Damon writes, “This distribution of ‘isotopic peaks’ on my calf is what a peptide of mass 2,005 Daltons looks like in a high-resolution mass spectrometer. That peak distribution is due to the relative abundance of the different isotopes of the elements that make up peptides, particularly carbon. 2005 is the year I got married and also the year I gave the corporate world the boot in favor of science. I wonder if there are any more proteomics tattoos out there….”

Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.

The latest edition of Ocean and Coastal Management has an article on the management of the world’s most charismatic invertebrate and I am sad to report–as expected–the news is not good:

Socio-Economic Features Of Sea Cucumber Fisheries
In Southern Coast Of Kenya

Jacob Ochiewoa, Maricela de la Torre-Castrob, Charles Muthamaa, Fridah Munyia and J.M. Nthutaa

A socio-economic assessment was conducted at Vanga, Shimoni, Majoreni and Gazi villages in the Kenyan south coast with focus on the sea cucumber fishing patterns, the social and economic characteristics of the fisher communities, the contribution of sea cucumbers to the local livelihoods, and analysis of the management systems. The results indicate that sea cucumber fishers are mainly men. Fishing is done in sub-tidal areas (3-10 metres deep) and inter-tidal areas depending on the species being targeted. Those who fish in the sub-tidal areas do skin-diving without using SCUBA diving gear. Sea cucumber fishing is heavily done during the north east monsoon season when the sea is calm and water is clear. About 32% of the sea cucumber fishers also collect other marine products such as octopus. The sea cucumbers are sold fresh from the sea to local first level middlemen who process and sell them to the second level middlemen and exporters in Mombasa. The fishers occasionally borrow money from first level middlemen especially when they fail to catch sea cucumbers but this in turn creates conditions of dependence and possible exploitation. Almost all sea cucumber fishers have stated that they are not willing to make sea cucumbers part of their daily diet. The economic value of the product was substantial; the average monthly revenue for dry sea cucumbers in the area was estimated to US$ 8,000. The relative highest profits are derived from juvenile species, thus there is an economic incentive hindering local stocks to reach sexual maturity, which in turn may create a situation in which recruitment success is highly dependent on faraway populations. The present management system falls into general fisheries regulations and was found weak. No specific management plan for sea cucumbers was found.

In other words, cukes are being collected before they reach sexual maturity and, at present, fishers have no incentive to harvest local populations sustainably.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, our oceans are going to hell in a handbasket. The signs of dramatic decline across scales are crystal clear, but we have a habit of ignoring what happens below the surface. So when there’s nothing but jellyfish and algae left, our children may wonder why we knew, yet did nothing. Oh, for the love of sea cucumbers… Surely we can do better!

Does your first- or second-grade daughter have trouble with math? Her anxiety could be stemming not just from a genuine fear of number crunching but also, a new study indicates, from an anxious female math teacher.

The study (pdf) published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that if a female teacher is anxious about math, she tends to pass on that anxiety to her female students. This can make the female students believe they aren’t hard-wired for math like the boys, and cause them to shy away from fully flexing and developing their mathematical muscles.

The findings are the product of a year-long study on 17 first-and second-grade teachers and 52 boys and 65 girls who were their students [Science Daily]. Researchers recruited the female teachers from a Midwestern school district and assessed their level of math anxiety. They also gave math tests to 117 of these teachers’ students and jotted down their beliefs about math and gender at the beginning and end of the year. By the end of the year, the more anxious teachers were about their own math skills, the more likely their female students – but not the boys – were to agree that “boys are good at math and girls are good at reading” [AP].

The girls who bought into the math-is-for-boys notion also scored, on average, almost 5 points lower than the boys on the tests. The researchers noted that the boys weren’t affected by their teachers’ math anxiety like the girls. However, the researchers aren’t sure exactly how the angst was transmitted from teachers to students. Perhaps math-anxious teachers call on girls to solve math problems less frequently; praise boys more effusively; or simply imply that it’s not important for girls to be good at math [Los Angeles Times]. It’s also not clear if a study of male elementary teachers with math phobia would have produced similar results.

