Hasta La Gadget!

 A friend growing up had a combination of prosthetic legs that replaced the limbs he’d been born without pretty admirably, using a combination of hydraulics and mechanical joints, but without any real smarts and so with considerably limitations (he drove using steering wheel-mounted controls rather than foot pedals, for instance). The prosthetic market has changed quite a bit in the… Read More

The issues facing modern physics are so baffling that they’ve crossed a threshold and now fascinate the general public. We laymen have very little at stake, personally speaking, when scientists argue over the Big Bang–without advanced mathematical training, it’s all but impossible to follow the arguments. But we do have a stake when the universe starts to disappear, as it is doing right this minute.

The cosmic vanishing act began, approximately, when dark matter and dark energy showed up on the radar of cosmology. “Dark” is a misleading term, because the space between the stars is pitch black, but it isn’t dark in the way that dark matter and energy are. They are dark as in totally mysterious. No light is given off by them, or any known form of energy we associate with the universe. They cannot be measured, and so far as anyone can guess, dark matter is probably not constituted of anything resembling atoms or subatomic particles.

The reason that dark matter and energy are important is arcane to the layman, having to do with the fact that instead of moving apart at a constant rate or slowing down, the galaxies are accelerating as they move away from each other. This acceleration defies gravity, so at the very least dark energy is some species of antigravity (to put it in very general terms–the actual nature of this unknown force is complex, arcane, and much speculated over).

Even knowing this, you may shrug your shoulders and ignore such an abstruse problem, until you discover that only around 4% of the created universe is accounted for by the matter and energy visible to the eye or to scientific instruments, bound up in galaxies and interstellar dust. The vast majority, around 96% is dark, hence unknown. Far beyond the abstractions of scientific theory, the known and knowable universe slipped out of reach–that’s the cosmic vanishing act.

Annoyed physicists can attach comments to the effect that a mere layman has no business poking his ignorant nose into their profession, a line of inquiry where quantum mechanics is boasted of as the most precise theory in scientific history.  Which is laudable, but it does seem as if someone has patched a hole in a flat tire and claims to have built the whole car. As headlines are grabbed by the discoveries made at billion-dollar particle accelerators, the whole fabric of reality is being shredded to tatters.

If you have heard the terms multiverse, string theory, superstring theory, and dark matter and energy, you need to realize the unmentioned problems with all of them:

1. None of these things called strings, superstrings, or multiverses has ever been observed.
2. There is every likelihood that they never will be observed.
3. None can be experimented upon in order to prove whether they exist or not. (There are supposedly some exceptions having to do with prying evidence out of the quantum field for dark matter, but no success yet.)
4. There is a good chance that the hidden fabric of reality cannot in fact be known through scientific means. Dark matter and energy, for example, if they are outside the framework of all forms of discovered matter and energy, may be so alien to our brains (which are composed of that ordinary matter and energy) that they are literally inconceivable.
5. If 96% of creation is inconceivable, all the brilliant mathematical models in the world can’t undo the fact that the universe, as we conceive of it, has vanished.

These aren’t just theoretical difficulties. What we are finding out is that reality isn’t what science has been describing. Instead, science has been relying on an assumption that measuring something and fitting it into a neat mathematical model is the same as knowing what’s real. This is like a deaf person examining a graph of the sound frequencies associated with Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and claiming that he knows the music. The fact that you have a map in your hands doesn’t mean you have experienced the territory.

Someone should have predicted the vanishing universe long ago. The famous physicist-astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington is often quoted as saying, “Something unknown is doing we don’t know what.” These words are generally taken as a quip from an era decades ago before physics had figured out so much about the cosmos that a Theory of Everything was just around the corner. But the quip should be taken soberly. Even a confident mind like Stephen Hawking has more or less given up on the Theory of Everything, settling for a patchwork of smaller theories that will serve to explain local domains of physics.

Yet the obvious point to be drawn isn’t technical and requires no Oxbridge postgraduate degrees: Reality is still unknown. The more one contemplates this strange situation, the more uneasy the situation becomes.

