Science Metaphors: Hysteresis

By: | April 26, 2019
etching of a person fleeing from a skeleton
My future self running from the mistakes of my past self

My first encounter with the word “hysteresis” was ten years ago when I was editing a particularly difficult electrical engineering feature. That story was one of my favourite I’ve ever worked on, the wild first-person account of the researcher who had unearthed an ancient prediction of a fourth circuit design element, foretold by the laws of mathematical symmetry to augment the holy trinity of electrical circuit design elements: the resistor, the capacitor and the inductor.

What distinguished this fourth mythical element – today known as the “memristor” – from its workaday siblings was its behaviour, which depended more on its history than on any stimulus hitting it at any given moment. This tendency is called hysteresis, and the makers of memristors hope it will make the computers of the future act more human.

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Cathedrals on Fire

By: | April 25, 2019
The Domes of the Yosemite, by Albert Bierstadt, 1867 (Wikimedia Commons)

Notre Dame is on fire! one of my oldest friends, Jessica, texted me from New York the morning of April 15th. 

I saw. So awful, I typed back.

Then I lost cell service. Pete and I were driving toward Yosemite, taking advantage of his spring break from teaching high school to explore the park. After paying the entrance fee, Pete and I drove through a natural arch formed by two massive boulders, like granite gargoyles touching noses. With the burning spire still flickering in my mind, I turned off my phone.

It was strange to be in Yosemite that day. Feeling tired, Pete and I chose the easiest path in the valley, a paved boulevard that leads straight to the base of Yosemite Falls. We raised our faces to the mist, surrounded by international tourists. A few spoke French, and I wondered what it felt like to be in Yosemite’s so-called natural cathedral while the world’s most beloved human-built cathedral collapsed in flames.

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Out for a walk in Big Sur

By: | April 24, 2019

We camped this past weekend at Big Sur, meeting up with some friends from the north. I made the reservations in November and wasn’t really looking at the calendar, so I didn’t realize that the weekend was a nexus of holidays—Passover, Easter, Earth Day. It felt right, though, being under the trees and in the ocean-tinted air, with the river rushing so fast and close that it sounded like rain.

I woke up earlier than everyone else in the mornings and walked through the campground with the moon setting above the ridge. I remembered when I’d found the campsite, the campground had seemed enormous—hundreds of spaces—and I wondered whether it would feel more like being in the middle of a music festival than camping. But no—the combination of the river and the big trees made the sites feel sheltered, and the air had a hushed feeling, even when our neighbors began playing a drum on the verge of quiet hours.

People talk about Big Sur being special, magical. Does the air have something to do with it? Several companies make perfume and candles that are supposed to recall redwoods and ocean waves, rainwater and eucalyptus. Febreze even makes an air freshener called Big Sur—which has some combination of sandalwood, jasmine, and cherry, according to the description.

The air is what brought Charles David Keeling to this campground, too, in 1955. As a post-doc at Cal Tech, he constructed instruments to measure carbon dioxide in the air, but found that the CO2 concentrations in Pasadena varied. So he took his equipment to a campground in Big Sur, an isolated stretch of the California coast.

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Spring Break

By: | April 22, 2019

Oh spring — a time for renewal. I’m finally (mostly) home from book tour, and I’ve been taking a little break from the grind to breathe in and focus my attention on things that replenish my creative energy and make me feel connected and fully present in my place. 

Perhaps the most soul-nourishing thing I’ve done is launch a new podcast with the poet Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, who is also one of my best friends. Emerging Form is a podcast about the creative process, and it’s given my own creative spirit a boost. The podcast is an excuse to stay up late drinking wine and exchanging stories about the creative life with Rosemerry and some interesting guests. It’s a passion project with no external expectations or constraints, and it’s been energizing to create something new that’s just for fun. The podcast feels a lot like this blog — a creative habit that feeds my muse and releases me from feelings of obligation.

I’ve also been spending a lot of time outside. Yesterday I passed some of the afternoon standing underneath one of our apricot trees, just taking in the fragrance of the blossoms and listening to the sound of pollinators buzzing around, doing their jobs. There’s something incredibly comforting about witnessing nature proceeding without human intervention. We’re less important than we believe.

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Parks without people? A response to Jason Mark

By: | April 19, 2019

A few days ago, environmental writer Jason Mark published an essay in Sierra, the national magazine of the Sierra Club, in which he advocates for “a provocative idea”: establishing nature reserves that would be “off-limits to most people” except “working scientists.” These preserves would be managed exclusively “for wild nature alone.” Mark invokes conservationist icon Aldo Leopold, who argued that the “land-community”—that is, the whole of an ecosystem including water, soil, plants, animals, and people—has a “right to continued existence.”

