Anatomy of a science tattoo.
"Is it a satellite," gets commonly asked. Nope. “What does it mean?” The short answer is a bunch of science stuff that I think is very interesting, and has some deeper meaning for me.
And the long answer is:
Starting at the top-left is the golden ratio phi (φ) which is a constant of nature. We know this number out to about a baJillion decimal places because it’s exactly equal to:
Many things in the natural world as well as the artificial man-made world utilize this number at a fundamental level. It's the basis of the Fibonacci sequence which goes like 1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34 etc.... where each number is obtained by adding the two numbers before it. Phi is how plants 'know' when to branch and when not to branch. It's how they 'know' where to grow leaves angularly to maximize sunlight exposure. Sunflowers and pinecones use phi to arrange their seeds in the most perfectly efficient spiral arrangement possible using two adjacent Fibonacci numbers. The number of petals in many plants is a Fibonacci number. Many shelled sea creatures like the nautilus grow in spirals proportional to 1.618. Phi has been with us for a very long time - all the way back to the beginning of life's evolutionary history. Phi might be the reason we have 5 fingers on each hand and foot, and is therefore the reason humans locked in to counting with base 10 in the first place. You have 1 bone in the upper arm (humerus) which splits into 2 bones (radius and ulna) in the forearm which splits into 3 wrist bones, which splits into 5 fingers: 1,2,3,5 - the Fibonacci series at work. The same thing occurs also in the legs - the 1 thigh bone (femur) splits into 2 bones (tibia and fibula) which split into 3 ankle bones which splits into 5 more ankle bones (for a total of 8 ankle bones) which continue as 5 digits out to the toes. Phi is also the ratio of the lengths of all these bones. The Fibonacci series is related to phi because taking any two adjacent numbers in the series approximates the constant. In other words, the series is phi's closest whole number approximation. It seems that nature prefers to use the constant exactly, but where it is constrained to using only whole numbers, the Fibonacci series suffices as the next best thing. Life discovered the utility of this 'most-efficient’ number of nature and exploited it, and that's what it represents here in this context - efficiency. Where some look at phi and see intelligent design, others see the elegant beauty of nature, as selection pressures converge upon this mysterious attractor in many different domains. Naturally there is much controversy here. Beware of pseudo-sciences like astrology that have put a nasty unfortunate stain on phi and diluted its truth and value.
At the bottom-left is another constant of nature - the coupling constant aka fine structure constant alpha (α), which in base 10 reads 137.035999etc... This number has to be observed and measured, so we currently know only about ten significant figures for it. It is dimensionless and unitless, so it will be observed as the same number everywhere in the Universe, regardless of the system of measurement being used or how that system emerged. Alpha determines the strength of interaction between electrons and photons. It can be defined in terms of other fundamental constants of nature in the nearby expression to the right:
Where e is the electric charge, pi(π) is 3.1416…, ε0 is the permittivity of free space, ħ is Planck’s constant, and c is the speed of light. The dimensions of these quantities cancel each other out leaving only a number, and if we were to ever encounter other intelligent life in the Universe, this is a number we could agree upon despite our profound differences. Base 10 is an arbitrary anthropocentric system, whereas binary would be a more ubiquitous universal language. This could be a likely message to communicate throughout the Universe that would signal intelligent life.
To quote the late physicist Richard Feynman about alpha,
"There is a most profound and beautiful question associated with the observed coupling constant, e - the amplitude for a real electron to emit or absorb a real photon. It is a simple number that has been experimentally determined to be close to 0.08542455. (My physicist friends won't recognize this number, because they like to remember it as the inverse of its square: about 137.036 with an uncertainty of about 2 in the last decimal place. It has been a mystery ever since it was discovered more than fifty years ago, and all good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it.) Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from: is it related to pi or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms? Nobody knows. It's one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the "hand of God" wrote that number, and "we don't know how He pushed his pencil." We know what kind of a dance to do experimentally to measure this number very accurately, but we don't know what kind of dance to do on the computer to make this number come out, without putting it in secretly!"