The study suggests that math anxiety could have a long-term effect on girls–as the nervousness could prevent them from picking math and science in high school and may preclude them from having certain careers in engineering, science and technology. It also reveals that there needs to be a fundamental re-thinking of how teachers view the subject, as more than 90 percent of elementary school teachers in the country are women and they are able to get their teaching certificates with very little mathematics preparation, according to the National Survey of Science and Mathematics Education. [Science Daily]. The study’s authors say that teacher training programs should be tweaked to include more math, and that math anxiety among teachers should be openly addressed.

Related Content:
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DISCOVER: The Myths About Mr. and Ms.
80beats: Girls and Boys Are Equally Good at Math, Study Finds
80beats: More Evidence That Girls Kick Ass at Math, Just Like Boys

Image: iStockphoto

While Jupiter’s two largest moons, Ganymede and Callisto, are nearly the same size, they’re far from identical twins. Now, in a Nature Geoscience study, Amy Barr and her team might have figured out this tale of two similar moons with very different histories.

Voyager and Galileo mission images showed Ganymede, seen here on the right, to be a geologically active place, with a surface that scientists think changes through tectonic processes like those that we have here on the Earth. Callisto, seen on the left, looks totally different: Its rock and ice have not mixed in the same way, and it doesn’t seem to have such active geology, despite being approximately the same size as Ganymede. For 30 years, researchers have wondered what process could have got enough heat into Ganymede to drive its geological evolution without setting off Callisto as well [ScienceNOW Daily News].

Trying to crack the puzzle, Barr turned to comets. Just less than 4 billion years ago, astronomers hypothesize, a wave of comets careened across the solar system during a phase called the late heavy bombardment. Barr’s team of scientists modeled how that comet storm would have affected Jupiter’s satellites. Ganymede, located about 500,000 miles closer to giant Jupiter than Callisto, bore the brunt of its parent’s heavy hands. Jupiter’s extreme gravity (a 150-pound person would weigh 355 pounds on Jupiter) tugged more comets toward Ganymede and caused them to crash at higher speeds than it did for Callisto [Discovery News].

That was the turning point, Barr says. If all those cosmic snowballs pounded Ganymede with enough energy, the formation of its core and other geological processes could have become self-sustaining. Says Barr: “Impacts during this period melted Ganymede so thoroughly and deeply that the heat could not be quickly removed. All of Ganymede’s rock sank to its center the same way that all the chocolate chips sink to the bottom of a melted carton of ice cream” [SPACE.com].

Castillo would not have been so lucky. Shortchanged on impact energy, Callisto would not have melted enough to achieve “runaway” heating during separation, leaving it cold and without a core [ScienceNOW Daily News]. Thus, Barr’s team says, the moon has been dead, geologically speaking, ever since.

Related Content:
80beats: 400 Years After Galileo Spotted Them, The Moons of Jupiter Are Looking Fly (photo gallery)
80beats: Saturn and Jupiter’s Moons Battle for Alien-Hunters’ Attention
80beats: Jupiter Grabbed a Comet for 12 Years, Then Flung It Back Out
80beats: Mysterious Smash on Jupiter Leaves an Earth-Sized Scar
DISCOVER: Jupiter, Not Bust chronicles the Galileo probe’s Jupiter observations in 1996

Image: NASA

The decade of the 2000s was the warmest on record.

You may know me as a buster of the Moon landing hoax claims, debunking the dumbosity of people who think the Apollo missions were faked.

But I have been leaked a picture that makes it clear that the truth behind Apollo was far, far bigger than anyone has ever suspected. In fact, it’s a real Thriller.

Reader Dan Brennan from the Unmanned Space Flight bulletin board sent this picture to me:

It’s a shot from Apollo 11 of Buzz Aldrin in the command module, a screen capture from the amazing (but Flash-heavy) site We Choose the Moon. Before I even read the content of Dan’s email I knew what he wanted to show me. Can you see it? Look just to the right of Buzz, at what should be a gauge on the control panel… but actually shows what looks for all the world (well, all the cis-lunar space) like Michael Jackson!

