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Spotted in some of the local community presses:

From the Arts, Culture and Entertainment section of Our Weekly, a local newspaper targeted at the African-American community in Los Angeles:

From the ACC (A Corporation for Christ) News:

From the Education section of the L.A. Watts Times, and also the L.A. Sentinel, (Family Section, under Religion), newspapers also targeted at the Los Angeles African American community, find two more clippings. (See below, to the right and left of the text, respectively.)

Ok. I’m sorry you spilled your beverage all over your front….or unwittingly sprayed it all over your monitor! Given some of the things written here at Cosmic Variance about Religion in the past, you’re thinking either I’m going to burst into flame the moment I set foot into the place of worship, or that this is another -even more elaborate than last time- April Fool Joke perpetrated by cvj, or….. the Religious have begun to take over some of your trusted sites on the blogosphere.

None of the above is correct (as far as I know). Given the strong positions taken on Religion in some of the eloquent writings of my esteemed co-bloggers Sean and Mark, I’m *so* going to get beaten up in the playground later! I’m very much looking forward to it. We disagree, I think, on the matter of degree and emphasis -and that’s ok- but it is important to be clear on this. I’d like to say once and for all that I don’t think that Religion – in its appropriate place (e.g., not in Science class at school, masquerading as Intelligent Design) – is all bad. Some terrible things have been done – and continue to be done – in its name, but it is not intrinsically evil or necessarily counterproductive. While neither Sean nor Mark have used precisely those last five words (and I stress that fact), it is often the sense that is taken away -rightly or wrongly- from some of their stronger, understandably passionate, and often excellent writings on Religious matters, especially when it starts to intersect with science.

I want to say that we need not throw away the baby with the bathwater. I think that Religion can be a powerful positive organizational force in the local community, often being the only thing left for people to cling to when all else has given up or failed.

As scientists and also as non-scientists (in other words, as members of society in general), we do indeed have to be watchful that Religion is not misused. That it is not hijacked to acheive power, and to gain political advances, as is all too often done in this country. It is too easy to hide behind it, rather than present sound argument. Too easy to exploit people’s ignorance, lack of education, or insufficient grasp of the facts by appealing to religious motives to which they might more easily relate, in order to win them over to your side. We must indeed fight that whenever we can, as though our lives depend upon it, since they certainly do. Mark and Sean are two admirable soldiers in the fight, and long may they continue to ensure that the battle is joined, and fought well.

Nevertheless, I think that we must be careful not to bash Religion just for the sake of it. In fact, when opportunity arises, I think that we should use the organisational power and assets of Religion -honestly- to achieve our own ends as well, those ends being simply the teaching of the citizenry to think for themselves. To help people learn how to move forward in Society through education. From my point of view, this is simply about Science Education, and you’ve read my writings about this a lot on this blog, I hope. (See the archives, if not.)

It is simply not unworkable to promote Science and Science Education in a Religious context. It is just downright naive to think that these things are mutually exclusive. The world is just not so simple. We have to compromise. Things are never so black and white or cut and dried in almost any walk of life, for us to get to the point where we cannot -with care- find a middle ground on such important issues. I’m not advocating bringing Science into the Religion classroom any more than I would advocate bringing Religion into the Science classroom. That’s not what I’m talking about.

This polarization -war in fact- that seems so prevalent in the USA is very odd to me, (although I am aware that a lot of the recent intensity has been brought on by those who would hijack religion for other means simply going on the attack on several fronts; a defense was rightly mounted in response to this). In England, for example (at least for now….remember that whenever the USA sneezes, the UK catches cold a while later, so don’t be smug), looking at the official Religion of the state (yes, think about that for a moment…there is a state Religion. So easy to forget, fortunately, and that’s the point…), the role of Religion in your typical local village as an organisational center can be simply marvellous. Nobody troubles you to wear your belief or non-belief in God on your sleeve. It is simply your private business, about which nobody forces you to talk. In fact, people can get downright uncomfortable if the whole issue of belief gets brought up. I know a lifelong Atheist who is an extremely nice fellow, a pillar of the community in his village. He regularly does readings in church on Sunday from his personal well-worn copy of the Bible. He raises tons of money every year for the local church by having garden sales. In cased you missed it a sentence or two ago: He’s an Atheist. It’s just not a big deal. In fact, it is just irrelevant. There are lots of members of the Church of England who are just like this. I’m pretty sure that there are a lot of Church of England vicars who are like this too! It does not actually matter so much to the business of quietly getting on and serving your community.

