If you’re a regular OC reader, you’re familiar with John Green, the bestselling author who has produced a series of educational videos — most notably, A Crash Course in World History, A Crash Course on Literature, and the new PBS video series, The Art Assignment. John often produces videos with his brother Hank — a musician, biochemist and vlogger — who put his talents together to produce this new song, “I F***ing Love Science.” Be warned, the version above is uncensored. As are the lyrics, found below the jump. A clean, tame, censored version of the song can be found here.
A few months ago, we featured the increasingly abstract portraits drawn by an artist after periodic doses of LSD. It happened in the late 1950s, a time when you might well imagine such an activity going down in, say, a bohemian quarter of New York, but also a time when hallucinogenic drugs rode a wave of popularity among legitimate scientists. Those ostensibly straight-laced researchers (sometimes funded by CIA money) had a fascination not with the taking of hallucinogenic drugs — not necessarily, anyway — but with what, exactly, these hallucinogenic drugs did to those who do take them. Particularly artists drawing portraits. Those portraits drawn on LSD came out under the close watch of University of California, Irvine psychiatrist Oscar Janiger. Above, you can watch the fruit of another, much more verbal 1950s experiment conducted just down the coast by the University of Southern California’s Nicholas A. Bercel, M.D.: “Schizophrenic Model Psychosis Induced by LSD 25.”
Here we also have an artist examined: this time, a Los Angeles painter named Bill. As Bill floats through his altered state, Bercel asks him to describe, in as rigorous detail as possible, his perceptions of objects in the room, of items of food and drink brought in, and of their interactions themselves. This 24-minute film of the four-hour process, punctuated by electroencephalographic scans, comes as a production of Sandoz, the Swiss pharmaceutical company who originally isolated LSD and who apparently had an interest in bringing a form of it to market. (One proposed pharmacological designation: “Phantastium.”) Though that didn’t happen, the Hungarian-born Bercel went on throughout his long career to conduct more research of the kind that ultimately earned him a legacy as a pioneer in neurophysiology. He also, when not in the lab, wrote over a dozen novels and film treatments. Clearly he had an impressive creative streak, whether or not he ever personally had his doors of perception opened by the substances his subjects like Bill so enjoyed.
Here’s a quick shot of science to start your day. The American Chemical Society, an organization representing chemists across the US, has released the latest in a series of Reactions videos. Attempting to explain the science of everyday things, previous Reactions videos have demystified the chemistry of Sriracha, Love, Pepper and more. This latest video breaks down the world’s most widely used stimulant, caffeine. If you haven’t had your morning cup of coffee, you may need to watch this video twice.
On a side note, if you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, consider spending Saturday, May 3rd at Stanford’s one-day coffee symposium. Organized by Stanford Continuing Studies, the symposium – Coffee: From Tree to Beans to Brew and Everything in Between – will feature guest speakers (historians, scientists, the CEO of Blue Bottle Coffee, etc.) talking about what goes into making this great beverage of ours. Students will also have the opportunity to participate in coffee tasting and evaluation sessions. In full disclosure, I helped put the program together. It promises to be a great day. So I had to give a plug. You can learn more and sign up here.
I can hardly think of a more appealing nexus of the sciences, for most of us and for obvious (and delicious) reasons, than food. Add a kind of engineering to the mix, and you get the study of cooking. Back in 2012, we featured the first few lectures from Harvard University’s course Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to the Science of Soft Matter. Their collection of rigorous and entertaining presentations of that which we love to prepare and, even more so, to eat has since expanded to include one- to two-hour lectures delivered by sharp professors in cooperation with respected chefs and other food luminaries on culinary subjects like the science of sweets (featuring Flour Bakery’s Joanne Chang), how to do cutting-edge modernist cuisine at home (featuring Nathan Myhrvold, who wrote an enormous book on it), and the relevance of microbes, misos, and olives (featuring David Chang of Momofuku fame). You can watch all of the lectures, in order, with the playlist embedded at the top of this post.
Alternatively, you can pick and choose from the complete list of Harvard’s Science and Cooking lectures on Youtube or on iTunes. Some get deep into the natural workings of specific dishes, ingredients and preparation methods; others, like “The Science of Good Cooking” with a couple of editors from Cook’s Illustrated, take a broader view. That lecture and others will certainly help build an intellectual framework for those of us who want to improve our cooking — and even those of us who can already cook decently, or at least reliably follow a recipe — but can’t quite attain the next level without understanding exactly what happens when we flick on the heat. One school of thought holds that, to come off as reasonably skilled in the kitchen, you need only master one or two showcase meals. When asked to cook something, I, for instance, have tended to make paella almost every time, almost out of sheer habit. But now that I’ve found Raül Balam Ruscalleda’s talk on the science of that traditional Spanish dish, I can see that I must now, on several levels, raise my game. View it below, and feel free to take notes alongside me. You can find Science and Cooking in our collection of 900 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.
Episode 5 of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos series aired last night on Fox. Thanks to Hulu, US viewers can now watch it online. The episode, called “Hiding the Light,” explores the wave theory of light. It moves across 2000+ years of history and eventually gets into the scientific work of Isaac Newton, William Herschel and Joseph von Fraunhofer, before winding up in modern times and touching on big questions contemplated by astronomers. (For a deeper dive into this material, see our collection of Free Astronomy Courses.) If you need to catch up on earlier episodes, you can find them below.
