Two problems with two theories

The biggest problem with a theory of rational economic behavior is not that humans are irrational (though they often are) but that rational economic incentives under-determine human behavior.  Given that we have to act rationally and maximize some measure of self-interest (usually a monetary return, but not always) there are multiple ways to get there.  A glance at the great variety found in human endeavors, in business models, in industrial practices, etc. should be enough to persuade one of that.

The biggest problem with technocratic approaches to education is not that students are complicated (though they are) but that even if you knew enough to optimize some measure (whether an evil standardized test or a progressive concepts inventory that looks remarkably similar to a standardized test or some more holistic measure of "critical thinking" or whatever) you would still be under-determining what you can/should do in the classroom.  There would still be multiple ways to get there, and culture and values would enter into the choices.

Ibn al-Haytham on refraction

I'll start with the confession:  I'm not going to read all of Book 7 of the Kitab al-Manazir.  Experimental papers are best read when they have the diagrams on the same pages as the main text, not when you have to flip around constantly to find diagrams and tables.  Not to mention that he got a lot of stuff wrong, and according to the translator's preface he probably didn't do all of the experiments that he described.  But I did want to see if he presaged the Principle of Least Time.

So I read the translator's preface.  One fascinating tidbit is that Ibn al-Haytham did measurements of the effect of refraction in the atmosphere on the apparent positions of stars near the horizon.  That was pretty amazing.  He was able to show that the atmosphere refracts light, implying that its optical properties are different from the more distant medium separating the earth from the celestial sphere that they believed the stars inhabited.  I didn't know that.

The translator mentioned a discussion of "easiest paths" at the end of chapter 2, so I read the first two chapters.  I skimmed the experimental section because (as I said above) it's hard to read.  I did carefully read the theoretical discussion in the last few pages, and it is definitely interesting.  Ibn al-Haytham thinks of refraction as occurring because the light encounters difficulty in piercing an interface, and we know that when chopping wood it is easiest to piece the wood if the ax strikes it perpendicularly rather than at a glancing angle. He talks about breaking up motion into components perpendicular and parallel to the interface, and if the perpendicular component is small then it is difficult to pierce the interface. In Ibn al-Haytham's view, when light encounters a denser medium (higher index) light tries to incline toward an easier direction.  There's a vague concept of a "path of least resistance" in here, but he doesn't actually use the word "path."  Rather, he talks about the direction that is easiest to move in.  That is a purely local description of the dynamics of the light (whether it's a ray or particle), based entirely on things that happen at the interface.  Likewise, the rest of the discussion involves only the interfaces, components of motion at interfaces, and analogies to mechanical phenomena that involve changes in motion at interfaces.  Fermat's Principle of Least Time, on the other hand, is a global principle, one that involves a consideration of the entire path that light will take from one location to another.  There's no hint of a global principle here.

Also, he has a much fuzzier explanation of what happens when you go from a high-index medium to a low-index medium.  There's no principle of time-reversal here.

Now, I haven't read any of Fermat's work. I don't know if he read Ibn al-Haytham. Maybe he really liked Ibn al-Haytham's idea about picking a direction that makes motion easier and then generalized it to a global principle.  Maybe not.  I don't know.  What I do know is that there's no hint of the Principle of Least Time in Ibn al-Haytham's work, because the Principle of Least Time is (1) global rather than local and (2) based on a model of a medium-dependent speed rather than a medium-dependent resistance.  The second point is less important, because I'm drawing a distinction that isn't really salient until you appreciate inertia and the fact that light doesn't have mass (not points that are required to do important things in an optics class) but still, I see none of the seeds of Fermat's work here.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

DISCLAIMER:  I only read a translation of the Latin text.  Maybe the Arabic text has something better.  However, the translator noted a number of errors in the translation from the original Arabic text to the Latin edition, and this section wasn't mentioned. Barring some additional evidence from a historian who knows medieval Arabic I consider it very unlikely that Ibn al-Haytham can be credited with the Principle of Least Time.

A succinct take on the post-industrial economy

I figured out a way to encapsulate a lot of what frustrates me about discussions of the post-industrial economy.  Everyone mouths "STEM" and "college", as though the great thing about the industrial economy was the opportunity that it provided for college-educated STEM professionals.  In fact, the great thing about the industrial economy was the sort of opportunity it provided for everyone else.  Yes, college-educated STEM professionals did their part in maintaining the system that provided those opportunities, but they were just one factor among many.

