Boobs are awesome. But why?

One day while lying in bed with some nude nubile nannies, I was asked the following question: "Why do guys like boobs so much?" I opened my mouth to speak and found I had no answer. This bevy of beautiful babes had stumped me. What is it about breasts that are so enticing? I decided to launch a straight-up sexy assault to find out. And yes, part of the reason I'm writing this is to post several pictures of ladies' puppy-pillows. Is that a slang-term for breasts? I'll be honest, I'm a little out of the loop on colloquialisms these days.

These don't look like breasts at all...

In order to begin my research I decided to head to Facebook to find out what the common people thought. Because I'm so popular and have millions upon millions of friends and admirers I decided to post the following as a status update via Twitter:

Research Question: why do most men seem to love boobs? Leave your answers/theories/anecdotes in the comments below please...

Most of my friends and admirers must have been busy that day, as I received only three responses. The first response was as follows: "Because they don't have their own. Greedy bastards."

Fair enough. The second response said, "Ask anthony.. Ugh". Anthony, as any loyal reader of this blog knows, is my co-author. Apparently I'm writing this in vain because Anthony already knows the answer. And whomever he's shared this answer with was disgusted by it. However, Anthony rarely knows what he's talking about so I am going to trudge forth with this study anyway.

The final response was this: "Because they are awesome?" This is also the only response from a male. Note the question mark at the end of what should have been the statement. For one, I believe that is indicative of why I only received three responses; As much as men love soft cannons, they're afraid and unsure of them at the same time.

Google image search is really letting me down today...

I stuck with Facebook for one last try as I saw a good friend of mine on Facebook chat and remembered that I had to talk to her about her birthday goings on that day, but also she has breasts. I asked her as scientifically as I could about them and their almost magnetic properties, and she said, "Because they (guys) don't have them." Ah... confirming what an earlier poster said. Playing devil's advocate I asked about fat guys. They have boobs, don't they? "Fat men don't have perky breasts. And it's different on females... They're a completely different shape." Touche my friend. She continued, "Women love breasts too... It's a fact actually. They are just fun to play with." True! Very true! They are fun to play with. I got hung up on this fact while she continued, "I also think it has to do with your attachment to them from childbirth bla bla bla." At this point I was still thinking about how much fun boobs are to play with and signed off.

After some more, uh... research, on a few websites that shall remain anonymous at this point, I found that some of the claims being made by the commoners on Facebook had some validity to them. That is, if you hate peer-reviewed articles. It seems that most scientists focus their energies elsewhere, and not on finding out why fatty bulls-eyes are so intoxicating.

At least that has a woman in the picture...

Instead of respectable, peer-reviewed articles, I decided to settle on more-or-less the first two sites with answers Google gave me. The first one, authored by some dude named Josh Johnson, basically restates the things those Facebookers said. When confronted with the question that stumped me, Josh is ready with a retort, "Actually, the answer to this question is almost unbelievably simple; We like them because they are there, and we don't have them."

As much as I thought Occam's design was the bomb diggity, that might be simplifying the matter a bit too much. What else you got, Josh? "It's hardwired into our brains as infants, men and women alike, that breasts are an important part of our survival. Most of us lived off the damned things at one point in our life, so it's only understandable that we carry a certain fondness for them as grow older."

Well... that was much better actually. However, I can't help but think there's more to it than the facts that evolutionarily we're hardwired to love fleshy balloons and we don't have them. Just those two things don't seem to explain the downright obsessiveness that men, and even our culture, has with them.

THESE ARE FLESHY BALLOONS?! THESE?! OH GOD WHY?!

Moving to a possibly more reputable website, but probably not, I checked out something that was authored by Askmen.com. They break down their reasons quite well, actually. One of the first points that are made is some subconscious psychological reasoning that doesn't have to do with Oedipus. "Breasts hint at a woman's ability to nurture and sustain life. They also point to a woman's capacity to breed, as they signal the onset of puberty." Very true. Despite what my asshole friends like to joke around about, men aren't attracted to pre-pubescent girls. Darwin was even a firm believer in this line of thought, or so I've heard. I mean, it seems like something he would agree with. He loved titties.

The article goes on to state that, biologically, men know that breasts are sensitive and can turn a woman on. "Any good lover knows that a woman's breasts are closely connected to her libidinal zone." I once read in Playboy (yes, I got Playboy for the articles, despite popular belief) that a very small percentage of women can orgasm just from playing with her nipples in the right way. This proves nothing, but sometimes I like to tell anecdotal stories with only tenuous connections to whatever the conversation is about.

Finally, the article argues that men are stimulated visually, while women tend to be stimulated more intellectually. While I don't wholly believe in this statement, their next statement I can agree with: "It's hardly surprising then that breasts, raised and perky as they often are, receive our obsessive attention. After all, apart from genitalia, breasts are a woman's most well-defined physical feature." Basically, boobs stand out. The more they stand out, the more attention men are likely to lavish on a particularly well-bosomed lady.

