Oslo

We had a delightful day trip to Oslo. Among the many interesting things we saw was the Viking Ship Museum:

We visited the Munch Museum. One of Edvard Munch's famous paintings is The Scream:

We walked on top of the Oslo Opera House:

We walked down Karl Johans gate, the main street of Oslo. The Norwegian Parliament is on this street:

At the end of Karl Johans gate is the Royal Palace. It was fairly dark by the time we got there, as the sun sets early this time of year in Norway, but we had our photo taken with the Royal Guard:

Earlier in the day we had tried to visit another royal residence, Oscarshall. It was not open to the public at this time of year, but we had a pleasant walk on the grounds.

Our last stop of the day before dinner was the Nobel Peace Center:

Return to intro post.

Drammen

The center of Drammen has picturesque municipal buildings and a beautiful church. The statue depicts Saint Hallvard protecting an innocent woman:

Although St. Hallvard is the patron saint of Oslo, he is claimed by Drammen, too, and every year there is a re-enactment here of this story from the 11th century.

Of more recent vintage is the award-winning Ypsilon pedestrian bridge across the Drammenselva river, so named because it is Y-shaped like the capital Greek letter ypsilon (or upsilon):

Oslo is 40 kilometers northeast of Drammen, at the northern end of the Oslofjord. Drammen is at the northern end of the Drammensfjord. Both fjords flow south and join before reaching the sea. The Drammenselva river flows into the Drammensfjord. The city of Drammen lies on both sides of the river where it flows into the fjord.

In southeastern Norway the land does not rise above the fjords as spectacularly as in western Norway. In the photo above, the hill on the other side of the river is Spiralen (or Spiraltoppen), which we climbed. Below is the view looking upriver (northwest) from near the top:

And this is the view looking southwest toward the fjord:

In Drammen there is a pleasant walking and biking path next to the river, but these sun-bathers found the chairs a little cold!

Else and Tore have a beautiful cottage on the Oslofjord. On our way to the cottage we stopped for a view of the Oscarsborg Fortress in Oslofjord:

World War II in Europe began in September 1939 when Germany invaded Poland. The war escalated significantly in April 1940 when Germany invaded Denmark and Norway. The Germans sent a naval task force, led by the heavy cruiser Blücher, to Oslo to capture the Norwegian king, parliament and gold. The Germans considered the defences at Oscarsborg too weak to stop them, but they didn't know about the underwater torpedo battery which sank the Blücher on 9 April 1940 in the Battle of Drøbak Sound. This delayed the fall of Oslo long enough to allow the king and parliament to escape, taking the gold with them.

Return to intro post.

Bergen

Bergen is on the west coast of Norway. This is the only place we stayed where we didn't know anyone. We stayed in a hotel near Bryggen, a series of distinctive commercial buildings with roots going back to the Hanseatic League in the 14th century:

From Bergen we took a Norway in a Nutshell tour. We took a train, bus, boat, and then two more trains back to Bergen. The boat went from Gudvangen to Flåm on two branches of the Sognefjord quite far inland from the coast. The fjord was spectacular, with snow above about 500 meters:

Notice the following in the photo below: the steep slopes into the water; the agricultural use of land wherever possible; the gray sheds at the water's edge; the white house up high; and the sheer waterfall. We saw lots of waterfalls.

From Flåm we took the Flåm Railway, a popular tourist train, to Myrdal (elevation 866 meters) where we changed to a commercial train back to Bergen. The Flåm Railway is the third steepest adhesion railway in the world. Before reaching Myrdal the train stopped at the Kjosfossen Waterfall (in the background in the photo below) where there was snow. Alas, the Huldra only come out in the summer and so we did not see them.

On the day after the fjord tour we took the commercial train from Bergen over the mountains to Drammen, near Oslo. This took most of the day. We were in the last car, and in the photo below you can see the rest of the train ahead of us:

This train line is the highest mainline railway in northern Europe, reaching an elevation of 1,237 meters (4,058 feet). We had sunny skies and plenty of snow. Cabins were popular in the mountains:

Tunnels are ubiquitous in Norway, for both railways and roads. The Flåm Railway goes through 20 tunnels in 20 kilometers, and there were also plenty of tunnels on the train ride from Bergen to Drammen.