I should note (although several will ignore this remark anyway) that I’m aware that religion in the UK is far from simple -especially in light of Northern Ireland, immigration from very diverse parts of the world, and the global political climate brought to a head in September of 2001- and I am aware that a certain degree of relative affluence, together with the quiet confidence that you are the state religion, allows for such apparent indifference to the supposed “core mission”, but I am not so sure that it should be so easily dismissed as an example from which we can learn something.

So you are probably wondering what the backstory is behind the press clippings (more…)

I’m back from an extraordinarily hectic yet unusually rewarding April Meeting of the American Physical Society in Dallas. The APS has two big meetings each year, the April meetings for very large- and small-scale types (particle physics, nuclear physics, gravitation, astrophysics), and the March meeting for medium-scale types (condensed matter, atomic physics, biophysics). The March meeting is a crucially important event for its constituency, while the April meeting suffers from too much competition and far less customer loyalty, and is correspondingly a much smaller conference (perhaps 1,000-1,500 attendees, as opposed to 6,000 at a typical March meeting). That’s a subject for another post, for those of you out there with an unhealthy interest in APS politics.

(For other reports from the meeting, see Jennifer Ouellette’s Cocktail Party Physics or the mysterious and anonymous Charm &c. Common refrain: “It’s 2006! Why isn’t there decent wireless in this hotel??!!”)

There’s a rule to the effect that any person can give no more than one invited talk at an APS meeting, but such rules are made to be broken and I sneaked in there with two talks. One was a general overview of the accelerating universe and its associated problems, at a special session on Research Talks Aimed at Undergraduates. Having a session devoted to undergrads was a splendid idea, although I suspect that the median age of attendees at my talk was something like 45. That’s because, when asked to pitch a talk to an audience of level of expertise x, most physicists will end up pitching it at a level of expertise x+3. So various people with Ph.D.’s concluded that their best chance of understanding a talk outside their specialty was to attend a session for undergraduates. Perhaps they were right. Before my talk they got to hear nice presentations by Florencia Canelli on particle physics and the top quark, and Paul Chaikin on packing ellipsoids. (Okay, “packing ellipsoids” doesn’t sound like the sexiest topic, but it was filled with fascinating tidbits of information. Did you know that both prolate and oblate ellipsoids pack more efficiently than spheres? That ordered crystalline packings are generally found to be more efficient than random packings, but nobody can prove it in general? That M&M’s are extremely reliable ellipsoids, to better than 0.1%? That the method by which the Mars Corporation makes their M&M’s so regular is a closely guarded secret?)

My other talk was at a joint double session on the past, present, and future of cosmology, co-sponsored by the Division of Astrophysics and the Forum for the History of Physics. Six talks naturally needed to be given: one each on the past/present/future of observational/theoretical cosmology, and organizer Virginia Trimble invited me to speak on The Future of Theoretical Cosmology. The observational session conflicted with my talk to the “undergrads,” but I got to hear the talks on the past and present of theory by Helge Kragh and David Spergel, respectively.

Of course nobody has any idea what the future of theoretical cosmology will be like, given that we know neither what future experiments will tell us, nor what ideas future theorists will come up with. So I defined “the future” to be “100 years from now,” by which time I figured (1) I won’t be around, or (2) if I am around it will be because we will all be living in pods and communicating via the Matrix, and nobody will be all that interested in what I said about the future of cosmology a century earlier.

With those caveats in mind, I did try to make some prognostications about how we will be thinking about three kinds of cosmological issues: composition questions, origins questions, and evolution questions. You can peek at my slides in html or pdf, although I confess that many were cannibalized from other talks. The abbreviated version:

• Composition Questions. We have an inventory of the universe consisting of approximately 4% ordinary matter, 22% dark matter, and 74% dark energy. But each of these components is mysterious: we don’t know what the dark matter or dark energy really are, nor why there is more matter than antimatter. My claim was that we will have completely understood these questions in 100 years. In each case, there is an active experimental program aimed at providing us with clues, so I’m optimistic that the matter will be closed long before then.
• Origins Questions. Where did the universe come from, and why do we find it in this particular configuration? Inflation, which received an important boost from the recent WMAP results, is a crucial ingredient in our current picture, but I stressed that there is a lot that we don’t yet understand. In particular, we need to understand the pre-inflationary universe to know whether inflation really provides a robust theory of initial conditions. Thinking about inflation naturally leads us to the multiverse, and I argued that untestable predictions of a theory are perfectly legitimate science, so long as the theory makes other testable predictions. We don’t yet have a theory of quantum gravity that does that, and I prevaricated about whether one hundred years would be sufficient time to establish one. (Naive extrapolation predicts that we won’t be doing Planck-scale experiments until two hundred years from now.)
• Evolution Questions. Given the initial conditions, we already understand the evolution of small perturbations up to the point where they become large (”nonlinear”). That’s when numerical simulations become crucial, and here I was a little more bold. The very idea of a computer simulation is only about 50 years old, so there’s every reason to expect that the way in which computers are used will look completely different 100 years from now. Quantum computers will be commonplace, and enable parallel processing of enormous power. More interestingly, the types of computation that we’ll be doing will be dramatically different; I suggested that the computers will not only be running simulations to test theories against observations, but will be coming up with theories themselves. Such a prospect is a natural outgrowth of the idea of genetic algorithms, so I don’t think it’s as crazy as it sounds.