In fact, I think it is Michael Jackson.

The evidence is overwhelming. Sure, he looks like he’s wearing an eyepatch, but given his wardrobe choices over the years, is an eyepatch all that unlikely? And look at this picture for comparison — my Photoshop skillz are unmatched (happily for millions of satisfied Adobe customers). The resemblance is too strong to be coincidence.

So what’s the deal? You might think that Buzz was a fan, so he had a picture of Jackson taped to the console — though Michael was only about 11 when our first mission to the Moon launched, so that’s silly. The gauge in the panel is visible in other images, and you can tell there’s a glass cover on it. That means the face is not taped on, but is in fact a reflection!

The conclusion is clear. What’s going on here, obviously, is that a time-traveling Michael Jackson stowed away aboard the Apollo 11 capsule to experience the mission for himself.

I mean, c’mon. How do you think he learned how to moonwalk?

Shamone!

The role of sexual intercourse in the etiology of carpal tunnel syndrome.

“The etiology of non-occupational carpal tunnel syndrome is not well understood. It is proposed that carpal tunnel syndrome can develop during sexual intercourse when the hands become repeatedly extended while under pressure from the weight of the upper body. Of the eight risk factors associated with non-occupational carpal tunnel syndrome, age, marital status, pregnancy and use of hormonal agents can be explained by changes in the frequency of sexual intercourse. On the other hand, obesity, macromastia and large chest circumference can be explained by the increased pressure imposed on the wrists by the heavier upper body associated with such conditions. The bilaterality of carpal tunnel syndrome can be explained by the fact that both hands are needed to support the upper body during sexual intercourse. A parallel decrease in the frequency of sexual intercourse and the incidence of carpal tunnel syndrome between the sixth and the seventh decades of life suggests a possible cause and effect relationship between sexual intercourse and carpal tunnel syndrome.”

Image: Wikimedia

I’ve been following the research of primatologist Frans de Waal on peacemaking among primates for a long time. Earlier this month I finally got to meet him in New York, where we had a conversation about his new book, The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society.

I’ve embedded the first of a series of excerpts you can watch on YouTube. You can find all the excerpts here.

My new-espresso-machine wave function has not yet collapsed. In the meantime, via Cynical-C, here are two videos from Intelligentsia Coffee in Venice (CA, not Italy). Making espresso, and making siphon (or “syphon,” apparently) coffee.

Suffice it to say that my level of coffee-making care doesn’t really compete.

If you’ve been expecting to hear from a far-off alien civilization, don’t hold your breath, suggests Frank Drake, the founder of Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI)–the odds of ET phoning Earth may be diminishing. And your digital TV might well be to blame.

Speaking at a meeting of the Royal Society in London, Drake said that digital transmissions are effectively “gagging” the planet. In the fast-fading analog age, TV and radio signals transmitted around the world escaped into space. At present, the Earth is surrounded by a 50 light year-wide ‘’shell” of radiation from analogue TV, radio and radar transmissions, he said [The Telegraph]. Those signals reach distant stars, which means that if someone is home at any of those stars, they could heard us.

But Drake says that phasing out analog transmissions from TV, radio and radar is making our planet electronically invisible from outer space. While an old-style TV transmitter might generate one million watts, Drake says the power of a digital satellite signal is around 20 watts. He added that present-day satellites tend to point towards the earth rather than old-school transmitters which beam their signals all over the place [The Guardian], and notes that digital cable is even more impossible to detect from space. He also said that if Earth is making itself “invisible,” albeit unintentionally, then other civilizations are probably doing the same. And he further hypothesizes that in some cases it might even be deliberate; a proverbial drawing of the kitchen blinds, so to speak [Wired].

Drake says he’s still convinced that intelligent life does exist somewhere in the universe, but added that because the transmissions that signal the presence of life may be weaker, we might need to look for them harder. “We’re going to have to search many more stars and many more frequencies” [The Telegraph].