Aren’t all these subatomic particles getting us closer to the nature of matter and energy? No, because at bottom, matter isn’t material. It isn’t tangible or visible.

Doesn’t scientific research count for anything? That depends. If most of the universe is totally inconceivable–or even well hidden–empirical data has reached its limit. The so-called subempirical domain may be running the whole show.

But surely the scientific method is the greatest tool ever devised by the rational mind. It has gotten us where we are today, at the height of understanding Nature, hasn’t it? Dubious. All theories ae right about what they include and wrong about what they exclude.  The scientific method, with its basis in reducing difficult problems to manageable bits and pieces that can be explicated, happens to exclude consciousness. It fails to entertain that we haven’t the slightest idea how the brain’s gray matter produces the mind. There is no biological basis for thinking. No one knows what preceded the Big Bang, if that’s even a meaningful question, since the Big Bang may be the beginning of time and space as we know it.

These aren’t just gaps in a fabric that needs mending and more weaving. They strike at the false assumption that if you measure a thing, you know the thing. Reality can’t be modeled; it’s infinite, every-changing, mostly hidden from view, based on inconceivable beginnings, and at times walled off even from mathematics, the primary language of science.

So what’s next? In practical terms, the world will crank along doing what it’s already doing, and this inertia applies to science too. No doubt 99% of practicing scientists go to work without considering any of the points I’ve raised. Why bother–the whole thing sounds like metaphysics, which 20^th-century science assumed was dead and buried.

What matters isn’t so much the fate of science, which has created its own self-sustained world. But it’s unsettling to realize that, “Something unknown is doing we don’t know what.” More than unsettling. Humans want to know what’s real and what’s not. Our minds depend on it, and it’s with our minds that we are human. Until the mind can touch reality and be sure that it’s not an illusion, the human project has been stalled, and scientific reassurances aren’t going to help us move forward again.

Deepak Chopra, MD is the author of more than 80 books with twenty-two New York Times bestsellers. He serves as the founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing. His latest book is The 13th Disciple: A Spiritual Adventure.

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Demi Moore opened up to Us Weekly exclusively on Tuesday after her daughter Rumer Willis took home the Mirrorball Trophy on the 20th season of “Dancing With the Stars”.

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You may think the advice that one super-successful corporate titan gives to another super-successful almost-CEO is something you can safely ignore.

Yet the last thing that Google founder Sergey Brin told Marissa Mayer right before she ascended to the throne of chief executive of Yahoo is something we all need to hear. Especially women.

In an interview with Patricia Sellers at Fortune, Mayer dished about the guidance Brin gave her in the minutes before Yahoo announced her appointment back in 2012. She said that Brin gave her all sorts of minor advice that she later wound up acting on — like changing the Yahoo logo, one of the first things she did as CEO.

But as she was headed out the door, Brin called her back, Mayer told Sellers. “‘Marissa, wait! Don’t forget to be bold,‘” he said.

That’s it. That’s the advice women need to hear. Because many of us have confidence issues. I reported earlier Wednesday on a new study that offered up more evidence of the problem. The study revealed that female college students are less confident about their job and salary prospects than men.

It is the latest brick in a hard wall of evidence that shows women hold themselves back at work by not aiming higher. Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg talked about the issue in her highly publicized book “Lean In,” and the Atlantic published a long piece last year called the Confidence Gap that detailed a lot of depressing examples of women’s propensity to be very much not bold.

In one anecdote, authors Katty Kay and Claire Shipman tell the story of their friend who supervises two direct reports: Rebecca and Robert. Rebecca plugs away at her job, diligently doing good work. When she needs to talk to the boss, she makes an appointment. She doesn’t speak up in client meetings. When she gets tough feedback, sometimes she cries. Meanwhile, Robert is at the boss’s office door constantly with new ideas. A lot of them are bad, but he doesn’t seem to care.