So there you have it, men like breasts for a variety of reasons. Breasts represent many things to a man, whether that be some unconscious safety-net for the warmth and security of a mother's bosom (not to mention the nutrition), or the fact that they're different from what men are naturally equipped with, or as a sign of fertility, or because they're fun to play with, or simply because on most women breasts stand out, men just kinda like them.

And that, ladies, will never change. Viva la Boobies!

Oh sonofabitch.

Love: An Analysis Part II: The Evolutionary and Psychological Stance

Last time, on the Science Liaisons:

Intrigue! Drama! Humor! Sex! Drugs (Mentioned)! Hormones! Hot Girls! In his discussion on the biological processes behind love, Craig? delved deep into the brain and its related hormones to find out just what exactly causes those feelings we call "love" and "emotions". There he found oxytocin, dopamine, vasopressin and other amphetamines. As he shifts his focus to the evolutionary advantages and psychological reasoning behind love will he learn anything about himself? Will he open a door that can never be closed? Will you, his loyal reader, buy him a chicken finger sub for all of the hard work he puts into entertaining and informing you? All of these questions have answers, and to find them all you have to do is keep reading...

Being a dork for the majority of my life, I've had my fair share of ups and downs. I've seen success in love, but mostly failure. I've rebelled against my best instincts, swearing myself to a life as a bachelor. I've embraced my basest needs and chased multiple partners. I've overcome those same needs and dedicated myself to monogamy. I've analyzed what I want in a partner, and I've analyzed why someone would or wouldn't want me. In conclusion, I've spent a lot of time thinking about what love means, where it comes from, and how it affects us. This is obviously because of how lonely I actually am.

I had just sat down...

The Evolutionary Advantages of Monogamous Love

If there is one indisputable truth about the world we live in it's this: People are awesome creatures. It's not because God made us that way, because God didn't seem to give us any advantages over most types of other animals. If anything, He stacked the deck against us. What makes people so special, to me anyhow, is at how well we exploit the advantages we were given, such as opposable thumbs and the intellect to use tools. We've used this simple advantage to become the most adaptable creatures to ever walk the Earth, physically changing habitats to suit our needs. We've evolved so far we've overcome nature, to a point.

That being said, we're still weak creatures. If an average person were to physically go up against almost any other animal, insect, or plant in the wild, even with a weapon, they'd be dead within minutes. It's because of this weakness that we've evolved to love.

In David Funder's The Personality Puzzle he details how the English psychoanalyst John Bowlby theorized that love had it's origins in staking a claim on survival. Whenever we feel alone or are sick and/or injured we have an almost unexplainable innate desire to have someone who loves us by our side. Mr. Bowlby believes this is for protection; We want someone who is invested in us to help protect us and increase our chances of survival.

Children are in an even worse position. The worst kept secret in the history of the universe is that children suck, mostly because they smell bad and they're selfish. Here's another reason children are a plague to humanity: They're useless and take up valuable resources. So why bother taking care of them? The reason for maternal and (sometimes - definitely not in my case though...) paternal love is so the child can survive and continue the species. Steven Johnson wrote the following quote summing up what I just said in the article Addicted to Love from Discover Magazine: "The biological capacity for love is one way the brain prepares us for offspring who are born young and helpless and need tending to have the slightest hope of survival." For homo sapiens, any hope of survival depends on relying on others. Following this logic, the best way to know you can rely on someone is to be sure they love you. Which is exactly why women can never rely on me.

Whoops, I broke your heart again.

It's unclear what sort of evolutionary processes resulted in the necessity for people to love, but according to Helen Fisher there are "three basically different brain systems that evolved for mating and reproduction". First, there is the sex drive, or lust. This helps us find a partner; Why we choose who we choose is a psychological thing (maybe). When we initially find someone we're physically attracted to hormones are released and we've already narrowed down the field from 3.4 billion to one. The second brain system is romantic love, or focus. This is what old timey people from the middle ages may have called "courting". It conserves mating energy by allowing one to focus on an individual in order to decide whether or not it would be good to get all up in their genes (see what I did there?). The final brain system is the attachment phase. Helen Fisher describes it as "tolerating (your mate) long enough to raise a child".

Between this stage and the romantic love phase is usually when people find themselves becoming possessive of their mate - another evolutionary advantage. There are several evolutionary advantages to this, such as that whole protection and caring for thing I talked about earlier. However, before DNA testing became such a popular way of figuring out who your parents were, this possessiveness was also one of the only ways for men to know the child was theirs and they had successfully passed on their genes.