Related Content:
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Discoblog: Alien Math Shows Why Grad Student Doesn’t Have a Girlfriend
DISCOVER: Who’s Out There?
DISCOVER: 22 Years Ago in Discover: Listening for ET
DISCOVER: 20 Things You Didn’t Know About… Aliens

Image: iStockphoto

This view from the front hazard-avoidance camera on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit shows the position of Spirit's front wheels following a backward drive during the 2,154th Martian day, or sol, of the rover's mission on Mars (Jan. 23, 2010). The view is toward the north. Click for a larger verison. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

“Spirit is not dead; it has just entered another phase of its long life,” said Doug McCuistion, director of the Mars Exploration Program at NASA HQ in Washington, on the news that the rover Spirit is now a stationary platform.

Yes, it appears Spirit is not going to get out of the sand that has trapped it for about 10 months and it will live out its life right were it is.  There is still plenty of science Spirit can do over the next few months to years, but can it survive the winter?

Spirit has been on Mars for the past six years and has returned over 133,000 images and traveled somewhere around 12 miles.  Not bad for a mission that was to last 90 days.

Spirit’s twin Opportunity is still mobile and is making its way to a location called ‘Concepcion’ Crater.

Read the Spirit press release.

After ten months of trying to extricate the Mars rover Spirit from a sandy patch on the Red Planet, NASA has finally given up. The space agency said Tuesday that Spirit will no longer be a fully mobile robot, roving over an alien planet. It will instead be a stationary science platform–which means a sedentary life for the robot geologist [that] has taken thousands of images and found evidence in Mars’ rocks of a wetter, warmer past [BBC].

Ten months ago, as Spirit was driving south beside the western edge of a low plateau called Home Plate, its wheels broke through a crusty surface and churned into soft sand hidden underneath [NASA]. The rover has been stuck there ever since, and now only four of its six wheels are functioning. Since all the maneuvers that the NASA instructed the rover to try have failed to free it, the sandpit known as “Troy” will be Spirit’s final resting place.

Spirit may stop roving, but hopefully it won’t stop working. In the coming weeks, NASA will focus on tilting the rover to the north so that more sunlight will fall on its solar panels during the long, cold Martian winter. Even if the rover does settle into a better position, it is likely Spirit will maintain so little energy in its batteries that it will go into hibernation, perhaps as soon as April. It will not emerge from that state until August or September, when the Sun gets high enough in the Martian sky to power up the rover’s systems [BBC News].

If Spirit does make it through the winter (when temperatures are expected to reach -55 degrees Fahrenheit), it can resume studying the tiny wobbles in the rotation of Mars to gain insight about the planet’s core. This requires months of radio-tracking the motion of a point on the surface of Mars to calculate long-term motion with an accuracy of a few inches [NASA]. This would help determine if the core of Mars is liquid or solid. Tools on Spirit’s robotic arm are also expected to study variations in the composition of nearby soil and see how they’re affected by water. Stationary science also includes watching how wind moves soil particles and monitoring the Martian atmosphere [NASA].

Since landing on Mars in 2004, Spirit has trekked nearly five miles and climbed a mountain as tall as the Statue of Liberty. Its twin, Opportunity, continues to drive and explore [Associated Press]. So far, NASA has spent more than $900 million on its Mars exploration rover program and the data acquired by the vehicles has generated about 100 scholarly papers, including special editions of the leading international journals Science and Nature.

Related Content:
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80beats: Future Looks Grim for Stuck Mars Rover
80beats: Mars Rover Will Try Daring Escape From Sand Trap of Doom
80beats: Will This Mars Rover Ever Rove Again? Spirit Get Stuck in the Sand
80beats: Mars Rover Spirit Shows Signs of Age, Including Senior Moments
DISCOVER: Mars Rover Delves Into Crater
DISCOVER: Those Mars Rovers Keep Going and Going…

Image: NASA/ JPL-Caltech

Scholars debate why opera doesn’t seem to hold much appeal for modern audiences, but they’ve overlooked a glaringly obvious answer: The Zeiss Universarium astronomical projector isn’t involved. Or at least, it wasn’t, until now.

