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THE BIOLOGICAL PHYSICIST The Newsletter of the Division of Biological Physics of the American Physical Society o Vol 2 N 6 Feb 2003 DIVISION OF BIOLOGICAL PHYSICS EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE In this Issue Chair FEATURE Robert Austin An Eternal Golden Braid: [email protected] A Conversation with Douglas Hofstadter Immediate Past Chair Sonya Bahar…………….……………………………..…..2 Mark Spano [email protected] FEATURE Chair-Elect Mentoring: Raymond Goldstein A la carte is better than nothing [email protected] Kathy Barker………………………...……………..….8 Secretary/Treasurer Paul Gailey [email protected] See you in Austin! APS Councilor Robert Eisenberg [email protected] At-Large Members: Andrea Markelz [email protected] Leon Glass [email protected] Sergey Bezrukov [email protected] Lewis Rothberg [email protected] Ken Dill [email protected] Angel Garcia [email protected] Newsletter Editor Sonya Bahar [email protected] Website Coordinator Dan Gauthier [email protected] Jazz Scribble by Douglas Hofstadter See Page 2 1 An Eternal Golden Braid: A Conversation with Douglas Hofstadter Sonya Bahar proved to be inextricably folded into the very heart of mathematics, and also akin to the In 1980, recalls Douglas Hofstadter in the "loopy" processes that give rise to self- preface to the 20th-anniversary Edition of his replicating molecules, a familiar theme to classic work Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal biophysicists. Golden Braid, “when GEB [Gödel, Escher, Bach] found itself for a while on the bestseller The key to the unraveling of consciousness, list of the New York Times, the obligatory one- Hofstadter writes, “is not the stuff out of which sentence summary printed underneath the title brains are made, but the patterns that can come said… ‘A scientist argues that reality is a system to exist inside the stuff of a brain.” In this view, of interconnected braids.’ After I protested form and content circle one another incessantly; vehemently about this utter hogwash, they indeed, it may be form that gives birth to finally substituted something a little better, just content. Brains are media supporting patterns barely accurate enough to keep me from howling that mirror or represent the world. But as parts again.” of the mirrored world, brains themselves are subject at last to an inevitable self-mirroring, In fact, Hofstadter’s best-known book, like his and it is here, Hofstadter writes, “that the strange other works and his rich creative life spent in loops of consciousness start to swirl.” both the arts and the sciences, is far too complex and varied to be encompassed by any simplistic Hofstadter’s interdisciplinary masterpiece, little catch phrase. In the author’s words, Gödel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, and his subsequent works Escher, Bach “is a very personal attempt to say in the visual arts, in literary translation, and in how it is that animate beings can come out of cognitive science, form a rich golden braid. This inanimate matter…What is an ‘I’, and why are intertwining of varied interests, that balance and such things found (at least so far) only in reinforce each other, may resonate with many association with certain kinds of gooey lumps interdisciplinary scientists and scholars who feel encased in hard protective shells mounted atop a dual passion both to understand the world and mobile pedestals that roam the world on pairs of to express their reactions to it. slightly fuzzy, jointed stilts?” His answer is what he describes as “strange loops”: abstract self- Douglas Hofstadter was attracted in his referential structures similar to those Kurt Gödel childhood by the beauty of mathematics and physics. He was particularly inspired by the interaction of form and content, a fundamental theme that runs through his adult work. His interest in the arts and in languages also developed early, when he spent a year in Geneva, where his father was on sabbatical. This interest in language led, in turn, to a fascination with the workings of the mind. In high school he was deeply inspired by Ernest Nagel and James Particle/Wave Oscillation. Ambigram by Douglas R. Newman’s book Gödel’s Proof, and began to Hofstadter. 