There are two things I learnt this morning on the way to work.

1) A Pantograph is not a graph of potential pants.

2) A way of testing whether someone has understood an idea not just been taught a definition.

So, what is a Pantograph?

“A pantograph (from Greek roots παντ- ‘all, every’ and γραφ- ‘to write’, from their original use for copying writing) is a mechanical linkage connected in a special manner based on parallelograms so that the movement of one specified point is an amplified version of the movement of another point.”

Richard Feynman was using it in a lecture discussing how one could build or create incredibly tiny machines. Each machine creating a miniature duplicate of itself.

When I checked out the word (not being familiar with it) wikipedia informed me that Pantograph’s can be used in engraving letters on to objects. Instantly I comprehended that this was something that I knew could be done (the engraving), but not how it was done. Great idea.

And at that point, reading some more, I came across the concept that to teach someone something, you can teach them the definition and you can teach them the idea. A way of testing whether they have understood it, could be that you ask “Without using the new word which you have just learned, try to rephrase what you have just learned in your own language.” If you have just learnt the definition, you wouldn’t be able to.

This got me thinking about the following brief conversation I had with a believer.

They tried to say that I was as militant in my faith of science, as any other militant religious person.

Like others have stated, I replied that I and others, who loudly mock religion, are unlikely to strap bombs to my body, killing innocents (or flying into tower blocks) to prove my point.

And here comes the crux. In order to rebuttal this they tried to tell me, that those people, who do despicable things in the name of religion, aren’t really religious.

I guess it’s because to them, the definition of a religious person following that faith, doesn’t include the slaughter of innocents. (which surely means they haven’t read much of their holy book).

So the cherry picking doesn’t just limit itself to the contradictions of the dogma of faith, about which rules to follow and which to ignore, but also to the definitions of who belongs or represents your faith.

I’m sure that the individual is (like many other representatives of religions in debates) willing to justify their existence though, of religions, based on all the good that the religious do. (in other words, if the person is religious and good, then they are definitely a true [insert faith title], but if they are a self proclaimed true [insert faith title] but do bad, then they aren’t really representative)

poor chap directs all this stylish scenes with big stars walk around spewing pokerfaced stratagems and toting all sorts of guns and basically telling the poor everyday dandy that there is a whole bunch of people out there that he can never hope to outwit/outrun/kick in the nuts/scare.

Really? That is a convenient way of scaring off a substantially large chunk of competition, having a director who can portray the thug to be as smart as Feynman. Hold on, i was thinking the other day what if all those stories in “surely you must be joking…” are also some sort of guy ritchie type fantasies.

What do i know. I am your everyday dandy.

Si a alguien le gusta la física, le sonará el nombre de Richard Feynman. Premio nobel en el 65 por sus trabajos en la electrodinámica quántica.

Pero lo mejor de este personaje es su vida aparte de la física. Durante su estancia en Rio de Janeiro como profesor invitado, estuvo clandestinamente colaborando con un grupo de samba de la ciudad para prepararse para el carnaval.

También famoso por ser infalible ante cualquier caja fuerte, este físico es muy recomendable para quien quiera leer a alguien que vivió la vida con pasión, ilusión y sobretodo diversión.

No os perdais una de sus memorias: ¿Está ud. de broma sr.Feynman?

Aquí teneis una muestra de sus habilidades como percusionista:

- Perché c’è qualcosa piuttosto che il nulla?

- Doveva esserci.

Lawrence Krauss

- Non crederai a quello che mi è successo oggi.
- Cosa?
- Assolutamente niente.

Richard P. Feynman

*

E la cosa veramente straordinaria è che continuiamo ad arrabattarci.

E pure a scriverlo sui blog.

F.

To continue the unabashed posting of YouTube videos in lieu of real content here’s another song in the tune of science:

Good to see Mr. Nye gets his due in inspiring folks to think beyond the tube. Go look at the stars, kids.

I found out about this video last night and I really thought that it’s a rather ingenious creation. I’ve been brought up rather scientific, with english as the primary base. Almost anything that is smart and so on, I’d love to listen or read.. though I don’t understand some of them, I know I will some day. Like the lyrics below, it just brings to my awareness as to how beautiful our world really is.. and how we are in some mysterious way, connected to each other.