Return to intro post.

Copenhagen

One of the most unique things we visited in Copenhagen was the Vor Frelsers Kirke (Church of our Saviour):

This church has a beautiful altarpiece depicting Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, a massive pipe organ supported by two elephants, and the largest carillon in northern Europe. But the most impressive feature is the spire with its external staircase. We climbed to the top, where we had wonderful views of the city:

We also climbed the Rundetårn (Round Tower). This features a 7.5 turn spiral ramp inside the tower leading to an observatory on top. It is attached to a chapel, not visible in this photo:

We saw the royal guards marching through the streets for the changing of the guard ceremony at Amalienborg Palace:

Note the bicyclist in the photo above. There were a lot of bicycles in Copenhagen.

We took a harbor tour, and saw many interesting sights including the Black Diamond (Royal Library):

The most famous landmark in Copenhagen, especially from a boat tour, is The Little Mermaid. Alas, it was absent. It had been sent to China for display in the Danish pavilion at the Worlds Fair in Shanghai. That fair ended 31 October 2010 and at the time we were in Denmark the statue was in transit back to Copenhagen. But we saw a replica in the sculpture garden at the Carlsberg Visitors Centre:

Carlsberg Beer was founded by J. C. Jacobsen in 1847. He built his brewery on a hill (berg) on the outskirts of Copenhagen and named it after his 5-year old son Carl.

In 1909 Carl Jacobsen, then the owner of Carlsberg Beer, was inspired by a ballet based on the 1837 fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen to commission The Little Mermaid statue and donate it to the city of Copenhagen.

In addition to H. C. Andersen, other famous Danes include Tycho Brahe, Søren Kierkegaard and Niels Bohr. (There are numerous posts on this blog that mention Niels Bohr!)

Return to intro post.

Three Special Families

The best part of our trip to Europe was connecting with three families involved with student exchanges. In 1973-74 Nancy lived as an exchange student in Drammen, Norway (near Oslo). Below is Nancy skiing in the mountains of Norway that winter, from a scrapbook that her host siblings pulled out during our visit:

We spent time with all three of Nancy's host siblings—Gunn, Else and Nils:

Four years ago we hosted Marion as an exchange student from Bondues, France (near Lille). Below is Marion with Laura and Emily in Paris during our visit:

In the photo above you can see the Obelisk and the Arc de Triomphe in the distance.

We stayed with Marion's parents, Carole and Thierry, during our visit to France:

The above photo was taken in L'Hermitage Gantois in Lille, where we had dinner to celebrate Marion's birthday. This hotel opened in 2003, in a set of buildings that had been a hospital and hospice from 1462 to 1995.

And, of course, the reason for taking our trip at this time was to visit Laura who is presently studying in Copenhagen and living with a host family. On our first day they treated us to a wonderful brunch:

Laura's host sister Stine is in the photo above. Below are her host parents, Brian and Nina:

In the photo above the building in the background is the Copenhagen Opera House.

All three families entertained us in grand style. We extend our grateful thanks to all of them for their wonderful hospitality and the time that they took out of their busy schedules to show us their part of the world.

For the record, the student exchange programs were AFS (Nancy), Rotary (Marion) and DIS (Laura).

Return to intro post.

What is money?

Over the past few years I have blogged about mathematical risk models (on my work blog) and the nature of reality (on my home blog). I'm becoming interested in a new question:

What is money?
Does that answer work??

Nope, it's not that kind of question.

So why am I interested in the nature of money?

A number of my posts have had connections to World War II. Examples: Herman Wouk, Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman (worked on the Manhattan Project), the play Copenhagen (about an event that took place during World War II).