While I was finishing one of my many years of college (because I'm so smart) I took a personality psychology course. One day our professor (her name escapes me, so I'll call her Professor Womanface) took an impromptu survey of the class. The sampling size was probably around 200. Professor Womanface asked how many people would rather their mate be monogamous over successful. Mostly men raised their hands. She then asked the inverse of the question and mostly women raised their hands. She explained that these gender-dominated answers are because women prefer their men to be able to provide for them and their child since there can be no doubt that the child is theirs - the thing does pass through their vagina-hole after all. Men, on the other hand, have no such security in knowing the child is theirs, so it's much more important that their mate be monogamous. Which is funny considering that according to women, most guys go for sluts anyway.

Especially Corporate Sluts

Speaking of personality, those differences that stand-up comedians like to talk about between men and women? Could be evolutionary differences. Check it: Women like to talk and men like to do things for a reason. When estrogen levels are up in women their verbal ability goes up. Estrogen levels go up during times such as childbirth and breastfeeding. Women talk to their child, it's an attachment thing. Men on the other hand have spent thousands of years sitting side by side in the bush with their friends, hunting or fighting or protecting or watching porn and playing ookie cookie. Men and women simply have different ideas of intimacy; Women's being talking and men's being doing things side by side. Miss Fisher said it best when she said, "... (men have spent) millions of years facing enemies (and) sitting side by side with friends".

The Psychological Reasons for Love

We've all wondered what was going through our partners heads at one point or another. The most true stereotype I've ever come across (outside of white people not being able to jump) is the "she has daddy issues" stereotype. People are affected by what's happened in their past, and that weighs heavily on their present, for better or worse. For example, when I was a child my family was brutally murdered in front of me in an alleyway outside of a theater. It scarred me quite badly psychologically leading to a fear of things with erratic flight patterns, an intense desire to practice martial arts while dressed as something with an erratic flight pattern, and an emotional distance one can only describe as erratic.

That's right... I AM MOTHMAN!

It's pretty well accepted among, well, everyone that a person's personality is outlined by their relationships. In attachment theory (originated with John Bowlby and expounded upon by Mary Ainsworth) different adult behaviors are assigned to things that happened in childhood. Sweet, more theories and lists to remember.

Anxious-Ambivalent attachment means that a person's caregivers growing up were inconsistent in their behaviors. They would reward only some of the time, and discipline only some of the time. Perhaps the caregiver also contradicted themselves in their discipline and reward patterns, sometimes rewarding for one behavior and later disciplining for the same behavior. This can lead to a clingyness that is on par with the gravitational pull of the sun. So perhaps the "daddy issues" in all women's cases stems from this inconsistency.

There is also the avoidant/distant caregiver. This person's caregiver didn't give them enough attention so, being used to that form of independence, this person is now distant themselves. Most men will tell you that they had an avoidant/distant caregiver when they don't want to talk about their feelings. The flip side to this is a general social retardation: anxieties and a complete lack of understanding of others emotions may abound.

The final type of caregiver is the secure caregiver. Generally, this caregiver gave our hypothetical person a good home life, and they've grown up to be respectful, well-adjusted, independent individuals. I've never met anyone in my life that had a secure caregiver, especially any women.

It is interesting to note, however, that in attachment theory there isn't much mentioned about spoiling one's child. This is assumed to be OK and does not lead to such things as inflated ego, trouble identifying with peers, a disproportionate value placed on material things, and a general annoyingness.

I hate him.

This brings us to ORT, or Object Relations Theory. Melanie Klein outlines four principal themes in ORT:

1.) Pleasure/Pain Relationship

2.) Love/Hate Relationship

3.) Distinguishing between "love object" and whole person

4.) Awareness and Disturbance by Contradictory Feelings

The basic principal behind this theory is the idealization of the people around you. Most adults do it still, like when you first meet that hottt grl at the bar and think she's totally cool and smart and you love her only to find out she's actually kind of a bitch and your friends hate her but you keep telling them what a good person she is anyway even though she's clearly not and no this isn't from personal experience stay out of my business you jerk.

As bad as adults can be with things of that sort, children are worse because they lack what us scientists like to call "common sense". There is also the fact that adults tend to hide more things from children (especially their own) than from one another, usually in an effort to protect some sort of innocence which they know will just be brutally ravaged somewhere down the line anyway. Regardless, this theory leads us to a thing called neurotic defense, which is the contradiction of idealizing what you want to destroy. Nobody can live up to an ideal, except me because I am one, and this leads to hard feelings sometimes.

Often, at least according to D.W. Winnicott, children will put the feelings they have for their "love object" into something inanimate - like a stuffed animal. This comforts the child through the loss of their "love object", whether it be on a literal level like death or a more subtle, emotional and psychological level like realizing their parents are actually meth dealers. Silly parents!

In conclusion, love is a battlefield. Or something like that.

And that concludes Craig?'s two part series on love. There was laughter, tears, epiphanies, and several other things not appropriate for your age level, dear reader. If you've taken anything from this opus of a masterwork, we hope it's been that you're bound by love regardless of whether or not you wish to be. Biologically and psychologically we are destined to need love in our lives. Even evolution got all up in this bitch. And that never happens!