We are all connected;
To each other, biologically
To the earth, chemically
To the rest of the universe atomically

And it’s all really there
But you gotta stop and think about it
About the complexity to really get the pleasure
And it’s all really there
The inconceivable nature of nature

I have been enjoying “Feynman Lectures on Physics” for a couple of weeks now and decided to share some quotes from the second lecture together with some of my thoughts.

…it was discovered that things on a small scale behave nothing like things on a large scale. It is hard because <…> we have no direct experience with it. Here things behave like nothing we know of, so that it is impossible to describe this behavior in any other than analytic ways. It is difficult, and takes a lot of imagination.

So true, so true. It is quiet difficult for us to grasp something outside our “nature”, something we do not directly experience with our main senses, to which we cannot relate. But does our understanding come from imagination or from excersising our senses to appreciate this next scientific level?

Another most interesting change in the ideas and philosophy of science brought about by quantum mechanics is this: it is not possible to predict exactly what will happen in any circumstance. <…> nature, as we understand it today, behaves in such a way that it is fundamentally impossible to make a precise prediction of exactly what will happen in a given experiment.

So basically he is saying the nature is unpredictable in its core. Is it? Or is it just our lack of understanding of the forces behind the events?

“Symphony of Science — We Are All Connected” (ft. Sagan, Feynman, deGrasse Tyson & Bill Nye),

Ciencia Kanija publica una entrevista en la que Roger Pensore básicamente se caga en la mecánica cuántica, la teoría de cuerdas, la cosmología inflacionaria y demás teorías físicas modernas que parecen más ciencia ficción que otra cosa (hay que reconocer que lo de los inflatones suena a chiste).

Los defensores de la mecánica cuántica suelen citar a Richard Feynman (premio Nobel, profesor extraordinario, virtuoso de los bongos) , que dijo que si crees que entiendes la teoría cuántica, es que no la entiendes, pero que aún así permite realizar predicciones tan precisas como lo que sería medir el ancho de Norteamerica con el margen de error del ancho de un pelo. En definitiva, que da igual las hipótesis de la teoría resulten incomprensibles para la mente humana, porque funcionar, funciona.

No hace falta buscar justificaciones tan rebuscadas, ni hacer cálculos, basta con leer los periódicos. Es cierto que lo del gato de Schrödinger, así de primeras, da un poco de reparo, pero más extraño que el estar vivo o muerto a la vez es el ser secretario general del PP y no serlo, y sin embargo ahí tienen a Ricardo Costa, que durante al menos un rato ha tenido un comportamiento cuántico.

Ahí es nada.

Alan Alda’s Commencement speech to the Caltech class of 2002

Finding Feynman

Twenty-five or thirty years ago, on my days off from the Korean War, which was at that time being waged at Twentieth Century Fox in Beverly Hills, I would often come to Pasadena to visit the Rembrandts at the Norton Simon Gallery, or take a walk in the Huntington Gardens. And sometimes I would drive by Caltech and give it a glance and wonder what interesting stuff was going on in there. I had been reading about science avidly for years and I was immensely curious about how scientists went about what they did. It didn’t occur to me each time I passed by that there was one particular man in one of these buildings who at that moment might have been drawing gluon tubes on a blackboard, or playing the bongos, or just standing looking out the window as a young woman passed by—a man in whom, in a few years, I would become intensely interested.

One day, exactly 28 years ago, he was standing right here, giving the commencement address. This is the way the universe operates. First Richard Feynman gives the talk; then, 28 years later, an actor who played him on the stage gives it. This is what’s called entropy. This is what happens just before the cosmos reaches a temperature of absolute zero.

Let me tell you a little about the path that led me here. After I had read several books about Richard Feynman, I brought one of them, a charming, touching book by Ralph Leighton, called Tuva or Bust, to Gordon Davidson at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. I wondered if he thought we might be able to make a play about Feynman. He suggested Peter Parnell to write the play, and the three of us started off on a journey to find out who Richard Feynman was. We thought we’d open the play a year or so later. Instead, it took us over six years.

