Entropy is a fairly easy concept to define, the measure of disorder in a closed system, and a rather difficult concept to grasp, but one that furnishes us with wonderful insights into the way the world around us operates. The amount of entropy in the Universe is ever-increasing, the energy concentrated in our sun is constantly radiating away in light and heat, dissipating into an unusable state, absolute undifferentiation.

Sunflower
Credit: riandreu

Living things form “pockets of resistance” to the force of entropy. They do this through syntropy, or negentropy, which is the entropy we export to reduce our internal entropy; in other words, it’s the waste energy we generate to keep our soma in an organized working state. We collect the sun’s waste energy and use it to organize ourselves through syntropy.

How Much Information Entropy?
Credit: Moi

In Information Systems, entropy, known as Shannon entropy for Claude Shannon, is the measure of uncertainty in a random variable. A coin toss has one bit of entropy for the 50/50 chance of it turning up heads or tails, 0 or 1. A six-sided dice carries three bits of entropy for the possible outcomes it may produce with each roll (1 (000), 2 (001), 3 (010), 4 (011), 5 (100), 6 (101)). The weather has an amount of entropy difficult to quantify, but it varies from location to location. The weather in New York has more entropy than the weather in Southern California because Southern California has a more consistent climate. Similarly, in our first example, if we were dealing with a rigged coin, one that turned up heads more often than tails, then there would be less than one bit of entropy in each coin toss because we would expect heads more frequently than tails.

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Dear Roger Ebert,

In your recent review of “Extract,” you made the comment about the film “Idiocracy” that “those Idiots had the benefit of a few hundred years during which to refute Darwin by evolving less intelligence.” I know that you are a man who appreciates science, and thought you should know that your statement reflects a common misunderstanding of evolution through natural selection: that species are always evolving to better, more advanced states. In fact, there are many examples of animals “de-evolving” to previous states, such as whales, which are descendent of land mammals, but gave up their legs and returned to the seas. Many species of whale still have the remnants of tiny hip bones floating deep inside them and the remnants of finger bones inside their fins.

Vestigial Hip Bones in Whales
Credit: Moi

The same is true of intelligence. Our big brains have conferred a magnificent survival advantage on us, but they come at a huge cost in energy to fuel them. The Indonesian “hobbit” fossils, homo floresiensis, discovered in recent years tell the story of a species of human that, once geographically isolated on an island with limited resources, adapted by shrinking in stature, including atrophying of the brain. The sea squirt is born with a brain, which it uses to navigate the world until it finds a suitable spot to plant itself, at which point it promptly .

I believe the evidence, in the form of increasing average IQs and other test measures, shows that we are growing more intelligent as a species. The sophisticated cultural environment we have constructed makes increasing demands on our average intelligence in order to survive and be successful; however, the sea squirt and homo floresiensis are cautionary tales that we must remain ever-vigilant. As the evolutionary biologist J. B. S. Haldane said, “The ancestors of oysters and barnacles had heads. Snakes have lost their limbs and ostriches and penguins their power of flight. Man may just as easily lose his intelligence.”

Sincerely,

Ryan Somma

http://ideonexus.com

PS – Thank you so much for your recent blog-post about trivia. You so eloquently expressed ideas I have been trying to articulate for years on the subject.

Grrrrr! Credit: Brian Scott

Colin Powell’s appearance on State of the Union recently stirred up many healthy debates on Iraq, Obama’s presidency, and Sotomayor, but I found his thoughts on American families most interesting, especially the following:

And I’m kind of a simple guy on things like this, John. I watch National Geographic and Animal Planet, and I love to watch lion shows or tiger shows, where a cub is born. And there is the mother and the father.

The father may be away at a distance, but he’s providing protection for the family. And the family unit knows exactly how much a cub is able to do at what age. And until you‚re 4 months old, you never leave the mom. And then when you’re 6 months old, you can go out a little way, but you’ll get smacked back if you ever exceed the limits of which you’re capable of managing.

Are we the only mammal who thinks we don’t have to follow these rules? That we don’t have to pass on a thousand previous generations of experience? That’s not acceptable.

Powell is a powerfully persuasive speaker with a great deal of integrity. Earlier he had mentioned children’s need to belong to a group, be it a family or a gang. I admire his comparing human families to a lion pride and specifically referring to us as “mammals,” who are subject to the same basic needs and instincts.

