Last summer I told my boys to get out of my hair, to go down to Washington Square and play. That's what I did when I was seven, and 10 and 14. Why shouldn't they? They looked at me like I was nuts. I knew they wouldn't go. I guess I knew I wouldn't really let them. Opening the door and letting the kids go out and play? That's not even in the realm of the imagination these days.

I called their mom to ask what she thought. Could the kids go down to the park by themselves? She suggested that once the nannies and young parents realized the boys where there alone, I'd probably be arrested.

The gas is out in my building this morning, so I went out to buy a coffee. I walked over to Prince Street. I knew there'd be some commotion. They say they caught the man who killed Etan Patz. Television types like to stand in front of his parents' house when they report the latest. Still, I was surprised to count six different TV-broadcast trucks; there might have been more. I don't watch morning TV, so I don't know if they were there to give live updates, or if they were waiting for something to happen. The crews were all standing around, most in jeans and t-shirts, with the odd one dressed up for the camera like a Wall Street banker.

I glanced up at what I think is the Patz' window. It was open on to their fire escape. I wanted to join the throng of people, to take part in a vigil. But it was no vigil. It was just reporters.

 

Suddenly the whole street felt like a stage set and I felt embarrassed for being there. But why should I be? I live here. Etan was my neighbor. I didn't know him, of course. (My brother says I did, actually, but I don't remember.) He was a little kid; I was bigger. In any case, we have people in common. SoHo was pretty tight in those days.

That store where they say he was killed? I used to shop there, even though it was off limits. Rather, I went there to buy beer and cigarettes, even though I shouldn't have. I don't remember where I was when Etan was taken, 33 years ago yesterday. But I know where I must have been. I was waiting for my bus to school at the next corner from where he was supposed to be waiting for his, over by the bodega.

And here's something else I can tell you: I distinctly remember being scared to go into that shop. Maybe it was because I was a teenager trying to buy stuff I wasn't supposed to buy. Maybe the fear came from knowing they were the kind of people who'd sell it to me. Or could it have been because it was the kind of place where a boy felt vulnerable, where you got the sense danger might be just around the corner?

Etan's murder changed everything, in many ways much more radically than 9/11 changed everything. We all know this. Amber alerts. Missing-person ads on milk cartons. But I'd like to know: how many teenage boys cried themselves to sleep trying not to think about what happened to Etan? Talk about terrorism!

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You can keep up with more of what Alva Noë is thinking on Facebook and Twitter.

Kathryn's Dad thought she was going through a tomboy phase. Kathryn's Mom suspected it might be something more. From the age of two onwards, Kathryn herself was utterly certain: "I am a boy," the child insisted.

Kathryn's story was told on the front page of The Washington Post last Sunday, and I found it a gripping tale. It explores Kathryn's sense, expressed consistently through her toddler years, that she is a boy, and her parents' "upheaval" in trying to do the right thing by their child. When Kathryn was four, after seeking professional counseling, the parents decided to let her live as a boy.

Tyler (the pseudonym chosen by the Post for Kathryn's new name) now dresses as a boy and attends preschool as a boy. Is Tyler a transgender child, with a natal sex (female) that does not match his gender identity (male)? Can children so young really know their own gender identity? How can families best support these children?

In a course I teach at William and Mary, Evolutionary Perspectives on Gender, my students and I grapple with questions of this nature. One of our primary texts is Sexing the Body by Anne Fausto-Sterling, a biologist and gender-studies expert at Brown University. Three days ago, I spoke with Fausto-Sterling by telephone about some of these issues.

 

Fausto-Sterling takes a dynamic systems approach to gender identity, one where a number of influences work together as a system to affect a child's experience of gender. She is interested in what happens as the child begins, especially in the second year of life, to move more fully into symbolic thinking, as expressed through verbal language and symbolic play.

"It seems likely that this transition from presymbolic to symbolic and to increasingly internalized representations of gender, which must start in the vicinity of one year of age and carry on for several years, is an especially important period for understanding the developmental dynamics of gender identity," she writes in a new article in the Journal of Homosexuality.

In other words, in the case of Kathyrn-becoming-Tyler, a host of interactions are shaping and reshaping the child's emerging identity, even as the child participates in shaping and reshaping those interactions as well. Thus, as Fausto-Sterling explains in her article, "gender identity is a pattern in time. In any one individual, it is shaped by the preceding dynamics and becomes the basis of future identity transformations."

This framework does not mesh with the "born that way" school of thought — the view that Kathryn was psychologically male right from birth, but trapped in a female's body.

"What could it possibly mean," Fausto-Sterling asked during our phone conversation, "to say that a child is 'born that way'? Children aren't born with identity."

