Blogs / Cosmic Variance

Well, I found a new job, moved across the country, and got engaged. What did you do this year? (On the other hand, I finished an anomalously low number of actual research papers. That should change in 2007, as I’m settled down and back in a groove.)

One of the nice things about 2006 (broadly construed) was that I got to meet a lot of people in person whom I had first come to know through their bloggy internet manifestations. So I thought I would share with you the inside scoop on some of the personas behind the web pages.

• PZ Myers of Pharyngula — I was expecting a mild-mannered Midwestern biology professor, and here it turns out he’s a fire-breathing atheist! Who knew?
• Melissa McEwan of Shakespeare’s Sister — from the blog you’d think she was a kind soul with a soft spot for Al Gore and a mysterious ability to inspire talented individualists into productive group action. Right you are!
• Rob Knop of Galactic Interactions — rumored to ride a unicycle into work. Rumors are always true. He totally should have won.
• Bitch Ph.D. of the eponymous pseudonymous blog — red-haired, beautiful, juggles multiple men while raising precocious child. And has a Ph.D.! You are right to be afraid.
• Chris Mooney of The Intersection — young, intense, focused on saving the world. Thank goodness somebody is.
• Eszter Hargittai of Crooked Timber — much taller in real life than on the internet! Has been known to put orange juice in the microwave oven.
• Dan Drezner of the eponymous blog — like me, booted out of the UofC under inexplicable circumstances. Understands what it’s like to be written about in major news media for reasons other than the reasons you’d really like to be written about.
• Jennifer Ouellette of Cocktail Party Physics — she seems nice.
• Lindsay Beyerstein of Majikthise — shorter in real life than on the internet! Of course, on the internet she is a towering figure, far beyond what seems appropriate in one so young.
• Michael Bérubé of the eponymous blog — who knows? He speaks in a rapid stream of French and Latin puns. But I have the vague impression that he is as engaging and impressive in person as you might surmise from the virtual persona.

And here, in traditional year-ending list-making style, are some of my favorite posts from the year past. Feel free to mention your own, in the unlikely event that I’ve missed something really good. And my lazy good-for-nothing co-bloggers are welcome to choose their own!

• Is This a Date?
• Quantum Interrogation
• Everything I Know About the Universe I Did Not Learn From Newspaper Headlines
• The Wrongness Singularity
• People Fusion
• The Universe is Structured Like a Language
• Feminism: Destroying the Planet
• The String Theory Backlash
• Summer School
• Boltzmann’s Anthropic Brain
• Lessons From Monopoly
• Rapped on the Head by Creationists
• Liquid
• Dark Matter Exists
• The Trouble With Physics
• The God Conundrum

You’ll notice that I couldn’t limit myself to the traditional just one per month. Count yourselves lucky that I resisted the temptation to list them all.

Here’s to a joyous and interconnected 2007!

NASA is sad. (Via Orin Kerr.) They have a spiffy new mission to go to the Moon, which speaks directly to our innermost yearnings to leverage our capabilities and energize a coordinated effort. Really, the kind of stuff that makes us truly human.

If anyone should be excited by this, it’s the two groups NASA cares about the most: young adults, and members of Congress.

At an October workshop attended by 80 NASA message spinners, young adults were right up there with Congress as the top two priorities for NASA’s strategic communications efforts.

But the target audience is not going along!

Young Americans have high levels of apathy about NASA’s new vision of sending astronauts back to the moon by 2017 and eventually on to Mars, recent surveys show.

Concerned about this lack of interest, NASA’s image-makers are taking a hard look at how to win over the young generation — media-saturated teens and 20-somethings growing up on YouTube and Google and largely indifferent to manned space flight.

So apparently, we blame the internets. The leap from media-saturation to Moon-apathy seems a bit of a stretch to me, but I understand that one must blame somebody. I blame the fact that the Moon/Mars initiative is eviscerating honest science at NASA, and also that “we must get there before the Chinese do” doesn’t currently evoke the “we must get there before the Soviets do” xenophobia that was so effective in the Sixties.

But we shouldn’t fear, as there is a solution for the frustrating indifference shown by those lazy kids today: celebrity endorsements.

Tactics encouraged by the workshop included new forms of communication, such as podcasts and YouTube; enlisting support from celebrities, like actors David Duchovny (”X-Files”) and Patrick Stewart (”Star Trek: The Next Generation”); forming partnerships with youth-oriented media such as MTV or sports events such as the Olympics and NASCAR; and developing brand placement in the movie industry.

Outside groups have offered ideas too, such as making it a priority to shape the right message about the next-generation Orion missions.

