Useful News for You

Wondering is a series of random questions answered by Harvard experts. For the latest installment, we asked the Kennedy School psychologist Jennifer Lerner to explain friend envy — where it comes from, why it’s so powerful, how we can avoid it. The question was inspired by a famous Gore Vidal quip: “Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.”

Envy is a timeless emotion. Long before Gore Vidal, Aristotle said: We envy those whose acquisitions and successful efforts are a reproach to us. The Vidal quote makes clear how envy robs potential moments of joy. Envy can eat you alive. It’s characterized in the scientific literature as a strongly unpleasant state of inferiority, hostility, and resentment, which is why it sometimes triggers its cousin emotion schadenfreude — taking delight in another’s downfall. Outside of New England, there are millions of football fans who are both envious of the Patriots’ trophies and delighted when they lose. While brief moments of schadenfreude can be relatively harmless, envy tends to endure, sometimes to the point of obsession.

Fortunately, envy is not inevitable. One way to avoid it involves appreciating the collective good. For example, a writer whose friend wins a literary prize could focus on the fact that any advance in literature is ultimately an advance for all of us. After all, we all get to read the book! Relatedly, the thriving field of negotiation research has demonstrated that if you avoid assuming a “fixed pie mindset” — i.e., believing there’s a predefined set of goods in the world, and any good for the other person is less good for me — you have a better chance of finding integrative solutions to conflict that create more value overall.

Hundreds of studies find that human beings routinely make social comparisons, intentionally or unintentionally. Nowadays, social media magnifies opportunities for making such comparisons. In the Harvard community, where someone wins an international award nearly every day, it might be easy to become envious if you constantly compare yourself to the superstar down the hall. Instead, we can consciously choose to compare our present self to our past self.

As a motivation device, and one that short-circuits envy as a byproduct, I make it a habit to recall my past circumstances and compare them to my present. As a sophomore in high school, I was diagnosed with a lifelong, sometimes severe chronic disease, systemic lupus erythematosus. There have been many days, weeks, and months where my focus had to be on simply getting out of bed or getting out of the hospital. When I think about such times, doing what we social psychologists call “downward social comparison to my prior self,” I’m typically filled with gratitude that I can work at all. I find this is much more conducive to happiness and productivity than if I compared myself to someone else. Anyone can choose to compare their present circumstances to their past circumstances (rather than to others’ circumstances). We’ve all overcome tough times, especially during the pandemic. Actively pausing to reflect on resiliently living through such times is perhaps the best kind of social comparison our comparison-prone minds can make. “Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me smiles” — knowing that they’ve overcome something, too.

How can anthropologists take the paranormal seriously? It’s a question Jack Hunter has explored for years and one he addressed in a virtual Harvard talk on Tuesday.

The Welsh author and anthropologist, who studies consciousness, religion, ecology, and the paranormal, discussed his academic work and his own supernatural experiences with Giovanna Parmigiani, a lecturer on religion and cultural anthropology at the Divinity School and a scholar of contemporary paganisms. The conversation was sponsored by the Transcendence and Transformation initiative of the Center for the Study of World Religion.

Researchers who study the paranormal have long been eager to bring their work out of the domain of mysticism and religion and into the domain of the natural, said Hunter. By using the term “supernormal,” he said, early investigators were acknowledging that while the topic may not be typical, “it’s a normal part of the processes that go on in the world.”

Hunter’s own interest in the supernatural developed early on. Though raised to be a religious skeptic, he was always interested in miracles, saints, and relics, he said, and later had “some extraordinary experiences of my own.”

As a college student he became intrigued with what happens when you “treat these experiences seriously.” He found his answer while researching the Bristol Spirit Lodge, a center in Bristol, England, for the development of mediumship. During his first séance, he saw “this green mask appear over the face of the medium, and kind of slide down and just sort of dissipate.” Convinced he was hallucinating, Hunter said nothing. Later he was shocked when someone else mentioned the same green mask.

In a separate séance, he felt his hand “being pushed up by a balloon of air.”

“My left hand started to literally move around; it was almost as if it was waving. And I was in a strange state of mind, where I realized that, you know, I’m not consciously willing this to move — I don’t know what it means. It really freaked me out.”