Furthermore, gender identity may not be fixed throughout life. "I doubt it is a permanent thing at age two," Fausto-Sterling noted.

A second article in the Post cites studies that Fausto-Sterling also described for me, showing that significant percentages (ranging from 43 percent to 80 percent) of kids who switch genders at young ages decide to switch back to their natal sex later on.

Tyler's mother is quoted as saying, "If Tyler wants to be Kathryn again [at some point in the future], that's fine." Here we have a family doing its absolute best for the child in what is a challenging — and unpredictable — situation at both the practical and emotional levels.

I wondered aloud with Fausto-Sterling about the entrenched binary nature of this whole discussion. Is it adequate to think in terms of two genders? Doesn't Fausto-Sterling's own work point to a more fluid continuum which, in line with some other cultures' fluidity, breaks us free of "opposite" genders and a locked-in male versus female choice?

"Whether there is, or could be a continuum, is a different issue from our social options," Fausto-Sterling explained. "We don't have any 'continuous' social options, we have to tell the schools [a male or female gender], and put it on the birth certificate, and the driver's license. In our culture, we are forced into this binary."

Something that worries Fausto-Sterling emerges, at least as I see it, from that binary. She is "extremely concerned about the medical consequences" for kids who decide to transition biologically to another gender. The long-term effects of medical interventions, ranging from early puberty blockers to later hormonal treatments and even to sex reassignment surgery, aren't known. Yet Fausto-Sterling understands that it may be agonizing for a child — for anyone — to live in a body that feels totally alien.

What I take away from Fausto-Sterling is this: young children know what they know about their gender in the moment. They may, or may not, change how they feel about being a boy or a girl as the years go by.

One fixed thing about these children, of course, is that they need what we all need: to be loved for who they are, moment by moment.

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You can keep up with more of what Barbara is thinking on Twitter

Could we distinguish ultra-advanced aliens from gods? I know; it sounds like a preposterous question, but hear me out.

Sci-fi classics, such as Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey, explore precisely this idea, that highly advanced alien intelligences would be essentially indistinguishable from gods. This is not news, really, as it has already happened right here on Earth a few centuries ago.

When Europeans first arrived in the Americas, some natives took them to be gods. They looked and dressed strangely, had huge, powerful vessels that could travel vast distances, their origin was uncertain and they could kill from a great distance with weapons of fire. They could do things unimaginable to the natives, far away from their reality.

In our case, "they" would be able to do things we couldn't dream of, such as dematerializing and teleporting to the other side of a wall or, possibly, the other side of the galaxy. They might be able to create new life forms in seconds, or read our minds.

We face serious technological impediments to such feats right now (for starters, just to store the information to reconstruct a human would take so much memory as to be pretty much impossible). But these impediments are in the context of current knowledge. Everyone knows that, in science, the dreams of today often are the reality of tomorrow.

"Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature," said the great 19th century physicist Michael Faraday.

 

It turns out that much of scientific discovery springs from finding new laws that provide avenues for getting around the ones we already know. In truly inspired moments, old laws are shown to fail and new, unexpected laws emerge.

The metaphors and images we use to describe the world change with time, depending on the current state of technology, invention and knowledge. Who would have compared the cosmos to a computer 100 years ago, before the information age took hold? In the same vein, who knows where our invention will lead us in 10 years? Or 50? No one could have predicted that computers would have led to Facebook and Twitter, and no one can truly predict what will be happening 20 years from now. So, we are partially (if not totally) blind to what the future has in store for us (apologies to all the futurists out there, but it's true).

This being the case, it's impossible to predict with any certainty what ultra-advanced aliens would be like, if they even exist. Of course, we are always free to entertain ourselves with speculation. The amazing powers we speak of today, teleportation and genetically engineered life forms, are anchored on today's science. Tomorrow's scientific reality, and what these aliens can truly do, is a huge question mark.

It may be, as books and movies like Men In Black have fantasized, that they are here and we can't see them. They may even control, or at least influence our lives, invisible but active, like spirits or fairies. Thinking this way, the boundary between the real and the magical, or the real and (gasp!) the supernatural, does blur. After all, if we we don't really know all of the laws of nature, it may well be that what is deemed supernatural today will be deemed natural tomorrow. These are tricky waters in which to tread!

Could there be a link, then, between what so many call the supernatural and the existence of beings out there that are perfectly natural but so beyond our comprehension as to be indistinguishable from supernatural entities?

I don't believe so, even if it is so much fun (and a little scary) to consider this.

Even with our limited capabilities, we have learned quite a bit about the natural world. Blind that we are, we have searched and searched for some sign and found nothing yet. Of course, "they" could be laughing at us (if they even laugh), masters of disguise that they are. Or, maybe, they just aren't there, or, if they are, they don't care much about us.