And NASA should take a hint from Hollywood, some suggested.

“The American public engages with issues through people, personalities, celebrities, whatever,” said George Whitesides, executive director of the National Space Society, a space advocacy group. “When you don’t have that kind of personality, or face, or faces associated with your issue, it’s a little bit harder for the public to connect.”

I understand that the X-Files and ST:TNG are the hot media properties on the streets these days. Never let it be said that NASA’s instinctive feel for the cutting edge of coolness is anything other than maximally supa-fresh.

If I may humbly offer a suggestion. It’s possible that youthful apathy towards the promise of a Moon base is not due to a short-circuit of wonder caused by too-easy access to YouTube videos. It might be, instead, that this apathy is due to the complete absence of any compelling rationale for spending hundreds of billions of dollars on this project. Perhaps we could return to a management philosophy in which we first hit upon a really good reason for doing something, and then we figure out how to do it and work on spreading the excitement, rather than the reverse order. Maybe — just maybe — those kids today are sophisticated enough not to get excited by boondoggles, but they might actually be enthusiastic about learning surprising new things about the universe.

I want to believe.

Quadruple digits! Yes, this is our 1000^th post here at Cosmic Variance. In honor of which we will — well, nothing special. But I will indulge in some shameless pluggery.

Today, you see, is the official publication date of The Physics of the Buffyverse, by the blogosphere’s own Jennifer Ouellette. I’m not going to offer a proper review of the book, because (1) I’ve only had a chance to skim it thus far, and (2) the author bakes me scones, which is a conflict of interest if ever I’ve seen one. But you could do a lot worse than buying a few copies for yourself and all your friends, let me assure you.

The construction of the title — The [field of academic inquiry] of [product of human imagination] — is by now well-known, inspired in large part by Lawrence Krauss’s The Physics of Star Trek. (In addition to the Physics, we’ve learned about the Ethics, the Art, the Computers, the Religions, and the Metaphysics of Star Trek, as well as corresponding studies of Star Wars, Harry Potter, and so on.) And as long as it’s been in circulation, the idea of subjecting TV shows or fantasy genres to scientific investigation has been the target of scoffing from curmudgeonly old folks who are taking a temporary break from chasing kids out of their yards. After all, they will tell you, how can you learn anything about science by studying fiction? Science is all about the real world! It has nothing to say about fake worlds that someone just made up.

Balderdash, of course. Neither physics, nor any other science, is some list of facts and theories to be committed to memory. There are a bunch of established pieces of knowledge that are worth remembering, no doubt about that, but much more important is the process by which that knowledge is acquired. And that process is just as applicable to imaginary worlds as it is to the real one. Any respectable universe, whether we find it out there or make it up ourselves, will be subject to certain internal rules of behavior. (When it comes to fiction, those rules are occasionally sacrificed for the sake of the plot, whereas in the real world they’re a bit more immutable.) Learning how to discover those rules, from the standpoint of an observer rather than one of the creators, is nothing more or less than learning how science is done.

I’ve long thought that video games would be a great way to teach the scientific method to kids. They’re playing them anyway — why not think of it as collecting data? The other day Seed’s Daily Zeitgeist linked to this gravity game.

Your job is to give initial conditions (position and velocity) to a little test body, which then moves around under the gravitational field of various heavier bodies, with the goal being to survive for as long as possible without colliding with one of the planets. But the “laws of gravity” certainly aren’t the ones that Newton came up with, as a bit of experimentation shows; for one thing, orbits around just one planet don’t describe conic sections, they decay in spirals. So what are the laws? Does the strength of gravity obey something other than the familiar inverse-square law? Or is there dissipation? Are energy and angular momentum conserved? Even better, is there some definition of “energy” and “angular momentum” such that they are conserved? What about those boundary conditions at the edges of the box? They are in some sense reflective, but the magnitude of momentum certainly isn’t conserved — what’s the rule? We know in this case that there certainly are hard-and-fast rules, as the programmers put them into the code. I would love to see kids in science classes using a game like this as a miniature “laboratory,” in which they designed experiments to test different hypotheses they came up with.

Somewhat more complex is N, the ninja game from metanet.

Here the physics is substantially richer. You are a tiny ninja, whose job is to jump around and avoid threats while doing what it takes to open a door and escape within a specified time limit. But, being a ninja, you have unusual powers — including the ability to alter your center-of-mass momentum in midair by sheer force of will. So: is the trajectory of the ninja uniquely defined by its initial data? Are there any conserved quantities? Are the laws of motion isotropic — are the rules governing left-right motion the same as those governing up-down motion? Can the ability to stick to walls be described in terms of a coefficient of friction? You can be killed by smashing into a wall or floor too quickly — but the allowed velocity depends on the angle of impact. So what quantity is to be calculated to determine whether a landing is safe or not?