The Gotham Chamber Opera has set out to give the genre some geek awesomeness with its presentation of Haydn’s Il Mondo Della Luna (The World on the Moon) at the American Museum of Natural History’s Hayden Planetarium.

The opera follows the exploits of the love-stricken Ecclitico, who poses as an astronomer to impress Buonafede, the strict father of his beloved. Ecclitico and his two romance-minded accomplices, smitten with Buonafede’s other daughter and maidservant, use a sleeping potion to convince the gullible old man that he has been transported to the moon. There, Buonafede can no longer impede the young lovers’ relationships, and the lunar emperor (a servant in disguise, resplendent in imperial glowsticks) commands the three happy pairs to marry.

The acoustics of the planetarium don’t lend themselves to live performance, but the singers and orchestra give an impressive performance in spite of the dead space. The costumes and occasional choreography revel in a burlesque take on Haydn, complete with a bawdy French-maid character, the fake astronomer incarnated as a cross between an 18th century dandy and Dr. Horrible, and plenty of booty-shaking all around. Well-integrated projections on the planetarium’s domed screen contribute swirling nebulae and lunar landscapes that take the audience along for Buonafede’s boozy trip.

Performances continue nightly through this Thursday, January 28. Tickets here.

Bats and dolphins are two of the most celebrated users of echolocation, employing high-frequency sounds to locate prey, find their way, or to communicate. Now a new set of findings in Current Biology show that not only do the two different kinds of mammals use the same method, they also evolved nearly the exact same molecular means for hearing at high frequencies.

That second part was a surprise, study author Stephen Rossiter says: “It’s common on a morphological scale but it’s assumed not to occur at a DNA level because there are so many different ways to arrive at the same solution” [BBC News]. That is, while it’s quite common for different species to separately evolve similar features—like the tusks of elephants and walruses—it’s quite unlikely that natural selection working in separate species would settle an essentially identical gene and protein for growing tusks, hearing high-frequency sounds, or anything else. Or so the thinking went.

The gene in question, and the protein it encodes, are both called prestin. It’s present in the short hairs of the inner ear, the researchers say. Prestin changes shape when exposed to high-frequency sound, and this in turn deforms the fine hair cells, setting off an electrical impulse to the brain. So the protein has the important jobs of detecting and selecting high-frequency sounds for amplification [New Scientist]. Prestin is common across mammals, although many different variants exist; mutations of the human version cause people to lose high-frequency hearing. But the prestin proteins that echolocating dolphins and bats evolved are almost identical, the study says. By contrast, bats that don’t use sonar don’t have that version of the protein, despite the fact that they’re much more closely related to their fellow bats than dolphins are.

For biologist David Pollock, who wasn’t involved in the study, this new could open a new window to understanding protein evolution. These findings, combined with a previously identified example of molecular convergence in snake and lizard mitochondrial genomes, suggest that molecular convergence may be more common than scientists realize — “it’s [just] not always easy to detect,” Pollock said [The Scientist].

Related Content:
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80beats: Tiger Moths Jam Bats’ Sonar Like a Helicopter in Enemy Territory
The Loom: How to Be a Bat [with high-speed video]
DISCOVER: Killing Whales with Sound
DISCOVER: How To Weave a Dolphin-Friendly Net

Image: flickr / Ken Lund

Some people say the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster was a joke made up to satirize creationism and the incursion of fundamentalist religion into politics. Other people seem to see their religious icons everywhere they look. Still others promote their beliefs through the military.

I think these folks ought to get together. Or maybe they already did:

People say there are no atheists in foxholes… but maybe there is a higher authority.

Tip o’ the noodly appendage to Jay Sinclair.

