Meaning of the Japanese word "hibakusha"

In John Hersey's 1985 edition of Hiroshima he included a new chapter, an update on what had happened in the lives of the six people he wrote about in the original version of the book (which was itself published in a single issue of The New Yorker in 1946, filling the issue completely).  In the new chapter, Hersey noted that the Japanese did not call the survivors of the atomic bombings survivors:

In referring to those who went through the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, the Japanese tended to shy away from the term "survivors," because in its focus on being alive it might suggest some slight to the sacred dead.  The class of people to which Nakamura-san belonged came, therefore, to be called by a more neutral name, "hibakusha"--literally, "explosion-affected persons."

In order to renew my slight knowledge of some aspects of Japanese culture, I plan to re-read Hiroshima now that Japan has had another tragedy befall it, one that wasn't of its own making, but one that now also involves nuclear energy release and radioactivity levels above the normal background level.  As far as hibakusha are concerned, the United States has more than its share nowadays, mostly young people who've been seriously and sadly affected physically and mentally by exposure to the shock waves from IEDs and other high explosives in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Alberto V.O. Einstein

It's big Al's birthday, his 132nd.  He wasn't actually that big if the wax figure of him at Madame Tussuad's Wax Museum in London is anatomically correct.  He wasn't that tall I mean.  Penis-wise, well, I don't think his size is in the historical record.  Perhaps one of the numerous women he "slept" with commented on that in her diary.  He wasn't prone to be celibate, nor was he prone to be a faithful husband, but his second wife (who was also a first cousin of his) could live with that.  His first wife, well they were real hot together at first, sorta like in that Steely Dan song "Haitian Divorce" ('so in love/the preacher's face turned red'), but they later drove each other crazy and had the same kind of troubles as separated or divorced people have these days--with money, visitation rights of the kids, demands made on each other. 

Anyway, regarding Uncle Albert's height, in May 1996, my girlfriend at the time took my photo in London (she paid for the trip, God bless her; it was a lot of fun) standing next to Einstein's waxen figure, and at 5' 6" I was slightly taller than Dr. Einstein, whose wax figure looks more like Walter Matthau's Einstein than the real Einstein.*

Here's a recent news release about him, then I gotta get outta this library in Pine Bluff, as closin' time is upon us:

Einstein’s archives to go online

March 14, 2011

JERUSALEM (JTA) -- More than 80,000 of Albert Einstein's documents will go online in the coming months.

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem announced Monday, on what would have been Einstein's 132nd birthday, that it has begun a yearlong project to digitize the documents and make them available on the Albert Einstein Archives website.

The project is being underwritten with a $500,000 grant from the Polonsky Foundation of London.

The Jewish scientist was a founder of Hebrew University in 1918 and sat on its first board of governors. In his will Einstein, who died in 1955, stipulated that his archives go to the university. Along with documents on physics, the archive includes his thoughts on politics and society.
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*actually he was taller than I am, according to most sources: 5' 9" (or in non-USA units, 175 centimeters).

Photographs as observation & measurement

When I took Steven Weinberg's undergrad quantum mechanics class in 1998, he said in the second or third class, "I assume you all know what an electron is, what a proton is."  This chagrined me enough that I immediately spoke up and said, "I don't know what an electron is."

I'd just written a master's thesis, at what's now Texas State Univeristy-San Marcos, questioning the assumption of an electron as a "point" particle, and pointing out that the electron was/is still a mystery.  Weinberg's choice of words was not ideal.  If he'd said something like, "I assume you are all familiar with the properties of electrons and protons," I would not have spoken up.  The endpoint of my classroom conversation with the good professor Weinberg was that I said mainly I was interested in what it means to "find" an electron.

This is one of those peculiar quantum mechanics things that are too often taken for granted:  we talk, for instance, about the wavefunction giving the probability of finding an electron--the square of the wavefuntion is interpreted as a probability density--but we don't say or think much about what the physical process for "finding an electron" is.  In answer to my question, Weinberg mentioned a photographic plate as one method of finding where an electron is (was), and a cloud chamber as another.

The photographic plate or just photographic film can be used as a detector in the so-called two-slit experiment, which is famous for showing the wave nature of electrons and other elementary particles. The set up is like a slide projector and a screen. Electrons go through the closely-spaced, very narrow slits (projector) and hit the faraway photographic plate (screen), leaving little dots where they hit.  Like a microscopic kind of pointillism, and defying all logic, the dots form a wave interference pattern of bright and dark bands on the screen.  Which slit a particular electron went through can't be determined without causing the wavelike property (interference) to disappear. So the observer--the experimenter, or photographer--can observe either property, wave or particle, but not both simultaneouusly, by her choice of experimental set-up. (More than two slits could be used, but the interference pattern is simplest with two.) 

