Investing in A New World - Part 1

Igniting the Imagination! 

The photos are intercalated by me.

Story

At a multi-denominational religious convention, a young student inquired as to when life begins. “When do you believe that life begins,” he asked a Catholic priest? “We believe that life begins at conception,” the priest replied. The seminarian went on to ask a Protestant Minister; “When do you believe that life begins, minister,” he asked.  “We believe that life begins at birth,” the minister replied. “When do you believe that life begins?” he then asked a rabbi. “We believe that life begins when the kids leave the house,” was the rabbi’s response. 

Detachment

No greater evidence exists of America’s  detachment from its spiritual and intellectual roots; its freedoms, its foundational beliefs, than 6 January 2021:

Innovation, FOMO, Sexual Preference and I've arrived!

A joint MIT/Harvard professor recently opined as to why people purchase EVs;

“It’s because of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out), he opined. One can expect such responses from the “faculty-lounge Robespierres,” the “armchair generals and admirals” and those who teach the privileged to speak eloquently about things they only vaguely understand. Speaking of vague understandings, Carl Sagan;

wrote;

Science is far from a perfect instrument of knowledge. It’s just the best one we have. In this respect, as in many others, it’s like democracy. 

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology. 

My Comment:

For example;

Stump Your Parents from National Geographic for Kids;

#9: Which step happens first to a caterpillar inside a chrysalis?

A. It grows wings

B. Its legs fall off

C. Its eyes get bigger

D. It dissolves into goo

Do you know the answer? 

Clue: Igniting the Imagination

It was R. Buckminster Fuller, creator of the geodesic dome:

who said; there is nothing in the caterpillar;

to indicate that it will be a butterfly;

It is not FOMO that drives the desire to own an EV. I would suggest that it is a combination of caring for others, sexual selection and the desire to say "I've arrived."

Sexual Selection 

Wikipedia: The concept was first articulated by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace who described it as driving species adaptations and that many organisms had evolved features whose function was deleterious to their individual survival,[3] and then developed by Ronald Fisher 

inside the early 20th century. Sexual selection can lead males to extreme efforts to demonstrate their fitness to be chosen by females, producing sexual dimorphism in secondary sexual characteristics, such as the ornate plumage of birds such as birds of paradise and peafowl, 

or the antlers of deer, or the manes of lions, caused by a positive feedbackmechanism known as a Fisherian runaway, where the passing-on of the desire for a trait in one sex is as important as having the trait in the other sex in producing the runway effect. Although the sexy son hypothesis indicates that females would prefer male offspring, Fisher's principle explains why the sex ratio is most often 1:1. Sexual selection is also found in plants and fungi.[4][5]

Einstein and von Frisch

The Guardian: In 1933, Einstein left (Hitler’s) Germany to work at Princeton University in the United States. It was here, in April 1949, he met scientist Karl von Frisch at a lecture.

Von Frisch was visiting Princeton to present his new research on how honeybees navigate more effectively using the polarisation patterns of light scattered from the sky. He used this information to help translate bees’ now famous dance language, for which he eventually received his own Nobel Prize.

The day after Einstein attended von Frisch’s lecture the two researchers shared a private meeting. Although this meeting wasn’t formally documented, the recently discovered letter from Einstein provides some insight into what may have been discussed.

Animal behaviour from a physicist’s lens

We suspect Einstein’s letter is a response to a query he received from Glyn Davys. In 1942, as WWII raged, Davys had joined the British Royal Navy. He trained as an engineer and researched topics including the budding use of radar to detect ships and aircraft. This nascent technology was kept top secret at the time.

By complete coincidence, bio-Sonar sensing had been discovered in bats at the same time, alerting people to the idea that animals may have different senses from humans. While any previous correspondence from Davys to Einstein appears lost, we were interested in what may have prompted him to write to the famous physicist.

So we set out to trawl through online archives of news published in England in 1949. From our search we found von Frisch’s findings of bee navigation were already big news by July of that year, and he had even been covered in The Guardian newspaper in London.

Birds, Bees and Light

The news specifically discussed how bees use polarised light to navigate. As such, we think this is what spurred Davys to write to Einstein. It is also likely Davys’s initial letter to Einstein specifically mentioned bees and von Frisch, as Einstein responded: “I am well acquainted with Mr. v. Frisch’s admirable investigations”.

Einstein wrote:

It is thinkable that the investigation of the behaviour of migratory birds and carrier pigeons may someday lead to the understanding of some physical process which is not yet known.

Einstein ideas seem right, yet again

Now, more than 70 years since Einstein sent his letter, research is indeed revealing the secrets of how migratory birds navigate while flying thousands of kilometres to arrive at a precise destination.

In 2008, research on thrushes fitted with radio transmitters showed, for the first time, that these birds use a form of magnetic compass as their primary orientation guide during flight.

One theory for the origin of magnetic sense in birds is the use of quantum randomness and entanglement. Both of these physics concepts were first proposed by Einstein. But although Einstein was one of the founders of quantum physics, he was uncomfortable with its implications.

“God does not play with dice”, he famously stated, to express his opposition to the randomness which lay at the heart of quantum mechanics.

In doing so, we created a virtual displacement. The bird does not move: it is tested at the site where it is captured, with all other variables remaining the same – apart from the magnetic field, which we changed to match a location far to the north east of their normal range. We chose the location so that it would be far beyond any magnetic field the warblers would have previously experienced.

Only if the birds were able to map their location based on the magnetic field around them would they recognise their displacement – and indeed they did, shifting their takeoff to fly in the “wrong” direction in the real world, but the “right” direction in the magnetic world we’d created around their Emlen funnels.

Winging it

While this cue may be relevant for reed warblers and other migratory songbirds, it is by no means the only navigation system used by birds. Other birds, including seabirds and homing pigeons, have been shown to require olfactory cues (scents and smells) to navigate. At this stage, we don’t understand the reason behind these different preferences.

And, while we are closer to understanding the mystery of how birds navigate using magnetic cues, it still remains something of a mystery as to how they sense the magnetic field. It’s been suggested that birds sense magnetic values through a light-sensitive molecule called cryptochrome, or through sensory cells containing magnetic iron oxide particles – but definitive evidence for either of these has not yet been provided.

However, behavioural evidence continues to underscore how the Earth’s magnetic field is crucial in helping some birds make their epic journeys to breed each year – providing a global positioning system that might just provide birds with a complete navigational map of the world.

Next: Bee Waggle Dance