Yourong Frank Wang

Category: The Aperiodicals

  • On Turning 21 (Revisited by an 24 year old)

    Forewords

    Over three years ago now, I drafted a short essay on my flight back from San Francisco. That whimsically spontaneous trip was made in the week after my 21st birthday. Back then, I was in the middle of my fourth year in my BSc physics program, and my slow transition from student to “adult” was just beginning.

    An incomplete version of the so-titled “On Turning 21” was hosted on FWPhys for a while until I’ve taken it down in the general content slimming and blog overhaul near the onset of COVID-age in early 2020. While its general messages I’d say stay somewhat relevant, I’m now at a somewhat better vantage point to re-write it with emphasis on what had worked, and what needs more attention.

    Epistemological Integrity, and Your Own Calculations

    My mind still sometimes ligers on my brief Olympiad physics course in Year 10. Back then, I didn’t know much higher mathematics beyond manipulation of trigonometric functions by rote memorization of a page of formulae, nor could I speak any of the “overpowered” languages of Lagrangian mechanics or differential calculus.

    Regrets of “what could have been” aside, I suspect the fondness with which I remember that period of my life was a sense of confused-optimism with which I approached my problems, which eventually guides my research actions today.

    It’s a mind state exclusive to one’s high school age, I’d hope: the general willingness to solve problems without regard of what’s established or optimal, and an endless drive to just try and see what works. Time is ample. Stakes are low. Naiveness fades over such self-driven explorations.

    As a student, I’m good at taking lecture notes, that I’m proud of. But during the time before homework problems and exam questions became directed efforts such as “show that”, what I did was more comparable to what I do now — just go on, and see where sense and your training takes you.

    I hope I am not talking down on the importance of directed training and systematic knowledge, no. In the context of turning 21 — on becoming an adult — what one needs to realize is that it is his or her sole responsibility to arrange the knowledge system, and, at the end of the day, carry out independent calculations reliably. I reached this point after some detours, but wish the later comers be more wary of the need of self-reliance.

    Well when brain download becomes a thing, this section will be nullified.

    Emotional Freedom, and the Weight of Spontaneity

    A general familiarity with numerical analysis — a path I’d followed since turning 21 — has opened a path littered with “Acts of Mundane Competence” for me. I’d built stuff in CAD, use 3D printers and laser cutters regularly, studied automotive bodywork in MATLAB, written songs (with computationally picked chords, of course), and produced various shorts with special effects. Some friends say I wear many hats, and I suppose it got me thinking. A critical evaluation of whether this is a beneficial development is in order, for self and for society.

    When I chose theoretical physics research as my job, I’d already taken a tacit but decisive stance to side with delayed gratification, so called “cold benches” in Chinese, as opposed to the retweet-like world built to complement and commandeer our immediate-feedback-craving nervous systems so well.

    Act of Mundane Competence is a new phrase I’d coined for myself. You might soon notice some FWPhys.com/LUX photo watermarks become LUX-AMC instead. The word “Mundane” in this context does not represent a dismissal on my end of professional knowledge and states of the art in the fields in which I dabble — my electronic music is crap and my photos, while a reliable source of income, are far from Academy levels.

    Rather, it stands for a recognition that I’m carefully reflecting on myself, after a period of immense self-empowerment and self-realization, whether I’m just drilling in the thin part of the board — whether my efforts are really best spent in such a manner, that they make me a better physicist or educator at the end of my life.

    Being adult — well, in my early twenties version of the word, somewhat independent, somewhat self-driving, somewhat self-interested, and somewhat self-sustaining — opens up much more dimensions with which one carves out his or her life trajectories, and makes it quite easy to branch up so often one stays running in circles, stagnant, and worse, getting distant with the initial motivation, assimilated by, or worse, lost in the external world.

    As such, being an adult to me is not only an exploration of the boundaries of one’s interests and limits, but also a constant process of self-evaluation and trimming of loose ends. The bedtime fantasy of adoring every corner of one’s finite life, every attempt at something new, every trip, every hobby, with numerous perfect and interesting narratives is just that, a fantasy, a shadow in the distance of the waking minutes from a dream.