The next day I managed to catch no fewer than three sessions filled with provocative talks — one on ultra-high-energy cosmic rays, one on cosmology and gravitational physics, and one on precision cosmology. And I would tell you all about them if I hadn’t lost the keys to my special time-stretching machine that allows me to put aside my day job for arbitrarily long periods so that I can blog at leisure. Probably the most intriguing suggestions were those by Shamit Kachru from SLAC, who argued that considerations from string theory (and in particular the constraint that scalar fields cannot evolve by amounts greater than the Planck scale) imply that gravitational waves produced by inflation will never be strong enough to be observable in the CMB, and those by David Saltzberg from UCLA, who listed an amazing variety of upcoming experiments to detect high-energy astrophysical neutrinos, including listening for sound waves (!) produced when a neutrino interacts with ocean water off the Bahamas. If I decide to become an experimentalist, that’s the one I’m joining.

The past few days have been spent preparing a public lecture on the topic of extra dimensions. It’s somewhat difficult to explain the concept of dimensions, period, to the general public, let alone get them thinking about additional ones. Anyway, I’ve poured all my energy the past few days into this and we’ll see how it goes. I gave a dress rehearsal today – talk lasted one hour and the comments lasted 1.5 hours! Given that it was a room full of physicists, each with their own opinions on how to present things, that’s not so surprising.

The talk is Tuesday evening 25 April (7:30 PM, SLAC auditorium), and is part of the SLAC public lecture series. Here’s the cool ad:

Actually, SLAC does a great job on the whole with its public lecture series. The lectures are advertised on the local NPR, the auditorium has been known to overflow, and the lectures have been great. CV readers in the Bay Area should come check us out!

You may have read celebrated and successful bloggers such as Mark and PZ Myers enthusing about the “Cafe Scientifique” idea. It’s an attempt, international in scope but local in focus, to promote discussion about exciting scientific ideas between experts and non-experts in an informal environment. By “in an informal environment” we typically mean “in a bar,” although I suppose an actual cafe or similar venue would do just as well. The original Cafes were located in England, but the idea has subsequently taken off and spread around the world. It’s similar in spirit to KC Cole’s Categorically Not series that Clifford has mentioned.

So now it’s our turn. Randy Landsberg at the University of Chicago has taken up the challenge of organizing a Cafe Scientifique in the Windy City, and the first meeting will be this Wednesday at the Map Room, a neighborhood bar famous for its dizzyingly diverse beer list. I’ll be the speaker, although the speaking is not the focus of the event. I’ll talk for about twenty minutes, followed by a break to give everyone a chance to refill their drinks, culminating in an extensive discussion/Q&A session where everyone gets a chance to talk the ideas through. The particular idea to be discussed is one of my favorites: Why is the past different from the future? We’ll talk about entropy and the arrow of time in our everyday lives, and connect it to big speculative ideas about the origin of the universe. Should be fun! And if everyone gets along, this will undoubtedly be the first of many events, and before too long the El will be alive with intense discussions about dispatches from the frontiers of science.

As I’ve mentioned here before, one of the features that makes Los Angeles such a wonderful city is all the hidden gems that abound, teasing you to find them. When you do, the pleasure of having found them really glows inside you for a while. Typically, you’ll find that pretty much everybody who knows anything about the city (and has not already prejudged it by viewing it through the glasses of European or European-wannabe (read: East Coast) models of cities) shares this feeling. This is also why people often hate the city. They can’t find things immediately, they see it from the freeway, and they decide that it is just an awful place, and pretty quickly the stupid cliches about there being “no culture” (which always means “no European culture”, sigh) begin to be repeated.

So imagine my delight when there was an article on Thursday called “Stages of Discovery”, in the Weekend Calendar section of the LA Times. It talked about some of the places in the region you can go to see music concerts of the “classical” (in the broad sense) type, besides the excellent Music Center Downtown, housing among other things the Disney Hall, of which I’ve told you of events several times before. Have a read of the article, by Chris Pasles, here.

