enhance, rewrite, or revise any scientific premise with further studies and new discoveries. There's nothing disturbing or disruptive about this, it's just the way it is.

By making a conflict about Religion, whether it's evolution, astrophysics, geology, or even whether or not to say Merry Christmas instead of Happy Holidays, certain religious leaders are discrediting their own standing, they are picking an impossible fight. It's unfortunate, because while religion has some great aspects like the ability to give people hope or the belief in treating people well and taking care of those less fortunate. Religious leaders run the danger of discrediting all religion by attacking science. In the end, we need the best from both fields to get the most out of life.