Kay and Shipman wrote:

Our friend had come to rely on and value Rebecca, but she had a feeling it was Robert’s star that would rise. It was only a matter of time before one of his many ideas would strike the right note, and he’d be off and running—probably, our friend was beginning to fear, while Rebecca was left behind, enjoying the respect of her colleagues but not a higher salary, more responsibilities, or a more important title.

Of course, as the authors note, women are often in a double-bind when it comes to boldness. Women who are bossy and decisive at work are often labeled as “bitches.” But things are changing, thanks to people like Sandberg and Mayer herself.

We can also thank some great new female comics. In a recent episode of “Inside Amy Schumer” called “I’m Sorry,” there’s a hilarious takedown of the female propensity to undersell ourselves and apologize for no reason. It involves a fake panel of women geniuses who step over themselves with self-deprecating nonsense.

You should check it out. Meanwhile, I’m so sorry for taking up your time with this.

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Businessman Matt Bevin led Kentucky Agricultural Commissioner James Comer by just 83 votes with all the precincts reporting in the state’s Republican gubernatorial primary Tuesday night.

Bevin’s lead of less than one-tenth of a percentage point out of the more than 214,000 votes cast led Comer to declare his intent to request a recanvass, meaning election officials will check printed vote totals against figures sent to the state’s Board of Elections. The secretary of state’s office announced that a recanvass will be conducted May 28. If Comer demands a full recount, the state’s law requires him to post a bond to pay for the cost.

The other two candidates in the party, businessman and former Louisville Councilman Hal Heiner and former state Supreme Court Justice Will T. Scott, conceded earlier in the night.

Waiting in the wings is the Democratic nominee, Attorney General Jack Conway, who comfortably won his own race Tuesday. History is on his side: 22 of the state’s 28 governors since 1900 have been Democrats.

The governorship is up for grabs because the Democratic incumbent, Steve Beshear, is term-limited. Since the state legislature is split — Democrats have held onto the House, while Republicans have the Senate — the stakes are particularly high for Republicans hoping to gain more control over the legislative and executive branches.

The Republican candidates’ four-way race has been called one of the dirtiest in the Bluegrass State’s history. In recent weeks, it was marked by domestic abuse allegations leveled against Comer by a former girlfriend, Marilyn Thomas. Comer vociferously denied the allegations and accused Heiner’s campaign of spreading them.

Heiner and Comer were considered the early favorites. Comer is the only current executive officeholder of the field, while Heiner’s personal wealth allowed him to outspend his competitors on television advertisements. But as the abuse allegations came to light, Bevin pitched himself as the conservative alternative.

Thomas’ allegations characterized Comer as a physically and mentally abusive boyfriend who controlled and threatened Thomas and her family when the two dated in the 1990s and were students at Western Kentucky University. Certain elements of Thomas’ story were confirmed by two of her former college roommates. Heiner has denied that his campaign was involved in spreading the story — but after learning a blogger who had written about the allegations had been in contact with the husband of the person running for lieutenant governor on his ticket, Heiner issued a statement saying, “I personally apologize to Jamie Comer if anyone associated with my campaign is involved.”

While Democrats said the ugliness of the Republican primary benefited their side, Republicans insisted that it was unclear what impact, if any, the nastiness had on the race.

Though there was much discord among the Republicans concerning their personal backgrounds, the primary wasn’t marked by significant policy differences: All four candidates opposed increasing education spending and the state’s minimum wage. They also vowed they would dismantle Kynect, the state’s health insurance exchange, although Kentucky has seen the nation’s second-largest drop in the percentage of residents who are uninsured.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) crushed Bevin in last year’s primary for McConnell’s seat. Bevin garnered just 35 percent of the vote, compared to McConnell’s 60 percent. If the primary race is called for Bevin, it remains to be seen whether the state’s Republican establishment will coalesce around him for the general election, given the bitter nature of last year’s race, during which establishment groups strongly supported McConnell and tea party groups backed Bevin. In that race, Bevin also came under criticism for speaking to a pro-cockfighting rally.

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