You get the point. Those of us who have become enchanted by science see the world as a giant puzzle, and our “job” is to unravel its secrets. The universe is a giant video game that a few of us get to play all the time. Yet somehow we manage to give everyone else the impression that it’s all about pulleys and inclined planes. If we can enlist the help of some imaginary characters — whether Spock or Spike — in illustrating the excitement of science, we’ll have achieved something very real indeed.

Happy Quasi-Religious but Mostly-Secular Holiday with Pagan Origins, everybody! We’ll be back with our regularly scheduled hardnosed blogging — and a numerological milestone! — come Boxing Day.

Scott Aaronson, well-known around these parts for thinking that a priori constraints on conversations with super-intelligent aliens are more important insights into the fundamental workings of the universe than dark energy and the holographic principle, is suffering from a bit of Stockholm syndrome. He has visited the Stanford high-energy theory group (intellectual hotbed of aggressive Landscapism), given an interesting talk on Computational Complexity and the Anthropic Principle, and discovered to his bemusement that string theorists are quite open-minded and reasonable people! When faced with an interesting new idea, they are even willing to consider it! And their objections to Loop Quantum Gravity seem to be based on physics, rather than just prejudice! Who would have thought? (Also linked from Not Even Wrong.)

So now, unable to choose sides in the Wars based on the likeability of the combatants, he’s offering his services to the highest bidder. Whoever offers him the best reimbursements, he’ll gladly shill for their viewpoint, at least temporarily. Why didn’t I think of this? Well, Scott, I can’t offer any hard cash, but I can promise that you’ll be treated even better when you visit Caltech than when you visited Stanford. (Even if you do think you are the second-funniest physics blogger.) We’re much more fun than those Northern Californians.

My real reason for blogging about this, however, is to get on the record that the phrase “The String Wars” is totally mine. I used it in an email, and George Johnson picked it up for his KITP discussions. It’s much more fun than the milqetoasty “String Debates” occasionally favored by those who prefer substantive engagement to showy fireworks. So anyone who makes any money off of this phrase, I want half.

From Paul Kedrosky, via Rebecca Blood, an excellent challenge:

Physicist Richard Feynman once said that if all knowledge about physics was about to expire the one sentence he would tell the future is that “Everything is made of atoms”. What one sentence would you tell the future about your own area, whether it’s entrepreneurship, hedge funds, venture capital, or something else?

Examples: An economist might say that “People respond to incentives”. I had an engineering professor years ago who said all of that field could be reduced to “F=MA and you can’t push on a rope”.

There’s lots of good and diverse responses out there…

People power culture with the tools they have at hand.
The future is built by the curious — the people who take things apart and figure out how they work, figure out better ways of using a system, and explore how to make new things fit together in unexpected ways.
The only freedom that can never be taken away from us (and hence our only area of true control) is our response to a situation.
The Secret to Existance is Movement.
Whatever else you do, don’t skimp on backups or fire extinguishers.

This actually relates to a project I’ve been thinking about a bit, which maybe I’ll say more about later. Anyways, here’s my summary of the Universe in a sentence.

The Universe began, about 13.7 billion years ago, as a hot, dense soup of elementary particles, and has been expanding, cooling, and clumping ever since.

Readers, what’s your sentence? (Not limited to physics, of course!)

Yeah, I already used this title once before. It’s a good title, okay? Cut me a little holiday slack here.

By way of slightly-warmed-over blogging, I present to you the slides from a talk I gave a few weeks ago at Villanova, my undergrad alma mater. The original mandate was to talk about scientific literacy to a collection of undergrads, but I didn’t know how to make that fascinating. So I took it to the next level and went a bit meta, talking about the way science works. It was at a fairly abstract level — I didn’t go into building detectors, and error bars, or anything like that — but not too highbrow philosophy-of-sciencey — I didn’t get into Kuhn vs. Popper, much less Feyerabend or the Strong Programme, although you’ll find touches here and there.

To bring things down to earth (relatively speaking), most of the talk consisted of an extended look at the battle between “dark matter” and “modified gravity.” It goes all the way back to Leverrier and the discovery of Neptune, whose existence was inferred via its gravitational tug on the orbit of Uranus. Neptune was the first successful prediction of dark matter — some unseen substance whose existence is revealed by its gravitational influence. Leverrier tried again with the similarly-discrepant orbit of Mercury, positing a planet called Vulcan; but this time it turned out that gravity itself was the culprit, after Einstein showed that general relativity correctly accounted for the precession of Mercury’s orbit. So the lesson from history is — different ideas work in different circumstances. Keep an open mind until the data come down on one side or another. (And once they do, admit it.)