It’s dangerous when humans try to distinguish ourselves from the animal kingdom, as somehow above it. Philosophers and theologians have spent millennia trying to find a solid argument for why we are not animals, but this line of thought abandons all we may learn by studying our animal nature. Powell has deep insights into what motivates us by watching Animal Planet, and we have much to learn about ourselves by observing our primate relatives on the evolutionary tree.

Powell’s example of the lion pride resembles hierarchies found in ape and monkey societies. In 1925, the London Zoo put together a baboon exhibit, bringing 99 male baboons and 36 females into an enclosure where each had about 60 square feet of personal space. Six years later, 35 of the males and five of the females were still alive. The remaining females were removed for their own safety, as fighting among the male baboons had killed off much of the zoo’s population.

The incident was seen as reinforcing the idea of animal savagery, that such violence was in the baboons’ nature and humans were above such baser instincts, but if such behavior were to occur in the wild, baboons would quickly be driven to extinction. Eventually, a more rational explanation came to light, as Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan elucidate:

What had gone wrong on Monkey Hill? First, almost all of the baboons introduced to the “colony” were unknown to one another. There was no long-term mutual habituation, no prior establishment of dominance hierarchies, no common understanding in these harem-obsessed males of who was to have many females and who none at all. No kinship-based female dominance hierarchy had been established.

Baboons in the wild are born into a cultural context, where there are adults with social relationships already worked out. The London Zoo’s baboons were all thrown in together at random, stripped of their social network, and forced to work out a completely new social hierarchy on the spot, resulting in unconscionable acts of mortal violence. As with Powell’s lion pride example, baboon children are part of a culture, a social network and they learn their place in it, the way it works, and how they may rise in status within it.

Piled baboons Credit: Tambako the Jaguar

There are examples of patriarchal and matriarchal social hierarchies in primate societies, each conferring the advantage of stability on the whole. Rather than look down on the animal kingdom as something meant for subjugation, we can see the importance of family and community for providing social stability from which we all benefit.

Dermacentor variabilis, female Credit: National Tick Collection

Vicky and I went for a short hike in Chesapeake’s Northwest River Park last weekend, a lovely site filled with marshland and waterways for canoeing, camping, … and ticks. Hot summer days combined with the humidity of the wetlands climate equals lots and lots of ticks, and this hike was no exception.

Except for Vicky. While I had to stop every so many hundred yards to scan my legs for the little bloodsuckers, of which I was literally finding dozens, Vicky found maybe four on her the whole trip. What gives?

Carl Sagan gives a brief description of the life of a tick in his book Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, and the small set of instinctual rules that command its life. Lacking eyes, ticks must find each other to mate by detecting the pheromones C₆H₃ OHCl₂. Then:

After mating, the female climbs up a bush or shrub and out onto a twig or leaf. How does she know which way is up? Her skin can sense the direction from which light is coming, even if she cannot generate an optical image of her surroundings. Poised out on the leaf or twig, exposed to the elements, she waits. Conception has not yet occurred. The sperm cells within her are neatly encapsulated; they’ve been put in long-term storage. She may wait for months or even years without eating. She is very patient.

Makes the tick sound like a tiny clockwork machine, doesn’t it? It’s possible to have some fun with this instinctual behavior too. As when Vicky and I put a blood-engorged tick in a sealed vial, where it soon laid a bazillion eggs, which hatched a few months later.

Baby Ticks Credit: Vicky

The baby ticks all climbed to the top of the vial. When the vial was turned over, they all climbed to the highest point again. Over and over again, until they eventually stopped moving (Don’t tell PETA). It was like some twisted version of an hourglass, appropriate for some Tim Burton film. Try this sometime, it makes a great conversational piece when you have guests over that you’re not very fond of.

Eventually, the right stimulus comes along the forest path, triggering the tick to drop, hopefully (for her), onto something full of blood:

What she’s waiting for is a smell, a whiff of another specific molecule, perhaps butyric acid, which can be written C₂H₇COOH. Many mammals, including humans, give off butyric acid from their skin and sexual parts. A small cloud of the stuff follows them around like cheap perfume. It’s a sex attractant for mammals. But ticks use it to find food for prosepctive mothers.

