I’ve already mentioned two of the program items I was on at Boskone (global warming and quantum physics for dogs). I should at least comment on the other two, “Physics: What We Don’t Understand” and “Is Science Addicted to Randomness?” They both featured me and Geoff Landis, but other than that were very different.
“Physics: What We Don’t Understand” took off from a column by John Cramer from ten years ago, laying out seven big problems in (astro)physics that hadn’t been solved. We talked about how some of Cramer’s items have been more or less solved (gamma-ray bursts, solar neutrinos, and ultra-high-energy cosmic rays), what he left off (unification of quantum mechanics and general relativity, problems in quantum measurement and information, high-temperature superconductivity), and a variety of other issues (this is where Gravity Probe B came up, for example).
It was a good deal of fun to be on the panel– when Karl Schroeder is the least qualified (formally, anyway) person on the panel, it’s bound to be an interesting conversation– and the audience seemed to enjoy it. I think my favorite result was the Landis Criterion for evaluating speculative theories: Geoff said his rule was to believe in whichever of two competing theories had the better potential for generating science fiction stories.
The “Addicted to Randomness” panel was Sunday morning, moderated by Greg Bear. I did manage not to do the pathetic fanboy thing on meeting him, and talk about how much I loved his books twenty-odd years ago, but it was close. The whole panel turned out to have been his idea, which was both good and bad.
The good part was that he had a clear idea of what the point was supposed to be, and where he wanted the panel to go. The bad part was that I had no idea where that was, so I had a bit of a hard time figuring out what it was that we were supposed to be talking about.
A good deal of time was spent trying to make a clear distinction between “knowledge” and “information,” aided by an audience member who, if I didn’t know better, I would’ve guessed was Jonathan Vos Post. Many of the arguments seemed to me to be awfully circular (Bear would say that knowledge was information that had been processed by a biological system, and then assert that only biological systems had the ability to use knowledge to improve their lot in life), but people seemed to be really getting into it, so I mostly shut up and let them proceed.
I think the whole thing was primarily about biology, and thus it was a shame that we didn’t have any biologists on the panel. Bear seemed to be arguing that some biological process that we take to be random are not, thanks to the ability of living things to process information into knowledge. There was also a big thing about kin selection toward the end, but my knowledge of the subject is barely enough to recognize “kin selection” as fighting words in a biological context, so I stayed clear.
I’d be interested in hearing what the audience thought of this one. I was pretty groggy (my current cold/ bronchitis thing was ramping up big time), and perhaps too involved in the details to figure out if there was any coherent message from the whole thing.