Love: An Analysis Part I: The Biological Stance

My, what a valid and thought-provoking question Mr. Haddaway, if that is your real name. Throughout the ages love has been one of the most talked about things probably... ever. It's an obsession of some (that ex-girlfriend that wanted to get married, and when you refused because you were only 19 she left you for some other guy, got married to said guy, then had a kid with said guy), and a bane of others (me).

But why do we feel love? What does it mean to feel love? How do we feel love? What I'm proposing, and what I'm going to do because none y'all can stop me, is to analyze love from biological, psychological, and evolutionary stances - in two parts. If you're not interested in understanding your deepest urges, turn back now. Like those puppies I sacrificed to Lord Byron in 1823 as he lay on his deathbed asking me to help him find eternal life, this will get messy. But if you're of a sound heart, rigid disposition, and a clear conscience, read on.

We've briefly discussed this before. Many of the emotions that people feel on a day-to-day basis originate in the brain. Love is no different, even if it is an emotion that is a bit harder to define than the others. Allow me to sum it all up in one word: Hormones.

Bam! Puberty!

To put a name to the fist, the actual feeling of love has to do with hormones such as norepinephrine, serotonin, vasopressin, oxytocin and dopamine. These are all amphetamines, meaning they stimulate the pleasure center in the brain. Pheromones such as testosterone and estrogen also play a big role. However, most of the research (that I've found, but I'm also very lazy; I can't stress that point enough) talks about vasopressin, dopamine and oxytocin, so we'll focus on those for the time being.

According to the 2002 edition of the World Book Encyclopedia, dopamine is "a chemical that acts in the brain to influence a wide range of feelings and behaviors... also plays a key role in motivation, pleasure, and addiction." Whoa! Hold on there World Book, you're telling me that dopamine influences addiction? I was under the impression that only my favorite celebrities could influence my addictions! I'm going to have to find someone else that shares your opinion, just to be sure. How about Helen Fisher? In her second talk at TED in February of 2008, she describes romantic love as having all the signs of addiction.

1.) Tolerance - I'm getting used to having you around.

2.) Withdrawl - What do you mean you want a life of your own? No! You stay here with me! I can't get enough!

3.) Relapse - I'm sorry.

Still not enough for ya? How about the fact that under CT Scans, the brains of those shown pictures of the people they felt love for had activity in the same areas of the brain as those under the influence of cocaine. If you ask me, love's some pretty serious stuff that we should probably declare war on. Or at least educate our children on.

It's Taking Over Our Schools!

In the Discover Magazine Special Issue: The Brain, the article "Addicted to Love" by Steven Johnson discussed an experiment done by Larry Young of Emory University. In this experiment he took the genes that encode one of the vasopressin receptors in the prairie vole (a monogamous mammal) and injected it into the forebrains of the meadow vole (a polygamous mammal). The meadow voles given these genes suddenly started forming pairs, and mating with their partners for life. Johnson writes, "Apparently a change in the expression of a single gene, in a context of preexisting genetic and neural circuits, could profoundly alter social behavior." So to all those ladies that are sick of their significant others it looks like you may have two choices: 1.) Leave that deadbeat for me, who will love you unconditionally forever* or 2.) Get him some new genes.

So where does oxytocin fit into all of this? Well considering it's probably the biggest puzzle piece in our little mystery we like to call love, I'd say anywhere it damn well pleases. Much like dopamine, oxytocin is responsible for a lot of different emotional states. According to this article from the April 4th, 2007 issue of Cell Metabolism, oxytocin "modulates social behaviors, including maternal care and aggression, pair bonding, sexual behavior, social memory and support, and human trust, and downregulates stress responses, including anxiety."

That's a lot of commas to go with a lot of responsibilities for this one little hormone to be handling. To dig a little bit deeper, oxytocin has a hand in regulating the neuroendocrine system (local amino acid and noradrenaline release), autoregulation (autoexcitation during birth and suckling), emotional states (positive mood, passive stress coping, and trust), social tenets (maternal behavior, maternal aggression, pair bonding, sexual behaviors), and cognitive aspects of a person (social memory, olfactory memory, and spatial memory).

Hey, where are you going? I told you this was going to be a rough trip! Hurry Craig?... You're losing them... Think quickly! Bam! Hot Girl!

I Knew That'd Get Your Hormones A-Ragin'!

Alright, now that I've got your attention again, the article from Discover Magazine discussed above elaborates on some of these things, and adds to the conversation a reason for some of the physiological things that happen to those of us in love - which has never been me by the way. I'm far too much of a man for falling in love. That gut-tightening feeling I've read so much about? Could be oxytocin's job of downregulating the bodies stress-axis system. That warm fuzzy cliché that people like to drone on and on about? Could be oxytocin working with your bodies other natural opiates and triggering that drive for companionship.