Of course, Alexander Pope could have been right (I'm writing this on his birthday, May 21): we truly are blind to what's out there.

All nature is but art, unknown to thee;


All chance, direction, which thou canst not see;


All discord, harmony not understood;


All partial evil, universal good.

Whatever the answer may be, how wonderful it is that we can keep on looking. Perhaps, our blindness is our blessing.

Today we continue on our tour of quantum-mechanical weirdness. After our last installment on probability, many folks started laying down bets that the Heisenberg Uncertainly Principle would be the next stop in the land of weirdness. As the author of the series I, however, was certain they were wrong. In this series I'm trying to go from the most basic assumptions we bring to the world and show how reality, on the quantum level, defies those expectations. So today we stumble across one of the most basic and most weird of quantum conclusions: The Wave Particle Duality.

There is a thing in logic called the Law of Excluded Middle. Aristotle was the first to codify it and it states the obvious fact that a statement about the world should either be true or false.

End of story.

Here we are explicitly focusing on the state of physical or mathematical reality. Statements like "Well, I kind of love her but I am not sure" are not part of the discussion. Think pregnancy. As everyone knows, you can't be "kind of pregnant." The statement "She is pregnant" is either true or it is false.

End of story.

In physics, waves and particles are totally and entirely different kinds of beasts. A particle is a little chunk of mass (mass-energy in fact a la Einstein). Think of a billiard ball. It exists in one place at a time. Waves, on the other hand, exist in many places at once. Think of the ripples spreading out on a pond after a fish breaks the surface. The wave is the entire circular ripple.

Waves and particles behave very differently, as well. When two waves collide they pass through each other. During the moments that they overlap they create either a bigger wave or smaller wave, depending on the positions of their peaks and troughs. This property is called superposition.

 

Collide two particles, on the other hand, and they either smash apart or stick together. Particles never superpose because there is no way to get them to occupy the same space.

For classical physicists, particles and waves are like "pregnant" and "not pregnant." There is no in-between for these two very different kinds of physical "thing".

And then came quantum mechanics.

I won't run through the history of how we stumbled on this (it's fascinating). But the long and short of the story is this: in quantum mechanics everything is BOTH a particle and wave. Light can act as a wave or it can act as particle. Electrons can act as a wave or a particle. Protons can act as wave or a particle.

If you do an electron experiment that looks for "I am all spread out and superposing like a wave," you will observe that kind of behavior. But if you do an electron experiment that looks for "I am all bound up in one place and time like a particle," you will see that too. And here is the very weird part. You will never see both at the same time. Wave experiments give wave results. Particle experiments give particle results. Try to get clever figure out what the electron really is and nature will always thwart you.

You can forget about trying to imagine a wave-sickle or something like that too. Its been tried and leads to conclusions shot down by experiments. But that is the key conclusion of today's lesson in weirdness. Waves and particles are opposites, like being pregnant and not pregnant, like having a dead cat or having a live cat (more on that in the future). We simply can't imagine, can't draw a picture in our heads, what quantum mechanics is pointing us to in terms of a "picture" of reality. We don't have the mental machinery to create images in our heads that embrace the reality these experiments imply.

Thus we have a duality: both, but neither at the same time. Everything is made of particles and/or/but/also waves.

That is weird.

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You can keep up with more of what Adam Frank is thinking on Facebook and Twitter. His latest book is About Time: Cosmology and Culture at the Twilight of the Big Bang.

At 60 degrees north, at high noon on January 6, in Finland, I saw the sun six degrees above the horizon and truly realized we live on a sphere. Some 10,000 years ago a people speaking a non-Indo-European language, the Finns, migrated into this northern land.

For these past 10,000 years an oral tradition of folk tales and songs called the Kalevala has been kept alive by the people. Generation after generation the Finns sat knee to knee, facing one another, hand holding hand, next to the fire, rocking, telling the tales. For 10,000 years.

The Kalevala was written down in the 19th century. The songs, still sung, had laid the groundwork for a masterpiece similar in its gestation to Homer's Illiad and Odyssey. Just as Homer's works transformed Greek oral tradition into a written form, into literature, so too the Kalevala became literature read by all Finns in high school.

The Kalevala is read in school as we read Chaucer. But the Kalevala is so ancient in its origins and imagery that Chaucer feels a bit like a medieval Days of Our Lives.

A bit of the first song goes something like this:

"The Air-Lass tumbled in the waves, her belly hard with the coming birth of the first bard, tumbled in the waves of the waters. Tumbled for 30 years, hard bellied. Tumbled in the waters."

"A small bird appeared over the Air-Lass in the waters, looking for a place to land. The Air-Lass lifted her knee. The bird landed, grateful."

