Published in the Jan. 7 – 23, 2015 issue of Morgan Hill Life
By Marty Cheek
Marty Cheek
Science is a passion of mine. That passion led me to serve as the co-chair with Marilyn Librers of the 5th annual City-wide Science Fair which is sponsored by the Morgan Hill Chamber of Commerce and will be held Jan. 15 at Oakwood School.
This year’s science fair will be organized a bit differently than those in the past four years. The competition will be divided into four separate categories to make it easier for judges to decide on projects and also give more students a chance to win an award in their scientific endeavors. These four categories are physics, chemistry, biology and behavioral science.
Science is a human endeavor that is really a continuum of energy exploration in its various forms of complexity. Physics serves as the foundational layer for all the sciences. Time and space, matter and energy – this is the “stuff” of the cosmos that physicists want to figure out. Most likely when you think of physics, you picture a wig-wearing Isaac Newton or a wild-haired Albert Einstein in front of a chalkboard full of equations.These two celebrity scientists dedicated their lives and careers to pulling back the layers of the laws of physics and finding out how the universe works. But there is much more to physics than the idea that an apple falling off a tree and the Moon orbiting the Earth have a common connection through the force of gravity.
Joseph Peters Atwell, a junior at Oakwood School, shows off his entry on behavioral science from last year’s science fair.
Morgan Hill Life file photo
Quantum mechanics is an Alice in Wonderland world where the zoo of particles defy everyday common sense. And the fascinating theory of superstrings — incredibly tiny filaments that might make up the “DNA of reality” — brings up the idea the universe might contain 10 dimensions in space and one dimension in time — and that our universe might be just one in a number of “multiverses.”
Next up on the physical science layering is chemistry, a subject in which the principals of physics and energy come into play to explore the composition, structure, properties and change of matter through the interactions and transformations of atoms and molecules.
In chemistry, scientists look at the 115 known elements of the periodic table and study their various properties and how many of them form chemical bonds to create compounds.
Biology provides the next rung up in the science ladder. It takes chemistry to a new level in which we explore the energy of life. Through research, biological scientists study how nature has combined over billions of years the atomic elements and chemical compounds together through the process of evolution to create the millions of species who inhabit or have inhabited our planet.
Through that evolutionary process, animal species have evolved brains, and that leads us to the next layer of scientific ideas — behavioral science. This is the science of the energy of the brain/mind which involves the generation of thought and emotions that lead to actions.
An interesting and exciting new field of behavioral science is evolutionary psychology, the idea that our brains are wired through the process of natural selection to use survival characteristics that influence our actions with the people and world around us. Among these characteristics is the ability to communicate through the tool of language, which humans have advanced to a far higher degree of complexity than any other animal species.
The behavioral science branch of language over the last 10,000 years or so has grown into its own layer of science — informational science, the science of storing, communicating and processing data, information and knowledge.
This science started with the agricultural revolution when people discovered farming technologies to grow their own crops and livestock instead of the traditional hunt and gather food gathering actions of their ancestors. People stopped wandering the land and stayed in one place to grow an abundance of food. This led to the growth of cities. Civilization required a practical way of recording information (such as crop yields) and so the process of writing evolved — first with cuneiform scratching on clay tablets, later on papyrus and paper.
With the advances of computer technology, informational science has given us the Internet and other digital media.
Informational science has advanced so much in recent years that we now get overwhelmed by the oceans of information available through digital devices. This trend has led to the emergence of what I consider the sixth layer of scientific exploration. I call this next category artificial sentience science (ASS). I’m sure the acronym will definitely need to be reworked a bit before it’s ready for prime time.
ASS will go beyond informational science by potentially creating computer-based sentient entities that will help us deal with the digital deluge of information. We’ve had a glimpse of this brave new world through Apple’s Siri where people can ask their iPhones natural language questions and receive a reply. A San Francisco-based company called Sentient Technologies worked on the Siri project. In November it received $143 million in funding to advance distributed artificial intelligence technology, which might one day advance humanity down the road to ASS.
This science is now at its earliest stage of evolution. But the potential is there — particularly with advances in quantum computing – for ASS to take over its own evolution and quickly build itself into an advanced state of sentience. Sentient computers might one day be able to independently think and create with a richer complexity than humans can ever achieve.
The potential is there for ASS to help humanity solve many of its biggest challenges such as healthcare, energy, and environmental issues. But, as the physicist Stephen Hawking warned in a BBC interview recently, artificial intelligence systems (such as ASS) without safeguards might one day take off on their own and re-design themselves at an ever accelerating rate. “Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete and would be superseded,” he said.
Perhaps students participating in the Jan. 15 science fair at Oakwood School will one day in the coming decades find themselves in a world where artificial sentience will be as common to their lives as asking Siri a question is now.
