You are offered a deal in which you are asked to flip a coin ten times. If any one of the flips comes up tails, you are swiftly and painlessly killed. If it comes up heads ten times in a row, you are given a banana. Do you take the deal?

For the purposes of this thought experiment, we may assume it is a perfectly fair coin, and that you like bananas, although not any more so than would generally be considered healthy. We may also assume for simplicity that your life or death is of absolutely no consequence to anyone but yourself: you live in secret on a deserted island, isolated from contact with the outside world, where you have everything you need other than bananas. We may finally assume that we know for certainty that there is no afterlife; upon death, you simply cease to exist in any form. So, there is an approximately 99.9% chance that you will be dead, which by hypothesis implies that you will feel no regrets or feelings of disappointment. And if you survive, you get a banana. What do you think?

Now change the experiment a little. Instead of flipping a coin, you measure the x-component of the spin of an electron that has been prepared in an eigenstate of the y-component of the spin; according to the rules of quantum mechanics, there is an even chance that you will measure the x-component of the spin to be up or down. You do this ten times, with ten different electrons, and are offered the same wager as before, with spin-up playing the role of “heads” for the coin. The only difference is that, instead of a classical probability, we are dealing with branching/collapsing wavefunctions. I.e., if you believe in something like the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, there will always be a branch of the wavefunction of the universe in which you continue to exist and now have a banana. Do you take the deal?

Lauren at Feministe talks about being a single teenage mom, getting through college, and becoming a teacher herself. You should read it.

When I was student teaching this past semester, battling my Basic students’ resistance to the educational process, I finally asked my students why some of them hadn’t opted for that alternative school from which I secretly graduated. It was a more organic layout, just a few hours a day, individual work toward short-term goals. For those who needed a more structured day, it wasn’t an option. But the rest of them. The rest of them considered it a cop-out. This surprised me. I figured that many of them would be attracted to an easy way out with the same ends as attending eight hours of high school a day. I wondered what they would think of me if I dropped the teacherly facade and was honest about my high school experience.

At one point I raised the risk level and revealed that I had been no model student in high school, that I thought many of them had what it takes to get through a four-year college, especially if I could do so. They laughed at me, accusing me of being some goody-two-shoes that had no idea about the difficulties of their lives. I didn’t tell them about the teenage pregnancy, or the criminal record, or the drugs, or the stay in juvenile hall, or the two trips to rehab, the years in AA. Sure, I don’t know the poverty, but I do know the expectations of failure. What I did say was that I was not a model student, that I had a past that was comparable to their present, and that I was within weeks of my degree. You can do it, I said. Trust me.

A while ago Mark posted about the fact that physicists come from quite diverse backgrounds, but a supportive environment is a common thread. Like Mark, I didn’t grow up in a high-powered intellectual environment, although it was basically middle-class; most of my family worked for U.S. Steel, my father was the first person in his family to get a college degree (my mother never did), and my parents divorced before I entered first grade. Graduated from a large public high school, got through college and grad school on fellowships. But I did receive support from all over, which is crucial to believing enough in yourself to ever try something as impractical as becoming a professor of theoretical physics.

My friends at Project Exploration specialize in taking underprivileged children and turning them on to learning by getting them interested in science. Roughly speaking, none of the kids who work with them would have expected to attend college, and all of them eventually do. One of the stories I’ve heard Gabe Lyon tell is the reaction of a group of inner-city kids to taking a long train ride out to Montana to dig for dinosaurs. All sorts of things to be excited about — train, dinosaurs, field trip. But here’s what they can’t get over: stars in the sky! Not something their familiar with from their everyday lives in Chicago.

Nobody pops out of the womb in possession of a complete skill set appropriate to tackling life’s challenges. A lot of kids in our country grow up in environments where looking at the stars, literally and figuratively, is not encouraged. Here’s hoping we find new ways to convince them that they can do it.