    24, I’m writing this section after realizing my high-degrees of spontaneity recently brought discomfort for and potentially overwhelmed some peers I deemed important in my life, to the point I’m not realistically expecting them to see this at all — sorry. In the lingo of my previous paragraph, I signed up for a random photo gig, first in my life, of a sports event during a hiking trip; I met a player at the event; nothing happened after.

    And that’s to be accepted.

    Just Do

    I’m talking a lot.

    Both at Berkeley and at Auckland, I’m fortunate to be in the vicinity of a crowd that comprises no shortage of people shining in the startup business world. Survivor bias plays a role, but I’d also commend the startup mentality’s positive effects in one’a daily dealings.

    It’s hard to pin down what I mean here by startup mentalities. “Fake it ‘till you make it?” Meh. I think I mean the drive to deliberately and constantly learn in action, in “doing”.

    This is in general quite similar to the first point I’m making, really, that informed adults take full responsibility of their epistemological integrity — organization of skills, knowledge, and life philosophies, and ability to reliably perform nontrivial tasks on one’s own.

    But the ability to construct good looking systems on paper alone is neither efficient nor meaningful. And in my case these are only summarized in retrospect: I didn’t have these fully comprehended or even written down when I celebrated my adulthood or during BSc graduation, or (more relevantly), at the beginning of my PhD. I went on with life. I failed at some points. I reflected on them. And here I am, learning from the mistakes.

    Just do.

    Go on with life.

    We are small, time is short.

    Western Springs, Auckland

    23 July, 2022

  • Our Unforeseen Consequences, II

    “More confident, far-seeing, capable and prudent.”

    Sagan

    There were documented reports that TEPCO allowed cooling water that contacted the nuclear fuel — the worst kind yet — to return to sea shortly after the initial 2011 incident. So whatever hacks they are doing over the table now might not even be the most despicable in the whole series of unfortunate human-error-led events.

    That’s enough mockery.

    I recall an old Internet joke, probably out of Japan, actually, saying that humanity’s commercial nuclear energy facilities are “apartments without toilets”.

    There’s merit to that statement. When it comes to dealing with fission waste, humans have little solution other than chucking spent fuel rods somewhere quiet until they fizzle themselves out: big caves in the arctic, solubles dumped into the sea — sorry California; water cans arranged on an earthquake-prone coast … Nothing humans devised or implemented so far can survive geological, let alone astrophysical timescales, and whenever somebody contemplates dumping nuclear waste any farther or deeper, one soon realises that our technology isn’t reliable enough to ensure stuff inside a miles-long perimeter around the launchpad do not turn into another no-man zone.

    But this concern isn’t what I mainly set out to discuss tonight.

    What I fear most about the Fukushima situation — the unforeseen consequence — probably isn’t the C-14 waiting to taint my own DNA, or make future archeologists cry (or laugh, if they are not our direct descendants but here to build their own toy human fossils collection, hi!).

    What I do fear, based on how I notice the ongoing situation is being portrayed, discussed, and felt, in various information bubbles around the world, is the grand opening of a new era of humanity. One during which cold-war weapons of thought are unholstered again, probably wielded by dumber people than last time around; one that has a greater potential than ever be the last chapter of history, or, at least, be remembered as the beginning of the end of our modern life; one where the words such as “common good” or “justice” are so bent out of shape, perverted and misused, that people lose responsibility and accountability to the civilisation collectively.

    For beings as feeble as ourselves, all we have is each other, and our fates are quite tightly linked as a civilisation. Hopefully some of you resonate with this observation – bring your god along if you need one. Of course, some of my Western readers may be recognising my philosophy of this shared future for mankind as Beijing propaganda. You’d be right, but to those of you I say, I occasionally fret upon the fact we need to carry you along for this journey too.

    May truth and justice prevail, and may humanity stay prosperous among the stars. I do not see a way how, but that’s what I suppose my whole life ahead will be about.

