Einstein, Santa Claus, and Relativity.

Mysteries of Father Christmas/Santa Claus 'solved' by relativity theory

The mystery of how Father Christmas (Santa Claus) can deliver presents to 700 million children in one night, fit down the chimney and arrive without being seen or heard has been 'solved' by a physicist at the University of Exeter.

Santa and his reindeer zoom around the world at such speed that -- according to relativity theory -- they would shrink, enabling Father Christmas and a huge sack of presents to fit down chimneys.

Dr Katy Sheen, a physicist in the Geography department at the University of Exeter, has also found a scientific explanation for why Santa is not heard arriving by children, and why they rarely catch a glimpse of him on Christmas eve.

Santa and Special Relativity
She recently explained to children at the University of Exeter that Santa's stealth delivery is partly explained by special relativity theory devised by Albert Einstein, whom Dr Sheen thinks bares a passing resemblance to Santa.

Was Einstein really Santa Claus?

Ever see them together, at the same

time, 

in the same room?

Relativity theory explains how Father Christmas can fit down the chimney. At the speeds he needs to travel to deliver presents to every child, Father Christmas shrinks -- or gets thinner -- in the direction he is travelling. And he has to be careful not to stop for a mince pie in a chimney, or he could grow back to full size!

Dr Sheen told children at the University of Exeter's Science of Christmas Festival on Dec. 14 that relativity also explains why Father Christmas appears not to have aged throughout the ages, because relativity can slow down clocks.

When Dr Sheen was seven years old she wrote a letter to Father Christmas asking why he never got any older (letter attached). She received a response in shaky handwriting telling her it was 'all magic'. But the budding physicist was not convinced and wanted a rational explanation -- which 26 years later she has now found.

As evidence of how Father Christmas's enormously fast delivery round has kept the years off him, she will present a picture of St Nicholas from 1901 and a photo from this year to the children at her talk.

The physicist has calculated that Santa and his reindeer would have to travel at about 10 million kilometres per hour to deliver presents to every child expected to celebrate Christmas in 31 hours (taking into account world time zones).

Santa, the Rainbow-coloured Blur
If millions of children have been good, and deserve bigger stockings, he may need to travel even faster. Such speed would make him change from red to green and, at greater speeds, he would disappear! Children would not be able to recognise him as he would appear as a rainbow-coloured blur, eventually disappearing to the human eye.

Travelling at more than 200,000 times faster than Usain Bolt, the world's fastest man, the laws of physics explain why Father Christmas is rarely seen by children while delivering presents.

The Doppler effect would make Santa change colour because the light waves he releases would get squashed at such a high speed.

The Doppler effect also explains why children cannot hear Father Christmas arrive. As Santa and his sleigh approach, the sound of bells and his deep 'ho, ho, ho' would get higher and higher (like when an ambulance siren whizzes by) and then become completely silent, because he would move beyond human hearing range. Even the sound of Santa urging on Rudolph would become unrecognisable, and then inaudible to the human ear.

Santa's Sonic Boom
If children hear a bang on Christmas night, it may not be the sound of Santa dropping his presents, landing on their roof in his sleigh, or sliding down the chimney with a plop. Santa's reindeer could have broken the speed of sound, resulting in a 'sonic boom.'

Dr Sheen, a physicist working in the University of Exeter's Geography department, is not planning to present her research to a peer-reviewed journal (it's prepared with the festive spirit in mind), and has done the calculations in her own time to interest children in science and physics.

Sheen will demonstrate the impact of the Doppler effect -- which would make Santa able to deliver his presents without detection -- by letting the children listen to the sound of a speeding ambulance, even though it is much slower than Father Christmas and his sleigh.

The Doppler effect is responsible for making a siren, such as on an ambulance or a police car, increase in pitch as it comes towards you and lower pitched as it drives away. This is because the wave length changes when it moves towards and away from you.

Dr Sheen calculated how fast Father Christmas would have to travel by working out the number of households likely to be celebrating Christmas around the world, along with the number of children likely to be in them. She hopes her explanation for Santa's stealth delivery system -- and therefore his very existence -- will inspire children to take a greater interest in physics, and put a science kit on the list of presents they want in their stockings.

