Blogs / Cosmic Variance

After being inspired in Part One and sweating through some calculations in Part Two, we’ve assembled all the ingredients of a good paper. We have an interesting question: “What would happen if there were a preferred spatial direction during inflation?” We have suggested a robust answer — an expression for the generalized power spectrum of density fluctuations — and calculated its observable effects. And then we proposed one specific model, lending credence to the idea that this is a sensible scenario to contemplate. Next it’s time to write the paper up, and then it’s cocoa and schnapps all around.

Which we proceeded to do, of course. Except that, as we were writing, there was something nagging at the back of my brain. We were thinking like field theorists, coming up with an idea (”a preferred direction during inflation”) and exploring how it could be constrained by data. But weren’t there people out there engaged in the converse — looking at the data and asking what it implies? Why, yes, there were. In fact, it gradually occurred to me, there was already a claim on the market that the actual CMB data were indicating a preferred direction in space! This had totally slipped my mind, in the excitement of exploring our little idea. (As the professional cosmologist of the collaboration, remembering such things was implicitly my job.)

The claim that there actually is evidence for a preferred direction in the CMB goes by the clever name of the axis of evil. If one looks closely at the observed anisotropies on the very largest scales, two interesting facts present themselves. First, there is less anisotropy than one would expect, on very large angular scales. Second, and somewhat more controversially, the anisotropy that does exist seems to be oriented along a certain plane in the sky, defining a preferred direction perpendicular to that plane. This preferred direction has been dubbed the “axis of evil.”

Is the axis of evil real? That depends on what one means by “real.” It does seem to be there in the data. On the other hand, maybe it’s just a fluke. Nobody has a theory that predicts CMB anisotropy directly as a function of position on the sky — rather, theories like inflation probabilistically predict the amplitude of anisotropy on each angular scale. But at each scale there are only a fixed number of independent observations one can make, implying an irreducible uncertainty in ones predictions — that was the original definition of cosmic variance, before we re-purposed the phrase. For what it’s worth, the actual plane in the sky defined by the large-scale anisotropy seems to coincide with the ecliptic, the plane in which the various planets orbit the Sun. Many people believe it’s just some local effect, or an artifact of a particular way of reducing data, or just a fluke — to be honest, nobody knows.

What’s relevant to the present discussion is that the very existence of the axis of evil phenomenon meant that other people had already been asking about preferred spatial directions in the CMB, even before our seminal work that didn’t yet quite exist. This fact dawned on me in the middle of our writing, and I started digging through the A of E literature. Lo and behold, I found a few of the equations of which we were so proud, especially in the work of Gumrukcuoglu, Contaldi, and Peloso. They had, in fact, derived a few of the equations of which we were justifiably proud.

But not all of them! We had, in other words, been partially scooped, although not entirely so. This is a remarkably frequent occurrence — you think you’re working on some project for esoteric reasons that are of importance only to you, only to find that similar tendencies had been floating around in the air, either recently or some number of years prior. Occasionally the scoopage is so dramatic that you really have nothing new to add; in that case the only respectable thing is to suck it up and move on to another project. Very often, the overlap is noticeable but far from complete, and you still have something interesting to contribute; that turned out to be the case this time. So we soldiered on, giving credit in our paper to those who blazed trails before us, and highlighting those roads which we had traversed all by ourselves.

At the end of the process — from meandering speculation, focusing in on an interesting question, gathering the necessary technical tools, performing the relevant calculation, comparing with the existing literature, and finally writing up the useful results — you have a paper. Considering all the work you have put into it, the actual paper is annoyingly slight as a physical artifact, even if it’s one of the longer ones. Unless you are really lucky (and perhaps also good), the amount of work you really do and stuff you figure out is much more than shows up in the distilled and polished final product. Nevertheless, I always finish the paper-writing process with a feeling of accomplishment and a degree of surprise that it seemed to work yet again.

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In the exciting cliffhanger that was Part One, we saw how the idea behind a paper came to be — nurtured from a meandering speculation into a somewhat well-defined calculational question. In particular, Lotty Ackerman and Mark Wise and I were asking what would happen if there were a preferred direction during inflation — an axis in the sky along which primordial perturbations were just a little bit different than in the perpendicular plane. We guessed, even in the absence of a specific model, that such a statistical anisotropy would show up as a nearly scale-invariant modulation of the power spectrum. Now we need to turn such ideas into something more concrete.

In fact, our phenomenological guess was enough to go and start calculating how this new effect will show up on the CMB, and we all set about doing exactly that. None of us — Mark, Lotty, and I — are really experts at this sort of thing, but that’s why they make books and review articles. (Without Scott Dodelson’s book, I would have been in trouble.) As it turns out, many years ago Mark had written one of the very first papers on deriving CMB anisotropies from inflationary perturbations, so he had a head start on calculating things. But the analysis that he and Larry Abbott had done way back when had concentrated on the gravitational redshift/blueshift of the CMB (the Sachs-Wolfe effect), which is only the most important contribution on large angular scales. Lotty and I realized that we should be able to calculate the effect at every scale all at once, which turned out to be right. It’s true that messy astrophysical effects (acoustic oscillations) become important at medium and small scales, and it would take a real cosmologist to understand them. But all we were doing was changing the initial amplitude of the perturbations, in a direction-dependent way. The eventual effect is simply a product of the initial amplitude and a “transfer function” that encodes the messy fluid dynamics once and for all; since our new primordial power spectrum left the transfer function unaffected, we didn’t have to worry about it.