I've blogged about two economists who famously debated the causes and cures of the Great Depression, which immediately preceded World War II and was at least a contributory cause of it. (here, here, here) I've written perhaps a dozen posts on my work blog about the recent financial crisis of our own time; let's hope it doesn't have the same ending as the Great Depression!

So that's why I'm interested in the nature of money. It seems that issues about our understanding of money can have big consequences.

A few places I plan to go with this question:

While blogging about the nature of reality, I wrote about some interesting ideas of Douglas Adams and Jaron Lanier. The works by Adams and Lanier that I cited in those posts also include interesting ideas about money. I intend to revisit those ideas.

I recently discovered that John Nash has some thoughts about money. You may recall John Nash from the movie A Beautiful Mind. I hope to explore his ideas.

Finally, I recently attended a Slow Money National Gathering. I'm not sure if all of their ideas are "sustainable" or not, but I did find parts of Woody Tasch's book interesting. I'll blog about it sometime.

In any event, this post is not about any new ideas. This post is a request for interesting links. In the past, when I was blogging about mathematical risk models or the nature of reality, some of the readers of my blogs sent me links to interesting articles, books and videos (and cartoons!) that I would not have found otherwise. So if you encounter any interesting links about the nature of money, please send them along. Thank you.

The answer is 42!

I've got the answer! (to the question at the end of yesterday's post)

The answer is 42! Haha.

OK, the real answer is Blowin' in the Wind. Hahaha.

All joking aside—well, almost all joking aside—there is an amusing connection between the two preceding paragraphs. Can any readers of this blog explain it in the comments? If you need a hint see the first comment.

And did you realize that today is 10-10-10? That's completely unrelated. Or is it?

Quantum Reality

Quantum Reality, by Nick Herbert, is an excellent discussion of what quantum mechanics has to say about the nature of reality. It turns out that physicists don't agree on the nature of reality. Dr. Herbert describes eight different possible quantum realities:

QR #1: The Copenhagen Interpretation, Part I - There is no deep reality. As Niels Bohr put it: "There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum description." (p. 17)

QR #2: The Copenhagen Interpretation, Part II - Reality is created by observation. As John Wheeler put it: "No elementary phenomenon is a real phenomenon unless it is an observed phenomenon." (p. 18)

QR #3: Reality is an undivided wholeness. As David Bohm put it: "One is led to a new notion of unbroken wholeness which denies the classical analyzability of the world into separately and independently existing parts." (p. 18) In other words, the observer cannot be considered separate and distinct from the object being observed.

QR #4: The many-worlds interpretation - Reality consists of a steadily increasing number of parallel universes. Proposed by Hugh Everett in 1957: "in the Everett picture, everything that can happen does happen." (p. 175) Sounds like Douglas Adams.

QR #5: Quantum logic - The world obeys a non-human kind of reasoning. As David Finkelstein put it: "Our classical ideas of logic [based on the ideas of Aristotle and Boole] are simply wrong in a basic practical way. The next step is to learn to think in the right way, to learn to think quantum-logically." (p. 21)

QR #6: Neorealism - The world is made of ordinary objects, that is, objects which possess attributes of their own whether they are observed or not. This was Einstein's view.

QR #7: Consciousness creates reality. This is a stronger version of QR #2. John von Neumann helped create this view. As his colleague Eugene Wigner put it: "It is not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to the consciousness." (p. 25)

QR #8: The duplex world of Werner Heisenberg - The world is twofold, consisting of potentials and actualities. In the quantum world there exist only potentials, which become actualities in the real world during the "magic act of measurement."

The Copenhagen Interpretation is the dominant view in physics today. But all of these interpretations have credible proponents. Dr. Herbert says that all of these interpretations are consistent with all known experiments. Are they perhaps therefore somehow equivalent?

For more on Bohr, Heisenberg and the Copenhagen Interpretation, see my series of posts in 2008 about the play Copenhagen.

Let's consider what this means for humans. Are humans special? The "no" position is eloquently stated by Douglas Adams. The "yes" position is just as eloquently stated by Jaron Lanier and Herman Wouk.