"Visiting around 700 million children in 31 hours would mean he would have to travel at 10 million kilometres an hour if he is to deliver presents to every child," Dr Sheen said. "How does Santa manage to reach these phenomenal speeds? Well that's magic! However, he would certainly need a lot of fuel -- so don't forget his glass of sherry, a mince pie or two and some carrots for the reindeer!"

Story Source:  Materials provided by University of Exeter. "Mysteries of Father Christmas/Santa Claus 'solved' by relativity theory." ScienceDaily, 14 December 2016. 

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ADHD and Creativity. You can't have one without the other.

Sydney Developmental Clinic

Analysis of mind-wandering studies

offers new perspective on mental disorders

". . .The ADHD mind allows us to think freely and creatively."

During downtime, some of us daydream while others might focus on a to-do list, or get stuck in a negative loop. Psychology has traditionally defined all these thought patterns as variations of "mind-wandering."

But a review of brain imaging studies led by researchers at UC Berkeley and the University of British Columbia offers a new way of looking at spontaneous versus controlled thinking, challenging the adage that a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.

It suggests that increased awareness of how our thoughts move when our brains are at rest could lead to better diagnoses and targeted treatments for such mental illnesses as depression, anxiety and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

www.zacharycirving.com

Dr. Irving is developing a new 

theory of mind-wandering as 

unguided attention.

"It's important to know not only the difference between free-ranging mind-wandering and sticky, obsessive thoughts, but also to understand, within this framework, how these types of thinking work together," said review co-author Zachary Irving, a postdoctoral scholar at UC Berkeley.

Irving and fellow authors looked at three different ways in which people think when they're not directly engaged in tasks: spontaneous thought, ruminative thought and goal-directed thought.

The ADHD mind allows us to think freely and creatively
"We propose that mind-wandering isn't an odd quirk of the mind," said the review's lead author Kalina Christoff, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia. "Rather, it's something that the mind does when it enters into a spontaneous mode. Without this spontaneous mode, we couldn't do things like dream or think creatively."

Irving, who has ADHD, said there are upsides to the most stigmatized mental disorders.

"Everyone's mind has a natural ebb and flow of thought, but our framework reconceptualizes disorders like ADHD, depression and anxiety as extensions of that normal variation in thinking," said Irving. "This framework suggests, in a sense, that we all have someone with anxiety and ADHD in our minds. The anxious mind helps us focus on what's personally important; the ADHD mind allows us to think freely and creatively."

Irving and fellow researchers reviewed nearly 200 neuroscience studies, a large number of which used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan brains during resting activities.

They found that interactions between large-scale neural networks offered insights into how the resting mind moves. For example, their review of brain-imaging studies found that when the brain was focused on a task at hand, its prefrontal "executive" network, which governs planning and impulse control, among other functions, constrains other brain activity.

When stuck in a negative loop, such as anxious rumination, the brain's "salience" network, which processes emotions, took control, shutting off most other networks. Not surprisingly, spontaneous thought, such as daydreaming, dreaming during sleep and other forms of free association, were linked to far lower activity in the neural networks responsible for controlled thinking, allowing the imagination to flow freely.

Overall, researchers hypothesize that the resting mind naturally transitions between spontaneous and constrained thought.

"Let's say you're walking to the grocery store," Irving said. "At first, your mind wanders to a plethora of ideas: your new shirt, a joke you heard today, an upcoming ski trip to Lake Tahoe. Then your thoughts become automatically constrained when you start to worry about a looming work deadline that needs to be met before the Tahoe trip. Then you realize that your worries are making you miserable, so you deliberately constrain your thoughts, forcing your mind back to grocery shopping."

Historically, Irving said, the field of psychology has approached mental disorders separately, as though each were in a vacuum rather than being interconnected.

"Clinicians have studied compulsive rumination in isolation, and ADHD in isolation, but now there's a huge interest in how we can make sure that the psychology and neuroscience literature is more closely aligned to what is happening in our heads," Irving said.