Here’s the clue as to why I was getting bum-rushed with blood-sucking arachnids, while Vicky was passing through the forest virtually untouched, butyric acid. Vicky had showered that morning and put on fresh clothes, while I figured I’d shower after the hike, and put on my workout clothes from the day before. I even wore the same icky socks. Vicky was virtually clean of butyric acid, while I was fairly drenched in the stuff.

So while I like to joke that the ticks preferred me because I was sweeter, in reality, they wanted me because I was stinkier! (Why am I sharing this with you?)

In fact, this basic instinctual set of commands can cause the arachnid to exhibit some buggy (in a software-metaphor sense of the word) behavior, as with the stimulus to trigger her blood-drinking response:

It’s not the taste of the blood that attracts her, but the warmth. If she drops onto a butyric acid-scented toy balloon filled with warm water, she will readily puncture it and, an inept Dracula, gorge herself on tap water.

I think I have plans for some future fun with stinky socks and warm-water filled balloons in my future. : )

Vicky introduced me to the Relay for Life this year, an all-night fundraising event where teams raise money for the American Cancer Society. We brought some of the neighborhood kids to the event, and much fun was had by one and all. The most impactful moment of the night for me was the Luminaria Ceremony, where a seemingly endless list of the names of people who have died from or are currently surviving cancer is read. The names Patrick Swayze and Farrah Fawcett both came up, and that added to the impact, but also a name I that took me by surprise; although, it shouldn’t have:

Carl Sagan Luminary

Carl Sagan, my biggest hero, died of pneumonia after a two-year battle with bone marrow cancer on December 20, 1996. There is a memorial to Sagan on the planet Mars, where the marker displays a quote from him that reads, “Whatever the reason you’re on Mars, I’m glad you’re there, and I wish I was with you.” I envy the future humans who will get to see that monument in person.

Rosalind Franklin Credit: MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology

This very thoughtful luminary made me think of another scientist who died of cancer who I would like to see honored. Rosalind Franklin, who’s 1952 Photo 51 captured the basic structure of the DNA molecule, performed her research spending long hours directly in front of an X-ray beam, which almost certainly led to the ovarian cancer that ultimately killed her and prevented her from receiving the Nobel Prize with Francis and Crick for deciphering the molecule¹.

Marie Curie Credit: Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology

Physicist and chemist Marie Curie also deserves a note here. She was awarded two Nobel prizes, one for her research into radiation (she coined the term “radioactivity”), and another for her discovery of the elements radium and polonium. She was the first woman to win a Nobel prize, the first person to win two of them, and one of only two people to have been awarded two Nobels in two different fields. Curie died of aplastic anemia, an illness where bone marrow does not produce sufficient new cells to replenish blood cells, a condition certainly brought on by her over-exposure to radiation; however, she deserves mention here because it was under her direction that the world’s first studies were conducted into the treatment of cancers using radioactive isotopes. Today the United Kingdom charitable organization Marie Curie Cancer Care bares her name in honor of her achievements.

Even if you don’t have anyone close to you who has died of cancer or is currently wrestling with the disease, you could donate money toward a luminary for one of these visionary pioneers whose lives were cut short by it.

¹ It is unknown if she would have actually received the prize, but she did deserve to share in it; unfortunately, they do not award the Nobel posthumously.

Note: The Carl Sagan Appreciation Society (this is a staging version of the site) works to maintain Sagan’s incredible legacy.

The movement of troops through the islands of the South Pacific in World War II had a profound, unintended consequence for the native cultures living in them. These isolated aboriginal peoples were suddenly exposed to soldiers in the Japanese and Allied Forces, who brought incredible amounts of manufactured clothing, medicine, canned foods, tents, weapons, and other goods with them. These supplies, some of which were shared with the islanders, were even dropped miraculously from the sky.

Then the war was over, the airbases were quickly abandoned, and the wonderful cargo stopped falling from the heavens. The islanders, in an attempt to persuade their gods and ancestors to bring more cargo to them in planes, ships, and parachutes, began ritualistically imitating the behaviors of the soldiers. They waved landing signals while standing on the abandoned runways, now lit with torches. They carved wooden headphones and sat in replicas of control towers, all in an attempt to bring the wonderful riches from beyond.