"The bird laid nine metal eggs: eight iron, one gold. Three hatched. The Air-Lass moved and the other eggs fell into the water. One cracked open. The yellow became the sun. The white became the moon. The bottom half shell became the earth. The top half shell became the sky."

It makes me cry.

The zombie within: the idea that we don't know what we are doing, or where we are going, when we think we best know, is an old one. (The words I've just paraphrased are Emerson's.)

James Atlas, in a recent New York Times article, is probably on to something when he notices that there has been an explosion recently of what he wittily calls Can't-Help-Yourself Books. These are books that take as their starting point something like the idea that science now teaches us the "choices we make in day-to-day life are prompted by impulses lodged deep within the nervous system" and that, therefore, in some sense, we are not really the authors of our own actions, responses, choices.

Today I want to come at the question of whether we are really controlled by a neural zombie deep within by considering one route that might lead to that conclusion. This has to do with how we think about thinking, action and the intellect.

 

Consider that a novice basketball player needs to think about the mechanics of how to dribble; doing so — concentrating, paying attention to hand, wrist, ball, etc. — improves performance. But not so for the experienced player. It isn't just that that he or she doesn't need to pay attention to ball handling to play well; it's that fluent and skillful performance will be disrupted if she does. This is a general fact about expertise. Pick your favorite example. A chess beginner needs to think about the rules governing how the pieces move in order to play. That layer of thinking recedes into the background for the advanced player, freeing him up to pay attention to the things that matter for winning, such as tactics and strategy.

It's tempting to say that the contrast here is between thinking and not thinking, or being conscious and being a zombie. The expert leaves the plodding, deliberative mind behind and enters "the zone," captures "the flow," lets the zombie within guide the fingers as they race over the neck of guitar, or the hands and feet as they (not "you"!) work the pedals and gear shift as you accelerate to overtake on the high way.

But this gets what interests us wrong.

Yes, athletes, musicians, drivers and chess players, when they are in the flow, can act fast without needing to make decisions about what to do. But this is not because they aren't thinking. Nor is it because they are thinking really fast. It's because they are thinking about what matters, such as the musical ideas or the traffic or the potential vulnerability of the King to attack. Mastery consists precisely in shifting attention from the mechanics of a task to, if you like, the task's point.

Nothing illustrates this better than the case of language itself. We learn to decline and conjugate so that we can talk. The learner of a second language needs to give painstaking attention to grammatical choices and rules. But conversation — thoughtful participation in the parry and thrust, the give and take — requires that we stop focusing on the grammar and start focusing on what we are doing. What is required is not that we become automata, or forget the grammar; what is required is that we become masters of it.

Historically, we have tended to think of "intelligence" as a matter of deliberate judgment; we celebrate rationality. Agency consists of doing things for reasons: see, think, decide, plan, execute. This is the structure of human agency. If it should turn out to be the case that much of our action passes over the thinking/deciding/planing stage, then it would seem to follow that, at least much of the time, we are not the agents we think we are. If it should turn out that we act without deliberating, then, it would seem, we're a lot less smart and in control than we think we are.

But this conclusion isn't mandatory. We can and should reject the conception of intelligence and agency it presupposes. An expert is not simply someone who has learned to do what the beginner does but fast. The expert has an entirely different relation to the task. The expert's intelligence and thoughtfulness shines not despite the lack of deliberation, but thanks to the freedom not needing to deliberate affords.

Sometimes not deliberating is the mark of our intellectual fitness, as when I answer your question without needing to ponder your grammar or my own.

When it comes to the activities of daily life — talking, thinking, shopping, driving, reading, looking, learning — we are all experts.

It is expertise that lets us get out of our heads, to the things that matter. Skillful, fluent action is not slavery to the neural zombie within; it is liberation from the rote and the regulated. It is flexible attunement to where we find ourselves. (Echoes of Emerson again.) It is intelligent life.

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You can keep up with more of what Alva Noë is thinking on Facebook and Twitter.

It was almost one year ago that the space shuttle Atlantis rose into the sky on a pillar of flame for the last time. The shuttle program ended forever with that mission. American astronauts were left to hitch rides on Russian space capsules, and American kids were left with no tangible direction forward for their dreams of a high-tech, space-happy future.

Tomorrow morning, the unmanned Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled to lift off from Cape Canaveral so that supplies can reach the space station.

What's the big deal? The Falcon 9 is a private spaceship. It was fully developed and is owned by the private company SpaceX, brainchild of Elon Musk, the Internet billionaire who made his fortune from PayPal. With contracts from NASA to develop new launch platforms, SpaceX and other companies are poised to make space the domain of profitable businesses. And Musk has been explicit about his intentions to go beyond Earth's orbit and build commercially viable ventures that might take people to Mars in a decade or two.