Credit: US Air Force and Tech. Sergeant Russell E. Cooley IV

Now we know what students do for fun over at Stanford University. If this video is to be believed, they wave their iPhones around while wearing speakers strapped to their hands. (Actually, the whole production seems kind of like using a weirding module, so maybe they’re onto something.) The speakers amplify the different sounds produced by various iPhone apps to create a glorious symphony, courtesy of the MoPho (Mobile Phone) Orchestra.

Some of the music apps are quite fun–like the one called the “Ocarina” that transforms your iPhone into a 12,000-year-old wind instrument (but with more apps). Check out the video below for a demonstration of both ancient music and modern compositions played on the iPhone, from Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics.

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My friend Nancy Atkinson usually blogs over at Universe Today, but has started her own personal-type blog. To inaugurate it she’s hosting the 138th Carnival of Space. So why not go over there and read up on the latest astronomy and space happenings?

Until or unless we can create a Jurassic Park and build dinosaurs from DNA, the best way to study them may be to build dino models using materials like balsa wood, carbon fiber, and rubber bands.

That’s what a team did for a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences. To figure out how the 120-million-year-old winged dinosaur Microraptor gui took to the skies, the researchers used a well-preserved fossil to build their own. “We went back and forth. We thought, maybe we’ll do 3-D graphics and it’ll look really cool. But it’s more accurate to do the modeling directly from the specimen,” said Dave Burnham, a paleontologist at the University of Kansas [Wired.com].

The micoraptor’s flight configuration has confounded scientists studying it, because no modern vertebrate flies with the hind legs “functioning as independent, fully developed wings,” so there’s no living analog for comparison. Previous studies suggested that the animal walked on the ground, but Burnham’s team argues that the feathered back legs would have prevented this. A 2007 study, also in PNAS, said the dino probably flew with its two sets of legs set parallel, like a biplane. But Burnham, whose team did glider tests with their model microraptor’s wings in three different positions, says the biplane formation would have put too much weight on the creature’s head.

Instead, he argues, the dinosaur would’ve taken off from the trees and glided like a flying squirrel. “The controversy was that these animals couldn’t spread their hind wings to glide,” Burnham says. “But we’ve been able to articulate the bones in their hip socket to show that they could fly” [LiveScience].

The study adds to the debate over how flight evolved in the earliest ancestors of birds–did flight begin when some ground-dwelling creatures hopped and leaped upwards, or when tree-dwelling creatures began to glide between branches? This new study of the microraptor, which is poised on the boundary between dinosaurs and birds, suggests that the arboreal, or tree-living, idea may be correct [LiveScience]. However, co-author David Alexander notes, the controversy probably won’t end here.

Related Content:
80beats: New Fossil Suggests Dinosaur World Domination Started in S. America
80beats: The Four Ways Raptors Use Their Talons to Smite Prey
80beats: Four-Winged Dino Clinches the Case For Bird Evolution
80beats: New Fossil Suggests That Fuzzy Dinosaurs Were Plentiful
DISCOVER: Plucking Apart the Dino-Birds

Image: University of Kansas

What do your cell-phone and a brain scan have in common? Both need clear signals for optimal efficacy.

Doctors often have to work with sketchy data when it comes to brain scans–but the solution to that problem isn’t one that many patients will clamor to try. A new study to be published in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience says the best way to get clearer EEG brain scans is to remove a part of the skull.

For years, doctors have been treating patients who have suffered severe head trauma like a gunshot or knife wound by cutting out a chunk of the skull–a procedure called a hemicraniectomy. This gives the brain room to swell, and when the wound heals they re-attach the chunk of skull.

Neuroscientist Bradley Voytek of the University of California at Berkeley, the lead author of this study, worked with hemicraniectomy patients and utilized this window to see how the skull acts as a barrier to EEG’s–a brain scan that is done to assess the brain’s electrical activity.

Wired reports that the patients were instructed to peform simple tasks:

During these tasks the team measured a patient’s brain waves on both sides of his head. On one side, just a thin flap of skin separated the brain from the EEG electrode, while on the other side the skull was intact. Signals from the skull-free side were, unsurprisingly, much stronger, less noisy and easier to pinpoint to a specific task and region of the brain.