We had no idea how hard it would be. For one thing, he was an extremely unusual person. Toward the end of his life, he knew he was dying and he knew exactly what the most important questions were, and he knew he had a shot at answering them . . . and yet he kept to his habit of doing only what interested him.

He spent a good part of his time trying to get to this little place in the middle of Asia called Tuva, mainly because its capital was spelled with no vowels, which, for some reason, he found extremely interesting.

But, just as getting to Tuva was tantalizingly difficult for Feynman, getting to Feynman became maddeningly hard for us.

What part of him do you focus on? He helped create the atomic bomb, he helped figure out why the Challenger blew up, he understood the most puzzling questions in physics so deeply they gave him the Nobel Prize. Which facet of him do you let catch the most light? The one who was a revered teacher, a bongo player, an artist, a hilarious raconteur or a safecracker?

We wanted to make a play about Feynman, but which Feynman?

A mathematician friend of mine suggested that a central image for a play about him could be Feynman’s own idea of a sum over histories. Just as Feynman saw a photon taking every possible path on its way to your eye, Feynman himself took every possible path on his way through life. He was the sum of all his histories.

Well, nature may be smart enough to know how to average all the paths of a photon. But, we three theater people couldn’t figure out how to add up all the histories that made up Feynman. At one point, I said, “You know what we ought to do? We ought to write a play about three guys sitting around in a hotel room, trying to figure out a play about Feynman. They never figure it out. They just drive themselves crazy.”

We researched him like mad, of course. The people who knew him and worked with him and loved him here at Caltech opened their doors and their hearts to us. They were extremely generous and helpful, as we struggled to reduce this irreducible person to an evening in the theater.
I think one of the things I most hoped would come through was his honesty. He never wanted to deceive anyone, especially himself. He questioned his every assumption. And when he was talking to ordinary people with no training in physics, he never fell back on his authority as a great thinker. He felt that if he couldn’t say it in everyday words, he probably didn’t understand it himself.

I was fascinated by this in him. He knew more than most of us will ever know, and yet he insisted on speaking our language.

Like Dante in his time, he could say the most exquisitely subtle things in the language of the common people. He was an American genius, and like many American artists, he was direct and colloquial… not afraid to take a look at the ordinary, and not afraid to go deeply into it to reveal the extraordinary roots of ordinary things.

And yet, he recoiled from oversimplification. He wasn’t interested in dumbing down science… he was looking for clarity.

If he left something out, he always told you what he was leaving out, so you didn’t get a false picture of a simplicity that wasn’t there. And, later when things got more complex, you were prepared for it. He treated you, in other words, with respect.

But there was something else about him that fascinates me.

I was reading a book by Freeman Dyson the other day and a paragraph about Feynman jumped off the page at me.

“Dick was… a profoundly original scientist [Dyson says]. He refused to take anybody’s word for anything. This meant that he was forced to rediscover or reinvent for himself almost the whole of physics . . .

He said that he couldn’t understand the official version of quantum mechanics that was taught in textbooks, and so he had to begin afresh from the beginning . . .

At the end he had a version of quantum mechanics that he could understand.”

I think I saw something in this paragraph for the first time; something suddenly clicked into place. The fact that he wouldn’t take anybody’s word for anything wasn’t new to me, or that he needed to go through every step himself in order to understand it. A phrase of his has been on the blackboard behind me every night as I’ve played Feynman: “What I cannot create, I do not understand.”

(People have asked us why that phrase is given so much prominence in the play. It’s because the blackboard on our set contains pretty much everything that was on the final blackboard left by Feynman in his office when he died. And “What I cannot create, I do not understand” was right up there at the top.)

But what did jump out at me the other day was the phrase “he couldn’t understand the official version of quantum mechanics that was taught in textbooks.” Now, this is Feynman we’re talking about. I suddenly had this picture in my head of Feynman going through the same experience the rest of us do . . . meeting that same blank wall half way up the mountain. I wondered. Did that give him the ability to remember what it was like to start that climb?

So, maybe it wasn’t just that he could visualize these little particles and their interactions that made him able to communicate it to the rest of us, maybe it was also that he could remember what it was like to feel dumb.