His timing couldn't be better or more urgent. Even with the shuttle program over, America needs to remain a leader in space.

When I was a kid, the U.S. space program fueled my imagination and led me into a life of science. But as I got older, it became clear that the real business of building a human presence across the solar system was going to have to fall to business.

Governments might get the exploration of space started, but the vagaries of election and budget cycles meant that it could never go further. Now, we've reached the point where it's the exploitation of space that matters.

While exploitation might seem a dirty word to some folks, they should stop to consider how dependent we've all already become on the commercialization of that region of space called Low Earth Orbit.

Think of the billions of dollars in commercial activity tied to weather prediction, global broadcasting and global positioning. All this business depends on satellites orbiting overhead right now.

But if, as a species, we want to go beyond the thin veil of space directly overhead, then the basic principles of private venture and risk will have to apply.

These are the ones that have always applied. While Queen Isabella may have given Columbus his ships to cross the Atlantic, it was private companies that built the seagoing trade routes and brought folks across to settle (for better or worse). Likewise, it's only through commercially viable endeavors that large numbers of humans are getting off this world and into the high frontier of space.

It is no small irony that many of the billionaires bankrolling the new space entrepreneurship built their fortunes not in jet-fighter aerospace manufacturing, but in the dream space of the Internet. Like so many of the post-Apollo generation (myself included), these former high-tech whiz kids had their visions of the future forged in rocket fire. In that way, the wide vista of their dreams is uniquely American.

While no one can doubt that problems enough exist here on Earth, the high frontier of space has always called to us as a nation. In stepping out across that threshold, who knows what new solutions we might imagine, what new expressions of our own creativity we might invoke.

But none of it will happen unless we ... get ... out ... there.

I am counting on that small step that SpaceX will take tomorrow to one day prove to be a giant leap for us all.

At the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, Australia, the artist Stuart Ringholt leads unusual, after-hours tours: art-gazing in the nude. One day last month, 32 men and 16 women signed up. The New York Times was there to document the tour, in all its glory.

The link between art appreciation and clothes-shedding is pretty tenuous. Ringholt's naked tour may strike you as a mere stunt. Yet it also leads to some interesting questions.

How do we come to be comfortable with certain patterns of dress (or undress) and wildly uneasy about others? What factors influence how different groups or individuals think about nudity and other aspects of body image?

 

An evolutionary perspective helps here. I know of no other animals who cover up or decorate their bodies in socially prescribed ways, unless we work hard to stretch our definitions. Wild chimpanzees from Sierra Leone fashion "twig sandals" to protect their feet from the thorns of the kapok tree. A wild chimpanzee in Tanzania was observed to drape a knotted "skin necklace" from a colobus monkey around her neck.

Among the primates we humans are the only near-hairless ones, and to some degree this evolved biology plays a role. The original selection pressures to protect our non-furry selves with animal skins may be linked to cold climates. I've always thought it likely that Neanderthals used animal skins for protection in cold regions, though some anthropologists date the first clothes only to our own species at around 70,000 years ago. That research uses what I affectionately call "the lice method," in which the origins of worn clothing are dated to the appearance of body lice.

Perhaps full-on clothing or decorating of the body is a human-only thing to do. Yet the wearing of clothes is not universally prescribed; in some groups, nudity or limited genital cover-ups work just fine. Cross-cultural patterns of dress range from penis sheaths for males to full-body cloth claustration for females, with lots of variation at every turn.

Cultural tradition, partially but by no means entirely linked to environment, is a major force at work here. In Europe, for instance, naturism has a long history, and in many areas today nude beach-going and sea-bathing are widely accepted. Nude beaches and clothing-optional resorts exist in this country too, including at my childhood beach, Sandy Hook in New Jersey. But generally, as travel writer Rick Steves points out, Americans just don't exhibit the broad comfort level with nudity that Europeans do.

Cultural preferences may become entrenched, but they also respond to changing social conventions — even on a tiny time scale. Some years back, in a social experiment, the BBC brought together eight strangers who, after some days going naked around each other, shifted from great initial discomfort to easy modesty with each other. Embarrassment and shame are socially malleable.

Yet I don't want to suggest that nudity, or partial nudity, is experienced the same way by every person within some identified group. Certainly, going nude or partly nude is a gendered experience in the U.S.: ask any girl who's told that her physical safety relates to the degree of her "provocative" dress, or any woman who is informed that breast-feeding in public is inappropriate. In large swathes of the world, a woman's public nudity or partial nudity would be unspeakably dangerous for her.

Maybe Australian artist Ringholt, with his nude museum tours, has pulled off something more than a stunt after all: a sort of performance art that invites all of us to think in fresh ways about the clothes we put on, or don't, every day.