(More generally, Lotty and I were full contributors when it came to ideas, but Mark is very fast when it comes to calculations. We would have to occasionally distract him with something shiny while we sat down to catch up with the equations.)

So we read up on calculating CMB anisotropies, and applied it to our model. Since everyone usually assumes that all directions are created equal, we couldn’t simply plug and chug; we had to re-do the usual calculations from the start, keeping the extra degree of complexity introduced by our preferred direction. That provided a good excuse to educate ourselves about some of the nitty-gritty involved in turning primordial density perturbations into a signal on the CMB sky. In particular, we had to play with spherical harmonics, which are the conventional way to encode information spread over a sphere — for example, the temperature of the microwave background as a function of position on the sky.

Every good physicist knows the basic properties of spherical harmonics, but we had to do some particular integrals that were not that common. I don’t know about you, but when I’m faced with a nontrivial integral, I try Mathematica first, ask questions later. But Mathematica didn’t know these integrals, so actual work was required. At some point it dawned on me that we could use a recursion equation — relating one spherical harmonic to a set of others — to turn the integral into something doable. No special points for me; my collaborators figured it out independently. Still, it’s always fun to crack a knotty calculational problem.

A few amusing footnotes to the recursion-equation episode. First footnote: I figured it out while sampling a martini at the Hilton Checkers lounge in downtown L.A. This was last fall, while I was still relatively new to the area, and was spending time checking out the various local establishments. Verdict: a pretty good martini, I must say. The bartender was intrigued by all the equations I was happily scribbling, and asked me what was going on. I explained just a bit about the CMB etc., and she was genuinely interested. But then, alas, she mentioned something about astrology. So I had to explain that this was actually very different etc. I got the impression that she ultimately did appreciate the difference between astronomy and astrology, once it was laid right out there. Now if only we could replace the horoscopes in daily newspapers with charts of the night sky.

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How does theoretical physics get done? I had my first exposure to research doing observational astronomy as an undergrad; it was fascinating, following the process all the way from spending freezing nights at the telescope collecting photons, to reducing the data, seeing what the light curves taught you about the stars, to finally writing a paper. But I knew all along that I really wanted to be a theorist. Looking at those papers with their incomprehensible Greek indices filled me with anticipation for the day it would all finally make sense. (Eventually you realize that more and more of it does make sense, but it never all makes sense, or anywhere close. Most of your time is spent thinking about the parts you don’t understand.)

But I had no idea how such papers were actually produced — where did you start? When I was looking at grad schools, I took the train up to Princeton to visit the physics department and knock on people’s doors — rather less planned out than I would advise anyone else to do. (You couldn’t Google people back then.) I found one guy who was sitting in his office, a faint smell of cigar smoke in the background, scribbling equations on a legal pad. Looked promising. I introduced myself and asked a few silly questions, among which was “How do you do research?” He leaned back, propping his sneaker-clad feet onto the desk, fixed me with a look and said “I don’t know. You just have an idea, and then do research about it.” As advice goes, it was more Delphic than practical. I didn’t know at the time that this guy would later be my boss for a while, and eventually win the Nobel Prize.

So I thought it would be fun to describe the process in a bit more detail, using a worked example. It is no exaggeration to say that every paper is different, but there might be some useful lessons in there somewhere. I recently finished a paper with Lotty Ackerman and Mark Wise that is a pretty canonical example — a solid paper, not something earth-shattering that will change the face of science as we know it, but a meaningful contribution with some good ideas and some useful equations. Well, it was “recently finished” when I began writing this monstrously long post, which by now was many months ago. So I’ve decided to divide it into pieces — this will be the first of a three-part series.

Lotty is a grad student here at Caltech; she had previously worked with Mark, who is a respectable particle theorist in the office next to mine. He knew that she was cosmologically inclined, so introduced Lotty and me to each other even before I officially arrived. I suggested to Lotty that we begin to think about density perturbations in inflation (the hypothetical period of accelerated expansion in the early universe), as much because I wanted to learn more about the subject as for any more focused research goal. I’m not the best advisor in the world; I have lots of ideas, but they inevitably start out rather ill-formed, and most of them stay that way. Occasionally one of them coalesces out of the fog into something substantial, and a paper gets written. It’s a harrowing way to operate, especially from the grad-student perspective.