Now, here’s why I’m going on about this. It may not seem important how Feynman did it. Maybe we should just be glad he could do it and let it go at that. But I think it is important. Because, I think we have to figure out how we can do it, too.

For one thing, we live in a time when massive means of destruction are right here in our hands. We’re probably the first species capable of doing this much damage to our planet. We can make the birds stop singing; we can still the fish and make the insects fall from the trees like black rain. And ironically we’ve been brought here by reason, by rationality. We cannot afford to live in a culture that doesn’t use the power in its hands with the kind of rationality that produced it in the first place.

But right now, instead of reason, a lot of people are making use of wishes, dreams, mantras, and incantations. They’re trying to heal themselves using crystals, magnets, and herbs with unknown properties. People will offer you a pill made from the leaf of an obscure plant and say, “Take it, it can’t hurt you, it’s natural.” But so is deadly nightshade.

Interestingly, they expect the plant to have active properties to cure them, but they’re certain it has no active properties that can harm them. How do they know that?

I mention this, not to denigrate anyone’s beliefs (I feel strongly that we’re all entitled to our beliefs, just as we’re entitled to our feelings) but I bring it up to point out that we’re in a culture that increasingly holds that science is just another belief.

And I guess it’s easier to believe something . . . anything . . . than not to know.

We don’t like uncertainty—so we gravitate back to the last comfortable solution we had—no matter how cockeyed it is.

But Feynman was comfortable with not knowing. He enjoyed it. He would proceed for a while with an idea as if he believed it was the answer. But that was only a temporary belief in order to allow himself to follow it wherever it led. Then, a little while later, he would vigorously attack the idea to see if it could stand up to every test he could think of. If it couldn’t stand up, then he simply decided he just didn’t know. “Not knowing,” he said, “is much more interesting than believing an answer which might be wrong.”

You’re graduating today partly as Feynman’s heirs in this gloriously courageous willingness to be unsure. And just as he was heir to Newton, who was in turn heir to Galileo . . . I hope you’ll think about devoting some time to helping the rest of us become your heirs.

I’m assuming you’re here at Caltech because you love science, and I’m assuming you’ve learned a great deal here about how to do science. I’m asking you today to devote some significant part of your life to figuring out how to share your love of science with the rest of us.

But not just because explaining to us what you do will get you more funding for what you do . . . although it surely will . . . but just because you love what you do.

And while you’re explaining it, remember that dazzling us with jargon might make us sit in awe of your work, but it won’t make us love it.

Tell us frankly how you got there. If you got there by many twists and turns and blind alleys, don’t leave that out. We love a detective story. If you enjoyed the adventure of getting there, so will we.

Most scientists do leave that out. By the time we hear about their great discoveries, a lot of the doubt is gone. The mistakes and wrong turns are left out . . . and it doesn’t sound like a human thing they’ve done. It separates us from the process.

Whatever you do, help us love science the way you do.

Like the young man so head over heels about his sweetheart he can’t stop talking about her, like the young woman so in love with her young man she wants everyone to know how wonderful he is . . . show us pictures, tell us stories, make us crave to meet your beloved.

Don’t just tell us science is good for us and, therefore, we ought to fund you for it; don’t tell us to trust you that your fancy words actually mean something; don’t keep the tricks of your trade up an elite sleeve. Don’t be merchants, or mandarins, or magicians . . . be lovers!

Look, we’re accustomed in our culture to know when a commercial is coming. We know how to turn it off. But love we can’t resist.

You may be swayed by people who insist they’re only interested in hearing about the practical applications of science. You may be tempted to bend over backwards, telling them what they want to hear.

When Feynman stood here and spoke 28 years ago, he cautioned scientists against going too far in telling laypeople about the wonderful everyday applications of their work, especially if there weren’t any. He felt it wasn’t honest to pretend there was such a benefit just to get funding for your work.

It’s a powerful urge, but it’s possible to resist it.

Robert R. Wilson resisted it beautifully. Bob Wilson was a physicist who Feynman had known well. He had helped recruit Feynman for the Los Alamos project. Wilson was also an accomplished sculptor. He had a foot in each of C. P. Snow’s Two Cultures.

