Perception of Reality and Mayonnaise

Jack Dikian

March 2010

How a jar of Mayonnaise helped overturn our perception of reality. For hundreds of years, we assumed incorrectly that materials, such as paint and mayonnaise remained viscous due to attractive forces that exist between neutral atoms and molecules.

The long held view that properties of such solutions are determined by van der Waals forces - long-range, attractive forces that exist between neutral atoms and molecules.

In the mid twentieth century the theory that was used to explain van der Waals forces, which had been developed by Fritz London in 1932, did not adequately reflect experimental measurements.

Casimir and Polder working at the Philips Research Laboratories in Eindhoven discovered that the interaction between two neutral molecules could be better described and interpreted in terms of vacuum fluctuations eventually leading to his famous prediction of an attractive force between reflecting plates. That is:-

What happens if you take two mirrors and arrange them so that they are facing each other in empty space?

Background

In the days of classical mechanics the idea of a vacuum was simple. The vacuum was what remained if you emptied a container of all its particles and lowered the temperature down to absolute zero. The vacuum therefore was/is a region that is devoid of matter or put another way - a volume of space that is essentially empty of matter. It’s what comes to mind when we thought about space as we were growing up.

Space is shockingly bizarre

According to quantum mechanics, all fields have fluctuations. That is, at any given moment their actual value varies around a constant, mean value. Even a perfect vacuum has a fluctuating field, the mean energy of which corresponds to half the energy of a photon.

Some 30 years after Paul Dirac formulated the famous Dirac equation, which describes the behavior of fermions and which led to the prediction of the existence of antimatter (however, unable to deal with more than a single electron) Richard Feynman, and others, attempted to take the understanding of the Atom further and help develop the theory of everything.

Their theory, Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) is a far-reaching and more accurate than any previous approximations and underpins almost everything we experience in the physical world – shapes, texture, color, and how everything interacts together.

Here, empty space (a vacuum) buzzes with matter and activity. Here, energy is said to be borrowed from the future and is used in the creation of a particle and an antiparticle. These particles, in turn meet in a fraction of a second and annihilate each other. So energy is borrowed out of nowhere, turned into matter self-destruct and returns back into energy all in a fraction of a second. This is happening everywhere countless times a second.

So according to QED, the everyday matter filling our physical world, the world we see and feel is a kind of left-over from the feverish activities virtual particles get up to in the “empty” void.

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Further reading

M Bordag, U Mohideen and V M Mostepanenko 2001 New developments in the Casimir effect Phys. Rep. 353 1 H B Chan et al. 2001 Nonlinear micromechanical Casimir oscillator Phys. Rev. Lett. 87 211801 F Chen and U Mohideen 2002 Demonstration of the lateral Casimir force Phys. Rev. Lett. 88 101801 C Genet, A Lambrecht and S Reynaud 2000 Temperature dependence of the Casimir force between metallic mirrors Phys. Rev. A 62 012110 S K Lamoreaux 1997 Demonstration of the Casimir force in the 0.6 to 6 micrometer range Phys. Rev. Lett. 78 5 K A Milton 2001 The Casimir Effect: Physical Manifestations of Zero-point Energy (World Scientific, Singapore)

Popularity, Kids and Social Networks

Jack Dikian

ABSTRACT
2003

When most kids reach that age where their proficiency with computers and mobile phones is only matched by what may be seen to be an obsession with the social desirability gained through an on-line social life.

Some parents will report that their kids’ on-line social life has taken over their life, and others will reflect on how these social networking sites have become a part of our every day life. It’s been said many times that teenagers consider social networks to be one of the prime avenues of leisure. In addition, teenagers will argue that depriving them of internet access is somewhat similar to that of being deprived of human rights.

From the myriad of interesting phenomena a social psychologist may glean of the role of the social network in mood modulation, social awareness, convenience of communication, educational value, language, social convergence, friendship forming, etc, the element I am particularly interested in is:

The question of perceived popularity in the age of social networking by both the teenager and also his or her parents of them.