  • Our Unforeseen Consequences

    In Series …
    THE APERIODICALS
    Local (personal, potentially shallow, and subject to change) outlooks on science, technology, growth, and occasionally culture and history. The goal is to write something every week, but whether it can make its way to FWPhys is random. Hence the series title.

    A few months ago, when I was preparing to demonstrate one of our few physics experiments that deal with radioactive sources — Co-60, for our use case, a good source of gamma rays and electron-positron pairs — I remember reading about the concept of low-background steel, the magical metal they required to build the radioactive castle and all our Geiger counters.

    The term “Low Background” is one of the more interesting technical terms. It does not generally refer to a particular manufacturing technology, not a certain grade of chemical resilience, nor some special mechanical performance. Rather, it refers to a priceless quality, a timestamp on their manufacturing time: before humanity’s first nuclear tests.

    From mid-19th century, humanity has been reliant on atmospheric gases to lower the carbon level in molten iron alloys, a crucial step in steel manufacturing. With the successful nuclear tests starting in the 1940s, especially when the Americans thought detonating nuclear bombs mid-air or next to an island nation were good ideas, a huge amount of radioactive byproducts have remained in atmospheric circulation ever since, some naturally find their way into our metals, and back to ourselves.

    “High Background” steel manufactured afterwards of course isn’t worthless. Other than precision scientific and healthcare scenarios, they are around in abundance, supporting every bit of modern life.

    What I do wish to remark, with decades of hindsight and speculative wisdom, is that the “background” distinction was an unforeseen consequence. To me, there is a general lack of evidence that Americans in the 1940s, or anybody else, stockpiled steel with foresight of this particular kind of threat, only realizing the lasting impacts of those free nucleotides after our geiger counters malfunctioned or photographic films exposed to random dots.

    This one little example actually marks the end of my essay this week.

    Whether I am insinuating that I feel concerned about what has transpired recently in the Northern Pacific, is up to your own comprehension. I have zero knowledge about real-world nuclear fallouts or power plant failure management, and understand that my opinion, if any, can effect little change in a world where “being transparent” earns oneself more praise than actually doing anything.

    That something is logical but unforeseen usually leads to the painful realization that humanity has little chance to do anything about it when it arrives, even if it is we who set it in motion. What are our generation’s unforeseen consequences? I am actually quite keen to know.

    Footnotes

    I am not to imply that nature before the nuclear age was particularly bucolic — the radioactive isotopes in all the metal forests humans inhabit come from more places than the steel. Radon, for example, mostly come from the radioactive decays within the earth itself. Potassium has an abundant radioactive cousin, K-40, let alone the lighter ones such as C-14 and H-3 that are replenished by a diverse range of natural processes.

  • Semilogy

    In Series …
    THE APERIODICALS
    Local (personal, potentially shallow, and subject to change) outlooks on science, technology, growth, and occasionally culture and history. The goal is to write something every week, but whether it can make its way to FWPhys is random. Hence the series title.

    Part of me thought it might be fitting to dump the following thought threads out of my brain, where a coarsely implemented make-believe persona of a health counsel suggested it might be for my own benefit.

    (more…)

  • One Try

    The idea for this essay came up during a discussion with one of my grad school referees after the 2019 season. Namely, if I so eagerly want to “save the world”, why study theoretical physics?

    The following essay was the first part of my attempt to answer that question… The rest, of course, needs to be in action.

    How are we sure, that Homo, our genus, is the maker of the first technical civilisation on this planet? This question persisted in my head, probably since my primary school readings of fiction and dubious mystery books.

    I thought I would (as a noble form of procrastination) outline a few facts that I believe supports the case that we are the first, and, quite probably, the last, to emerge from this planet to our current level of technical (and scientific) proficiency.

    Looking at our own past, some preliminary evolutionary considerations can be made. The environmental and thermodynamic conditions required for “intelligence” to be in favour was indeed rare. We owe our bipedalism, our properly placed thumbs, our sugar-craving brains, and the worlds we managed to shape with those gifts, to the K-T comet that cleared the stage for us long before our story, to the receding forests on the African highlands, to the frozen northern Pacific ocean, and to the tigers and lions that didn’t like the taste of monkey flesh too avidly … to name a few.