What Hunter calls his “hand-possession experience,” convinced him that there is, at the very least, “an experiential origin to the belief in mediumship.”

“If you take that experience seriously in itself,” he added “then you have to take the other implications that go along with that as well, which may be that our standard models are limited, or they don’t cover everything that happens in the world.”

Hunter addressed the question of fakery among mediums, acknowledging the performative element of the practice. But being able to detect trickery in a séance, he said, “doesn’t mean that everything else is fake.”

On the question of how to study the paranormal anthropologically, Hunter said that his field has an advantage over others thanks to its emphasis on context.

“That’s what we need to understand these kinds of complex experiences,” he said. “The moment that we start to try to break them down and put them into a laboratory condition, remove them from the emotional, lived-world experience that they take place in naturally, then we’re kind of steering ourselves away from understanding them.”

Anthropologists, he added, engage with phenomena in ways sociologists or psychologists might avoid. “We’re encouraged to actually participate in rituals,” he said, “in order to understand them.”

It looks like fireflies flickering in the darkness. Slowly, more and more amass, lighting up the screen in large chunks and clusters.

But this is not a video about insects. It’s a simulation of the early universe, a time after the Big Bang when the cosmos transformed from a place of utter darkness to a radiant, light-filled environment.

The stunning video is part of a large suite of simulations described in a series of three papers accepted to the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Created by researchers at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, the simulations represent a monumental advancement in simulating the formation of the first galaxies and reionization — the process by which neutral hydrogen atoms in space were transformed into positively charged, or ionized, hydrogen, allowing light to spread throughout the universe.

The simulated period, known as the epoch of reionization, took place some 13 billion years ago and was challenging to reconstruct, as it involves immensely complicated, chaotic interactions, including those between gravity, gas and radiation, or light.

“Most astronomers don’t have labs to conduct experiments in. The scales of space and time are too large, so the only way we can do experiments is on computers,” explains Rahul Kannan, an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics and the lead author of the first paper in the series. “We are able to take basic physics equations and governing theoretical models to simulate what happened in the early universe.”

Throughout human history, most of our efforts to store information, from knots and oracle bones to bamboo markings and the written word, boil down to two techniques: using characters or shapes to represent information. Today, huge amounts of information are stored on silicon wafers with zeros and ones, but a new material at the border of quantum chemistry and quantum physics could enable vast improvements in storage.

Suyang Xu, assistant professor of chemical biology, is tying quantum mechanical “knots” in topological materials, which may be the key to unlocking the potential of quantum technologies to store and process vast arrays of information and bring game-changing advances in a variety of fields.

“Imagine a rope identified by a number of knots,” Xu said. “No matter how much the shape of the rope is changed, the number of knots — known as the topological number — cannot be changed without altering its fundamental identity by adding or undoing knots.” It is this robustness that potentially makes topological materials particularly useful.

Xu, who took his undergraduate degree in China, first encountered topological materials when he started graduate school in physics at Princeton in 2008 when the materials were first being created. Xu’s research interests involve electronic and optical properties in quantum matters, such as topological and broken symmetry states.

Topological materials move electrons along their surfaces and edges without any friction or loss, making them promising materials for super-high-speed electronics, like quantum computers. Such devices have the potential to be more powerful than existing computers because their quantum bits, referred to as “qubits,” take advantage of two properties of quantum states —superposition and entanglement — to encode information.

However, quantum states are delicate and when they are perturbed can lead to decoherence, falling out of sync and losing stored information. Because topological materials are robust and resist perturbation, they could be used to build more resilient and longer-lasting qubits.

Walk into Jacob Barandes’ new class and the topic of discussion might be a philosophical exploration of whether a cat could be simultaneously alive and dead. A visit on a different day may find the lecturer filling the blackboard with a mathematical equation that stretches 20 feet before continuing on a new line, over and over. Or students might be dissecting an example of classical physics such as Newton’s laws of motion.

So, exactly what kind of class is this?