We examine factors including:-

• The concordance in avatars replicating the actual self versus avatars used by teenagers projecting the ideal self.

• The degree of automatic stereotype activation when confronted by negative feedback.

• If perceived popularity within the peer group (social network) is a predictor of some life outcomes.

• Parent’s natural response when faced with a teenager who reports that he or she hasn’t nearly as many “friends” or “buddies” as others in his/her class.

Does the following sound familiar?

Why is it that we want 220 friends when we only ever speak to about 10 of them? And the worst thing is, there is always a mini competition to see who has the most friends driven to such an extent that people make fake accounts and/or befriend strangers who are new to these social networking sites.

It started to bother me says one mum, my daughter wasn’t very popular, and I suggested that she could fatten up her buddy list with names that I know my daughter is friends with….

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The Strange Effect of the Bathroom Scales

Jack Dikian

A few weeks ago I found myself weighing almost 10Kgs more than what I thought I'd weigh. This was after jumping on a new set of bathroom scales and having to almost do a double-take of the rotating dial. Whilst it’s true that some of my otherwise slim-fitting shirts aren’t fitting so well – I still regarded the 10Kg increases as excessive.

A number of theories prevailed – after all, the scales cost less than ten bucks. Engineering? that's something you wouldn't want to bank the farm on. Having said that though, the complication of most scales is by no means a Swiss chronometer. Also, it seemed to be calibrated, at least without a load.

Could using scales on soft flooring alter the scales’ functioning? More importantly, and by far the more interesting question - what exactly is it that scales measure. It turns out that this isn’t as obvious as it might seem, unless of course you are a physicist.

I’m going to return to the saga of the bathroom scales a little later – after exploring shorthand conventions and assumptions relating to the physical quantities, mass and weight. For example, it is often said that bathroom scales is a measuring instrument for determining the weight or mass of an object. Here, both mass and weight are used synonymously.

Mass and Weight

Students of science often confuse mass and weight and many feel that there is no difference between the two. In fact the two are not the same.

Mass is the amount of matter present in a body and is an intrinsic property of the body. The mass of an object remains unaltered regardless of the reference frame it is being measured in and according to special relativity it is related to energy by the famous relationship formula E = mc2. Weight on the other hand is the force which a given mass experiences due to the gravitational force between itself and another mass point (the Earth in our reader’s case).

Simply, we use the word mass to describe how much matter an object posses. On Earth, we weigh objects in order to calculate their mass. The more matter there is, the more the object will weigh. The difference between mass and weight is that weight is determined by the pull of the Earth’s gravity. If we are comparing two objects to each other on Earth, they are pulled by the same gravitational force and so the one with more mass weighs more. In space, where (where there is large distance between the two mass points) the gravitational force or pull of the Earth is smaller, an object may have no weight and yet still posses mass.

More formally, mass refers to any of three properties of matter, which have been shown experimentally to be equivalent. These are:

 Inertial mass,
 Active gravitational mass and
 Passive gravitational mass.

The inertial mass of an object determines its acceleration in the presence of an applied force. According to Newton's second law of motion, if a body of mass m is subjected to a force F, its acceleration a is given by F/m.

A body's mass also determines the degree to which it generates or is affected by a gravitational field. If a first body of mass m1 is placed at a distance r from a second body of mass m2, each body experiences an attractive force F whose magnitude is :

F = G(m1m2)/ r2

where G is the universal constant of gravitation, equal to 6.67×10−11 kg−1 m3 s−2. This is sometimes referred to as gravitational mass (when a distinction is necessary, M is used to denote the active gravitational mass and m the passive gravitational mass). Repeated experiments since the seventeenth century have demonstrated that inertial and gravitational mass are equivalent; this is entailed in the equivalence principle of general relativity.

The Unassuming Kilogram

Since 1889, the International System of Units (SI system) defines the magnitude of the kilogram to be equal to the mass of the International Prototype Kilogram often referred to as the “IPK”. The IPK is made of a platinum alloy and is machined into a cylinder. The IPK, also affectionately known as the ‘Big K’ and its six sister copies are stored at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in a vault in the outskirts of Paris.