I think most physicists—including Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg and Feynman—would agree with Adams. But not so fast. Doesn't QR #7 imply that humans are special? And see Copenhagen, part 4 where Niels Bohr says (in the playwright's words): "We put man back at the centre of the universe."

So, are humans special or not?

Dang. Stumped again. I'm sure the answer is right here in something that I've posted about, but it's just not coming to me. Maybe if I sleep on it the answer will come to me tomorrow.

UPDATE: I've got it!

Einstein: His Life and Universe

Einstein: His Life and Universe, by Walter Isaacson, is an excellent biography of Albert Einstein (1879-1955). Einstein was the most famous physicist of the 20th century. He is best known for his Special Theory of Relativity (1905) and General Theory of Relativity (1915). The Special Theory led to the famous equation E = mc² and the atomic bomb. The General Theory led to our current understanding of the outer universe, from its origin in the Big Bang to quasars and black holes.

Einstein also made important contributions to the other revolutionary physics theory of the 20th century: quantum mechanics. In fact it was for his 1905 paper on the photoelectric effect, not his work on relativity, that he was awarded the 1921 Nobel prize. But Einstein never became comfortable with the implications of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics leads to the conclusion that at the atomic and subatomic level, our world is not deterministic. It is probabilistic. Einstein famously wrote in 1926: "I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice."

Einstein and the second best known physicist of the 20th century, Niels Bohr, famously carried on a debate about the meaning of quantum mechanics for as long as they lived. For more about Bohr and quantum mechanics see my series of posts in 2008 about the play Copenhagen.

Einstein lived in Germany and Switzerland until he later emigrated to the United States. He earned what we would now call a bachelor's degree from Zurich Polytechnic in 1900, after which it took him two years to find a job! And then it was not a teaching job as he was hoping for, but a job as a clerk in the Swiss Patent Office. In 1903 Einstein married. It was while working at the Swiss Patent Office, and before he earned his PhD, that Einstein wrote a series of revolutionary papers in 1905, two of which are noted above.

Einstein was married twice. He had three children with his first wife, a daughter before they were married and two sons after they were married. (Little is known about the daughter. She may have been given up for adoption and likely died as an infant.) He and his first wife separated in 1914 when Einstein moved to Berlin to accept a university professorship. (Just as World War I was starting!) The two boys remained with their mother in Zurich. Einstein remarried in 1919. His second wife tolerated his many affairs better than the first wife did.

Einstein was born Jewish but he did not think of himself as Jewish until the Nazi movement arose in Germany. Einstein was a professor in Berlin 1914-1933 but emigrated to the United States in 1933 when the German government passed a law barring Jews from teaching at universities. He was a supporter of the creation of Israel.

Although Albert Einstein signed the famous letter in 1939 to President Roosevelt that launched the Manhattan Project, Einstein was not himself directly involved in the development of the atomic bomb. In fact, he was excluded as a possible security risk because of his German background and political views. Einstein was a pacifist (he later regretted signing that letter) and he favored socialism. But he opposed communism and all forms of totalitarianism. He was a nonconformist in both science and politics, as well as his personal life.

Was Einstein religious? In 1929 he wrote: "I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God Who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind." By "lawful harmony" Einstein meant the laws of science, which he spent his life trying to better understand.

Anything that happens happens

"Is There an Artificial God?" was the title of a talk given by Douglas Adams in 1998. It can be found in The Salmon of Doubt (p. 126 in the paperback edition) and online here. It relates to the concept of reality that I have blogged about.

Adams sums up his view as: "Anything that happens happens." He explains this in terms of the Four Ages of Sand. That is, sand to make glass lenses, silicon chips and fiber optic cable.

1. Telescopes - We discover the outer universe.
2. Microscopes - We discover the inner universe.
3. Computers - We discover computation.
4. The Internet - We discover new ways of communication.

In the First Age we discover that humans are insignificantly small. In the Second Age we discover that even with the microscope we still don't understand life. In the Third Age we discover that complexity can arise from the iteration of very simple processes.