From our technologically-advanced perspective, we may fall into the trap of looking down on these “Cargo Cults,” as they are known, but a bit of introspection finds that we may all be guilty of such magical thinking. In my own profession, we have the term cargo cult programming, where a novice programmer includes code that serves no purpose in their software simply because they don’t understand what it does. I know that I have been guilty of such a logical fallacy in my own coding as a novice, where I would incorporate a large block of another programmer’s code into my work because I lacked the skills to identify the smaller portion of it that I actually needed. I didn’t know how the code worked; I just knew that copying and pasting it into my software solved my problems.

Richard Feynman coined the term “Cargo Cult Science” in his 1974 commencement address at Caltech to describe scientific ideas that we accept because they are established dogma rather than because they provide evidentiary proof of their effectiveness:

There are big schools of reading methods and mathematics methods, and so forth, but if you notice, you’ll see the reading scores keep going down–or hardly going up in spite of the fact that we continually use these same people to improve the methods. There’s a witch doctor remedy that doesn’t work. It ought to be looked into; how do they know that their method should work? Another example is how to treat criminals. We obviously have made no progress–lots of theory, but no progress–in decreasing the amount of crime by the method that we use to handle criminals.

Yet the true essence of science is to perpetually challenge the dominant paradigm. Someone once told me they didn’t trust science because it was, “One guy saying he saw something and some other guy agreeing with him;” but this is the very antithesis of the scientific process.

Science doesn’t say “This is what I saw, worship me!” Science says, “This is what I saw, this is how I saw it, now go see for yourself.” The whole purpose of peer-review is to have others try and replicate your experiments, and if they don’t get the same results? Well, isn’t that interesting?

Feynman has a word of warning to scientists who will compromise scientific truth for personal gain:

We’ve learned from experience that the truth will come out. Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right. Nature’s phenomena will agree or they’ll disagree with your theory. And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven’t tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And it’s this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in cargo cult science.

The cargo cults of the south pacific mostly vanished when their newfound rituals failed to procure the favor of the gods, but one of these religions, the John Frum Cult, still exists today, and the inhabitants of Tanna island in Vanuatu still hold a parade every year, waiting for their god to return. In the meantime, the cult believes it has some empirical evidence validating their faith, as the influx of tourists to the island bring with them some of the legendary riches of the past.

Which societies are better off, the ones who abandoned their magical thinking, or the ones still living the illusion?

“For now we see through a glass, darkly…”
- 1 Corinthians 13:12

There is a common theme among religions of the world: humans are flawed. We are subject to a cycle of suffering, guilty of original sin, or afflicted with a modern malaise of dissatisfaction, which may only be cured through adherence to Buddhism, accepting Jesus Christ as our lord and savior, or following the Sastras. If we fail to follow the official path, we are damned to misery of some form or another.

Science also recognizes the flaws in human beings, chiefly our stunted natural perceptions of the world around us. We don’t see that the solid world around us is made up of atoms that are mostly empty space because there was no evolutionary advantage to perceiving this fact. Optical illusions can distort our perspectives because our brains try to predict the way the world should be, rather than simply accept things as they are. As with religion, science purports to have the solution to such shortcomings as well.

Wavelengths for colors Credit: NASA

The visible spectrum, the range of light frequencies we can see with our eyes (ROY G BIV), is an itsy-bitsy subset of the possible frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum. While we can see wavelengths from 380 to 750nm, the entire spectrum runs from 1 pm up to 100 Mm. We see ROY G BIV, but we don’t see radio, microwave, far and near infrared, ultraviolet, x-rays, gamma rays, or high energy gamma rays. At best, we must indirectly perceive these frequencies using the scientific innovations such as radios, night vision goggles, Geiger counters and other inventions.

The human senses of smell and taste are examples of chemoreception, where chemical signals are converted into stimuli. Receptors in our noses are triggered by molecules in the air and receptors in our tongues are triggered by molecules in what we eat. Humans have approximately 800 olfactory receptor genes, while mice have 1,400. There are more ways to combine molecules than there are atoms in the universe, so it’s easy to understand how limited our senses are in differentiating molecules, however the magnitude of how stunted our senses are is difficult to comprehend. Thank the Cosmos we have chemistry, through which we may detect the mercury, arsenic, and other toxins we cannot taste; spectral analysis, which reveals the elemental content of stars; or biochemistry modeling the molecular processes of life.