Three independently controlled keys are required to open the vault. Official copies of the IPK were made available to other nations to serve as their national standards. These are compared to the IPK roughly every 50 years.

For Australians, a metal ingot weighing precisely one kilogram is locked in a safe in a government facility on Sydney's North Shore. It is the kilogram against which all other kilograms in Australia are measured. Every precaution is made to ensure the weights are not contaminated. Given this is the reference standard of mass, any contamination with dust or fingerprints or any sort of foreign material, if unchecked, will impact upon and propagate throughout every aspect of everyday life as we know it.

What of the bathroom scales

David MacKay, a physicist at the University of Cambridge, after a chance conversation about bathroom scales measuring a greater weight when on carpet decided to investigate the reasons.

MacKay and his students tried a number of analogue bathroom scales on different surfaces. Sure enough, they found they weighed in at around 10 per cent more on thick carpet than on the hard floor.

To find out why, the studens took several sets of scales apart and measured the movement of the internal mechanisms when loaded on different surfaces. Inside each set of scales, four levers or "fulcrums", each pointing inwards from one of the corners, transmit the weight of the person to a spring-loaded metal plate at the back of the scales. The movement of the plate is then transferred via a metal rod to turn the dial on the scales.

They found that on a hard surface, the base of the scales bows. This makes the fulcrums at each corner of the scales tilt in slightly, shortening the distance between each fulcrum and the point at which the load pushes onto the lever.

Put the scales on a deep carpet, however, and the scales sink into it, so the carpet supports the base, which prevents it from bending. This increases the distance between each fulcrum and the point at which its lever is loaded, so for the same force the lever moves further. Even a small increase in this distance can add several kilograms to the weight registered on the display.

"I've always thought this was an urban myth," says a spokeswoman for Weight Watchers. "But it sounds like it makes a huge difference."

Artificial life

Jack Dikian

Life as we know it - Life as it could be!

As a development of that ongoing effort, last week Venter announced in the pages of Science magazine that his research team had – by putting together a living and replicating bacterium from synthetic components, inserting a computer-generated genome into a cell – "created life" in the laboratory for the first time. The experiment suggested the possibility of creating bacteria to perform specific functions: as producers of fossil fuels or medicines.

"This is the first synthetic cell that's been made and we call it synthetic because the cell is totally derived from a synthetic (gene-bearing) chromosome, made with four bottles of chemicals on a chemical synthesiser, starting with information in a computer," Dr Venter said.

Venter first came to international attention as the biologist who attached himself to the painstaking $5bn, 15-year programme to decode the human genetic blueprint, "the book of life" Human Genome Project and announced that he could do it much more quickly and much more cheaply with private capital.

How artificial life is created

1. Decode DNA from a bacterium (single-celled organism), in this case Mycoplasma mycoides

2. Synthetically create the DNA of the bacterium in the lab and add a "watermark" to distinguish it from real DNA

3. Transplant the artificial DNA into a living bacterium (in this case Mycoplasma capricolum) with its own authentic DNA

4. Allow the bacterium, which now contains artificial and authentic DNA, to divide and create "daughter" bacteria, some of which contain artifical DNA and others that contain authentic DNA

5. Add an antibiotic that kills the bacteria with authentic DNA, but not the bacteria with artificial DNA

6. Allow the artifical bacteria to produce proteins

The artificial DNA produce proteins from the original bacterium, the Mycoplasma mycoides, qualifying as the world's first artificial cell

Source:

MIT Press, Artificial Life, the official journal of the International Society of Artificial

Extracts and image from The Australian (May, 2010)

Guardian (the Observer Profile)

The Impact Of A Name On Personality

Jack Dikian

ABSTRACT

Looking at yourself in the mirror – seeing the person you know so well. Better than anyone – this person called Kate, Kelly, or David. Would you feel the same way about yourself if you had a different given name? Would you still see the person you know so well…

Many of us at some point in our lives have wondered what we would be like if we were given a different name. If we went through school with a different name, if our work mates knew met us with a different name. Some of us may even feel that we are more of a Jennifer instead of a Jenny, or a Sarah with a “h” rather than a Sara.