Some holiday frivolity for you. I’m a big fan of Yes‘s progressive-rock masterpiece Close to the Edge, but I’ll admit that I always presumed the lyrics were mostly nonsense. Not true! It turns out that every line is imbued with subtle and hermeneutically challenging messages, worthy of the closest of readings. Happily, such a reading has been provided by the Church of Yahweh (don’t ask). Here are the lyrics by Jon Anderson, Steve Howe, and Chris Squire; have a crack at interpreting them yourselves before peeking at the answers.

I. The Solid Time Of Change

A seasoned witch could call you from the depths of your disgrace,
And rearrange your liver to the solid mental grace,
And achieve it all with music that came quickly from afar,
Then taste the fruit of man recorded losing all against the hour.
And assessing points to nowhere, leading ev’ry single one.
A dewdrop can exalt us like the music of the sun,
And take away the plain in which we move,
And choose the course you’re running.
Down at the edge, round by the corner, not right away, not right away.

Crossed the line around the changes of the summer,
Reaching to call the color of the sky.
Passed around a moment clothed in mornings faster than we see.
Getting over all the time I had to worry,
Leaving all the changes far from far behind.
We relieve the tension only to find out the master’s name.

Down at the end, round by the corner.
Close to the edge, just by a river.
Seasons will pass you by.
I get up, I get down.
Now that it’s all over and done,
Now that you find, now that you’re whole.

II. Total Mass Retain

My eyes convinced, eclipsed with the younger moon attained with love.
It changed as almost strained amidst clear manna from above.
I crucified my hate and held the word within my hand.
There’s you, the time, the logic, or the reasons we don’t understand.

Sad courage claimed the victims standing still for all to see,
As armoured movers took approach to overlook the sea.
There since the cord, the license, or the reasons we understood will be.

Down at the edge, close by a river, close to the edge, round by the corner.

Sudden call shouldn’t take away the startled memory.
All in all, the journey takes you all the way.
As apart from any reality that you’ve ever seen and known.
Guessing problems only to deceive the mention,
Passing paths that climb halfway into the void.

As we cross from side to side, we hear the total mass retain.

Down at the edge, round by the corner, close to the end, down by a river.
Seasons will pass you by.
I get up, I get down.

III. I Get Up, I Get Down

In her white lace
You can clearly see the lady sadly looking.
Saying that she’d take the blame
For the crucifixion of her own domain.

I get up, I get down, I get up, I get down.
Two million people barely satisfy.
Two hundred women watch one woman cry, too late.
The eyes of honesty can achieve.
How many millions do we deceive each day?

Through the duty she would coil their said
amusement of her story asking only interest
could be laid upon the children of her domain

I get up, I get down, I get up, I get down.

In charge of who is there in charge of me.
Do I look on blindly and say I see the way?
The truth is written all along the page.
How old will I be before I come of age for you?
I get up, I get down.

IV. Seasons Of Man

The time between the notes relates the color to the scenes.
A constant vogue of triumphs dislocate man, so it seems.
And space between the focus shape ascend knowledge of love.
As song and chance develop time, lost social temp’rance rules above.

Then according to the man who showed his outstretched arm to space,
He turned around and pointed, revealing all the human race.
I shook my head and smiled a whisper, knowing all about the place.
On the hill we viewed the silence of the valley,
Called to witness cycles only of the past.
And we reach all this with movements in between the said remark.

Close to the edge, down by the river.
Down at the end, round by the corner.
Seasons will pass you by,
Now that it’s all over and done,
Called to the seed, right to the sun.
Now that you find, now that you’re whole.
Seasons will pass you by,
I get up, I get down.

Well, it’s about half way through the time that I might generously include in “the Holiday period” and I must say that, as usual, I’m loving it. So long as religion doesn’t get in the way of the rampant commercialism and overindulgence that give the Holidays true meaning, I’m a very happy camper at this time of year.

Yes, it’s true, I love the presents – that’s a given. But what I really enjoy is the extra time afforded by a few weeks without teaching or any kind of administrative meetings or responsibilities. Don’t get me wrong; these are important and usually interesting and rewarding parts of my job. But from time to time something needs to give to provide a little breathing room, and at this time of year these things just naturally cease for a short while.