An example of the opposite or complementary case from particles behaving like waves is the photoelectric effect, where ultraviolet light hits a clean metal surface and ejects electrons from the surface. As explained by Einstein in 1905, it's necessary (and sufficient) to imagine a single-energy unit of light, now called a photon, being responsible for the ejection of a single electron. The wave description of light propagation just fails completely here, as does the particle model of an electron in explaining the interference pattern in the two-slit experiment. Which could be called the two-hole experiment if tiny round holes are used instead of slits. 

So, anyway what we have in general on the sub-microscopic scale is the wave-particle duality, while on the large scale of everyday life, we have the love-hate duality in the case of the not-so-elementary psychological-physical-emotional-spiritual entity known as the person (per-SAHN). Hard to figure, also.
  

Today I present photos (below) not of the traces of electrons, but of an alligator gar (small) and a water moccasin (big) that I took last summer from the platform shown in the photo at left.  You have to look carefully to find the snake in the mud (an S shape, bottom photo). Well, the gar too, for that matter (hint: it's horizontal, parallel to my bare foot, not much more than a shadow). 

In my much younger days, the gar and snake would have been targets for shooting with my .22 rifle.  Nowadays the only living thing I shoot is an occasional minnow.  Usually I shoot at a piece of wood or other floating target.  I did shoot a water moccasin once a couple of years ago at the farm, where I built this platform between two large fields (very quiet out there!).  It was unnecessary.  I pulled the trigger "without really thinking about anything at all," like the young man who shoots the monkey at the beginning of Denis Johnson's novel Tree of Smoke.    

Peace.

Measurement vs observation, plus the paradox

All right.  Where were we?  Measurements versus observations, right.

In weighing yourself or reading your speedometer you're observing a measured quantity.  In the case of weighing, you don't have much influence, or not much immediate influence (oh, yeh, long term, sure), and in the case of driving and reading your speedometer you do have immediate influence. On the highway, you need to watch your speed, as they say.

Okay, you're right!  People watch their weight also.  I could surely stand to lose a few pounds, like ten at least.  154 at the doc's office last visit.  (My digital scale in the bathroom, by the way, is inaccurate.  It gives readings to the 10th of a pound [that's called precision--not the same as accuracy], but repeated measurements give different readings by as much as five pounds.  The mechanical scale at the doctor's office--ancient technology--is much more accurate.  A good digital scale, such as I've used in student labs many times, is  both accurate and precise.)

I was going to talk about measuring cups and measuring sticks, both of which require an active role by the measurers, and contrast that with a speedometer reading. But let's just say here that a measurement is a quantitative observation, and leave it at that. No semantical difficulties there.

But sometimes a measurement doesn't give you the quantity you're looking for.  Sometimes you need to make a calculation!  In my very first physics lab, in the excellent year 1974 at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (as referred to in my Intro post, August 14th), the instructor had us go out to the side of a very busy street, Universty Avenue, and measure the times it took the front bumpers of particular cars to travel a certain distance in order to calculate the speed of the cars.  Rather dangerous.  Probably not done these days.  Anyway, there is a hierachy of observation, measurement and calculation involved in experimental physics. The calculation is not necessarily done by a person, of course.

So where does this leave us with our investigation of Schroedinger's cat?  (Without the two dots on the "o", you're supposed to put in the "e".)  The measurement is more like an observation because it's not obviously quantitative.  But we can call the live state 1 and the dead state 0.  So it's a very simple measurement, the looking in the box part anyway. 

The significant and more complex thing is the meaning of a measurement in quantum mechanics.  Schroedinger, in the cat thought experiment, was trying to show the ridiculous nature of the "measurement creating the reality," which is what the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum measurement says happens. 

This is the same idea as the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen "paradox," and it was the publication of the EPR paper in 1935 that set Schroedinger to thinking of his cat.  Originally Einstein and Schroedinger corresponded about the wave function (or state vector) of an unexploded keg of gunpowder subject to being exploded by the decay of a radioactive nucleus (one decay from a collection of slow-decaying nuclei, actually) .  Einstein pointed out that the wavefunction would have components for the exploded keg and the unexploded keg.  Schroedinger changed this when he published his paper later that same year to be a cat in a box, and the components become the live cat plus dead cat combination.  The measurement is considered to be performed when the state of the cat is determined. 

Schroedinger's cat

The first question of course is whether Erwin the Schrödinger was a cat lover or a cat hater. Or neither (then why'd he choose a cat?). I don't know the answer to that question (those questions). Some people might say, "Does it matter?" in a rather irritated voice, like Judith at the dinner table when Larry mentions that their next door neighbor, Mr. Brandt, is mowing part of their yard. Well, no, it doesn't matter!  But I'd still like to know.