Not only do some of us have strong perceptions about first names and associate them with success, luck and attractiveness, many people walk around with stereotypes in their heads that can influence all sorts of decisions, yet don't even realise it, however with very real consequences in everyday life.

This is particularly true in some cultures. For example, in the Jewish culture it is accepted that a name does indeed determine someone's destiny and health in general. Not only does a Jewish person feel that the given name characterizes the person who possesses it, he feels that when he/she gives a newborn son or daughter their given name, that offspring's basic personality and traits are being defined, and in a sense, his entire approach to life is mapped out for him in advance.

Having a rare name or a very common one must be a very different experience to live with. With a rare name, one may feel a little more special or even unique. With a common name, one is more likely to have friends (or foes) with the same name, which could only change our ego perception associated with our name.

More importantly, living with a name that we like or one that we dislike does have serious consequences on self-confidence, happiness or the way we relate to others in society. For example, what would it be like if you didn’t always get asked to special your name, or even explain your name when meeting people you don’t know.

According Dr Martin Skinner, a social psychologist at Warwick University, people by at large make the most of their given name. Dr Skinner says that efforts can overwhelm the impact of a name. The real consequence is not in the actual name itself, but in the intentions behind it," says Dr Martin Skinner, a social psychologist at Warwick University.

"Names usually reflect parental aspirations, so someone who wants their child to be taken seriously will give them a name that has weight and is not frivolous - whatever class they are."

A name certainly plays more of a part than we think, according to Dr Wiseman. While many factors influence how we view a name - from liking a successful actor to disliking your boss - these perception can have a very real impact.

Research has shown that such perceptions can become self-fulfilling prophesies, with teachers giving higher marks to children with attractive names and employers being more likely to promote those who sound successful, he says.

George Clooney regularly tops "gorgeous man" polls, yet his is the first name least associated with attractiveness, and luck in love according to studies, as is for Brian and Helen.

According to Wiseman, who, through his research asked more than 6,000 people about their perceptions of the most popular first names in the UK, observed some strong trends. Elizabeth and James are considered the most successful sounding first names, Lucy and Jack the luckiest and Sophie and Ryan the most attractive.

The author is particularly interested in the impact of given names in an ever-shrinking world. Names such as Elizabeth or a James that may be associated with success in the UK, might carry very different perceptions should Elizabeth or James decide to immigrate.

Promoting The Incompetent

Jack Dikian

Feburary 2000

Formulated by Dr. Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull in their 1969 book The Peter Principle, a humorous essay depicting members in a hierarchy (read organization structure) being promoted so long as they work competently – however, sooner or later they are promoted to a position at which they are no longer competent. This being their "level of incompetence". They then remain at this level unable to earn further promotions.

Dr. William R. Corcoran in his work Corrective Action Programs described the more generalized principle that anything that works will be used in progressively more challenging applications until it fails making the Peter Principle as special case.Observations on incompetence can be found in the Dilbert cartoons. Dilbert explains how an incompetent person can still be promoted into positions where he/she continues to remain incompetent.

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Psychology of Mirrors

Jack Dikian

October 2003

ABSTRACT

Why do Mirrors reverse left and right but not up and down?

Introduction

Kids spent hours puzzling over the fact that their mirror images are swapped left and right but not up and down and it seems that there's much about mirrors that we may not understand.

One of the most intriguing objects invented by man is the mirror. It is closely connected to our own consciousness, reflecting both reality and illusion and proving us with a tool for self-contemplation. The mere presence of a mirror in a room changes our social behaviour because it seems to make us more self-aware. Unlike other very early inventions such as the wheel, people still find it difficult to understand how mirrors work.