So what am I doing with the extra time? Well, my goal is to get myself in the state of mind so that I can really hit the ground running in the New Year, relaxed and rejuvenated and ready to make lots of progress on all the different things I’m involved with. For a start, I genuinely took a few days completely off. By this I mean that, apart from glancing at email a few times a day to make sure there wasn’t anything absolutely essential to deal with, I did nothing at all associated with being a physicist or a Professor for about three days. This is already something that some physicists would see as a lack of commitment, but I insist that it constitutes an investment that will pay off in the quality of work I do and my improved focus when I get back to my usual schedule.

The rest of the time I’ve been getting a few hours a day of real work done – completing work on a couple of drafts of papers; editing a long white paper I’m working on, in preparation for an associated teleconference tomorrow; preparing some information requested by my grant manager at NSF; prepping for the start of classes; and several other things. But I’ve also been doing plenty of things that are just plain fun.

I’ve been spending long, enjoyable evenings with my wife and with friends. I’ve been reading, playing scrabble, cooking, eating, and drinking. On Christmas day I had sausage rolls (cooked by a wonderful friend who is also from the North of England) and some fine champagne. Later, Sara and I went to a lovely dinner with sixteen other people, hosted by two of my good friends who are also colleagues. On Boxing day Sara and I had a fantastic pork dinner (including lots of crackling – look it up if you have to) with the same sausage-roll friends, and yesterday I spent the afternoon cooking great soups out of a cook book I received as a present. Tomorrow I’m hosting a poker game and on Friday evening one of my best friends is arriving from Providence to spend the New Year’s weekend with us. I’ve had tremendous food, some lovely and interesting wine, and lots and lots of great company – a truly enjoyable time.

But I’m not just telling you this because I think you’ll get a kick out of my festivities (although if you do – good for you!). What I really want to get across is that I think it is extremely important for academics to relax and spend some time away from their work on occasion. Before I get going, I should make it clear that I’m not suggesting people do what I do, rather that they spend time doing whatever it is that they love to do that isn’t work. And I’m really only speaking with confidence about what I know best – theoretical physicists – although I suspect something similar would apply equally well to other academic disciplines.

I’ve mentioned before that one thing that struck me when I moved to the US was the diametrically opposite public attitudes taken by academics towards their schedules. While I have no idea who works the most, the style (at least as I remember it) in England is to act as if one does hardly any work, and then to be even more impressive because one manages to be successful with that schedule. On the other hand, in the US it is usual to claim to work as many crazy hours as one can, so as to be sure to be seen as dedicated to the subject. In reality academics on both sides of the pond work extremely hard, but nevertheless, the public faces are starkly different.

In the US, where I have most experience, a phenomenon that is perhaps associated with this is that academics seem to feel great pressure never to take time off work unless, for example, it is associated with a family emergency which, let’s face it, isn’t going to count as relaxing.

From my point of view this is extremely unhealthy, and is an attitude we should do everything we can to dispel in our graduate students and postdocs. These young researchers get their ideas about a healthy schedule from, at least in large part, their mentors. It is our job to provide them with an appropriate lens through which to view the attitudes they encounter in the wider academic community.

We don’t work on an assembly line, so the sheer number of hours spent on physics does not necessarily translate into correspondingly more good physics. I’m certainly not trying to imply that our work isn’t highly enjoyable and rewarding. But our work is, at its heart, creative, and more than anything we need quality time to spend on physics. And by this I partly mean time during which we feel relaxed, well rested and unstressed. Taking time in one’s life to ensure that this is possible is very important and, I think, will help you do better physics.

Certainly there will be people reading this and thinking “That’s easy for you to say – you’ve got a job”, or “That’s all well and good if you’ve got tenure”. But the truth is that I’ve been going on about this since I was a graduate student, and have always given this advice to postdocs and graduate students. I certainly realize the stress that postdocs are under. There are other stresses as a faculty member (untenured and then tenured), and different ones again as a graduate student. However, this is precisely why I think the advice is so important. This stress can be quite unhealthy, and if you don’t occasionally take time away from your crazy schedules, you risk never doing the work that helps you achieve what you want to with your career.