Wilson built Fermilab, the giant atom smasher in Illinois. But at a congressional hearing in 1969, he was grilled by Senator John Pastore, who wanted to know what an atom smasher was good for. Does it in any way contribute to the security of the country?

Wilson said, “No, sir, I do not believe so. “

“It has no value in that respect?” the senator asked.

Wilson looked at him and said, “It only has to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of people, our love of culture . . . In that sense, this new knowledge has all to do with honor and country. But it has nothing to do directly with defending our country—except to help make it worth defending.”

Like Wilson, I don’t think Feynman needed to justify his curiosity about nature.
Pure science was pure pleasure. It was fun.

It’s like the story of the plate.

The one thing I was certain of from the beginning was that we had to have the story of the plate in the play. It was central. The author, Peter Parnell, would do draft after draft. And I would look at it and say, “Where’s the plate?” I drove him crazy.

The plate story is this: After the war, Feynman became depressed. His first wife had just died of tuberculosis and the realization of the awful destructive power of the bomb he had helped make had finally sunk in. He was teaching at Cornell, but he had no taste for it. He couldn’t concentrate. Then, one day, he’s in the school cafeteria and some guy starts fooling around, tossing a plate in the air. Feynman watches the design on the rim of the plate as it spins and he sees that as it spins, the plate wobbles. He gets fascinated, and he tries to figure out the relationship between the spin and the wobble. He spends months on this. And finally comes up with this complicated equation, which he shows to Hans Bethe.

And Bethe says, “That’s interesting, Feynman, but what’s the importance of it?” And Feynman says, “It has no importance, it’s just fun!”

But, see, that’s the thing—it not only brought him out of his slump, but that playful inquiry, according to Feynman, eventually led in a circuitous way to the work that won him the Nobel Prize.

But no matter where it might have led him, he made up his mind that day in the cafeteria never to work on anything that didn’t interest him, that wasn’t fun.

Of course, what Feynman was looking for was serious fun. It was the awe he felt when he looked at nature. And not just the official great wonders of nature, but any little part of nature, because any little part of it is as amazing and beautiful and complicated as the whole thing is.

So, this is interesting. I’m urging you to be like someone who I admit I’ve found to be pretty elusive.

Here I am, seven years later. And, just as Feynman never got to see Tuva, I never really found Feynman. Not really. I came close; but he was too many things. He had too many histories.

We came up with a play in QED that was immensely satisfying. It was beautifully written and beautifully directed and it gave the audience a Feynman that was as close an approximation as we could come up with. But part of me feels that a large chunk of the man is still beyond our reach—probably beyond the reach of anyone. He’s just out of sight, smiling at us. Laughing at how he put one over on us, letting us think he was just an ordinary guy. A guy we could get.

It turns out, though, that the old thing about the destination not being as valuable as the journey really is true.

Because, when we began, finding Feynman seemed important, and I guess it was . . . but as it turned out, looking for Feynman has been the fun.

Every once in a while, though, I can feel Feynman looking over my shoulder, and he’s not smiling. Like right now. I’m at the end of my talk and I feel the pressure of the words he closed his talk with 28 years ago. “One last piece of advice,” he said; “never say you’ll give a talk unless you know clearly what you’re going to talk about and more or less what you’re going to say.”

In other words, where are the brass tacks?

Okay, let me be more or less practical. I’m going to propose something to you today. I realize it’s a childish idea, something only an unschooled layperson would come up with, but it’s specific enough that it might get you thinking.

What if each of you decided to take just one thing you love about science and, no matter how complicated it is, figure out a how to make it understood by a million people? There are about 500 of you taking part in this ceremony today. If just a few of you were successful, that would make several million people a lot smarter.

How you do it is up to you. You’re clever people, and I bet you come up with some ingenious solutions. On the other hand, you may be thinking, “WHY? Why should I do this impossible thing?”

Well, I don’t know, maybe for the same reason that the birds sing.

If it does for you what it does for birds, there’s a lot to recommend it:

1) It’s a good way to improve your chances of having sex.
2) It feels good to sing.
3) Singing is the music nature makes when it dances the dance of life.

You are the universe announcing itself to itself. You open your mouth and a little muscle in your throat makes a corner of nature vibrate. You’re one part of the forest saying, “This is what I think I know,” while another part of the forest is saying, “Yeah? Well this is what I think I know!” Your chirpings are the harmony of all knowledge.