We've assumed that we can credential our way out of this problem, but that's insanity.  We need to ask what sort of economic arrangement can provide good opportunity for those who don't have college degrees, rather than asking how to get more people through college.

Next book: Book 7 of De Aspectibus/Kitab-al-manazir by Alhacen/Ibn al-Haytham

My next reading will be Book 7 of the Book of Optics by Ibn al-Haytham, an Arab scientist of the 10th and 11th centuries.  I read the first part of his treatise in 2009; in that part he debunks the ancient idea (going back to the much-lauded Greeks) that vision involves the emission of something from the eye.  I skipped the next 5 books, which expand his theory of vision and then delve into image formation by curved mirrors.  However, I recently came across an assertion that Ibn al-Haytham was the first person to discover that refraction phenomena can be derived from the Principle of Least Time, presaging Fermat's statement of the principle by more than 600 years. The Principle of Least Time is one of the most beautiful principles in physics, being closely related to the Lagrangian formulation of classical mechanics, and this coming year I am scheduled to teach optics in fall and Lagrangian mechanics in spring, so I absolutely MUST find out if the great Ibn al-Haytham has priority over Fermat in discovering the most beautiful principle in physics.  If you do a Google search for "Ibn al-Haytham" and "Least Time" you will find a great many pages that assert this discovery, but so far I've found none that actually quote directly from his writings.  Consequently, I'll have to read it for myself.

The matter gets complicated by the fact that Ibn al-Haytham's writings took two different forms, historically.  Ibn al-Haytham did most of his work in Cairo (though he was apparently born in Iraq) and wrote it up in Arabic under the title Kitab al-Manazir (Book of Optics).  However, much of his influence on the subsequent history of optics came via a Latin translation titled De Aspectibus (which, as I understand it, means roughly "On Perspective").  In the Latin translation his name was given as "Alhacen." The Latin translation is not entirely faithful to the original Arabic, which means that it is not always useful for gauging what Ibn al-Haytham actually thought.  However, because of its influence the Latin translation is nonetheless worthy of study as a historical document, as a way of gauging what the Europeans did or didn't learn about optics from the Arabs.  I've had trouble finding a translation of Book 7 directly from Arabic to English  (it's easier to find translations of the first book, which made the vital contribution of debunking the emission theory), so I'm going to be using Prof. Mark Smith's English translation of the Latin version.

Oh, there you go, bringing class into it again

I'm not sure I agree with everything in this article from the latest American Conservative, but one needn't agree  with all of it to appreciate the extra analytical dimension that it brings.  Thinking about class along more dimensions than rich and poor, bringing ideology and sector into it, helps a lot.

Anderson being curmudgeonly

1) Anderson notes that physicists are the shamans of our day, charged with telling a secular world what the ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything might be.  He likes particle physics hype even less than I do.

2) In a 2004 address to the Santa Fe Institute he has some pretty harsh words for an academic system that is more interested in collecting tokens of prestige and generating overhead on grants than generating genuinely insightful work.

Next book: More and Different by Phil Anderson

I'm reading More and Different, a collection of essays (of varying length and, sadly, readability) by Nobel-winning solid-state physicist Phil Anderson.  Most of the essays that I've read so far have been his remembrances of great moments in the history of solid state physics and his work at Bell Labs.  However, in his reflection on the trajectory of 20th century physics as a whole, he makes the unusual move of offering a sober-eyed lament about the state of science careers at the dawn of the 21st century.  People know that there is a game, and so they collect tokens of accomplishment rather than simply pushing forward on problems that they find to be intellectually significant.  I've noted before that sometimes you learn more about people when you observe them in comfortable circumstances rather than competitive ones.  Alas, as we keep expanding the number of scientists (while proclaiming that project to be a moral and economic imperative) we get fewer chances to observe how people respond to comfort and more chances to observe how they respond to competition.  Of course, it is completely impossible in a democratic culture (a concept that is related to but somewhat distinct from a democratic government) to afford intellectual elites too much visible comfort.  Forget about what the masses will say--the educated themselves will recoil from it, because Americans are Americans.  Just look at how the National Science Foundation wants to keep people busy with the democratic work of outreach, whether graduate students or established faculty, rather than let people focus on science.