The bottom line is that, in my experience, one will in general be healthier, happier, and more successful if one takes reasonable amounts of time away from work, doing whatever helps you to relax. Don’t let the culture of crazy work schedules and macho bragging about them drive you to unhealthy practices. Find out what works for you and, as long as it isn’t clearly unreasonable, stick with it, and explain that to anyone who tries to persuade you not to.

Happy New Year Everyone!

I was never a big Bill Clinton fan — so much ability squandered on just keeping himself afloat, no willingness to take a tough stand on principle alone. But he did have his charms. Here’s Gabriel García Márquez, describing a dinner with William Styron, Carlos Fuentes, and Clinton:

When we asked him what he was reading, he sighed and mentioned a book on the economic wars of the future, author and title unknown to me.

“Better to read ‘Don Quixote,’” I said to him. “Everything’s in there.” Now, the ‘Quixote’ is a book that is not read nearly as much as is claimed, although very few will admit to not having read it. With two or three quotes, Clinton showed that he knew it very well indeed. Responding, he asked us what our favorite books were. Styron said his was “Huckleberry Finn.”

I would have said “Oedipus Rex,” which has been my bed table book for the last 20 years, but I named “The Count of Monte Cristo,” mainly for reasons of technique, which I had some trouble explaining.

Clinton said his was the “Meditations of Marcus Aurelius,” and Carlos Fuentes stuck loyally to “Absalom, Absalom,” Faulkner’s stellar novel, no question, although others would choose “Light in August” for purely personal reasons. Clinton, in homage to Faulkner, got to his feet and, pacing around the table, recited from memory Benji’s monologue, the most thrilling passage, and perhaps the most hermetic, from “The Sound and the Fury.”

The resemblance to GW Bush is uncanny! He’s an avid reader too. Really!

Adam Felber is not feeling the Christmas spirit.

And I started thinking about Christmas, and I realized that somehow I no longer thought highly of Jesus. Examining it, I realize that it’s because of a lot of very recent things. It’s because of Bill O’Reilly and his Fox News cronies yelling about the “War on Christmas.” It’s because of an increasingly loud and angry bunch of Jesus fans who seem to have jettisoned the whole tolerance-and-peace thing in favor of getting Jesus into as many public places as possible as though there was little difference between a cross and a Nike swoosh. It’s because of a President who clearly sees our current war as the struggle between the Friends of Jesus and the Friends of Mohammed, as though there were no other teams and as though that conflict was the same as one between God and Satan or Good and Evil. When presidents go to war for Jesus, when preachers call for political assassinations, when America’s undisputed top-dog religion starts acting like a bat-worshipping cult lobbying for its first tax exemption… well, it gets harder and harder to feel any affection for the team mascot.

I’m very much anti-religion in the sense that I think it’s a mistake; it’s just not a correct way of thinking about our universe. But for the most part I’m pretty neutral on whether or not religion’s overall impact is good or bad. It’s obviously extremely influential (which is why it’s worth explaining over and over why it’s not right), but the influences for good and the influences for bad are both so dramatic that it’s hard to do an accuate accounting. I like the music and the art, and I am sincerely appreciative of the community-building and charitable aspects of religion. I’m not so fond of the twisted sexual morality and warlike fanaticism that is often part of the package.

But Felber’s right that the obnoxious aspects of religion, or at least of Christianity, are momentarily ascendant. I’ve never been sympathetic to claims along the lines of “Jesus was a wonderful guy, even if his followers are occasionally problematic.” Jesus died two thousand years ago, without leaving any writings of his own or even any first-person account of his teachings, and claims about who truly understands him have been going on ever since. Jesus is nothing but the actions of his followers, and they’ve been quite a turn-off lately.

Matthew 5:43-45:

Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy.

But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you;

That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.

Modern interpretation:

You know, I don’t know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he thinks we’re trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It’s a whole lot cheaper than starting a war.

Or:

I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America, I point the finger in their face and say: you helped this [Sept. 11th] happen.