You’ve learned so much in this place about how nature works. Is there anything more beautiful than that? Is there anything greater to sing about?

So sing. Sing out. Sing. Out.

Thank you, and good luck.

EDIT: I was hoping I wouldn’t have to clarify this, but based on reactions on a different website I suppose I should: The following article is a parody.  It’s satire.   If you read the whole article this should be pretty obvious.  But I guess these days it’s hard to tell.  If you’ve never heard of The Secret or Hexagonal Water and you don’t get it, consider yourself one of the lucky ones.  And if you think this is real and you start sending me your own crazy quackeries, be prepared to be ridiculed.  There’s already been a casualty, and I don’t wish to see any more.

Though if you have links to other crazy shit feel free to post it for a good laugh

***

The Even More Secreter Secret:

A Guide To Quantum Life Improvement

Ever wonder why physicists win the lottery more often and are less prone to crippling diseases?  Ever wonder why physicists are out there living the good life, partying all night long in their million dollar mansions and marrying supermodels while you’re stuck in some dead end job without any prospect of ever fulfilling your childhood dreams?

The answer is simple.  It’s a closely guarded secret that physicists have known about for nearly a century, and it’s just now finally being disclosed to the public:

**QUANTUM MECHANICS IS MAGIC!**

Bongos? or Interdimensional Reality-Bending Modules? ... You decide.

You see, Quantum Mechanics is very strange.  Even Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman is quoted as saying: “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.”

What he clearly meant to say is that any crazy thing we make up about Quantum Mechanics must be true!

In Quantum Mechanics, it is impossible to know both the position and momentum of a particle, as shown by this formula I won’t bother to explain but I totally know what it means:

What is important to understand here is what this means in layman’s terms, and don’t look it up because I’ll tell you right now:  it means that everything is possible!  That’s right!  Absolutely anything and everything can happen at any point in time for no reason!

In Quantum Mechanics, atoms are made up of mostly empty space, yet empty space is filled with things called virtual particles.  So everything is made out of nothing and nothing is made out of everything?  Whoa, slow down there Slick! – What’s more, the mere act of measuring and observing something affects its nature!

So what does this mean to you and me? — Isn’t it obvious?  It meas WE CAN MAKE ANYTHING HAPPEN WITH OUR MINDS!!!

You see, **QUANTUM MECHANICS IS MAGIC!**

WARNING: In case of accidental direct eye contact with Rhonda Byrne, seek medical assistance or notify your local poison control center immediately.

Any crazy shit you make up will come true!  Just look at Rhonda Byrne, she made up some crazy shit and now she’s a millionaire!

All you have to do is make three easy payments of $29.99 and within three weeks you well receive my Guide On Quantum Reality Life Improvement.

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE!

If you order the Guide On Quantum Reality Life Improvement right now, you will also receive a free sample of Quantum Water!!!!!

Quantum Water is made up of 100% naturally occurring  isotopes.  What’s more, it has been filtered by our experts and vortexed through a selectively permeable membrane.  At the molecular level, Quantum Water is permanently vibrating, even at room temperature!  Our leading experts personally guarantee that each water molecule in every bottle of Quantum Water has been oppositely charged at both ends; this electrically dipolar nature of Quantum Water will maximize the interchange of ions and the dilution of electrolytes within every cell of your body!

Every year, millions of Americans trust their health to filtered tap water.  Yet were you aware that the ingestion of only trace amounts of cyanide could prove fatal?  Were you aware that exposure to radioactive Uranium can cause cells in your body to mutate and become cancer cells?

Quantum Water is medically proven to hydrate your body.  Sign up now and receive a monthly shipment of Quantum Water right to you home.

And if this once in a lifetime offer doesn’t sound like the stupidest fucking thing you’ve ever heard, here are few more products that might be perfect for you!

In this video you can see the Water Vitalizer Plus at work! Watch as microclusters of hexagonal water form right before your eyes as Buddyguy adds Crystal Energy into the vortex!

You too can own your own Vitalizer Plus for only $439.99!  Or just make one yourself!:

Or how about:

Click on the image and make sure to sign up for the FREE Quantum Jumping introductory course... really. I mean it. You won't regret it.

