Author Archives: Eann Patterson

Coping with uncertainty

Leave a reply

The first death of driver in a car while using Autopilot has been widely reported with much hyperbole though with a few notable exceptions, for instance Nick Bilton in Vanity Fair on July 7th, 2016 who pointed out that you were safer statistically in a Tesla with its Autopilot functioning than driving normally.  This is based on the fact that worldwide there is a fatality for every 60 million miles driven, or every 94 million miles in the US, whereas Joshua Brown’s tragic death was the first in 130 million miles driven by Teslas with Autopilot activated.  This implies that globally you are twice as likely to survive your next car journey in an autonomously driven Tesla than in a manually driven car.

If you decide to go by plane instead then the probability of arriving safely is extremely good because only one in every 3 million flights last year resulted in fatalities or put another way: 3.3 billion passengers were transported with the loss of 641 lives, which is a one in 5 million.  People worry about these probabilities while at the same time buying lottery tickets with a much lower probability of winning the jackpot, which is about 1 in 14 million in the UK.  In all of these cases, the probability is saying something about the frequency of occurance of these events.  We don’t know whether the plane will crash on the next flight we take so we rationalise this uncertainty by defining the frequency of flights that end in a fatal crash.  The French mathematician, Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827) thought about probability as a measure of our ignorance or uncertainty.  As we have come to realise the extent of our uncertainty about many things in science (see my post: ‘Electron Uncertainty‘ on July 27th, 2016) and life (see my post: ‘Unexpected bad news for turkeys‘ on November 25th, 2015), the more important the concept of probability has become.   Caputo has argued that ‘a post-modern style demands a capacity to sustain uncertainty and instability, to live with the unforeseen and unpredictable as positive conditions of the possibility of an open-ended future’.  Most of us can manage this concept when the open-ended future is a lottery jackpot but struggle with the remaining uncertainties of life, particularly when presented with new ones, such as autonomous cars.

Sources:

Bilton, N., How the media screwed up the fatal Tesla accident, Vanity Fair, July 7th, 2016

IATA Safety Report 2014

Caputo JD, Truth: Philosophy in Transit, London: Penguin 2013.

Ball, J., How safe is air travel really? The Guardian, July 24th, 2014

Boagey, R., Who’s behind the wheel? Professional Engineering, 29(8):22-26, August 2016.

Digital detox with a deep vacation

14 Replies

beachIt’s official – half of us are addicted to our internet-connected devices and a third of us have attempted to kick the addiction.  A recent study by the UK’s communication regulator, OFCOM found that 59% of internet users considered themselves ‘hooked’ and spending the equivalent of more than a day a week on-line.   They also reported that one in three internet users have attempted a ‘digital detox’ with a third saying they felt more productive afterwards, while slightly more that a quarter found it liberating and another quarter said they enjoyed life more.  So, switch off all of your devices, take a deep vacation,  do some off-line reading (see my post entitled ‘Reading offline‘ on March 19th, 2014), slow down and breathe your own air (see my post entitled ‘Slow down, breathe your own air‘ on December 23rd, 2015).  Now, you won’t find many blogs advising you to stop reading them!

Health warning: OFCOM also found that 16% of ‘digital detoxers’ experienced FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out’ (‘FOMO’), 15% felt lost and 14% ‘cut-off’.

More uncertainty about matter and energy

3 Replies

woodlandvalley

When I wrote about wave-particle duality and an electron possessing the characteristics of both matter and energy [see my post entitled ‘Electron uncertainty’ on July 27th, 2016], I dodged the issue of what are matter and energy.  As an engineer, I think of matter as being the solids, liquids and gases that are both manufactured and occur in nature.  We should probably add plasmas to this list, as they are created in an increasing number of engineering processes, including power generation using nuclear fission.  But maybe plasmas should be classified as energy, since they are clouds of unbounded charged particles, often electrons.   Matter is constructed from atoms and atoms from sub-atomic particles, such as electrons that can behave as particles or waves of energy.  So clearly, the boundary between matter and energy is blurred or fuzzy.  And, Einstein’s famous equation describes how energy and matter can be equated, i.e. energy is equal to mass times the speed of light squared.

Engineers tend to define energy as the capacity to do work, which is fine for manufactured or generated energy, but is inadequate when thinking about the energy of sub-atomic particles, which probably is why Feynman said we don’t really know what energy is.  Most of us think about energy as the stuff that comes down an electricity cable or that we get from eating a banana.  However, Evelyn Pielou points out in her book, The Nature of Energy, that energy in nature surrounds us all of the time, not just in the atmosphere or water flowing in rivers and oceans but locked into the structure of plants and rocks.

Matter and energy are human constructs and nature does not do rigid classifications, so perhaps we should think about a plant as a highly-organised localised zone of high density energy [see my post entitled ‘Fields of flowers‘ on July 8th, 2015].  We will always be uncertain about some things and as our ability to probe the world around us improves we will find that we are no longer certain about things we thought we understood.  For instance, research has shown that Bucky balls, which are spherical fullerene molecules containing sixty carbon atoms with a mass of 720 atomic mass units, and so seem to be quite substantial bits of matter, exhibit wave-particle duality in certain conditions.

We need to learn to accept uncertainty and appreciate the opportunities it presents to us rather than seek unattainable certainty.

Note: an atomic mass unit is also known as a Dalton and is equivalent to 1.66×10-27kg

Sources:

Pielou EC, The Energy of Nature, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001.

Arndt M, Nairz O, Vos-Andreae J, Keller C, van der Zouw G & Zeilinger A, Wave-particle duality of C60 molecules, Nature 401, 680-682 (14 October 1999).

 

Electron uncertainty

2 Replies

daisyMost of us are uncomfortable with uncertainty.  Michael Faraday’s ability to ‘accept the given – certainties and uncertainties’ [see my post entitled ‘Steadiness and placidity’ on July 18th, 2016] was exceptional and perhaps is one reason he was able to make such outstanding contributions to science and engineering.  It has been said that his ‘Expts. on the production of Electricity from Magnetism, etc. etc.’ [Note 148 from Faraday’s notebooks] on August 29th 1831  began the age of electricity.  Electricity is associated with the flow of electric charge, which is often equated with the flow of electrons and electrons are subatomic particles with a negative elementary charge and a mass that is approximately 1/1836 atomic mass units.  A moving electron, and it is difficult to find a stationary one, has wave-particle duality – that is, it simultaneously has the characteristics of a particle and a wave.  So, there is uncertainty about the nature of an electron and most of us find this concept difficult to handle.

An electron is both matter and energy.  It is a particle in its materialisation as matter but a wave in its incarnation as energy.  However, this is probably too much of a reductionist description of a systemic phenomenon.  Nevertheless let’s stay with it for a moment, because it might help elucidate why the method of measurement employed in experiments with electrons influences whether our measurements reflect the behaviour of a particle or a wave.  Perhaps when we design our experiments from an energy perspective then electrons oblige by behaving as waves of energy and when we design from a matter perspective then electrons materialise as particles.

All of this leads to a pair of questions about what is matter and what is energy?  But, these are enormous questions, and even the Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman said ‘in physics today, we have no knowledge of what energy is’, so I’m going to leave them unanswered.  I’ve probably already riled enough physicists with my simplistic discussion.

Note: an atomic mass unit is also known as a Dalton and is equivalent to 1.66×10-27kg

Source:

Hamilton, J., A life of discovery: Michael Faraday, giant of the scientific revolution. New York: Random House, 2002.

Pielou EC, The Energy of Nature [the epilogue], Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001.