Chunking in Short-Term Memory Credit: Python Software Foundation

Human working memory can only hold about seven elements at time for a mere 18 seconds on average. When we are given a set of things, say {“blue”, “robot”, “mirror”, “a-flat”, “time”, “42″, “warm”, “E.O. Wilson”}, the overwhelming majority of us will fail to commit at least one of the items to memory. If this last is unconvincing, take a moment to try and memorize pi to one-million digits in order to understand the scope of the world around us and how little of it we can hold in our minds at any one time. One way we overcome this imprecision is through the discipline of computer science, where we may store everything we know about the world, and even generate new information from algorithms that do the inference for us.

Human long-term memory is incredible fallible. Our brains are not video cameras, recording things as they happen, but rather they recreate events in our minds in a biased and inaccurate manner, often giving false positives where a suggestion from someone causes us to remember something that did not actually happen. Eyewitness accounts can often be wrong, with victims identifying the wrong person in a line-up, but science has identified this problem and provides us with DNA testing, photography, recordings, citations, the peer-review process, archaeology, and psychology to compensate, so that we may discover even our own personal pasts the way they actually happened.

Science gives us infrared cameras that we may see in the dark, computers so that we may calculate the incalculable, writing and recording that we may revisit the past as it actually happened, chemical analysis, spectral analysis, medical diagnoses, telescopes, electric lights–Of course, without science, we would also be completely unaware of how incredibly stunted is our ability to perceive the world, but anyone who would like to give it up, return to life without antibiotics, modern agriculture, air conditioning, television, and a future where knowledge will continue to grow, along with the enhancements it will bring to our lives, is welcome to drop out of civilization anytime.

Nobody flunks a science museum. – Frank Oppenheimer, founder of Exploratorium

Center Director Jenny Eaton at the Port Discover Booth for Knobbs Creek Recreation Center’s Safety Day

There’s a feeling I get when I find a picture of a living species on Earth that looks as though it belongs in a science fiction film, come across a new mathematical equation that explains some part of the world around me I previously thought unquantifiable, or read the philosophical speculations of a researcher who has spent a decade immersed in the intricate details of some obscure scientific realm. These are discoveries already made known to the world, but I am discovering them personally for the first time, and I come away from them seeing the entire world around me with a new layer of understanding. I’m addicted to this feeling, constantly seeking it out, so that I am perpetually looking at the world in a different light.

This state of mind, the sense of harmony we receive from comprehending that our reality is orderly and understandable is known as the Ionian Enchantment, a term coined by the physicist and philosopher Gerald Holton, and I’ve always thought the Physicist Richard Feynman best articulated it in this passage:

The World looks so different after learning science.

For example, trees are made of air, primarily. When they are burned, they go back to air, and in the flaming heat is released the flaming heat of the sun which was bound in to convert the air into tree. [A]nd in the ash is the small remnant part which did not come from air, that came from the solid earth, instead.

These are beautiful things, and the content of science is wonderfully full of them. They are very inspiring, and they can be used to inspire others.

A regular visit to the Port Discover science center in downtown Elizabeth City offers a fresh bit of Ionian enchantment each month. Walk into the center one week and you might find a light box filled with rows of sprouting plants, another week might find a new terrarium filled with local plant life, and every month brings new guest speakers to present engaging perspectives on the infinite enlightening subjects science has to offer. This perpetual introduction of new ideas to engage the mind is an attribute of all good science centers.

When volunteers were helping to put the Port Discover together, Director LuAnne Pendergraft kept reminding everyone that we were building a center not a museum. Nearly 50 years ago the Science Center Movement began, a “dramatic shift toward the empowerment of students and individuals to be in control of their own learning,” and creating “new institutions of ideas rather than things.” Yet, despite being a half-century in age, the movement is still in its emergent phase, still catching on; however, as Alan Nursall of Science North argues, centers serve an important need in our communities:

A science center can illustrate to visitors that science is an energizing human activity and that great works of science are as passionate and inspirational as great music, art, and sport… [Science Centers] must provide an opportunity to enjoy science, to do science, to laugh at and about science, to be skeptical of science, and to be awed by science. We need places like that–science arenas–where we can play with our friends and let our minds work up a sweat.