Dr Marco Bertamini, from the University’s School of Psychology, conducted a number of experiments involving mirrors. He said: “People tend not to understand that the location of the viewer matters in terms of what is visible in a mirror. See the “Venus Effect”.

When participants were asked to estimate the image size of their head as it appears on the surface of the mirror. They estimated that it would be similar to their physical head. However, participants based their answer on the image they saw inside the mirror rather than on the image on the surface of it. They failed to recognise that the image on the surface of the mirror is half the size of the observer because a mirror is always halfway between the observer and the image that appears inside the mirror.

Researchers have shown that mirrors can affect human behavior, often in surprising and positive ways. People tested in a room with a mirror have been found to work harder, to be more helpful and to be less inclined to cheat, compared with control groups performing the same exercises in non mirrored settings. Reporting in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, C. Neil Macrae, Galen V. Bodenhausen and Alan B. Milne found that people in a room with a mirror were comparatively less likely to judge others based on social stereotypes about, for example, sex, race or religion.

“When people are made to be self-aware, they are likelier to stop and think about what they are doing,” Dr. Bodenhausen said. “A by-product of that awareness may be a shift away from acting on autopilot toward more desirable ways of behaving.” Physical self-reflection, in other words, encourages philosophical self-reflection, a crash course in the Socratic notion that you cannot know or appreciate others until you know yourself.

Other researchers have found that inactive women exercising face-to-face with their reflections walk away feeling less energized, less relaxed, and less good about themselves than women who work out without mirrors to gaze at. In the study, (study was published in the journal Health Psychology) Kathleen A. Martin Ginis, an associate professor of kinesiology at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, analysed the behavior of 58 college students after they spent 20 minutes on a stationary bicycle while wearing loose-fitting shorts, a T-shirt and running shoes. She says that the team was surprised to find that even women who were happy with their bodies were affected by the mirrors. "We thought that the effects would be strongest in women with the worst body image," she says, "but body image didn't matter."

The Left and Right Problem

Standing in front of a mirror and holding up your left hand. The person standing in the mirror holds up their right hand. It seems the mirror reverses left and right. It does not, however, reverse up and down.

The relative position from which you look in the mirror can make it seem like left and right are reversed. If for example, a person was standing above and behind the mirror, they, would describe you as lifting an arm near the right edge of the mirror because, they are standing opposite of you just like the mirror.

The mirror reverse is actually front-back. If you are heading north your image is heading south. Whilst we intuitively accept that left means left and right means right, in actual fact left and right are slippery concepts and hard to define. We need to know other things about an object before we can determine its right and left. For example, if handed a blob-like object and asked which side is its right side, we may not be able to determine that. It seems that we also need to know its top and front before we can identify its right side.

So, the three directions, top, front, and right are mutually perpendicular and it turns out that if we know two of them, then we can determine the third. For a person, a car, an animal, etc, the top and the front are unambiguous and intuitive - we use them to determine which side is the right side.

if we stand in front of the mirror and point at the mirror, then our reflection points in the opposite direction — the mirror image points back at us. In other words, the mirror reverses front and back. Our brain does not have to do any work to calculate the top and front sides of our reflected image. It uses them to calculate our reflection’s right side. More specifically the reflection’s up-down points in the same direction as ours, but the mirror image front-back points in the opposite direction. We point into the mirror and the reflected image in points out. Consequently, if top-down and in-out are accounted for, what remains for the brain is to cross left and right and we perceive the mirror reversing left and right.

Further Reading:

The Left Hand of the Electron, by Isaac Asimov, contains a very readable discussion of handedness and mirrors in physics.

The Ambidextrous Universe, by Martin Gardener is another book that covers this subject.

The Feynman Lectures Volume 1 contains a chapter Symmetry in Physical Laws that deals with what we mean by left and right, and how we might go about instructing a Martian on these concepts.

Key words: Mirrors, psychology of mirrors, human behaviour, self-image, self image, psychology, self-aware, self-awareness, self-reflection.