“The establishment of people-less parks would recognize that right and mark a grand gesture of ecological solidarity,” Mark writes. “Like any true solidarity, the giver gains in the course of the sacrifice. Preserving a place truly beyond us would, in the end, be a blessing to ourselves.”

I had a strong negative reaction to Mark’s essay. Although he acknowledges that many parks were created by evicting and then excluding Native peoples, along with the grim history of Jim Crow policies in parks, he seems to acknowledge these legacies only insofar as they would “complicate” the approval of his proposal for off-limits protected areas. And he confusingly asserts in the same essay that “[f]rom their inception, American parks have prioritized the interests of people.” I mean, yes, some people—mostly affluent white people who want to recreate in them but not, obviously, the indigenous and non-white people who were excluded.

The piece seemed to me to be insulting to Native Americans, seeming at first glance to be arguing that since European settlers stole Native land and then screwed it up, now no one should be able to have it.

In addition, much of my work has been focused on recognizing and tracing the implications of the fact that humans are part of nature and have never been separate from it. Yes, many of our current modes of interaction with the nonhuman world are destructive and thoughtless. But walling-off nature from people isn’t the answer, in my opinion. The answer is to learn or return to positive relationships with nature.

So I contacted Mark and asked him if we could talk about his essay, and he graciously agreed. 

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Pyramids, Hidden Tunnels, and All the Best Mysteries

By: | April 18, 2019

This post was originally published on March 21, 2018

I love a good mystery. And in a weird way, I kind of hate it when they are solved. It’s a little like candy. I have a vicious sweet tooth and I love going into a candy story and looking for something to buy. But when I eat it, it’s always a let down. And I also feel like crap.

The point is that mysteries and candy are both more about the process than the resolution. Rock climbing too, I guess. Baseball, Sudoku, Wes Anderson movies – man, I guess everything in my life could boil down to activities that have amazing journeys and disappointing payoffs.

Maybe that’s why I love science so much. You never really get all the answers you want and even when you do there is always a bit at the end where you say, “Scientist still have a lot of questions…” And you keep coming back to see what’s around the next corner.

Nowhere is this more true than archeology. A couple years ago I wrote about a dynasty of Maya rulers that took almost 30 years to uncover. That’s a maddeningly slow process. At the same time in other sciences, measles was eradicated from the Americas, hadron colliders were built and detected Higgs bosons, and genetic engineering, CRISPR and the internet were invented.

But archeology takes its time. I like to think it’s all about the journey. Yesterday I went to my favorite site here in the mountains, Teotihuacan. It was packed and sweltering and I had a furious toddler strapped to my back but it was still just so amazing to stand atop the Pyramid of the Sun and looking out across an ancient metropolis. It was the first archeological site I saw here in Mexico, the subject of my first stories here and still just as stunning as the day I first saw it.

The reason I like it so much is because it was the most powerful city of the Classic Era and we have almost no idea who these people were. We don’t even know if they were ruled by a king or a committee. The Classic Maya, who lived 600 miles away, sort of mentioned a Teotihuacan ruler but the people themselves were oddly silent on the topic (partly because they didn’t have a writing system). As I wrote four years ago in Scientific American, the argument for a king boils down to: “No committee or senate could have coordinated such perfect construction – it had to be a king.” Meanwhile the other side boils down to: “Great, so then where is he?” Teotihuacan has no pictures of kings, no buried tombs, nothing to point to a specific ruler.

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Litterbug

By: | April 17, 2019

This post originally ran April 25, 2017. It’s almost Earth Day again, and litter still seems like the least of our environmental concerns.

On Saturday, Earth Day, I went for a run. About a mile in, I came upon a bald, middle-aged man. He wore a leather jacket and a Bluetooth headset. I was perhaps twenty feet from him when he chucked a crumpled plastic bag on the ground. Then he got on his bicycle and started peddling away.

I wasn’t quite sure what to do. The man wasn’t moving very fast. I had time to yell. I imagined myself saying, “Excuse me! Sir! You dropped your bag.” This made his action sound like an accident, but I what else could I say? I wasn’t looking for a confrontation.

Instead, I did nothing. I let the man ride off. I left the bag where it lay. I kept running. And for the next 43 sweaty minutes, I thought about the man, the bag, and my reaction.

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