Story Source:  Materials provided by University of California - Berkeley. Kalina Christoff, Zachary C. Irving, Kieran C. R. Fox, R. Nathan Spreng, Jessica R. Andrews-Hanna. Mind-wandering as spontaneous thought: a dynamic framework. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2016

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Consciousness, Fractals and Great Literature

You want mathematics in your understanding of writing, you got mathematics.  You want hard science?  This science is hard.  And to paraphrase that pithyest of pithers, S.J. Perelman: "There is nothing like a report (see below) filled with decimal points and guarded generalizations to put a glaze on your eye like a sung vase (long a, please).

I'm of the school that writers write, editors edit, readers read, agents take ten percent of the gross, and reviewers do something, no one is sure exactly what. Literary theoreticians, to continue the cascade, scare the hell out of everyone.  I have images of graduate assistants assigning nascent authors underlining the fractals, mono-fractals and multi-fractals in a story.  And you thought parsing a sentence was a chore.

Finally, if you understand any of this research, anything at all, even one pseudo-fractal, kindly post your explanation for the rest of us at the end of this story.  In the meantime, I need a drink.  Perhaps a double.  Remember, writers, as Hemingway is alleged to have said, "Write drunk, edit sober." Take your pick before plowing through this research.

*  *  *  *  *

The world's greatest literature reveals

multi-fractals and cascades of consciousness

As far as many bookworms are concerned, advanced 
equations and graphs are the last things which would hold
their interest, but there's no escape from the math.

Credit: Source: IFJ PAN

Sequences of sentence lengths (as measured by number of words) in four

literary works representative of various degree of cascading character.

James Joyce, Julio Cortazar, Marcel Proust, Henryk Sienkiewicz and Umberto Eco. Regardless of the language they were working in, some of the world's greatest writers appear to be, in some respects, constructing fractals*. Statistical analysis carried out at the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences, however, revealed something even more intriguing. The composition of works from within a particular genre was characterized by the exceptional dynamics of a cascading or avalanche narrative structure. This type of narrative turns out to be multi-fractal. That is, fractals of fractals are created.

*A fractal is a never-ending pattern. Fractals are infinitely complex patterns that are self-similar across different scales. They are created by repeating a simple process over and over in an ongoing feedback loop. Fractals are images of dynamic systems – the pictures of Chaos. Geometrically, they exist in between our familiar dimensions. Fractal patterns are extremely familiar, since nature is full of fractals. For instance: trees, rivers, coastlines, mountains, clouds, seashells, hurricanes, etc. Abstract fractals can be generated by a computer calculating a simple equation over and over. 

The Ice-Bound Concordance

This chart has nothing to do with anything.  It is easy to follow.

As far as many bookworms are concerned, advanced equations and graphs are the last things which would hold their interest, but there's no escape from the math. Physicists from the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IFJ PAN) in Cracow, Poland, performed a detailed statistical analysis of more than one hundred famous works of world literature, written in several languages and representing various literary genres. The books, tested for revealing correlations in variations of sentence length, proved to be governed by the dynamics of a cascade. This means that the construction of these books is in fact a fractal. In the case of several works their mathematical complexity proved to be exceptional, comparable to the structure of complex mathematical objects considered to be multi-fractal. Interestingly, in the analyzed pool of all the works, one genre turned out to be exceptionally multi-fractal in nature.

A Sierpinski square-based pyramid and its 'inverse'.

Fractals are self-similar mathematical objects: when we begin to expand one fragment or another, what eventually emerges is a structure that resembles the original object. Typical fractals, especially those widely known as the Sierpinski triangle and the Mandelbrot set, are mono-fractals, meaning that the pace of enlargement in any place of a fractal is the same, linear: if they at some point were rescaled x number of times to reveal a structure similar to the original, the same increase in another place would also reveal a similar structure.

Multi-fractals are more highly advanced mathematical structures: fractals of fractals. They arise from fractals 'interwoven' with each other in an appropriate manner and in appropriate proportions. Multi-fractals are not simply the sum of fractals and cannot be divided to return back to their original components, because the way they weave is fractal in nature. The result is that in order to see a structure similar to the original, different portions of a multi-fractal need to expand at different rates. A multi-fractal is therefore non-linear in nature.