Well, I had other things to do on the bus the next morning (which is when I read the Calendar Weekend section…it gives me ideas about what extra activities I might get up to that weekend beyond things already planned) and so I did not read it as thoroughly as I should have. I skimmed through in that way that one does when one is happy to satisfy oneself smugly that one already knows of and had been to at least some of the “hidden gems” already, and then made a mental note to keep the article for later detailed analysis, to learn more about the places that I did not know about.

On the cover was a picture (by Genaro Molina) of a particularly interesting looking performance space, with the Janaki String Trio posing in it:

… and somehow I did not really consciously note where it was. I was to read the article later, of course.

Well, later that evening I was to meet a friend of mine to go to a concert. She’d got the tickets from a friend and I was going along as her guest. I’d agreed to this a long time ago without even knowing what exactly they were for. I knew it was music, and assumed that it was the Disney Hall. Turned out I was wrong. It was at the Doheny Mansion, which happens to be just North of (imho, right next to) the USC campus. Convincing my friend to walk over there from campus (via that wonderful hidden gem, La Taquiza, sampling some excellent mulitas, for dinner), we showed up there in good time for the pre-concert talk, and went inside. Well, of course, you’ve guessed. I went into the splendid historic mansion, walked to the performance space, and was treated to the view above! Without the Janaki, of course. It is called the Pompeian Room.

Here’s a nice link to the Doheny mansion, complete with some history and some pan-able photos of the interiors. Once upon a time, this part of LA was the place to be if you were part of the high-class crowd. You woud have had a well-appointed house here, etc. The Doheny family were as high-class as it gets in these parts: Oil money (La Brea tar pits, etc…). This also explains why there are all those fantastic craftsman houses all over the neighbourhood that people are now giving any amount of money for, but that’s another story. It was not until later that the Beverly Hills’ of this world began to rise in stature, and the high-class set moved away….but the remnants are still here, if you know where to look.

Turns out that there is a society/club whose mission in life is to arrange chamber (more…)

This lovely crop of white cyclamen flowers is typical of this plant. It faithfully does this every year, with little encourangement:

Quite a pleasure. I think I should plant some directly into the soil one day.

-cvj

It is Earth Day today! So go out and do something……earthy, ok?

Have a look at this (from Hecate, the blog of, um…. a good witch):

So, it’s finally here! All the Earth Day gifts are heaped under the Earth Day tree, while all the old familiar Earth Day songs play softly in the background. In just a little while, the children will wake up and gather round to hear the Earth Day story, unwrap their Earth Day gifts, and look inside their Earth Day baskets to see what Gaia brought them. Then, the whole family, all three or four generations, will head off to church, or temple, or synagogue, or grove and give thanks for our lovely Earth on Earth Day. Finally, everyone will head to Grandma’s for the traditional Earth Day feast, followed by naps, football, and lots of happy family time together. Truth to be told, you’re almost glad that all the fuss is over. Earth Day ads have been on the radio and tv for months and it seems as if every year, Earth Day gets more and more commercialized and we move farther away from the true meaning of Earth Day.

Read the full post here (apologies for linking you to a post with a title with salty language, but the point she makes in the rest of the post about commercialism -or not- of holidays is worth reflecting upon from time to time).

But seriously folks, do pop your head into your neighbourhood and see if there are any Earth Day events going on. Join in one.

Happy Earth Day.

-cvj

P.S. Consider making every day Earth Day.

At least in Illinois. Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich declared today as Particle Accelerator Day in recognition of the state’s federal laboratories (Fermilab and Argonne) as world leaders in accelerator technology. The goal of this recognition is to help bring particle accelerator projects, such as the multi-billion dollar International Linear Collider, to Illinois. The governor’s proposed budget for the next fiscal year includes $13 million for projects at Argonne and Fermilab, with $3 million to support the construction of an Illinois Accelerator Research Center. This will strengthen the case for Fermilab to be a possible host for the Linear Collider project. The details are here. The $13 million investment is sizeable for a state’s contribution and will certainly help develop advanced accelerator technology. It’s great to see this commitment to science from the state of Illinois!

I’m traveling right now, and so only really have time to quickly check in. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I was in England for a few days and am now on the Italian island of Ischia, at the International Conference on the CMB and the Early Universe.

I got here on Wednesday afternoon and my talk was scheduled as the second one of the conference, beginning on Thursday. However, Michael Turner, the first person scheduled, wasn’t able to make it, and I ended up speaking first. This was fine by me, since I love to get my presentation out of the way early so as to get the maximum amount of time in a relaxed frame of mind to enjoy the rest of the conference and, you know, this beautiful island.