Did I forget to mention that oxytocin seems pretty good at building relationships of its own? In that prairie vole experiment I mentioned earlier, another reason for the prairie voles monogamy (besides that gene) seems to be the placement of their oxytocin and dopamine receptors. In the monogamous prairie voles, their oxytocin receptors overlap with dopamine receptors in their nucleus accumbens. This doesn't seem to be the case in more polygamous species. These voles brains developed in such a way as to make attachment pleasurable. The same is true in people - oxytocin receptors are found in several dopamine rich areas of the brain.

Why? Because oxytocin seems to work in tandem with a lot of other hormones. It is now supposed that oxytocin isn't directly responsible for any sorts of easily describable feelings itself, but instead only heightens the effects of other hormones. This may explain why in monogamous species it is paired with dopamine receptors, dopamine being responsible for addictions and boners and all.

This goes hand in hand with why women seem more obsessed with love than most men; Estrogen seems to heighten oxytocin's effects while testosterone dampens it. So next time your girlfriend is looking for commitment, just calmly explain to her that isn't what she really wants - it's only the estrogen talking. Then gently kiss her forehead and force her into making you dinner, because that's a woman's job**!

Stay Tuned for the Second Half of This Article - Evolution and Psychology!

* Not True - At All.

** This Works for me Every Time.

My Adventures in Time Travel II: The Paradoxes

We'll See About That

Welcome to the middle section of my highly acclaimed trilogy on time travel! How do I know it's highly acclaimed when I've only written two of the three? Think about it, silly. (I'm a time traveler.)

Last post I discussed how time travel might (or might not) be possible (for someone other than me, who doesn't already have an awesome, quite functional, time machine). This article is about the paradoxes involved in time traveling. Or, rather, some of them. There's quite a few depending on which avenue of time travel you wish to explore. And most have existential and historical ramifications that can change who you are at the most fundamental levels one can think of.

Here is a good primer on some of the paradoxes one might be confronted with. Of the ones mentioned there, perhaps the most famous paradox is the grandfather paradox. The grandfather paradox states that if you were to go back in time and murder your own grandfather, would you still exist? Logically, why you would want to do this is beyond me, but I'll buy into the initial premise.

As outlined in Michio Kakus book, Physics of the Impossible, there are a few possible solutions to this problem. If you don't believe in free will, but rather some sort of destiny, then whatever happens in the past is the way it was meant to happen. This would also hold true for what happens in the future. This is a closed time loop. Whatever happened, happened. If you go into the past to change it, that means you were already there trying to change it and everything is going according to plan. Whose plan? I don't know, someones somewhere. Possibly the man?

Oh God I Hope This is The Man

There is also the idea that there is some natural law that would prevent you from ever altering the timeline in that fashion. If you were to point a gun at your grandfather, state you were going to kill him, underline the reasons for why you felt it necessary to kill him - perhaps he told one too many stories of this time a guy claiming to be from the future tried to kill him - and then tried pulling the trigger, something would happen.

The gun would jam. You'd have a crisis of conscience. Your grandmother hits you in the head from behind with a shovel. Your grandfather is actually Ozymandias from Watchmen and he catches your bullet before beating the snot out of you. Point being, some natural occurrence prevents the death of your grandfather from happening, and nothing major changes. This still allows for the fact that you have free will, as it only states that the past cannot change. For example, you may in you heart of hearts wish to fly, and you should be able to because of your free will, but you can't because of gravity.

The solution to almost any paradox is likely to be alternate universes. If you were to pull the trigger and shoot your grandfather dead, it wouldn't matter in your universe because it never happened there. You simply traveled along a different timeline where your grandfather did get murdered by your evil doppleganger.

How Do You Fight Yourself?!

This would ostensibly happen every time you traveled to the past or future to change something. However, the biggest flaw I see in this theory is that it's not actually time travel. It's simply going to a parallel universe where things have changed only slightly. Unless, because of your dicking around in the past changing things, you created a new universe with just your actions. But how would that work? Considering what a universe physically is (lots and lots of energy and a tiny bit of matter), how could one persons actions create an alternate timeline where things were the same up until the moment they changed them, and dramatically different thereafter? Seems to raise more questions than it answers if you ask me. This is one of the major issues with time travel my esteemed colleague, Anthony, has. We've spent countless hours in our smoking room drinking whisky discussing how it could be possible that our matter is transfered to a time before our matter existed. Or, how the matter of anything in the past can still exist if it's in the present.