Today, of course, we’re dealing with an analogous problem, given that 25% of the universe is apparently some kind of dark matter that doesn’t fit into the Standard Model of particle physics, and 70% is some kind of dark energy that is even more mysterious. Modified gravity might be at work here as well, and I talked about the prospects.

Along the way, I drew out some of the lessons about how science works that these various investigations have taught us. I intentionally did not try to wrap it all up with a neat bow into a catch-all philosophy of science, as I think the reality is kind of messy, and it’s worth admitting that. The closest I came was the famous quote from Professor Rumsfeld, previously shared. This led to a series of cautionary homilies warning against misuse of the hypothesis-testing nature of scientific inquiry. The truth is, scientific knowledge is inevitably tentative, not metaphysically certain. But that doesn’t mean that anything goes — some things we really do understand! So I cautioned against various mistakes, using perpetual-motion machines, Intelligent Design, and What the Bleep Do We Know as good examples of what not to do.

In her post below, JoAnne refers to “the real world” in the literally accurate sense — the physical reality that exists independently of our understanding, in contrast to the tentative frameworks put forward by theorists as hypothetical models of that reality. But there’s a more metaphorical sense in which physicists (and academics more broadly) use the phrase “the real world” — to refer to the socio-economic milieu peopled by those outside the academy. We say things like “she spent a couple of years in the real world before going to grad school,” or “most of the time I hang out with physicists, but I do have some friends in the real world.”

I figure we can’t be the only people who talk this way. Professional actors or musicians (I’m guessing, and would love to hear confirmation/refutation) might think of themselves as being distinct from “the real world,” as might people serving in the military, or working in politics. We have the idea that certain kinds of lifestyles are stereotypically “real,” while others are somehow in a separate zone. And it’s generally a point of pride to consider one’s self and colleagues as non-real — we are privileged enough to operate outside the petty concerns of conventional reality, concentrating our powers on esoteric specialties with petty concerns of our own.

So, is there a flipside to this, with a corresponding feeling of pride? That is, are there occupations or milieux that think of themselves as quintessentially “real,” and wouldn’t have it any other way? (Presumably ones where people don’t babble on about “milieux.”) My many non-physicists friends are generally happily cocooned in lifestyles that are just as non-real-world as mine, so I don’t have much data here.

David Sklansky, well-known poker theorist, is challenging Christian fundamentalists to a battle of standardized-test-taking skills! (Via Unscrewing the Incrutable and Cynical-C.)

This is an open challenge to any American citizen who passes a lie detector test that I will specify in a moment.

We will both take the math SAT or GRE (aptidude test). Your choice. We will both have only half the normally allotted time to lessen the chances of a perfect score. Lower score pays higher score $50,000.

To qualify you must take a reputable polygraph that proclaims you are truthful when you state that:

1. You are at least 95% sure that Jesus Christ came back from the dead.

AND

2. You are at least 95% sure that adults who die with the specific belief that Jesus probably wasn’t ressurected will not go to heaven.

If you pass the polygraph you can bet me on the SAT or GRE. Again this is open to ANY one of the 300 million Americans.

Also, for those who think I am being disengenuous because I would make the offer to anyone at all, you are wrong. I am now so rusty that at least one in 5000 Americans are favored over me and I would pass on a bet with them. That’s 60,000 people. If the number of people who would pass that polygraph is between 10 and 30 million, which I think it is, that means that at least 2000 of these types of Christians are smart enough to be favored over me. Given such Christian’s intelligence is distributed like other American’s are.

But I’m betting fifty grand they are not. Their beliefs make them relatively stupid (or uninterested in learning). Or only relatively stupid people can come to such beliefs. One or the other. That is my contention. And this challenge might help demonstrate that.

(I’d feel better about Sklansky’s chances if he knew how to spell “resurrected” — good thing he’s sticking to the math test.)

This sounds like an interesting way to get publicity, but the theory behind it is kind of … dumb. It relies on the idea that there is some unitary thing called “intelligence” that correlates in some simple way with both test-taking skills and religious beliefs. If only it were anywhere near that simple.

Assume for the moment that belief in the literal resurrection of Jesus really does indicate a certain amount of credulity, lack of critical thinking, etc. (Obviously not an unproblematic assumption, but let’s grant that it’s true for the sake of argument.) Why in the world would that be inconsistent with being a math prodigy? The human mind is a funny, complicated thing. There are extraordinarily basic mathematical calculations — taking the square root of a fifty-digit number comes to mind — at which a pocket calculator will always do much better than any human being. Yet if you asked the calculator to invent a theory of gravity based on special relativity and the Principle of Equivalence, it wouldn’t get very far.