The Fourth Age is something that we are just beginning to experience. We have always had one-to-one communications. We have long had one-to-many communications (mass media). Adams says that democracy is a clunky form of many-to-one communications. What is new is the ability to have many-to-many communications. We don't really know where this will take us, but it is sure to be full of surprises. Adams talks at length about the novelty (at the time) of someone typing on a computer and being able to control a Coke dispensing machine thousands of miles away. He would be fascinated by today's news of the Stuxnet worm.

Adams's thesis rests primarily on the Third Age and the fact that complexity can emerge from simplicity. He says that this is where life comes from. In his view life did not come from an intelligent designer, but emerged out of the simpler natural world through iterative processes analogous to how computers work, gradually becoming more and more complex.

A good example of this idea is the Mandelbrot Set. Infinite complexity arises out of something so simple that even I have programmed it, just to see how it works. Experience with computer programming helps one to understand Adams's point.

Computation is certainly a wonderful thing. To Stephen Wolfram and Max Tegmark it is everything. (See also the ideas of Nick Bostrom, linked in the Tegmark post.)

But we should keep in mind that there might be another view, as eloquently expressed by Jaron Lanier and Herman Wouk.

Well, what other luminaries can we consult for their views? How about Einstein? Funny you should ask. I just finished listening to the biography of Einstein that Nancy gave me last Christmas. See the next post.

The Salmon of Doubt

Douglas Noël Adams liked to tell people that he was born in Cambridge, England, in 1952 a few months before Watson and Crick made their famous discovery there and that his initials were DNA. Alas, he died all too young at the age of 49 in 2001.

Douglas Adams is best known for his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. His last book, The Salmon of Doubt, was published posthumously. It is a compilation of materials found on his various Macintosh computers. The last quarter of the book is an unfinished novel that might have become another book in the Hitchhiker series or another book in his series of Dirk Gently detective novels, no one is quite sure. "The Salmon of Doubt" was Adams's working title for this unfinished novel, and is a spoof on the Salmon of Wisdom in Irish mythology.

The rest of the book consists of a wide variety of materials. For example, we learn that Adams's favorite author was P. G. Wodehouse. From page 67 in the paperback edition:

He's up in the stratosphere of what the human mind can do, above tragedy and strenuous thought, where you will find Bach, Mozart, Einstein, Feynman, and Louis Armstrong, in the realms of pure, creative playfulness.

Sounds like Adams himself. We also learn that Douglas Adams was a friend and fan of Richard Dawkins, who wrote a "keening lament" when he heard that Adams had died in the gym of a heart attack: "I have lost an irreplaceable intellectual companion and one of the kindest and funniest men I ever met." This lament was published in the British press and is republished in The Salmon of Doubt as the Epilogue.

The Salmon of Doubt includes a fascinating talk that Douglas Adams gave in 1998: "Is There an Artificial God?" (p. 126) That talk relates to the theme of reality that I have blogged about here, and it deserves a post of its own.

Richard Dawkins gave the eulogy at the funeral for Douglas Adams. In the eulogy, Dr. Dawkins quoted liberally from Adams's talk "Is There an Artifical God?" Both the eulogy and the lament mentioned above are available online here.

Blowin' in the Wind

When climbing Sugarloaf yesterday we could see in the distance the wind turbines in the Kibby Mountain Wind Power Project. Today we drove home through them. From ME-27 north of Eustis:

From the Sarampus Falls Rest Area:

Well, this is a timely subject to post about, with Laura's recent climb to the top of a wind turbine in Samsø.

Xkcd recently had a hilarious comic about wind turbines:

The Tripods may be the least familiar of the four literary references in the comic. They are a great set of books that I read some years ago. It's nice to encounter someone else who appreciated them.

Speaking of references, the title of this post comes from the Bob Dylan song made famous by Peter, Paul and Mary.

Closer to home we have the Lowell Mountain wind project in the planning stages: official web site, recent news article. We saw a number of "Save the Lowell Mountain Range" signs driving through Lowell on our way to and from Sugarloaf.