Or:

“Did God have anything to do with Katrina?,” people ask. My answer is, he allowed it and perhaps he allowed it to get our attention so that we don’t delude ourselves into thinking that all we have to do is put things back the way they were and life will be normal again.

Or simply:

[I]f you are really offended, you gotta go to Israel.

A thousand years from now, the twentieth century will be remembered as the time when we discovered quantum mechanics. Forget wars, computers, bombs, cars and airplanes: quantum mechanics is a deep truth that will continue to be a part of our understanding of the universe into the foreseeable future.

So it’s kind of embarassing that we still don’t understand it. Unlike relativity, which seems complicated but is actually quite crystal clear when you get to know it, quantum mechanics remains somewhat mysterious despite its many empirical successes, as Dennis Overbye writes in today’s New York Times.

Don’t get me wrong: we can use quantum mechanics quite fearlessly, making predictions that are tested to the twelfth decimal place. And we even understand the deep difference between quantum mechanics and its predecessor, classical (Newtonian) mechanics. In classical mechanics, any system is described by some set of quantities (such as the position and velocity), and we can imagine careful experiments that measure these quantities with arbitrary precision. The fundamentally new idea in quantum mechanics is that what we can observe is only a small fraction of what really exists. We think there is an electron with a position and a velocity, because that’s what we can observe; but what exists is a wavefunction that tells us the probability of various outcomes when we make such a measurement. There is no such thing as “where the electron really is,” there is only a wavefunction that tells us the relatively likelihood of observing it to be in different places.

What we don’t understand is what that word “observing” really means. What happens when we observe something? I don’t claim to have the answer; I have my half-baked ideas, but I’m still working through David Albert’s book and my ideas are not yet firm convictions. It’s interesting to note that some very smart people (like Tony Leggett) are sufficiently troubled by the implications of conventional quantum mechanics that they are willing to contemplate dramatic changes in the basic framework of our current picture. The real trouble is that you can’t address the measurement problem without talking about what constitutes an “observer,” and then you get into all these problematic notions of consciousness and other issues that physicists would just as soon try to avoid whenever possible.

I feel strongly that every educated person should understand the basic outline of quantum mechanics. That is, anyone with a college degree should, when asked “what’s the difference between classical mechanics and quantum mechanics?”, be able to say “in classical mechanics we can observe the state of the system to arbitrary accuracy, whereas in quantum mechanics we can only observe certain limited properties of the wave function.” It’s not too much to ask, I think. It would also be great if everyone could explain the distinction between bosons and fermions. Someday I will write a very short book that explains the major laws of modern physics — special relativity, general relativity, quantum mechanics, and the Standard Model of particle physics — in bite-sized pieces that anyone can understand. If it sells as many copies as On Bullshit, I’ll be quite happy.

This famous photograph was taken on Christmas Eve, 1968, by Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders. It’s usually rotated by 90 degrees, but apparently this view is what Anders actually saw. (Don’t ask me how they know that.)

Peace on this tiny little ball!

Science magazine has presented its list of the top scientific breakthroughs of 2005. The list, as cribbed from the BBC website, is

• Winner: Evolution in action. Genome sequencing and painstaking field observations shed light on the intricacies of how evolution works.
• Runner up: Planetary blitz. Europe’s Huygens probe touched down on Saturn’s moon Titan in January. It was joined by a fleet of other explorers, including Nasa’s Deep Impact, which smashed a hole in a comet.
• In bloom. Molecular biologists pinned down several of the molecular cues responsible for spring’s vibrant burst of colour.
• Neutron stars. Satellites and ground telescopes shed light on the violent behaviour of neutron stars; city-sized corpses of stars that pack matter into an extreme state.
• Miswiring the brain. Researchers gained clues about the mechanisms of disorders such as schizophrenia, dyslexia and Tourrete’s syndrome.
• Complicated Earth. Comparisons of rocks from Earth and outer space forced scientists to scrap long-held views of how our planet formed.
• Protein portrait. Scientists got their best look yet at the molecular structure of a voltage-gated potassium channel.
• Change of climate. More evidence implicating human activities in global warming was presented, the magazine said.
• Systems biology. Molecular biologists are looking to engineering in order to understand the behaviour of complex systems.
• Bienvenue Iter. After 18 months of wrangling, the $12bn International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (Iter) got a home: Cadarache in France.