    I have to accredit Harari’s Sapiens, for inspiring most of those above personal notions — which might be a sign to you that my thoughts on this subject have been shallow and stagnant. Take my rumblings with a grain of salt.

    Still, the history of earth’s biosphere is way longer than the measly millions of years that the primates have arrived on stage. That much I do know. Time erodes a lot of things, including our trust in time itself. So, you might ask, longingly, maybe, could technology and science have happened to some entirely different branches of life than us?

    Well, we know of ants that make tools and farm aphids. But probably not.

    Other than the so-far general lack of archaeological footprints left by any long-gone technocratic societies, the most convincing observation, to me, is the (historic) prevalence of easily accessible natural resources.

    We found, happily accepted, and sometimes wasted, the surplus of earth’s carbon cycle over tens of millions of years (…oil and coal…story for another day). But our luck did not end there. For most of our early history, we had inorganic minerals in shallow caves, if not right on the surface. And that, to me, is a hint that nobody prior has seen much use in them.

    The laws of nature dictated that our societies progressed from[1] bronze to iron, i.e. against the reducing agent strength ladder. Often, after metal tools became prevalent, agriculture evolved on the massively expanding farmlands, and industry emerged with the express aim to produce increasingly complex or powerful tools. The logic might have held up to an practically exclusionary extent in our history — civilisation did not thrive at places that generally lacked minerals, even though many of those states did have excellently arable land and massive settlements.

    Today, far more iron-rich and copper-rich ores come from inhospitable or technically challenging environments than when we started mining millennia ago. Among other reasons, we’ve largely dug up the ones more easily within our reach. It perhaps stands to reason, then, that if humanity is to be wiped off the surface of earth in our current era, whichever species[2] that emerges in another million years might not have any minerals to use.

    They can siphon and recycle our rubbles. You think to yourself. Indeed, it might be sufficient, over geological timescales, for pulverised metropolis and dilapidated recycling plants to return some of their constituent metals to their natural state. But I doubt if this is good enough.

    To begin with, without obvious hints of the way forward, in other words, without a easily accessible experience through which the future foragers can understand why these shiny bits from the ground promises a higher level of productivity, it’s possible our tech relics become more of an ornament than a industrial resource, like humans had done with various cave minerals for thousands of years ourselves. Secondly, the metals we discussed so far are far from the whole story. I will present one example of the missing pieces to try to bring my arguments together.

    By this point[3], many of you might have heard of how Napoléon treated his favorite visitors with alumin(i)um cutlery, and only less important guests of his got gold plates. But today, less than 200 years later, I am typing this essay up on an Aluminum laptop keyboard, protected from some 6th-floor high wind by a presumably aluminum alloy window frame. What made this dramatic cost drop possible?

    Credit human ingenuity as you please, (and I probably tend to agree), but the fundamental drive might be this naturally occurring chemical, Cryolite (Na3AlF6). It readily mixes with aluminium oxide, and it significantly lowers the melting point of the latter. This mineral was mined completely dry from the face of the earth in 1987, by the way. Only industrially prepared alternatives are available for use since[4].

    The ability to synthesise cryolites is only a tiny node on human’s industrial expertise today, but once upon a time, discovering cryolites in nature, was the key for us to access the entire branch of aluminium-based technology. I cannot fathom how many little things like these played similar roles in our past, and how many achievements would have been impossible if those little factors weren’t here.

    I suppose that trivia like these make me appreciate the preciousness and uniqueness of our one try at achieving cosmic greatness. The chances we took to entangle our legends with the threads of our planet, the rare finds that we stumbled upon before we knew better, and the rivers we crossed[5]. But, at the same time, the likely outcome for our story to be followed by endless stagnation and sorrow if we fail[6].

    I remain optimistic, that progress in science and technology solves our existential threats, though slowly, sometimes backtracking, and not exempt from strifes and struggles. Depleted resources? We most likely can find alternatives. Dead end of knowledge, and, by extension, a lack of vision for the future? That curse is eternal.