The study not only offers a creepy way to get clearer brain scans, it also suggests another way to situate neural implants, like the kind that may one day be used by paralyzed people to relay their brain signals to prosthetic limbs. Researchers note that it’s difficult to maintain a long-term electrode in the brain, but some delicate brain signals aren’t strong enough to be read from outside the skull. By drilling a small hole into the skull and placing the electrode on the outermost surface of the brain, the researchers think they might obtain better brain signals.

Related Content:
80beats: Researcher Updates His Twitter Feed Using Only Brainwaves
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80beats: Electrodes Stuck in the Brain Show How Thought Becomes Speech
80beats: Play Tetris, Get a More Efficient & Thicker Brain
DISCOVER: Brains Don’t Lie

Image: Bradley Voytek

Welcome to this week’s installment of the From Eternity to Here book club. Today we look at Chapter Two, “The Heavy Hand of Entropy.”

[By the way: are we going too slowly? If there is overwhelming sentiment to move to two chapters per week, that would be no problem. But if sentiment is non-overwhelming, we'll stick to the original plan.]

Excerpt:

While it’s true that the presence of the Earth beneath our feet picks out an “arrow of space” by distinguishing up from down, it’s pretty clear that this is a local, parochial phenomenon, rather than a reflection of the underlying laws of nature. We can easily imagine ourselves out in space where there is no preferred direction. But the underlying laws of nature do not pick out a preferred direction of time, any more than they pick out a preferred direction in space. If we confine our attention to very simple systems with just a few moving parts, whose motion reflects the basic laws of physics rather than our messy local conditions, there is no arrow of time—we can’t tell when a movie is being run backward…

The arrow of time, therefore, is not a feature of the underlying laws of physics, at least as far as we know. Rather, like the up/down orientation space picked out by the Earth, the preferred direction of time is also a consequence of features of our environment. In the case of time, it’s not that we live in the spatial vicinity of an influential object, it’s that we live in the temporal vicinity of an influential event: the birth of the universe. The beginning of our observable universe, the hot dense state known as the Big Bang, had a very low entropy. The influence of that event orients us in time, just as the presence of the Earth orients us in space.

This chapter serves an obvious purpose — it explains in basic terms the ideas of irreversibility, entropy, and the arrow of time. It’s a whirlwind overview of concepts that will be developed in greater detail in the rest of the book, especially in Part Three. As a consequence, there are a few statements that may seem like bald assertions that really deserve more careful justification — hopefully that justification will come later.

Here’s where I got to use those “incompatible arrows” stories I blogged about some time back (I, II, III, IV). The fact that the arrow of time is so strongly ingrained in the way we think about the world makes it an interesting target for fiction — what would happen if the arrow of time ran backwards? The straightforward answer, of course, is “absolutely nothing” — there is no prior notion of “backwards” or “forwards.” As long as there is an arrow of time that is consistent for everyone, things would appear normal to us; there is one direction of time we all remember, which we call “the past,” when the entropy was lower. It’s when different interacting subsystems of the universe have different arrows of time that things get interesting. So we look briefly at stories by Lewis Carroll, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Martin Amis, all of which use that trick. (Does anyone know of a reversed-arrow story that predates Through the Looking Glass?) Of course these are all fantasies, because it can’t happen in the real world, but that’s part of the speculative fun.

Then we go into entropy and the Second Law, from Sadi Carnot and Rudolf Clausius to Ludwig Boltzmann, followed by some discussion of different manifestations of time’s arrow. All at lightning speed, I’m afraid — there’s a tremendous amount of fascinating history here that I don’t cover in anywhere near the detail it deserves. But the real point of the chapter isn’t to tell the historical stories, it’s to emphasize the ubiquity of the arrow of time. It’s not just about stirring eggs to make omelets — it has to do with metabolism and the structure of life, why we remember the past and not the future, and why we think we have free will. Man, someone should write a book about this stuff!