There’s some great stuff in here, but I am delighted that evolution sits at the top of the list. It’s not that I think that the greatest scientific results in 2005 necessarily came from biology – any choice for this spot would be debatable in any year. But given the orchestrated political and religious assault on this pillar of modern biology, I’m grateful for any opportunity to make it clear that evolution is one of the most experimentally established and successful scientific theories there are.

The magazine highlighted several specific evolutionary advances for which the number one slot was awarded, including

the sequencing of the chimpanzee genome; recreation of the 1918 flu virus in a laboratory; and a study on European blackcap birds which demonstrated how two different populations can become two separate species.

I’d agree that these achievements can compete with those from any field of science over the last year, but I suspect that the following was important in choosing a winner

Colin Norman, news editor of Science, said the choice was based solely on the merits of the research, not the battle over intelligent design.

“I suppose if [that debate] influenced us at all, it was in the realisation that scientists tend to take for granted that evolution underpins modern biology,” he told the BBC News website.

“The arguments about intelligent design just made us a little bit more aware of it.”

Mr Norman said he hoped the choice would send a message to scientists and the public: “Evolution is not just something that scientists study as an esoteric enterprise,” he explained.

“It has very important implications for public health and for our understanding of who we are.”

I particularly liked that planetary probes, and specifically Huygens, earned second place. Like most physicists, I am in awe of the remarkable science that robotic space missions can perform. The payoff for the amount of money required makes them clearly the way to move forward with science in space, although this is at stark odds with recent political decisions regarding NASA.

Planetary science aside though, there’s another reason I’m impressed by the Cassini mission (of which Huygens is a part). As you might imagine, communications with a spacecraft across large distances within the solar system, require scientists to take account of the subtle effects of General Relativity, which governs the paths (geodesics) that radio waves take as they travel between Earth and Cassini.

In fact, the timing of such signals is exquisitely sensitive to differences between the predictions of General Relativity, and those of theories involving even small modifications. As an example, Brans-Dicke theories, which are a particular example of scalar-tensor theories of gravity, involve a dimensionless parameter, omega, which is a measure of the deviation from GR. Only for omega=infinity is GR recovered. Before the Cassini mission, experiments bounded omega>3500. The timing of signals between Earth and Cassini improved this bound to around omega>40,000, which is a remarkable result. This new measurement has actually been quite important for several projects I’ve been involved with in the last couple of years.

Anyway, I encourage you to enjoy the list, take a look at the video presentation about the winner and listen to the podcasts about the runners up.

‘Tis the season to celebrate great science – Happy Holidays to you all.

Count me among the staunchly pro-Christmas atheists. I may not be religious, but I’m all about the loot. If the price of getting presents is the ostentatious display of a few borrowed pagan images around Winter Solstice time, I can deal.

So our gift from Cosmic Variance to you is — new blogs! New to us, anyway. First up is inkycircus, a very fun site from three British journalists who are in the process of starting their own science magazine (found at Element list). The twist is that Anne, Katie and Anna are all women, and seem to be having a great time with the whole operation. (Men would feel the pressure to be all ponderous and serious-sounding, if I may venture an unsupported generalization.) My favorite category of post is men whose babies we want to bear, even if it is somewhat unrepresentative of the larger project and despite the fact that Jon Stewart makes the list and I don’t.

The other new site worth checking out is systemic by Greg Laughlin, discussing the search for extrasolar planets. (“systemic” is the name of a Java applet for analyzing data collected in the search for such planets.) In addition to cool science, it’s full of great images like the one at left. Unfortunately this is a map of light pollution in the vicinity of Lick Observatory (see the Bay Area coastline outlined in white?), but it’s still a great image.

Finally, I note that Cosmic Variance is currently ranked 374th in the Truth Laid Bear ecosystem traffic rankings, one slot above HorsesAss.Org. Draw your own conclusions.

Happy holidays, everyone.