But if all of these options are a bit too advanced for you, if you’re interested in wasting your money on more mainstream stupid shit first and then work your way up, you can always turn to the classics:

I highly recommend The Secret as the starting point for anyone who’s interested in dedicating their life to the pursuit of stupid shit to believe in.  Most importantly, remember not to listen to people who don’t want you to believe in stupid shit.  They’re just bitter because they can’t keep an open mind.

http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/index.html#

Bill Gates has bought the rights to seven lectures by Richard Feynman, which were filmed by the BBC in 1964, a year before he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics. You can watch it for free at Microsoft Research website.

The seven lectures are:

1. The Law of Gravitation, an example of Physical Law
2. The Relation of Mathematics to Physics
3. The Great Conservation Principles
4. Symmetry in Physical Law
5. The Distinction of Past and Future
6. Probability and Uncertainty the Quantum Mechanical Law of Nature
7. Seeking New Laws

binomial coefficients

..binomial coefficients?! That’s right. I’ve found the web site of a Mr. Bob Jenkins with an entire page dedicated to a pairwise covering array generator named jenny.c. I’m fairly sure that only the most hardcore of the software testing weenies have some notion of what those are so for the sake of being succinct I’ll be providing my own explanation here: A pairwise covering array generator is a program for silicon computing machines that deduces sequences of input value possibilities for the purposes of software testing; and yes, I did say silicon computers–since testing their software is really a question of the great Mr. Turing’s halting problem, the existence of a practical, affordable, and efficient nano/molecular computing device such as a DNA computer, Feynman machine, universal quantum computer, etc. would essentially predicate a swift solution to the problem of testing contemporary computer software in non-deterministic polynomial time. The only problem we would have then is how to test those fantastic, futuristic, (seemingly science fictive) yet wondrous problem-solving inventions as they break through laborious barriers of algorithmic complexities that twentieth century computer scientists could have only dreamed about: PCP, #P, PSPACE-complete, 2-EXPTIME and beyond.. The stuff that dreams are made of.

Now, let’s return to Earth and learn about a few things that make Jenny so special. Computer scientists learned early on in their studies of software testing that pairwise or test cases with two input values were the most likely to uncover erroneous programming or “bugs.” Forget the luxury of automation for a minute, old school programmers typed input pairs manually to test their own software. Code tested in that manner was most likely some sort of special-purpose console mode utility. (Celsius to Fahrenheit, anyone?) As the computing power of the desktop PC increased according to Moore’s law, it became time-effective to write a simple program to generate these input pairs instead of toiling over it yourself–I suppose not testing at all was another option. Today, still some software is released to market after only very minor functional and/or quality assurance testing. Regression, stress, security, and other forms of testing cost money and reduce time to market, but in reality significant return on investment acts as a hedge against any losses incurred. Even ephemeral losses justify the absolute necessity of these expenditures.

A Jenny built in modern times undoubtedly has the power to deductively prove that a software product of the eighties decade is comprised of components (or units) that are fundamentally error-free. However, the paradox remains that improvements in automated software testers share a linear relationship with improvements of software in general. Thus, pairwise has become “n-way” which describes the process of utilizing greater multiples of input values in order to cover acceptable numbers of test cases. The number of covering arrays generated in this fashion grows exponentially and can be calculated as a binomial coefficient (see formula below.)

(n choose r) in factorial terms

According to Paul Black, former SAMATE (Software Assurance Metrics and Tool Evaluation) project leader, researchers at NIST have pegged 6-way as the magic number for optimal fault interaction coverage (notably Rick Kuhn and Dolores Wallace.) This conclusion is based on hard evidence from studies on real-world software scenarios including medical devices and the aerospace industry. However, it would not surprise me to see this approximation rise significantly in the coming decades, just as the paradoxical relationship between general-purpose software and automated software testing programs shifts itself in accordance with Moore’s law. If not by Moore, then by some other axiom of metric progression such as Rogers’ bell curve of technological adoption.