At the left-middle is the Euler-Lagrange equation. In school, this struck me as a beautiful and elegant equation - a master equation with which to derive other equations. It's now been elevated to a status even more fundamental than Newtonian mechanics. In layman's terms it could be described as the principle of least action. The Lagrange equation seems to suggest the physical Universe operates according to laws of nature based on a principle of economy. Of all the possible pathways a particle or a phenomena could take, the path they actually DO take in reality, is always a minima (or interestingly, a maxima) relating to this equation. It applies from the smallest scale of Quantum Mechanics to the largest scale of General Relativity. Where we dwell at the macroscopic level in between, this equation is useful for solving problems in a manner that bypasses causality and forces, and yields equations of motion derived from energies alone.
The overall shape of the whole tattoo design is the molecule dopamine. Dopamine is related to evolution's reward mechanism in the brain, and is in part responsible for everything that feels good or is good. Tasty bacon or sugar taste good because dopamine in the brain is released. Sex or a feeling of well-being, or a sense of accomplishment all feel good because of dopamine. Dopamine takes part in our pleasures and our desires, but it also comes with a great danger of being abused. Illegal drugs like heroin or meth exploit dopamine and are addicting. More trivial drugs like smoking or playing games are addicting to a lesser extent. Animals being tested in the lab that were given the power to push a lever and release dopamine into certain parts of their brains preferred doing so to any other activity including eating. It felt so good, they forgot to eat and starved to death. I get pleasure out of contemplating some of the other ideas in this design, and I desire to understand them better, which is why I chose the dopamine molecule. The brain is a complex chemical place though, and dopamine doesn’t take credit alone for all these powerful things. In this context it represents everything that feels good and keeps us going, and also the maxim 'everything in moderation'. I believe that in the future as humans unlock the secrets of the brain, our self-discipline to not pull on our own dopamine levers will be critically important at best, and an existential risk at worse.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dopamine
The O's in front of the H's that would otherwise mean oxygen, are for fusion, which I think is one of the most important things humans are inventing right now. Fusion energy is arguably the second most important thing man will create - the first thing being the singularity in the back-middle. The Sun burns hot with nuclear fusion, and humans most definitely want to harness it to bootstrap our peak-oil civilization into a fusion energy civilization if we wish to continue the comfortable exponential growth we are all accustomed to.
The h+ in the middle is the symbol for the futuristic ideology Transhumanism. For me this represents continually improving myself. H is for humanity, and Plus is for improving – both physically and mentally, biologically and artificially. The merger of man and machine is already well underway. I already outsource some of my memory to say, my cell phone contacts list, or my computer hard drive. Much of my knowledge is outsourced to ‘the cloud’ of Wikipedia and all I need know is the procedure of how to access it. My calculator is sitting next to me and isn’t ‘inside’ me yet, but Man as he exists today is not the final product of evolution, in spite of those who would anthropocentrically wish to believe that he is. Technological evolution is just an extension of biological evolution and Man is currently inventing and creating his successor now.
The Singularity in the background is in regards to the technological singularity, not the black-hole type of singularity, although those are interesting too. There is an analogy between the two, however – Just as an event horizon surrounds a black hole and what is inside cannot be observed, so too we cannot predict what lies behind the future’s event horizon of artificial intelligence. Similar to how a housecat lacks the comprehension of its master’s actions, we today cannot comprehend the things we would know if we had the improved cognitive hardware to know the things we would know if we had the better hardware etc…. If we are really lucky, a utopian Kurzweilian Merger awaits, or if we are unlucky perhaps the Fermi Paradox will filter us out. Either way, our biological kluges of brains, evolved as they are with multiple imperfect systems cobbled together, cannot yet read this next chapter of punctuated equilibrium.
Entropy is one of the most fundamentally important elegant truths in the Universe. It’s closely intertwined with energy and information, and somehow I suspect it may be the basis for the meaning of life. Life in our corner of the Universe overcame entropy all the way from supernova to singularity in ~4.5 billion years. Maybe it was lucky, or maybe it was inevitable. I don’t know, but I hope the singularity will someday tell me. In the meantime, I believe entropy is the reason we all get up every day and go work.
The DNA strand at the bottom-right… is a DNA strand.
The NH2 at the top-right is to make it less ambiguous that the whole overall structure is the dopamine molecule.
The number on the right is hex ascii code that reads “Science For Life.”
So it would seem I’m THAT guy... the one that gets a tattoo that says Science For Life. lol.