As David Bowie had his cocaine period, so too did Sigmund Freud, beginning in 1894 and lasting at least two years. Unlike the rock star, the doctor was just at the beginning of his career, “a nervous fellow” of 28 “who wanted to make good,” says Howard Markel, author of An Anatomy of Addiction: Sigmund Freud, William Halsted, and the Miracle Drug Cocaine. Markel tells Ira Flatow in the NPR Science Friday episode below that Freud “knew if he was going to get a professorship, he would have to discover something great.”
Freud’s experiments with the drug led to the publication of a well-regarded paper called “Über Coca,” which he described as “a song of praise to this magical substance” in a “pretty racy” letter to his then-fiancé Martha Bernays. (He also promised she would be unable to resist the advances of: “a big, wild man who has cocaine in his body.”) Two years later, his health suffering, Freud apparently stopped all use of the drug and rarely mentioned it again.
Freud’s cocaine use began, in fact, with tragedy, “the anguished death of one of his dearest friends,” writes TheNew York Times in a review of Markel’s book:
[T]he accomplished young phsyiologist Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow, whose morphine addiction Freud had tried to treat with cocaine, with disastrous results. As Freud wrote almost three decades later, “the study on coca was an allotrion” — an idle pursuit that distracts from serious responsibilities — “which I was eager to conclude.”
The drug was at the time touted as a panacea, and Fleischl-Marxow, Markel says, was “the first addict in Europe to be treated with this new therapeutic.” Freud also used himself as a test subject, unaware of the addictive properties of his cure for his friend’s addiction and his own depression and reticence.
While Freud conducted his experiments, another medical pioneer—American surgeon William Halsted, one of Johns Hopkins “four founding physicians”—simultaneously found uses for the drug in his practice. Freud and Halsted never met and worked completely independently in entirely different fields, says Markel in the news segment above, but “their lives were braided together by a fascination with cocaine,” as addicts, and as readers and writers of “several medical papers about the latest, newest miracle drug of their era, 1894.” Halstead is responsible for many of the modern surgical techniques without which the prospect of surgery by today’s standards is unimaginable —the proper handling of exposed tissue, operating in aseptic environments, and surgical gloves. He injected patients with cocaine to numb regions of their body, allowing him to operate without rendering them unconscious.
Halsted, too, used himself as a guinea pig. “No doctor knew at this point,” says Markel above, “of the terrible addictive effects of cocaine” before Freud and Halsted’s experiments. Both men irrevocably changed their fields and almost destroyed their own lives in the process (see a short documentary on Halsted’s medical advances below). In Freud’s case, much of the work of psychoanalysis has come to be seen as pseudoscience—his work on dreams significantly so, as Markel says above: “Cocaine haunts the pages of the Interpretation of Dreams. The model dream is a cocaine dream.” The “talking cure,” however, engendered by the “loosening of the tongue” Freud experienced while on cocaine, endures as, of course, do Halsted’s innovations.
Like many right-brained people, artist and critic Matt Collings finds higher math mystifying, a word that implies both bewilderment and wonder. Faced with the equations that make, for example, Stephen Hawking’s work possible, most of us are left similarly slack-jawed. Collings aptly describes the realm of theoretical physics—which so contradicts our everyday experience—as “an alien world,” with its equations like “incomprehensible hieroglyphs.” He decided to enter this world, to “learn about some of the most important equations in science.” His angle? He views them as art, “masterpieces” that “explain the world we live in.” Collings spends his hour-long BBC special Beautiful Equations chatting with Stephen Hawking and other theorists about such paradigm-shifting equations as Einstein’s formula for special relativity and Newton’s laws of gravity.
In an era characterized by scientists encroaching on the arts—to claim Marcel Proust as a neuroscientist, Jane Austen as game theorist—it’s refreshing to see a humanities person engage the world of math, using the only schema he knows to make sense of what seems to him unintelligible. Unlike those scientists-turned-literary critics, Collings doesn’t make any large claims or assert expertise. He plays the humble everyman, owning his ignorance, his most endearing and effective tool since it provides the basis for his interlocutors’ remedial, and friendly, explanations. The results are an intelligent primer for layfolk, a refresher for the more knowledgeable, and perhaps an entertaining diversion for experts, who will likely have their quibbles with Collings’ necessarily basic presentation. But he is not on the hunt for complexity—quite the opposite. As the title of the special indicates, Collings’ inquiry seeks to find out just what makes the work of Newton, Einstein, and others so profoundly, simply elegant.
Aesthetic feeling is not at all alien to math—far from it, in fact. As Bertrand Russell famously wrote in his essay “Mysticism and Logic”: “Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty.” Russell’s point has been empirically validated by recent neuroscience. As BBC.com reported in February, a study in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience found that in the brains of mathematicians, “the same emotional brain centres used to appreciate art” are “activated by ‘beautiful’ maths.” While the concept of beauty itself may be impossible to quantify, when it comes to equations, scientists (or at least their brains) know it when they see it. The rest of us, like Collings, may require an appreciation course to understand the awe inspired by the math that, as our host puts it, so elegantly captures the “enormity of the universe.”
On Sunday evening, Fox aired the latest episode of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos series. This episode, called “A Sky Full of Ghosts,” explored some more out-of-this-world subjects — the speed of light and how it helps us undertand the Big Bang; the scientific work of Isaac Newton, William Herschel, James Clerk Maxwell; Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity; dark stars; black holes; and more. US viewers can watch the entirety of Episode 4 online (above), along with previous episodes in the series below (or on Hulu). For viewers outside the US, we have something perhaps better for you: Carl Sagan’s Original Cosmos Series on YouTube. Plus, we have a bunch of Free Online Astronomy Courses in our collection of 875 Free Online Courses. Enjoy.
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