Director LuAnne Pendergraft Setting Up LED Booklights at the Port Discover booth for the Fourth of July

Port Discover serves this fantastic function in our community, and it does so with a miniscule amount of space. Recently, the space adjacent to the science center became vacant, providing the perfect opportunity to expand; however, in order to do this, Port Discover needs public funding to purchase the space, and is asking for $50,000 each year for three years, which the center will match with equal funds raised through charitable donations:

May 6, 2009

Friend of Port Discover:

Port Discover is seeking to expand its operations to the former Arts of the Albemarle space adjacent to the current center location. Exhibits, activities and programs would expand along with the physical space. In order to be most successful, Port Discover is requesting public financial support from the City of Elizabeth City and Pasquotank County. The request from Port Discover’s Board of Directors is not from the general fund, but rather from funds that are restricted to tourism-related projects, for which Port Discover qualifies.

If you believe that Port Discover is a positive addition to Elizabeth City and that your family and the greater community would benefit from an expanded space, we need your help. Please express support by communicating about a positive experience related to Port Discover; your feelings about the need for informal science education centers; a family trip planned around a center like Port Discover or the positive effect Port Discover creates for visitors and residents. Or simply say “I support Port Discover and hope that you will too by helping them grow”.

Contact your Pasquotank County Commissioner. Information at www.co.pasquotank.nc.us/Departments/manager/commissioners.cfm

Contact your Elizabeth City Council representative. Information at www.cityofec.com

Write a letter of support to Port Discover at 613 E. Main Street, Elizabeth City

Email a letter of support to luanne@portdiscover.org

Become a Port Discover member. Download a membership brochure at www.portdiscover.org under “Get Involved.”

Send a monetary donation to Port Discover.

Thanks for your commitment to Port Discover!

Science centers nurture an environment conducive to free Inquiry, where young minds are encouraged to explore whatever suits their interests, and, by providing the means to explore the world of ideas, the science center tailors learning to the individual, empowering them. In fostering a community curious about the world of ideas around them, science centers can bring us a bit closer to Dennis Schatz’s dream:

I have a fantasy–that someday science will be as pervasive as sports in our society. Just think what it would mean to have intramural science, after-school science, and even that pickup science activity at the local park…. The ultimate test for knowing when science is as pervasive as sports will be when everyone has to rush home to see Monday Night Science.

“I believe that consciousness is, essentially, the way information feels when being processed.” – Max Tegmark

The ancient Greeks, Hindus, Buddhists, and Medieval Alchemists thought the universe was composed of five classical elements: air/wind, water, Earth, Fire, and Aether/Space. Recently, I came across the most basic way to categorize everything in our universe into two eleements, matter-energy and information.

In the realm of physics, everything is matter-energy, a single element that takes two basic forms as explained in special relativity. Then Cybernetic systems came along, which described systems in terms of matter-energy interactions, but added the element of information, which creates a feedback loop for the system. Throughout history, some philosophers and theologians have considered information processing a separate element, the soul, but we know this Cartesian Dualism is a conceptual illusion.

Cartesian Duality Credit: Rene Descartes

Roundworms do calculus to find food or avoid unpleasantness. Computers do calculus too. They do this with logic-gates inside the arithmetic logic unit (ALU), an electro-mechanical sequence of events in the circuitry that produces a result we read on a screen and understand through an electro-biochemical sequence of events in our brains, two very different matter-energy systems understanding the information in very different ways, but interfacing nonetheless.

Photons reflected off our surroundings hit the retinas of our eyes, which signal the brain via the optic nerve, where 100 billion neurons make sense of the image and decide how to react. It is unacceptable to write this symphony of interactions off as information. It seems as though we are simply labeling “information” what we cannot yet explain through matter-energy mechanisms in detail.

Can information be reduced to matter-energy, and return us to only that single element? Matter and energy were once considered two separate and distinct elements, until Einstein came along and proved they were the same thing with the E=mc² equation.

Stuart A. Umpleby published a paper in the journal Systems Research and Behavioral Science titled Physical Relationships among Matter, Energy and Information, which attempts to connect these three concepts. Using Einstein’s established mass-energy equivalence formula, the relationship between the frequency of light and photon energy, which is observed in the photoelectric effect, and Bremermann’s limit, which is the maximum rate at which any system can compute based on E=mc², 2×10⁴⁷ bits/second/gram, Umpleby comes up with the following triangle connecting the dots:

Energy-Matter-Information Triangle

Information is difficult to define in this context. It’s not the words on a sign, as the photons being reflected from the symbols exist regardless of there being an observer to see them. It’s not data, as numbers, charts, statistics are only meaningful at the moment someone sees their patterns in real-time or brings them into awareness from memory. Information is processing, an action, a verb. It does not exist when there is not a brain or computer to create it. Information and consciousness are synonymous, the merging of data and the immediate awareness of its significance.