I’ve also got a hunch that the tiny percentage of bugs in that “n is arbitrarily greater than 6″ range are some of the most critical, powerfully impacting software vulnerabilities known to man. They lie on an attack surface that’s almost non-existent; this makes them by definition, obscure, non-obvious, shadowy, and hidden. Vulnerabilities in this category are the most important by their very nature. Therefore, detecting vulnerabilities of this type will involve people and tools that are masters of marksmanship and artistic in their innovation. Research in this area is entering a steadfast beginning especially within the realms of dynamic instrumentation or binary steering, active analysis, fault propagation, higher-order preconditions/dependencies, concurrency issues, race conditions, etc. I believe that combining merits inherent in various analysis techniques will lead to perfection in software testing.

For perfection in hashing, check out GNU’s gperf, read how Bob used a perfect hashing technique to augment Jenny’s n-tuples; then get ready for our Big ßeta release of the BlockWatch client software (just in time for the holiday season!)

Hace 50 años este mes, gracias a una idea del físico Richard Feynman nació una de disciplinas científicas más prometedoras de la era moderna: la nanotecnología.

Richard Feynman

La historia cuenta que durante la reunión de la Sociedad Americana de Física de la división de la Costa Oeste, en 1959, Feynman ofreció por vez primera una visión de la tecnología totalmente nueva, imaginando enciclopedias escritas en la cabeza de un pin, con “toda la información que el hombre cuidadosamente ha acumulado en todos los libros del mundo… escritos… en un cubo de material de unas dos centésima de una pulgada de ancho.”

El escepticismo de los asistentes hizo que su discurso provocase más risas que admiración hasta el punto que, aunque publicado al año siguiente en la revista Engineering & Science, antes de 1980 su artículo apenas recaudó citas.

Sin embargo, hoy en día Feynman es considerado uno de los científicos más brillantes de la historia. Premio Nobel por la Física en 1965 por sus estudios en el campo de la electrodinámica cuántica, Feynman fue uno de los teóricos más originales de la posguerra, pues contribuyó de manera fundamental en muchos campos de la física hasta su muerte (15 de febrero de 1988).

Con su discurso de 1959 él fue el primero en hablar de la posibilidad de manipular directamente los átomos en el ámbito de la sintesis química. Y su sueño no se realizó hasta mas de 30 años después, en 1991, cuando Don Eigler y Eric Schweizer en el Almaden Research Center de IBM escribieron el nombre de la empresa usando 35 átomos de xenón manipulados usando un microscopio de efecto túnel.

A pesar de que Feynman ignorase la capacidad de los átomos y las moléculas de unirse en estructuras complejas guiados por sus interacciones físicas y químicas (algo muy presente hoy en día a escala nanométrica), queda su impresionante clarividencia en saber identificar en la naturaleza un abundante depósito de recursos, poniendo de manifiesto al mismo tiempo su confianza en el carácter ilimitado de la creatividad humana.

“En un sistema biológico las células, aunque muy pequeñas, son muy activas, fabrican diversas sustancias, se mueven y hacen cosas maravillosas, todo en una escala muy pequeña” decía. Y aunque para él las células eran unas cajas negras que escondían importantes secretos, gracias a la nanotecnología hoy sabemos que ellas determinan el mecanismo de trabajo de las proteínas.

Aun así, también en la vida cotidiana nos podemos percatar de las multiples aplicaciones a las que las ideas de Feynman han dado vida en los últimos años. El uso de ordenadores cada vez más ligeros y más potentes, de móviles minúsculos o de reproductores portátiles de música sólo son algunos de los productos innovadores fructo de su imaginación, sin hablar del desarrollo tecnológico que – entre otras cosas – permite el avance en todos los campos de la investigación.

Cuando se lanza una satélite al espacio, por ejemplo, uno de los problemas más importantes a nivel logístico es cómo y dónde acumular la increible cantidad de datos científicos recogidos por el artefacto. En los años ‘60 y ‘70 se disponían de ordenadores enormes almacenados en dépositos de muchos metros cuadrados.

Hoy, en cambio, las nanotecnologías han permitido desarrollar procesadores que no solamente permiten guardar esta información en un espacio reducido sino que también permiten obtener – casi en tiempo real – el resultado de la investigación, listo para el análisis interpretativo final.