My somewhat unwieldy assigned title was Physics of the very early Universe: what can we learn from particle collider experiments?, and I gave the usual broad overview of how, particularly when it comes to dark matter and the question of why the universe is fundamentally matter-antimatter asymmetric, colliders experiments and observational cosmology may work very well as complementary probes. Today, Bernard Sadoulet gave a very nice talk in which he discussed one of the other ways of learning about dark matter – through direct detection experiments.

My favorite talk of the conference so far (although I have enjoyed most of them) was a joint talk given by Anthony Lasenby and Mike Hobson, both from Cambridge, in which they discussed in a very pedagogical way how one performs Bayesian estimates of whether cosmological datasets prefer one particular theoretical model over another one. This is a topic somewhat far from my particular expertise, but they did such a nice job that I really came away thinking I’d learned something new and interesting.

Tonight I’m off to dinner with a few friends and then tomorrow I leave around noon, heading back to England for one night and then straight back to the U.S. on Sunday to get a day’s rest before heading to Michigan State University to give a seminar on Tuesday.

Ciao.

The day before yesterday I mentioned at the end of a post that I had some film scripts to read. I was not kidding. I spent a bit of time reading screenplays, written by students in the USC School of Cinema-Television. This is, as you may know, one of the finest schools of its type, and it feeds the Industry (entertainment and related visual arts) with a huge amount of new talent. Just look at the CVs of the various writers, producers, directors, etc, who are nominated each year for Oscars and Emmys -and the CVs of the huge number of unsung people who work on those films- and you’ll see how much USC matters in this area.

Well, you might recall that I am passionate about science outreach, public science education, and helping members of society get truly involved in the democratic process (by being able to make more informed decisions about issues affecting our lives) by being more engaged with science, the scientific process, and scientific issues. A major start in this is for them to get more comfortable with scientists, learning that they are real people, in the real world, just like they are. Break down the fear of the scientist (the one that is portrayed most often in the media now) and maybe the breakdown of the fear of science will follow……. and you’ve maybe read my many blog posts on this (see here and also follow the trackbacks in the comment stream; also here)….. So you might agree with me that one way of advancing these goals is to get more science (and especially portrayals of scientists) in the places where people spend most of their time looking: TV, Cinema, and other media (such as this blog). So I therefore cannot ignore the fact that I’m at USC and that there is this wonderful training ground of the future leaders in the Industry not many buildings away.

Turns out that every year the Sloan Foundation awards grants to students for works that advance goals similar to those I expressed above. You can read about the Foundation’s excellent work here, and here is an extract:

The goal of the film schools program is to influence the next generation of filmmakers to create more realistic and dramatic stories about science and technology and to challenge existing stereotypes about scientists and engineers through the visual media. With Foundation support, prizes are now awarded at six leading film schools to stimulate top students to write and produce new film and television shows about scientists and engineers: American Film Institute ; UCLA School of Theater, Film,and Television ; Carnegie Mellon University School of Drama ; Columbia University Film Department ; NYU Tisch School of the Arts ; and USC School of Cinema-Television . In addition to screenwriting and production awards, there are now prizes in animation and a first feature film.

Yes! Somebody gets it! And Somebody with resources.

Anyway, some students took on the challenge. They are required to seek out a real scientist, and get them to read the work and comment. Well, they found me. (I guess there were no real scientists willing to do this, so a string theorist will have to do. LOL!) Well, I did this with one student last year, and it turned into a really fun and informative series of conversations where we both learned a lot. Me about the process and contraints involved in writing for the entertainment industry, and the student about what science and scientists are like. I’ve also spoken about this sort of thing in the context of the (later) playwriting project I got involved in later last last year, about which I’ve blogged here and here, and will tell you more later.

This year, three of them found me (apparently the University’s improved online experts directory is beginning to kick in), and so I had my work cut out for me. Just as happened last year, it was a real pleasure. My initial thought was that I was going to have to cringe my way through this (bear in mind that several of these young hopefuls have never ever spoken to a scientist before….part of the problem in the industry is that fact right there…..) and then I started reading and in each case I was just hooked. First reaction….”Wow, she/he can really write!”, and the second reaction… “They’ve taken the time to try to understand and incorporate the science!”

How can I not try to help and encourage further?

So as it has been a series of spectacular days outdoors here on campus weatherwise, between classes and meetings I decided to go and hide and sit in the sun near a fountain and a tree and really dig through these screenplays. This took a while, including some reading on a couple of bus trips to and from home (yes, one of those great uses of public transport I go on and on about), red pen at the ready.

(more…)