Schrödinger did mention in his description of setting up the thought experiment that the equipment involved "must be secured against direct interference by the cat," which he described as "penned up in a steel chamber” with a flask of hydrocyanic acid that would be broken by a hammer released by a mechanical relay switch activated by the radioactive decay of a nucleus that is specified to have an equal probability of decaying or not decaying in one hour.

At the end of the hour, the experimenter looks inside the steel box, and by doing so determines if the cat is dead or alive.  During the hour before the box is opened, however, according to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory, the cat is both dead and alive, because the wavefunction (or state vector) of the atomic nucleus has equal components of decayed-state and non-decayed state and only by a measurement is the wavefunction put into either one state or the other.  Thus only by a measurement is the cat put in one state or the other.

The semantics gets a little tricky, though, when you consider that looking in the box is more of an observation than a measurement. Can you say what the difference between an observation and a measurement actually is? Looking at your speedometer while you're driving, for instance, or weighing yourself.  You're looking at a numerical reading produced by an instrument.  More about all that later!

Trulock's Dog

Happy Valentine's Day to you, too.

In June I visited my brother Arch in Birmingham in order to get a painting of mine that I now have room to put up, although I haven't yet put it up.  I returned not only with the painting but with a pretty big analog TV, a DVD player, my banjo, and a dog named Jessie.  She's four and a half approximately.

I let her run free at the Bayou Bartholomew trail if nobody else is there, which is most of the time, and at the farm.  She doesn't like the sound of the .22 rifle and wants to get back in the car if I get it out, so I go on separate outings at the farm, either with Jessie or with the gun.
She's learned to come back at just the time I'm getting to the end of the bayou trail (about a 30 minute walk), but also likes to run up from behind me and pass me several times while I'm on the trail, which makes me whoop and holler* and start running myself if I'm not already.  The bayou trail is a good place for whooping and hollering, if nobody else is there, which is most ...yeh, I said that already, but sometimes of course people will arrive after me and I won't know they're on the trail, which is a one and three-fourths mile loop, so I've encountered people before who no doubt have heard me singing or at least making semi-musical-type noises.  Jessie's goal is to find something to chase, and I saw her once trying to catch up with a deer in the woods (it's all woods along the trail).  First  I saw the deer, a medium-sized doe, running about 50 yards away from me, then turning my head from the direction she came, I saw Jessie following at top speed (not fast enough) looking a little like a deer herself, at least colorwise.       *a sort of maniacal laughter

The Malice God

I have an older relative, an uncle once removed, who was diagnosed in the 1960s as paranoid schizophrenic, and during my most recent visit with him in NW Arkansas a couple of weeks ago, he told me about the malice god.  This has something to do with Jesus being sexually molested by the Romans.  (My twice-removed uncle was sexually molested by a neighborhood kid when he was young.) What the connection is with God and the Devil, I don't know, but in my cousin's mind, the malice god has something to do with why he is mistreated and conspired against by other people--they are operating under the orders of the malice god.

The subject came up because we were talking about the recent amputation of my cousin's left foot, and the effort by those responsible for his medical care to prevent amputation of his right foot.  He has numerous health problems and adult diabetes is now added to the list.  He didn't seek treatment for the problems he was having with his left foot until it was too late, and now he blames the attempted treatment to save his foot for actually causing the foot to have to be amputated.  So he wanted a wound on his right foot to be left untreated.  It took an appearance in court before a judge to get the wound treated without his, my cousin's, consent.  When I visited him in the Senior Care section of Sparks Medical Center in Fort Smith, the wound was dressed and he was not in a bad mood, considering.  But he did in passing mention the malice god.

Which naturally lead me, later on, to think that the malice god is the one calling the shots--you might call them pot shots--taken at Professor Larry Gopnick in A Serious Man.  And you might call the enjoyment of the movie by people like me schadenfreude.  But you'd be missing the intended intellectual slapstick aspect of the movie if you did that.

The end of the movie leaves two questions hovering:  is there something really wrong with Larry's x-rays or has the doctor got them mixed up with someone else's (the doctor, not a technician, took the x-rays, which seems odd even for 1967), and will Danny and his fellow students make it into the basement of the synagogue (will the teacher find the right key) before the arrival of the tornado?

I watched Then She Found Me again, and added it to my list of favorite movies.  So much good dialogue is in there!  That includes this exchange between April (adopted) and her brother (not adopted), although don't quote me on the exact dialogue:

"Trust me, you have no idea what it's like to be adopted." 

"And you have no idea what it's like to not be adopted. Right?"

"So, what's it like?" 
 
(there's a brief pause before he answers)

"It was exhausting. It was embarassing, sometimes." 

Oh, yeh, and one more thing about A Serious Man, from the shtetl scene at the beginning.  The dybbuk?, upon entering the home of Dora and Velvel, after Velvel, standing at the door, tells him he's welcome there, says: "You're too kind, Velvel, too kind."  Apparently so!  And that might be seen to apply to Larry also.