    FW, 100 seconds before midnight.

    Footnotes and references

    [1] Other than the obvious omissions (tin, lead), there are also gold and silver. However, as they require little to no chemical changes to be useful, I would, subjectively, count them as something no more challenging than rocks.

    [2] Ant people and squid people look equally appealing to me. But again, the selection pressure on brains is a cosmically delicate thing. Boltzmann knows best.

    [3] My sense of how well people around me are in knowing and using science is heavily biased as I progressed through my own education and travelled to various institutions. This is just a general comment and I will probably discuss it in full next week, when my #DailyChemistry stored on Tencent Weibo gets permanently deleted as the service shuts down. Still, I need to point out that if you’ve come for the chemical engineering… You are reading the wrong blog.

    [4] Cryolite lowered the temperature required to get Aluminium via electrolysis from 2000 degrees Celsius to about 1000. From as much I can gather from my high school memory, the reaction is done in three scalable steps. You get HF by boiling Fluorites (CaF2, that glowing ore in Minecraft) in sulfuric acid. Then the HF is taken to react with an Al(OH)3 solution, after which the whole thing is heated in the presence of either NaCl or Na2CO3 to make the crystal.

    [5] Hi Carl.

    [6] I do not worry too much. Our ancestors have definitely taken risks like this before. On the wild grass plains, some humble animals, not the strongest, not the fastest, and without almost all ferocity, made it to become us, against a fate of extinction. Of course, my Bayesian philosophy suggest that luck might be independent between risk taking… Take good care of your nuclear button, if you have one.

  • AUG

    Aug is short for August, and AUG in an mRNA is a “Start” Codon, where translation first begins, or where a DNA message commonly begins to manifest as an amino acid sequence.

    On the one side, the 8th month of a Gregorian year was named after Gaius Octavius Thurinus (63 BCE to 14 CE), adoptive son of Julius Caesar and the first emperor of the Roman Empire (27 BCE to 480 CE, West, and 1453 CE, East). Octavius was remembered as “Augustus”, in Latin that means sacred, venerable, or majestic (?).

    His calendar system, one that pitted number prefixes (Sept-, Oct-, etc…) against actual numbers, persisted to the day of the author, and is still widely used after some patches.

    On the other, A, U, and G, in molecular biology, stand for three nitrogenous bases (nucleobases), Adenine, Uracil, and Guanine. The name “Adenine” was created in 1885, rooted in “pancreas” — ἀδήν “aden”, in Greek — the organ sample from which the molecule was first identified. “Uracil” was also coined in 1885, in an attempt to synthesize derivatives of uric acid. The molecule was then found in living things (yeast cells) in 1900. Guanine was isolated in the early 1840s, as a crystal from bird excrement, which was known in Spanish as guano.

    For quite some time after their discovery, some of these molecules were merely regarded as funny nitrogenous ring derivatives, and some once a vitamin (which they are not qualified to be, as the body readily synthesizes them all the time), and their logical connection wouldn’t be clearly established until the early 20th century, where the central dogma proposed a main pathway of DNA expression. In this picture, A,U, and G, molecules, when properly attached to one molecule of ribose (which makes the duos Adenosine, Uridine, and Guanosine, respectively), form codons and anticodons in RNA, which make protein expressions possible.

    That I am beginning my research career in a month that sounds like “Start” is about the most trivial thing I’ve ever set to discuss around here, but it’s a coincidence 2000 years in the making, which, like most things in life, gives me that sense of weird depth and wonderful complexity. Also I suppose it is a good (minor) detail to help pinpoint myself in the stream of history.

    Notes and References

    The time points of the Roman Empire were taken from Encyclopedia Britannica, while the meaning of Augustus was provided by the trusty Google Latin -> English Translate.

    The stories of A, U, and G Molecules are based on the following book,

    Paul O. P. Ts’o. Basic Principles in Nucleic Acid Chemistry, vol. 1. (1974). pp. 7