Some people (and physicists are among the most guilty, for obvious reasons) seem to think that the ability to do math is the quintessential expression of “intelligence,” from which all other reasoning skills flow. If that were true, scientists and mathematicians would make the best poets, statesmen, artists, and conversationalists. And faculty meetings at top-ranked physics departments would be paradigms of reasonable discussion undistorted by petty jealousies and irrational commitments. Suffice it to say, the evidence is running strongly against. (It’s true that physicists are incredibly fashionable and make the best lovers, but that’s a different matter.)

There really are different ways to be smart. Which is not some misguided hyper-egalitarian claim that everyone is equally smart; some people are very smart in lots of ways, while others aren’t especially smart in any. But it’s very common for people to be intelligent in one way and not in others. David Sklansky, for example, is a great poker player and quite mathematically talented. But his understanding of human psychology falls a bit short.

(I should add that Sklansky may in fact know exactly what he is doing, judging that hubris will be enough to lead more people he can beat to accept the challenge than people he will lose to. But from the discussion, it seems as if he really doesn’t think that anyone fitting his criteria will be able to beat him.)

Last Wednesday I dropped my parents and brother off at the airport, after having them here for a few weeks, including a fun trip to Virginia with my in-laws over Thanksgiving. My how things have backed up over this period!

One of the many bloggable things that occurred during my family’s visit was Lisa Randall’s appearance on campus to deliver one of our celebrated University Lectures. As a University Lecturer, Lisa follows in an illustrious tradition, including such speakers as Steven Pinker, Salman Rushdie, Richard Leakey, Rem Koolhaas, David McCullough, Paul Krugman, Tobias Wolff and Maya Lin. I love this series and it is particularly fun when a friend turns out to be the speaker. Lisa’s talk was based on her book – Warped Passages – and was a terrific popular-level description of the idea of extra dimensions and their applications in modern particle physics.

This is not an easy subject to make accessible at a general level; I found it hard enough recently doing it for a scientifically trained, but non-physicist audience, never mind a general educated one. But Lisa did a wonderful job, focusing on warped extra dimensions (as one might expect) and getting across the main motivations, ideas and consequences. While string theory was given its proper recognition for providing motivations for the Randall-Sundrum constructions, Lisa didn’t focus on that, and instead presented the idea mainly as a phenomenological construction. I thought this worked very well and allowed the audience to focus on the more immediate applications and testable aspects of the models without throwing up the many other questions that go along with string theory.

Earlier that afternoon we had Lisa over to the department for a discussion on extra dimensions, which ended up as a long and detailed chat with my colleagues Kaustubh Agashe, Cristian Armendariz-Picon and me. This was great, and I certainly learned a lot about the most recent work on this topic. Part of my work is in this area, but there are so many interesting avenues being explored that it is hard to keep up with the literature and it is always useful to hear what’s going on from someone involved in some of the aspects one is not working on.

After her talk there was time for Lisa and I to grab a couple of glasses of wine at Ohm Lounge. I have known Lisa for quite a long time, since I was a postdoc at MIT back when she was a faculty member there, but this is the first time we’ve managed to get together in Syracuse and it was great fun to have her here.

After a busy semester, Thursday was my last day of classes, and on Saturday I went to Toronto to spend a long weekend there, culminating in a seminar at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA) on Monday. I spoke on modified gravity and had an interesting day discussing physics, and an entertaining dinner discussing other topics entirely, with Neal Dalal, Latham Boyle, Jonathan Sievers, Mike Nolta, Lev Kofman, Dick Bond, and others (told you I’d give you a shout-out Neal).

I was supposed to leave this evening to spend tonight in New York and get up refreshed to give a talk at the 8th Northeast String Cosmology Meeting, organized by the Institute for Strings, Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics at Columbia University, and held at the The New York Academy of Sciences in their new home at 7 World Trade Center. However, since my flight was horribly delayed I’m getting a very early one tomorrow instead – cross your fingers for me please! Also speaking at this event are Nathan Seiberg, Justin Khoury and Raphael Bousso, so I definitely don’t want to miss any of their talks, never mind making it in time for my own.

Maybe I’ll see some New York CV readers there, since the event is free to non-members as part of some special promotion, as long as you sign up (full information here).

Anyway, I’ll report on this event when I return – better try to get to sleep early so that I can get up at 4am!