Started out, as usual, from Epsom Station. A dull and cold evening but kept myself warm trying to puzzle out the mysterious white lines and numbers that had been sprayed onto the platform. The number 0.5 seemed to be important, but the only conclusion that I reached was that repairs to the damaged surface were not a sufficient explanation.
The concourse at the entrance to Vauxhall tube station was more crowded than I have ever seen it, but once one got down to the platforms it was quiet enough. So there were enough trains, but with just one escalator carrying us down, there was bunching at the top. Generally orderly with just one young man pushing in while I was there and with no walking down the left hand side – for which see the first part of reference 6.
Standing picnic at Green Park followed by refreshment in the form of a glass of Quickie at the Goat, where I was able to admire the upstairs tables held together by strips of brass let into their tops. Neatly enough done, as can be seen from the snap above, but essentially a fake, with the polished brass intended to give the tables the look of antiquity, luxury and solidity, rather than serving any structural function.
The main lecture theatre at the Royal Institution was very full and, for once, I sat in the front row. Wrong in that one had to keep craning up to see the screen and wrong in that the chap next to me, a middle aged man, spent most of the talk communing silently with his mobile phone. Right in that I was able to make a much quicker exit than usual, turning up an opportunity to get the first personally signed book of my book buying career.
Davies turned out to be a polished performer, if a little glib.
He told us, for example, that plutonium needed life to exist on earth. Which turns out to be an obscure way of saying that plutonium has a relatively short half life and most of the stuff presently on earth comes out of nuclear reactors. At least, in the course of checking up on this, I came across the natural fission reactor in Gabon described at reference 3. I also came across the theory, new to me, that the moon might have been formed at the result of a small planet crashing into the young earth, several billion years ago.
We had an excursion into Maxwell’s Demon and the second law of thermodynamics, which Davies appeared to want to amend by including a term for information, so that information counted as part of the energy of a system. This in the context of life containing a lot more information than raw matter. He also wanted a life metre which you could point at things to tell you if there was life there. Amino acids did not count, while the ribonucleic acids probably did, there being a big gulf of complexity between the two.
I learned that there are people out there actually building nano-versions of Maxwell’s Demon.
I learned in passing that the film we had watched a few days earlier, about a moon of Jupiter with ice covered seas, was not complete fiction. Such a moon did in fact exist. See reference 4.
Another excursion into epigenetics, which I understand to be a sort of heritability which does not depend on genes. With one example being flatworms which could be manipulated to produce two headed and two tailed strains, without changing the genes involved. From where I associated to George Eliot’s husband’s early experiments on worm chopping, but I don’t think he succeeded in creating a two headed worm.
The Davies view seemed to be that to get a proper description of life we were going to need to make a few tweaks to quantum theory. Roger Penrose got a passing mention in this connection, as did Tononi and his IIT, with this last being a theory of consciousness, occasionally mentioned in these columns, which seems to be gaining adherents. A theory which, to my mind, is having a fair crack at how consciousness comes to be, but which has come to the wrong answer. See, for example, reference 5.
A field with plenty of room for cranks, but a talk which gave me lots of interesting leads to follow up – if I ever find the time for them. Even if it did not do what it said on the tin.
The format was first introduction by a young blonde, fire escapes and stuff like that, second introduction by a science journalist, then talk, then questions compèred by the science journalist. A chap whose manner I found rather tiresome: he might have started out as a scientist, but too much time in television studios had not done him any favours.
One of the questions, concerning Davies’ work on cancer, came from a lady who had cured herself of stage 4 cancer in some novel way. A novel way which did involve drugs, but not the sort of complicated new drugs and expensive research for which drug companies can charge a lot of money. So given that most large scale trials of new treatments are organised and paid for by said drug companies, what are we going to do about treatments like this one which do nothing for them? We don’t seem to have either the money or the machinery.
Out to find a queue of young men waiting to get into something next to the Clarence in Dover Street. I did not stop to ask what for, moving instead onto the platform at Green Park to catch the wrong train, that is to say a northbound train rather than a southbound train. The first time I have done such a thing for longer than I can remember.
And I can’t make out the premises in question – 5-7 Dover Street – in Street View. Closed grills and art gallery on the ground floor, candelabras on the first floor and flats above. So I shall never know what the queue was for.
References
Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Davies.
Reference 2: The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Solving the Mystery of Life – Paul Davies – 2019. A tenner or so from Amazon.
Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor.
Reference 4: Europa Report - Sebastián Cordero – 2013.
Reference 5: http://integratedinformationtheory.org/.
Reference 6: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/10/kilogram.html.
No comments:
Post a Comment