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You can keep up with more of what Barbara is thinking on Twitter.

Sometimes death comes from unexpected places. If you were a dinosaur living some 65 million years ago, your greatest fear was probably other dinosaurs; especially if you weren't a mighty meat-eater like the tyrannosaur, who had little to fear apart from, perhaps, other mighty meat-eaters. Yet, in spite of possible downward trends in some types of dinosaurs, what finished them off was a cosmic cataclysm of untold proportions, the collision with a six-mile wide asteroid.

The impact left a 100-mile-wide crater off the coast of Mexico in the Yucatán peninsula. It's hard to imagine that a single impact could do so much damage. But doing the math, the collision with a rock that big traveling at about 20 miles per second (150 times faster than a jet airliner) would deposit as much energy as one-hundred-thousand times the energy that would have been produced by the detonating all the H-bombs that existed at the height of the Cold War. Apparently, the violence of the impact was such that the rebound shot debris half the distance to the moon.

 

Dense clouds of dust blocked sunlight for months, causing the Earth's surface temperature to plummet. After the dust settled, greenhouse gases had the reverse effect. Temperatures to skyrocketed, going well above pre-impact levels. Over 50 percent of all living species died.

This was not the only impact, or the most deadly. A list of impacts and their respective craters can be found on the Internet. Fortunately, all large impacts are quite old. The most recent one of note is the Tunguska Event of 1908, possibly an asteroid fragment about 120-feet across that blew up a couple of miles above the ground. It flattened a 20-mile-wide swath of Siberian pine forest. The energy released was equivalent to 185 Hiroshima bombs.

Can something like this happen again? NASA's Near Earth Object Program attempts to map and estimate the impact risk of asteroids that come close to our cosmic neighborhood. Within their window of precision, we have nothing to fear in the short term, and certainly nothing to fear from really large objects, the so-called "global killers," such as the one that finished off the dinosaurs.

Large comets and asteroids should be detectable a couple of years out from impact, giving us some time to prepare. Our response wouldn't be quite as spectacular as the operation in the blockbuster movie Armageddon. Instead, by sending an unmanned craft with explosive devices or attachable rockets, we could ease the threat into a new, non-impact orbit. I discuss some ways of dealing with possible impacts in my book The Prophet and the Astronomer.

The rich history of cosmic collisions teaches us something important about life on Earth: had history been different, life would have taken a different course and we wouldn't be here.

We owe our existence to massive cataclysmic events, random accidents that played a large role in determining the pace of evolution. As a consequence, we can state confidently that humans are unique in the cosmos. Even if intelligent life exists on some Earth-like planet in a distant corner of our galaxy, "they" will be very different from us. We are the products of our own planetary history, a history that hasn't and won't be duplicated anywhere else.

The history of life on a planet mirrors the planet's life history.

Since no two cosmic histories will ever be the same, we are unique in the universe; a good lesson to learn from dead dinosaurs, especially in days when you may not be feeling so important in the big scheme of things.

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You can keep up with more of what Marcelo is thinking on Facebook and Twitter.

The only constant is change. It's the most basic fact of human existence. Nothing lasts, nothing stays the same.

We feel it with each breath. From birth to the unknown moment of our passing, we ride a river of change. And yet, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, we exhaust ourselves in an endless search for solidity. We hunger for something that lasts, some idea or principle that rises above time and change. We hunger for certainty. That is a big problem.

It might even be THE problem.

 

Religions are often built around this heartache for certainty. In the face of sickness, loss and grief, a thousand dogmas with a thousand names have risen. Many profess that if only the faithful hold fast to the "rules," the "precepts" or the "doctrine" then certainty can be obtained.

Fate and future can be fixed through promises of freedom from immediate suffering, divine favor or everlasting salvation. Scriptures are transformed into unwavering blueprints for an unchanging order. These documents must live beyond question lest the certainty they provide crumble. When human spiritual endeavor devolves into these white-knuckle forms of clinging they become monuments to the fear of change and uncertainty.

It would be symmetrical if I could point to science as the pure antidote to the rigid rejection of uncertainty. Science, in the purest forms of its expression as a practice, holds to no doctrine other than that the world might be known. In the ceaseless pursuit of its own questioning path, science asks us to allow for ceaseless change in our ideas, beliefs and opinions. It's this aspect of science that I value more than any other.

But science does not exist alone as practice. It's also a constellation of ideas that exist within culture and those ideas can gain value, in and of themselves, without connection to actual practice. In this way science becomes something more and less. For some people the idea of Science offers a trumped up certainty that yields its own false defense against the rootlessness that roots of our existence.