2 wonder about the possibility of computers and continued to this day. At 21, he took up the carrying out the same abstract processes as does piano again “with an enormous fervor”. He was a human brain, and hence potentially becoming not aiming at the concert stage, but at building conscious and having their own selves. At 15, a up the technique necessary for musical self- friend taught him to program in Algol, a expression, which was a profound internal language he describes as “mathematically longing that drove him for many years. In the elegant”. It was one of the first computer late 1960's and early 1970's, he composed some languages to allow the possibility of recursive 40 pieces for solo piano, and speculated about a algorithms, and Hofstadter began to write professional career in composition. But this programs of his own, for several years exploring would have entailed abandoning mathematics, intricate patterns in the world of numbers, and which he still loved. “To leave mathematics then branching out to make programs that completely,” he says, “would have been to randomly created syntactically and semantically betray too large a core element in myself.” complex sentences in various languages he had studied, including English, Italian, and Hindi. This led him to ponder further the mysterious connection between algorithms and human thought processes. As an undergraduate at Stanford, Hofstadter studied number theory, logic, and recursion. It seemed the natural next step to enter graduate A. Einstein/ Constant C. Ambigram by Douglas school in mathematics, but at the University of Hofstadter.(Look at it upside-down!) California at Berkeley, he began to find mathematics “too abstract, too confining, too After much painful soul-searching, Hofstadter arid, and too difficult.” He felt disappointed in decided to switch from math to physics, also his own mind, he recounts. He had always moving from Berkeley to the University of coasted through mathematics before, but now Oregon at Eugene. He says he found physics in felt himself hitting a wall, like a marathon some ways more difficult than mathematics, its runner at the eighteen-mile mark. concepts stranger. He initially was interested only in elementary particle theory, driven by a Frustrated by the internal mental barriers he had yearning to understand the most fundamental run into in his mathematical studies at Berkeley, elements of reality’s fabric. But once again, he Hofstadter intensified his involvement with was bitterly disappointed. Elementary particle languages, music, and the visual arts, combining theory no longer glowed with the pristine beauty all these long-term interests in the creation of of the work of the thinkers he admired, such as abstract “musical shapes” – visual fugues and Dirac, Born, Schrödinger and Heisenberg. It had canons at first, and then all sorts of non- grown unwieldy, even ugly, he felt. The endless contrapuntal forms – which he improvised in speculations that filled the field struck him as felt-tip pen on scrolls of paper, up to 20 feet absurd. The last straw was an article he was long. The curvilinear forms that covered these required to read and present to his colleagues, in scrolls were initially inspired by the exquisitely which feeble group-theoretical arguments were beautiful writing systems of languages from used to posit 132 new particles in one fell swoop India, but gradually they took on a life of their in order to explain some tiny and obscure own. "Are these idiosyncratic visual creations of phenomenon. “It was unimaginably ugly”, he mine just side projects, or are they central to my says. “I couldn’t understand how anyone could life's aims?", he wondered. call particle physics beautiful those days. To me it was grotesque, incomprehensible, and Between the ages of 8 and 16, Hofstadter had hateful.” He went through several advisors, and sporadically studied piano, playing classical, found himself, after 5 or 6 years of graduate jazz and popular songs. And as a listener, he had study in math and physics, in a crisis. “I couldn’t explored classical music in great depth, do anything”, he recalls, “because I didn’t indulging in what he describes as a “passionate believe in it.” Discouraged and confused, he binge of record buying”, which started at age 16 dropped out of graduate school for a time, doing 3 work on behalf of a social cause which he did remembers, “I would stop and pitch my little deeply believe in: the United Farm Workers. tent, sometimes in a forest, sometimes by a lake, and then I would eagerly plunge by flashlight During the difficult months of the spring of into these articles until I fell asleep in my 1972, however, a chance moment of browsing in sleeping bag.” It was in the course of this trip, the University of Oregon bookstore reawakened which culminated in one semester of graduate Hofstadter’s fascination with logic, and with work at New York’s City College (CCNY) Gödel’s proof. On the bookshelf he found a copy during which, as a teaching assistant at Hunter of Howard DeLong’s extraordinary book A College, he tried his hardest to convey the Profile of Mathematical Logic. He began to beauties of special relativity to a tiny class of wonder again about how thinking was or wasn’t nurses, that Hofstadter began drafting early governed by patterns related to the subtle versions of what would become Gödel, Escher, mathematical laws of symbolic logic. “Within Bach, first in longhand, then on a typewriter. weeks,” he recalls, “all my love for the Gödelian mysteries and all that they touch on was He returned to Eugene, still working on his then- reawakened.

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