It’s officially designated Physics 137, “Conceptual Foundations of Quantum Mechanics,” but it’s really part physics and part philosophy, with a hearty infusion of math and logic.

The subject sits within a much larger field called the philosophy of science, a branch of study that examines the theoretical foundations, methods, and implications of science in the real world. In this case, Barandes is applying the class’ inquiry to quantum theory.

“This is physics by scrutinizing,” said Barandes, who is also co-director of graduate studies for the Department of Physics. “This is taking our best scientific theories, dissecting them, disassembling them, looking at the pieces piece by piece, trying to understand them and how they fit together, and the larger wholes that they form.”

Quantum theory, which explains the nature and behavior of matter and energy on the atomic and subatomic levels, is often described as the best-tested and most predictive scientific theory out there, one that makes possible precision technology such as atomic clocks and particle accelerators. Much of our modern technology — including smartphones, lasers, LEDs, and MRI machines — relies on it.

But when it comes to painting a picture of the real world, quantum theory can feel unwieldy and counterintuitive. Take, for instance, the notion of particles being in more than one place at a time.

The class aims to explore why quantum theory contains so many strange and exotic mathematical structures and seemingly illogical possibilities and to get a sense of the different ways the world would appear depending on how aspects of the theory are interpreted.

It delves into the century-long effort to resolve these mysteries and hits on ideas from quantum theory like entanglement, superposition, and, of course, parallel universes and Schrödinger’s cat (both alive and dead in a box).

“[One of the goals is] to reformulate the classical picture as closely as we can to quantum theory so that we can pinpoint as precisely as possible what it is that we’re changing when we go from classical to the quantum case,” Barandes said.

What sets the class apart from many quantum physics courses is that this one is less about calculating numerical predictions and more about learning foundationally and logically how the theory works and what it tells us about the world around us. Through it all, students are encouraged to ask the ultimate philosophical question: Why?

At one recent class, for example, as Barandes was working through a quantum equation, a student’s hand shot up and Barandes was asked why he chose one specific example over another to illustrate the point of the lesson. The class then went into an extended debate over the logic behind that decision.

Lavanya Singh, a senior concentrating in computer science and philosophy, says this type of discussion usually wouldn’t happen in a more technically focused class.

“Why have we decided to model the system in this way? Why are these the operations we have chosen? What if we did it differently?” Singh said. “Those are usually questions that are not the point of a technical class, but in this class the [instructor] was really happy to entertain those questions because that is the point. The point is to understand why we are making the decisions that we are.”

Students say this level of understanding, especially when it comes to a theory as counterintuitive as quantum can be, is one of the main reasons they took the course.

In Steven Spielberg’s 1977 film “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” extraterrestrials communicate with humans through a catchy five-note sequence. In Spielberg’s 1982 blockbuster “E.T.,” a diminutive alien learns basic English from a children’s TV show. More recently, in 2016’s “Arrival,” squid-like visitors use pictograms to make themselves understood to American scientists wielding whiteboards with words.

But what would really happen if we made direct contact with an alien species? How would we recognize or interpret their intelligence, and what would we say? Those were just some of the questions discussed during a wide-ranging conversation Monday afternoon sponsored by Harvard’s Mind Brain Behavior Interfaculty Initiative and moderated by Edward J. Hall, Norman E. Vuilleumier Professor of Philosophy.

Using “Arrival” as a springboard, panelists Jesse Snedeker, a professor of psychology and expert in language comprehension, and Avi Loeb, an astrophysicist and author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Signs of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” (2021), examined the potential challenges we might face.

You’ve probably seen the video — or at least heard some chirpings about it.

Footage from a security camera in Cuauhtémoc, a city in Chihuahua, Mexico, shows a massive flock of migratory birds swooping down like a cloud of black smoke and crashing onto pavement and the roof of a house. While many of the yellow-headed blackbirds recovered, about 100 died.

Ever since the mass crash, on Feb. 7, viewers of the viral video have sought to explain what happened. Suggestions from scientists and anyone with a Twitter account have included: the birds were reacting to a predator, inhaled toxic fumes, were zapped by a power line, or became victims of electromagnetic interference. Some sleuths have floated 5G technology as the culprit.