My co-blogger Marcelo Gleiser put it beautifully two weeks ago when he wrote, "what is pompous is to think that we can know all the answers. Or that it's the job of science to find them." When science as an idea is used to push away the tremulous reality of our lived existential uncertainty then it, too, is degraded. It becomes just another imaginary fixed point in a life without fixed points.

Of course it doesn't have to be this way. The world's history of spiritual endeavor contains many beautiful descriptions of authentic encounters with uncertainty. Ironically these often serve as gateways to the most compassionate experience of what can be called sacred in human life.

Buddhism's First Noble Truth, which focuses specifically on the reality of change and suffering, serves as one example. In the Christian tradition works like the "Cloud of Unknowing," a 14th century paean to the importance of experience over doctrine or dogma, serves as another. Dig around in most of the world's great religious traditions and you find people finding their sense of grace by embracing uncertainty rather than trying to bury it in codified dogmas.

For science, embracing uncertainty means more than claiming "we don't know now, but we will know in the future". It means embracing the fuzzy boundaries of the very process of asking questions. It means embracing the frontiers of what explanations, for all their power, can do. It means understanding that a life of deepest inquiry requires all kinds of vehicles: from poetry to particle accelerators; from quiet reveries to abstract analysis.

Though I am an atheist, some of the wisest people I have met are those whose spiritual lives (some explicitly religious, some not) have forced them to continually confront uncertainty. This daily act has made them patient and forgiving, generous and inclusive. Likewise, the atheists I have met who most embody the ideals of free inquiry seem to best understand the limitations of every perspective, including their own. They encounter the ever shifting ground of their lives with humor, good will and compassion.

In the end, embracing uncertainty is to embrace a quality I have written about many times before: mystery. These lives we live, surrounded by beauty and horror, profound knowledge and pitiful ignorance, are a mystery to us all. To push that truth away with false certainty, falsely derived from either religion or reason, is to miss our most perfect truth.

We are, after all, just "such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep."

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You can keep up with more of what Adam Frank is thinking on Facebook and Twitter. His new book is About Time: Cosmology and Culture at the Twilight of the Big Bang.

Last week I started a new series of micro-posts touching on the different ways quantum physics is weird. The motivation comes from my summer project of reviewing old notes and reacquainting myself with the mechanics of quantum mechanics. But no matter how many theorems on Eigenstates and Unitary operators I crank out, I am still bothered by how strange the quantum world is compared with our common sense expectations (of course the world cares not a whit about our expectations).

So today's weirdness can be summed up in a single word: probability. We are all familiar with probability. You flip a coin and before it lands there is a 50 percent chance it will come up "heads" and a 50 percent chance it comes up "tails."

The reason we don't know which side we'll get before it lands is because of ignorance.

 

From a classical physics perspective, if we knew the initial location and motion of every atom in the coin and the air and our hand we could, in principle, exactly and explicitly predict the coin's fate. Thus the probabilities we usually deal with in life come from not knowing everything there is to know.

Probabilities in quantum mechanics are not like this.

Not at all.

Not even a little.

In quantum mechanics probabilities are inherent. They don't come from ignorance. They are an intrinsic to reality. While I can speak quite accurately about half-lives relevant for a large collection of radioactive atoms, there is no way to predict exactly when an individual radioactive atom will decay.

Why is this weird?

Well, we like to think that every event we see in the universe has a cause. Vases don't fall from shelves on their own. Something, or someone, has to knock them off the shelf. Not so in quantum physics. Individual events like a radioactive decay just happen when they damn well want. They are inherently probabilistic or, better yet, "a-causal."

That is very weird indeed.

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You can keep up with more of what Adam Frank is thinking on Facebook and Twitter. His latest book is About Time: Cosmology and Culture at the Twilight of the Big Bang.

From this primate mother to all others out there ... Happy Mother's Day!

I'm sharing here a beautiful two-minute video from the forests of Sumatra; it shows the intense, prolonged mother-infant bond among orangutans (great apes from Asia).

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You can keep up with more of what Barbara is thinking on Twitter.

Let's call it Heimat is a show by Hans Schabus, a 42-year-old Austrian artist, now up at Simon Preston's gallery at 301 Broome Street in New York's Lower East Side. The focus of the show is a video installation entitled "Atelier." A roughly 10-minute loop, "Atelier" takes as its score the final shoot-out scene in Sam Peckinpah's 1969 movie The Wild Bunch. Cut for cut, and camera angle by angle, "Atelier," which documents the artist's studio and its Vienna neighborhood, is a match to the Peckinpah original.

The dynamics and visual logic of the Peckinpah battle organize our perceptual encounter with what appears to be a safe, benign urban locale. We hear the Peckinpah soundtrack, very loud — mostly the violent noise of gun fire — as it builds energetically to a bloody conclusion.