Another diagram I found online, makes this relationship linear rather than triangular, information comes from matter, through energy:

Energy-Matter-Information Transformations

There is little else I could find on this question, and nothing concrete. All of this is still vague, speculative. Humans started out working primarily with matter through agriculture, then we began producing massive amounts of energy with the Industrial Revolution, now the Information Revolution is putting this question right in our collective face, and, in doing so, brings the possibility of answering it.

The 1700s were a century of phenomenal progress in the subject of electricity. Luigi Galvani discovered that electricity made dead muscles twitch, inspiring Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. Alessandro Volta discovered that electricity was dynamic, flowing through conductive materials like water in a stream, which is why we call it an “electric current.” William Nicholson and Anthony Carlisle discovered that running an electric current through water broke the molecular bonds, generating hydrogen and oxygen, linking the stuff of electricity to the very atoms themselves (Asimov, 1985).

Benjamin Franklin’s electrostatic motor Credit: Peter Collinson, Royal Society

The great American polymath, Benjamin Franklin, made some major contributions to our understanding of the stuff as well. In his Memoirs there is a section Wonderful effect of points.–Positive and negative Electricity, where he hypothesizes, correctly, that electricity is only one fluid, and electric currents, like static electric shocks and lightning, are the result of an excess of this fluid in one place and a deficit in another, which sought equilibrium.

A, who stands on wax, and rubs the tube, collects the electrical fire from himself into the glass… B, passing his knuckle along near the tube, receives the fire which was collected by the glass from A… To C, standing on the floor, both appear to be electrisied… If A and B approach to touch each other, the spark is stronger, because the difference between them is greater; after such touch there is no spark between either of them and C, because the electrical fire in all is reduced to the original equality… Hence have arisen some new terms among us; we say B is electrisied positively; A, negatively. Or rather, B is electrisied plus; A, minus.

We know now that this “electrical fire” Franklin speaks of is a surplus of electrons, and he was correct that static electric shocks were the result of deficits and surpluses of electrons. The problem was that he had no way of knowing where the surplus, the plus/positive, was. So he took a 50/50 guess… and got it wrong. He meant to give electrons the positive/plus/excess charge, and where they flow to the negative/minus/deficit charge.

For most conceptual purposes, this causes no problems with understanding electricity; however, in thinking of electricity as a flowing entity, it does vex slightly. As Isaac Asimov observes, when recounting how the scientist Michael Faraday used it in naming the two poles between a flowing electric current:

The two poles were “electrodes,” from Greek words meaning “electrical route.” The positive pole was the “anode” (“upper route”) and the negative pole, the “cathode” (“lower route”). This visualized the electric current flowing, as water would, from the higher positions of the anode to the lower position of the cathode.

Actually, now that we follow the electron flow, the electric current is moving from the cathode to the anode, so that, if we go by the names, it is moving uphill. Fortunately, no one pays any attention whatever to the Greek meaning of the words, and scientists use these terms without the slightest feeling of incongruity. (Well, Greek scientists might smile.)

So, thanks to Benjamin Franklin, electric currents are an excess of negatively charged electrons flowing to the deficit of electrons, where there is a positive charge. Thanks to this labeling, we inadvertently labeled the point from which the electrons flow lower and the point to which they flow higher.

You now have enough background to get the following cartoon:

Urgent Mission Credit: XKCD

I do have to side with those academics who argue Franklin wasn’t wrong in assigning electrons the negative charge. Electrons and protons could just have easily had their respective charges named “up” and “down,” as we do with some quarks, or “black” and “white,” or “male” and “female.” The labels “positive” and “negative” assign no characteristics to the particles except to describe them as opposites.

Okay… maybe it does irk me slightly. But, living in America, solving this problem has to take a lower priority than adopting the metric system or establishing phonetic spelling.

References

Asimov, Isaac (1985). Salt and Battery, printed in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Mercury Press Inc.