Imagine this situation: You want to go into the past to stop your best friend from contracting herpes from this girl he met at a club one night. Now, let's ignore the impossibility (in my experience) of a girl actually being at a club for something other than dancing. You head back in time and see your best friend - but how? How could he exist in the past if he is still existing in the future? I proposed a few solutions that I admittedly pulled out of my ass. Obviously I went to the alternate universe theories first, Anthony countered with the fact they're parallel and therefore running on the same timeline as our universe. I was skeptical of this stance, but whatever. I also proposed that time is constantly repeating itself, somewhere and somehow. Kinda weak, that one. I moved on to the fact that matter has always been around in some form or another, since the big bang. I brought up wormholes, and the curvature of spacetime. I said, relighting my corncob pipe, which had gone out in our breathless debating, that perhaps because of this curvature, there is only a displacement of matter. I asked him to picture how a tornado tube works; The water in the top half of the tube can only go to the bottom half if there is a displacement of air. That's why it works, and that's why time travel works! Anthony took a long, pensive sip of his whisky, sent our servant to the kitchen for a fake steak dinner (he's a vegetarian), and wondered how there can be a displacement of matter in that way. I countered that it probably has something to do with quantum entanglement and I conceded that I did not know. My, what a tangled web of intrigue these paradoxes weave!

The April, 1976 issue of American Philosophical Quarterly tackled some of these same issues, to a less humorous effect. The author, David Lewis immediately throws away the alternate universe theory. What he does distinguish between, instead of a multiverse, is a difference between what he calls "external time" and "personal time". External time, in the way he describes it, is time as we know it. It's whatever is happening in the present. Personal time is whatever is happening for the individual in their present. Even if their present happens to be someone else's (even their own) past. It can be equated with biological time, but it does seem to encompass more than that. This would make it possible for things to be happening along different planes of time, but it still glosses over the fact that our matter would still be existing and interacting in two places at once. However, Mr. Lewis does insinuate that perhaps it's not the same matter that is interacting. Do our atoms change into something else over time, as we grow older in our personal time? This seems a likely answer, as people do biologically and, dare I say, atomically change over time.

So what is the grand answer to the question of paradoxes? I don't know, what do I look like? Bill Nye the Science Guy? Jeez, leave me alone.

Be sure to tune in soon for the exciting conclusion to this three-part series on time travel!

My Adventures in Time Travel I: Introduction/An Explanation

I Only Watched The First 3 Minutes

Almost everyday I'm bombarded with emails asking me about our heading, because it seems most people don't read past that. Most are a lot like this email from reader n00b$f8: "i notised that u say u guys have a time machine. 1st off, tiem machines rnt possible. 2ndly even if they were u coulnd't use one because of the paridoxes involved. i saw in that movie butterfly effect how badly you can screw up the past if you mess with it!!!11!!"

Usually my response goes something like this:

"Dear n00b$f8,

Thank you for reading our blog! It's so nice to see that the youth of the great undeveloped nations of the world (judging by your somewhat tenuous grasp of the English language) has an interest in what we're writing about! Now, on to what you said in your email.

While I can see why you would think that time travel isn't possible, as it seems counter-intuitive to how we perceive time and the natural world (as Newton thought, progress only ever moves forward through time in a straight line, right?). However, because we live in a spatial universe where time is interwoven into that fabric, certain physical laws can be bent. But, as you'll see if you come back and read my blog post on this very subject, there are problems with that if you believe at all in free will.

As far as your other comment goes, I would first like to point out that Ashton Kutcher is not a good actor. I would also like to say that the paradoxes are avoidable, if they exist at all. Check back sometime to see why.

Thanks again for your time,

Craig?"

So here it is, my explanation of how our time machine works. Later this week, just in case there are some non-believers out there (like I would ever lie to you, my dear reader), I will post the meticulously recorded transcript of one of my time-traveling misadventures in honor of the greatest day in the history of the world, February 12th. Now, on to how our time machine works.

There are a lot of different theories about time travel, and how it can possibly be achieved. Most have to do with Einstein's Theories of General and Special Relativity. Special Relativity details how the speed of light is constant for all observers, because nothing can travel faster. What this has to do with time travel is simple, and it's called time dilation. Time dilation is similar to the story of The Tortoise and the Hare, except it's nothing like that at all. Supposing I'm traveling close to the speed of light (as I'm wont to do), and you're not, you will age quicker than I will. This has already been done with astronauts in orbit, who age nanoseconds less than people on Earth. So, if you can travel at or close to the speed of light for an extended period of time, when you slow down the Earth will have progressed past you and you'll be in the future. There is also a theory that says if you can travel past the speed of light, you may be able to go into the past. Almost like in Richard Donner's original Superman, when Superman finds out that he couldn't save Lois Lane in time and he freaks out and decides that he'll break every known law of physics and turn the Earth's rotation around in the vague hopes that maybe he'll reverse time and have a second chance at saving her which - thanks to the fact that it's only a movie - totally works and he totally saves her and totally ends up with the girl eventually, maybe, I've never actually seen it.

The Best Picture of Superman I Could Find

Of course, traveling anywhere near the speed of light with current technology isn't possible, let alone surpassing lightspeed in order to travel into the past. It also defies the laws of physics, as in order to travel past the speed of light one would need to have infinite mass. We know that kinetic energy is converted to mass thanks to E=mc2. To have infinite mass (and also apparently stop in time) just doesn't make sense according to Einstein, so we'll have to count that one out. Not to mention that method requires a lot of waiting. I'm not interested in that. So what other options do I have?