"Analyses on multiple scales, carried out using fractals, allow us to neatly grasp information on correlations among data at various levels of complexity of tested systems. As a result, they point to the hierarchical organization of phenomena and structures found in nature. So we can expect natural language, which represents a major evolutionary leap of the natural world, to show such correlations as well. Their existence in literary works, however, had not yet been convincingly documented. Meanwhile, it turned out that when you look at these works from the proper perspective, these correlations appear to be not only common, but in some works they take on a particularly sophisticated mathematical complexity," says Prof. Stanislaw Drozdz (IFJ PAN, Cracow University of Technology).

The study involved 113 literary works written in English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Russian and Spanish by such famous figures as Honore de Balzac, Arthur Conan Doyle, Julio Cortazar, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Alexandre Dumas, Umberto Eco, George Elliot, Victor Hugo, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, Wladyslaw Reymont, William Shakespeare, Henryk Sienkiewicz, JRR Tolkien, Leo Tolstoy and Virginia Woolf, among others. The selected works were no less than 5,000 sentences long, in order to ensure statistical reliability.

To convert the texts to numerical sequences, sentence length was measured by the number of words (an alternative method of counting characters in the sentence turned out to have no major impact on the conclusions). The dependences were then searched for in the data -- beginning with the simplest, i.e. linear. This is the posited question: if a sentence of a given length is x times longer than the sentences of different lengths, is the same aspect ratio preserved when looking at sentences respectively longer or shorter?

"All of the examined works showed self-similarity in terms of organization of the lengths of sentences. Some were more expressive -- here The Ambassadors by Henry James stood out -- while others to far less of an extreme, as in the case of the French seventeenth-century romance Artamene ou le Grand Cyrus. However, correlations were evident, and therefore these texts were the construction of a fractal," comments Dr. Pawel Oswiecimka (IFJ PAN), who also noted that fractality of a literary text will in practice never be as perfect as in the world of mathematics. It is possible to magnify mathematical fractals up to infinity, while the number of sentences in each book is finite, and at a certain stage of scaling there will always be a cut-off in the form of the end of the dataset.

Things took a particularly interesting turn when physicists from the IFJ PAN began tracking non-linear dependence, which in most of the studied works was present to a slight or moderate degree. However, more than a dozen works revealed a very clear multifractal structure, and almost all of these proved to be representative of one genre, that of stream of consciousness. The only exception was the Bible, specifically the Old Testament, which has so far never been associated with this literary genre.

"The absolute record in terms of multifractality turned out to be Finnegan's Wake by James Joyce. The results of our analysis of this text are virtually indistinguishable from ideal, purely mathematical multifractals," says Prof. Drozdz.

The most multi-fractal works also included A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers, Rayuela by Julio Cortazar, The US Trilogy by John Dos Passos, The Waves by Virginia Woolf, 2666 by Roberto Bolano, and Joyce's Ulysses. At the same time a lot of works usually regarded as stream of consciousness turned out to show little correlation to multi-fractality, as it was hardly noticeable in books such as Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand and A la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust.

"It is not entirely clear whether stream of consciousness writing actually reveals the deeper qualities of our consciousness, or rather the imagination of the writers. It is hardly surprising that ascribing a work to a particular genre is, for whatever reason, sometimes subjective. We see, moreover, the possibility of an interesting application of our methodology: it may someday help in a more objective assignment of books to one genre or another," notes Prof. Drozdz.

Multifractal analyses of literary texts carried out by the IFJ PAN have been published in Information Sciences, a journal of computer science. The publication has undergone rigorous verification: given the interdisciplinary nature of the subject, editors immediately appointed up to six reviewers.

Story Source: Materials provided by The Henryk Niewodniczanski Institute of Nuclear Physics Polish Academy of Sciences.  Stanisław Drożdż, Paweł Oświȩcimka, Andrzej Kulig, Jarosław Kwapień, Katarzyna Bazarnik, Iwona Grabska-Gradzińska, Jan Rybicki, Marek Stanuszek. Quantifying origin and character of long-range correlations in narrative texts. Information Sciences, 2016.

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