Friday 6 January 2006

Pic of the day: "But it's totally wrong!" That's how I feel about throwing away scientific magazines too. On the other hand, much of what I read there is probably also wrong by now. When I was young, I was told that a truth only lasts for 20 years. That's like 25 years ago...

Burning knowledge

I should write about something else too, lest the non-gamer readers give up on me completely. That would be a shame, because I am not just a gamer. In fact, as I trust you can see from the latest week of entries, I was more of a typical gamer in the past. Oh, I still play games, and even buy one every few months, but I don't just devour any game that comes out. I have other interests too.

And it is the same with them. I just can't get myself to write about each and every issue of Scientific American that I have to throw away. Besides, they are much cheaper. But it sure adds up. I am sure with years and years of Scientific American, Illustrert Vitenskap, Viten and Fakta (the two latter being discontinued Norwegian popular science magazines) and more sporadically the British New Scientist, we are once again talking about several months' wages, at least after tax and rent. Can you imagine that feeling? Months and months of mind-numbing work being stuffed in black plastic bags and old cardboard crates to drive off to the garbage / recycling station. All that I worked so hard for, being carted away to dis-exist forever. Gone. Gone, just like that.

Well, perhaps not quite gone. After all, I still carry my brain with me. And the articles I have read through my life, while I don't remember each of them in detail (well, most of them not), they have all contributed to the unified view of the world that I hold today. Filling in outlines, details or just color and texture, they make my life richer and more meaningful, because I can see the world in which I live and of which I am a part, at least as far as my body and much of my soul are concerned. (The spiritual world is a somewhat different topic ... or is it? That is the topic, actually. But not for today.)

And of course, when I have access to the Internet again, I can always find either those articles or other, perhaps newer ones, on the same topic. Now that I have an idea that the topic exists and roughly what kind of keywords are used to describe it, it would anyway have been faster for me to look up on Google than in my bookshelf. In fact, the magazines that are there, nicely organized in binders, haven't been touched in the years since I put them there. I see two of them are marked 1985 and 1986. The two others are not marked, but I know I set them there around the same time.

That's the thing, you know. Having all this paper around doesn't help when I don't read it. Only now that I throw away the papers, do I look at the headlines and think: "I should read this", "this looks interesting". As long as they were just cluttering up my apartment, I did not spare them a second look. (Except for a very few ones.) So ironically, I may remember them better for throwing them away!

I am currently reading an article from Scientific American, April 1993. (Well, not right now, but in between, OK?) I remembered it vaguely: Modern humans and Neanderthals had lived together in what is now Israel for tens of thousands of years, and there were even forms that might be taken as crossbreeds. The disturbing part was that the anatomically modern humans seemed to have arrived before the Neanderthals. Also, their technology was pretty much the same ... until 55-40 000 years ago, at which point there was a sudden explosion of creativity among our species. Sounds familiar? It should. It is one of my main interests in that sector of science.

Anyway, it is fascinating to see that less than 15 years ago, there was still a heated debate as to whether humans had expanded from a single point in Africa fairly recently or whether the species had evolved simultaneously across much of the "old world", Africa and Eurasia. Including the thought that modern Europeans at least may be partly of Neanderthal descent. Today we know that the last common female ancestor of all women tested so far, and presumably everyone, lived around 150 000 years ago. That is well after Neanderthals separated from our branch of the evolutionary tree. And with men it is even more so, as the common source of all known human Y chromosomes lived somewhere around 60 000 years. It seems highly unlikely that he was a Neanderthal. So while crossbreeds may have existed, they are gone now. (Of course there are many other chromosomes than the Y, but the total lack of male Neanderthal ancestors on that point does not look too encouraging for the other chromosomes.)

I am sure there will be much more research on this in the near future, if any. And I guess some of the things we believe to be true now will not be seen as true in the future. When I was a kid, there was some discussion whether the new Big Bang theory could be true. Then for a while various articles in Scientific American debated whether the universe would collapse to a Big Crunch, and possibly explode again from that point, perhaps forever... or whether it would expand forever. The consensus was that it was a very narrow miss in any case. Today, the accepted wisdom is that cosmos is expanding faster and faster. 15 years from now, what will be the current truth? I don't have the faintest idea. Perhaps the redshift is not caused by expansion after all but by some mysterious aspect of spacetime, automatically red-shifting all light that travels through it. And people will giggle and titter at the idea that the universe was exploding. And I will look at my issues of Scientific American from 2006 and think to myself: You paid good money for this??

But I'm sure I want to buy them even so. Because that's the kind of guy I am.