There is the other theory of relativity, the less fancy sounding General Theory of Relativity. This basically states that mass displaces spacetime, which is in itself a cause of gravity. If the gravity is strong enough, it may warp spacetime enough that you can travel through time (remember earlier how I mentioned that spacetime is like a fabric, all interwoven and shit? Well it can also bend like a fabric). Black holes are massive enough to do this. However, black holes are also massive enough to tear you apart atom by atom. That, to me anyhow, just doesn't sound too pleasant. Not to mention the fact I couldn't afford the bus ticket to get there.

A similar idea to traveling through a black hole is to go through a wormhole. What's the difference you ask? Well, according to Michio Kaku's book Physics of the Impossible, black holes are "non-transversable wormholes" while a wormhole is, in fact, a "transversable wormhole". What this means is that black holes are a one way trip (because they destroy you at their event horizons) while wormholes in the sense time travelers like myself discuss them are not. The trick to using wormholes (besides generating one) and surviving the event horizon of one is a little something called negative energy. This is not the same as antimatter, as it doesn't destroy any matter it comes into contact with but, rather, repels it. Which is why it would be so perfect to get through the event horizon of a wormhole.

So what's the issue with this theory? A few things, but mostly the insane amount of energy it would need to work. At least the equivalence of the energy that wants to tear you apart. Even if you were able to harness that energy, there would be enough radiation generated by the wormhole to kill you instantly if it were stable enough to stay open at all. These are a lot of variables for me to be worrying about as I have my sexy adventures through time.

And yet, I do have sexy adventures through time. All because of the time machine that n00b$f8 mentioned in his email, and we've written about in our heading to our blog. But how does it work? Well allow me to ask you this, n00b$f8 and others like him/her/it, do you know how your iPod works? Or do you just use it, thankful that it does work? Because I've never read the users manual to my Time Machine either.

Our Time Machine Looks Like Santa's Sleigh

Check back soon for Part II: The Paradoxes and next week for Part III: My Time with Lincoln and Darwin!

How Not to Prepare for the Coming Robot Apocalypse (Because It Won’t Actually Happen)

In January GQ ran an article by Dan Halpern entitled “Are You Ready for the Singularity?” It chronicled the author’s misadventures at the Singularity Summit held annually in New York City. For the uninitiated, the Singularity (the technological kind, not the physics kind) is the “technological creation of smarter-than-human intelligence”. Now this can occur in many ways, including a super-advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) kind of like the kind Haley Joel Osment played in the movie AI: Artificial Intelligence.

The Fall of Man?

The Singularity website offers some more suggestions: "... direct brain-computer interfaces, biological augmentation of the brain, genetic engineering, ultra-high resolution scans of the brain followed by computer emulation". Certainly intense stuff and, in theory, completely plausible.

That is, if you know what consciousness is (we don't know). And understand what exactly it means to learn (we aren't sure). And can feel (we can do this, but outside of Mr. Osment up there, robots cannot - yet). The reason for the Singularity Summit is a mixture of (unfounded) fears and extremely high hopes. As Mr. Halpern points out, there "are very smart men and women who have spent a lot of time doing a very creditable job at finding the right answers to whatever difficult questions they have pursued, and they have a lot of data that says they're right about this, no matter how strange it sounds."

But are they right? Really? Really really? No, seriously, I want you to be sure. OK... if you say so.

I think the main problem with believing in the singularity as an event that spells the end of mankind is hubris. People are actually cocky enough to believe that they can create an intelligence greater than their own. Part of the fantasy, in some sick, masochistic, pour more hot wax on my nipples you dirty, dirty scientist because I forgot our safe word, way is the idea that we humans who have already conquered nature (thanks evolution) can create something so much better than us that it can destroy us, and take our place at the top of the food chain - not that they'd need food.

Robots Hate Pancakes... It's A Trick!

But I digress, let's talk about how plausible all of this is shall we? Because of Moores Law, which states that however many transistors a chip has will double in about 18 months, people expect computers to have as much or more processing power than the human brain as soon as 2030. At this point, it is assumed, machines (for lack of a better word) will become smart enough to self-replicate and improve on themselves. This will eventually lead to said machines becoming conscious, and realizing that the world would be a much better place without those pesky humans running around causing global warming and deforestation! At least, I hope that's their motivations for genocide and not something like... I don't know... money? Would robots like money?

Here's the problem, at least on the outset: Machines are more than just hardware. They're software too, and usually pretty crappy software at that (I'm looking at you Windows Vista, I'm looking at you hard...). Jaron Lanier summed it up perfectly in his "One Half of a Manifesto" in 2000. He said, "For computers to design their own successors, someone has to write the initial software. Humans have given no evidence of this ability." He also says, along the same lines, "As processors become faster and memory becomes cheaper, software becomes correspondingly slower and more bloated, using up all available resources." One more quote, for the road: "... processing power isn't the only thing that scales impressively; so do the problems that processors have to solve." Really, the article should just be read. It's quite the argument, and covers a lot more territory than the three tethered quotes I chose to reproduce.