The effect is darkly hilarious and even shocking; it is mysterious and fascinating, even once you are in on the joke. (See here for a short, very positive review.)

 

There's a lot one could say about what gives this video installation its authority and power. "Heimat" is a word with very particular associations in German; it has been used by Nazis and other right-wing extremists and has something like the meaning of homeland or fatherland. And then there is the fact that Schabus uses an artistic rendition of extreme graphic violence and mayhem to choreograph his own presentation of his Viennese art studio. Is it significant, given these themes, that two women in Islamic dress are briefly shown ambling down the street (to the sound of gunfire)? And what of the fact that the studio itself — the place of work and creation that is the video's ostensible subject — seems to be located in or near one of the famous pre-war Viennese Gemeindebau, that is, low-income social housing projects?

All this doubtless repays further thought. But I suggest we turn in a different direction.

The poet Antonio Machado once wrote, "you lay down a path in walking."

The act of walking scores the earth, marks it, and produces the path which, in turn, guides, but also constrains, our movements. Our lives play out against scores — in this case the sculptured ground on which we stand — which are of our own devising.

We are wanderers, says the poet; that is, we are path makers by nature.

Path-making, in the end, it turns out, is a graphical practice. The path is the trace of our wanderings, just as the line on paper, or in the clay, is itself, whatever else it is, the trace of the movements of the hand that made it.

The link between home and studio (Heimat and atelier) is as basic as it gets, then. Let's call it fundamental.

The work of art never contents itself with mere manufacture, with mere mark making, but seeks to exhibit what creation and mark making presuppose.

Part of what is displayed in Hans Schabus' video installation, and part of what makes it so outstanding, is this: life itself is a process of making; action leaves traces and these traces, whether on a piece of paper or canvas, or on the earth, are the scores we live by. This is what is presupposed and it is the work of art to bring this fact into focus.

Art is a way of keeping score.

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You can keep up with more of what Alva Noë is thinking on Facebook and Twitter.

Thanks to Bad Astronomy for posting this beautiful fly-over of the asteroid Vesta via the Dawn space probe.

Franklin and Lila had no clue they were making history earlier this week when they went to the hospital in upstate New York.

Franklin is a piglet and Lila is a goat. Each was rescued from a life-threatening situation and taken to Farm Sanctuary's new animal hospital, the country's first to be dedicated to what a Sanctuary press release calls "the victims of America's industrialized food system."

I see the new Melrose Small Animal Hospital in Watkins Glen as an excellent step forward in how we may think about, and work to protect, farm animals.

 

Lila the goat was part of a rescue operation at a farm that housed over 70 animals. Accounts of the rescue, one in the Buffalo News and the other by Farm Sanctuary, make for rough reading because the extent of the animals' suffering is made so clear. Emaciated as she was, Lila couldn't even stand up when she was discovered.

But Lila is recovering now, as are the other animals seized from that farm.

Franklin's survival was at risk in the short term because he was a runty piglet. He'd been briefly adopted from a pig farm by a kind person who first endeavored to nurse him back to health, then couldn't tolerate the idea of his surviving only to be slaughtered later for food. Franklin arrived at the hospital with mange, a skin condition that caused him great discomfort.

The animal hospital will treat chickens, turkeys, calves, piglets and goats. Patients will not be in short supply. Lila and Franklin attest to the fact that animal abuse may occur on farms of any size when the animals are seen primarily as financial commodities. Factory farms supply 95 percent of the meat, dairy and eggs consumed in the U.S.; that animals frequently endure injury and trauma on farms of this type is no secret.

Am I tarring all farms with a single dark brush? Is my purpose in blogging about this news to push everyone to lay down their steak knives and chicken nuggets, and convert to a vegetarian or vegan diet?

No, on both counts. Some farmers, of course, do not treat their animals poorly.

And until, maybe, 10 years ago, I'd happily have eaten Franklin. For that matter, until 4 months ago, I ate chicken and turkey frequently. So I'm in no position to moralize about diet to anyone.

But even meat-eaters can get behind the fair treatment of farm animals. Gene Baur, Farm Sanctuary's President and Co-Founder, put it to me this way in an email message:

"The creation of this hospital, from the generosity of so many supporters around the country, shows a growing mainstream awareness that farm animals are intelligent, emotional beings who deserve to be provided with the same level of care that we have traditionally given to dogs and cats. Regardless of dietary choices, most people now agree that intensely confining and abusing animals who are destined to be slaughtered for food is no longer acceptable. We have a moral responsibility to protect animals from factory farming abuses."

I, myself, can't eat farm animals anymore.

As Farm Sanctuary puts it, farm animals are "someone" and not "something."

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You can keep up with more of what Barbara is thinking on Twitter.