"Now hol' on there kiddo," I imagine you're saying right now, "Imma not good at the whole arithmetic thing, but by my figerin', that was 9 years ago that article you gon and mention there's been written. Somethin' musta gotten better since then." To this I would respond, "My good clearly southern based on your accent sir, I only need to point to the aforementioned Windows Vista, or maybe the dreaded RROD."

The Savior of Man?

So there's that. There is also the fact that consciousness is hard to define, let alone understand on such a fundamental level as to recreate it in a lab through code or processing power. The neuroscientist Gerald Edelman defines it in this way: "It is a process, and it involves awareness." Wow, way to be specific there Mr. Edelman. Based on that I can safely say I don't know many people that can be considered conscious. Hey-oh! Digressing from that awesome burn, that definition doesn't seem to be too far off from Merriam-Websters definition that I won't repeat here due to laziness.

So if we can't even really, accurately define the term, how will we know when machines have it? I suppose since we know we have it, and we know that animals seem to have it, we'll be able to tell through careful observation. If machines can think, and plan, then they'll be attributed consciousness. This is only fair. But what type of consciousness? Edelman, in the interview with Discover Magazine linked above, briefly mentions two types of consciousness: Primary Consciousness and Self-Consciousness. The biggest difference between man and beast is man's self-consciousness. I mean, how often do you see a cat checking itself out in the mirror before a date?

He's Ready for his Scuba Date!

Besides not even knowing their own reflection, animals aren't aware of their own impending dooms (especially from robot apocalypses). So how will we know which consciousness our machine overlords have? Maybe some sort of a symbol test? "The human brain is capable of symbolic reference, not just syntax." says Mr. Edelman. While a machine might be able to learn, and it might be able to remember, will it associate things without meaning with meaning? Will this lead to art? Religion? Anything like that? Doubtful, as any software a machine would run would be based off algorithms, and algorithms are pretty straightforward.

Besides that, if a machine is mass produced with the same components, and is given or achieves or however-you-want-to-look-at-it consciousness, will it share a consciousness with it's brethren? Actually, on a simple level, that's a very stupid question. Twins, for instance, are born via the same components but don't share a consciousness. Edelman says, "Every single brain is absolutely individual, both in its development and in the way it encounters the world." Although these twin machines may not be different in their development, they will no doubt become different via different experiences, just like any animal or person. But people and animals have something machines don't (and probably won't ever have): Organic materials.

Which brings me to my final, and my biggest reason, I don't believe the robot uprising will actually happen. Any real, organic brain is more than just electrical signals running through neurons. We, more than any other example, aren't just ones and zeroes as computers are. The neural code is far more complicated than that, so much so that we aren't even close to understanding it. The way the brain communicates within itself, and with parts of our bodies, has as much to do with hormones and chemicals as it does with electrical signals.

For example, the hypothalamus is a tiny part of your brain that releases hormones that control things in your body such as growth hormones (for puberty) and sex hormones (for women being bitches once a month). Let's focus on the sex hormones for a second. Besides the obvious joke already made about how it plays with women's emotions, how many guys in the room have had their thinking all clouded up due to some sex hormones being released at a bad time? Considering I'm the only guy in the room as I'm writing this, I'm going to raise my hand and say, "Amen brother!"

Sometimes You Just Have to Remind Yourself

How about the amygdala, which controls not only positive emotions such as sexual responsiveness (which shows that parts of the brain work together, my amygdala sees a bangin' hot chick and tells my hypothalamus, which then releases the appropriate hormones to the, uh, less reputable parts of my body). Emotions are mostly a hormonal response to a stimulus, which the amygdala controls. Will computers have that? It's been said that if you experience a strong stimulus, or something emotionally scarring, that your brain will scar from it. New neural connections are formed on a daily basis. Unlike a motherboard, an organic brain is not a static thing. It's constantly evolving, constantly remaking itself in response to stimuli.

Now does that mean that the singularity in it's most base form won't happen? No, I do believe eventually we'll make machines that are smarter than us in terms of processing power. Hell, that's an inevitability. It is also completely possible that once technology advances that far some evil, evil men will want to use that power for evil, evil purposes. And, I mean, cyborgs are a possibility. However, cyborgs would still be human on some level. And with that humanity would come some sense or morality. There is a huge worry over what constitutes human, and while I won't get into that here, I think it's deeper than just our hardware. We like to see the trees in the forest, but not the forest itself. Our bodies, our consciousness, is a whole. To use a sports metaphor only 250,000 people at best will understand, consciousness in people is a lot like the Buffalo Sabres; There aren't any great individual players but the team as a whole is great.

In conclusion, suck it HAL 9000.