One day Lotty was having lunch with Jonathan Pritchard, another grad student here, and they wondered out loud what would happen if inflation didn’t happen the same way in every direction in space. That is, what the consequences would be if there were some direction picked out throughout the universe, so that inflation occurred at a different rate (or something) parallel to that direction than perpendicular to it. Presumably there would be something different we could observe about the density fluctuations if we looked along that particular direction than if we looked in another direction, but what exactly? How could we tell? And is there some physical mechanism we could imagine introducing that would actually pick out a direction during inflation, and then (just to keep things simple) disappear afterwards so that we wouldn’t notice it today? Don’t ask me why they thought of it. Just the kind of thing you chat about at lunch all the time, if you happen to be a theoretical cosmologist.

This kind of meandering speculation is one way papers get started. You (if you’re like me — I can’t speak for other people) never sit down and say, “Let’s have an idea.” Some people are fortunate enough to have programmatic, focused research agendas — when I was a postdoc at MIT in the early Nineties, Ed Bertschinger had collected around him an amazing set of postdocs and grad students, all focused on understanding temperature anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background and what they could tell us about the universe. It was a great moment to be thinking about those issues, and a lot of those students are now high-powered faculty members with groups of their own. But most theorists are not quite so systematic. You noodle over problems, talk to other people with similar interests (or complementary skill sets), make connections between different ideas. Occasionally a flash of insight will hit just before you fall asleep, or while you’re waiting for the barista to make your latte.

(I should make clear that this particular “What if?” question is not completely unmotivated speculation. Inflation is a great theory, and is likely to be “right” in some yet-to-be-defined sense, but it’s not something that anyone should think we more or less understand. We’re extrapolating well beyond known physics, so it pays to keep an open mind. One way of forcing yourself to keep an open mind is to ask specific and testable questions about the space of possibilities encompassed by your ideas.)

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Early Friday morning I returned from a five-day jaunt to Reykjavik, where I was taking part in the inaugural meeting of the Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi).

Of course, these days one rarely “jaunts” anywhere. The flying portion of this trip, which was perhaps just a little more trouble than the average, may be summarized by: First flight delayed so many times that entire trip is postponed one day; spend 3.5 hours on phone with some of the world’s most incompetent customer service people (Travelocity), and their runners-up (Icelandair), before finally getting some help rescheduling from Delta; arrive in Iceland one day late, only to discover that you will be luggageless for at least a day; spend next 2 days in same clothes; fly back to New York; second flight delayed significantly; deal with useless and borderline rude Delta service at airport; board plane 1.5 hours late; spend 2 hours on runway; finally arrive home (at least with luggage this time) at almost 2am.

However, although I think I seriously need to review the amount of traveling I do, given how broken the system is, I must say that my time in Iceland was worth it.

We’ve discussed FQXi here before, in a guest post from Associate Scientific Director Anthony Aguirre, in which he not only laid out the philosophy and goals if the organization, but also addressed concerns that I and others had voiced about the sole current financial backer of the endeavor - the John Templeton Foundation (JTF). I have agonized over this ever since. I am clearly not in agreement with the goals of JTF. On the other hand, FQXi is independent of them, has its own charter, and is, as far as I can tell, supporting good, defensible science. They are also actively looking for a more diverse funding stream and, in fact, their seed grant from JTF will soon expire. Most certainly, if they had a number of donors, of which JTF was one, I would not spend time worrying about these issues.

In any case, earlier this year FQXi invited me to take part in their inaugural meeting and I decided that this would be a good way to dip my toe in the water and get a brief first-hand look at what they’re about, while getting to talk with colleagues old and new about a lot of intellectual issues that I spend time thinking about. So I accepted their kind invitation and submitted myself once again to the tortures of modern air travel.

The workshop was held at the Radisson SAS Saga in Reykjavik, Iceland; a place I have never been to previously, and always thought would be intriguing. Arriving early on Sunday, I checked in, cleaned my smelly self up as much as possible and headed right back out to attend the first real sessions of the meeting. The first day was filled with the only invited talks of the entire conference - overviews on Quantum Mechanics, Inflation, Non-String Quantum Gravity, String Theory (or Non-Non-String Quantum Gravity, as might have been more fair), The Late Universe, etc. Most of these talks were excellent, providing a clear summary and, most importantly, some common vocabulary useful when you have participants with such diverse experience - people interested in the Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics may have a great deal to say to those fascinated by how to put a measure on eternally inflating spacetimes, but they may never know if they don’t get a common language straight.

Monday, the entire day was spent at the Blue Lagoon Spa, which sounds decadent, but … oh, okay, it was decadent. But if it makes you feel better, we had an hour of short talks in the morning there, and three hours of group discussions in the afternoon. Groups were organized on the basis of three foundational questions each participant had submitted in advance, and I ended up in an “arrow of time” group, which was fun, but not quite what I’d expected. Nevertheless, I learned quite a lot from the discussions, which is what its all about.

The spa itself was a remarkable place, with a hot pool, warmed by geothermal springs, and lined with natural mud that is supposed to make physicists pretty if applied in the correct way. None of us figured out the correct way. Here’s a picture courtesy of the extremely fun Valerie Jamieson (from New Scientist, and who has also blogged about the trip over at the New Scientist Space Blog), who I’ll mention again in a while.

Tuesday was all business. The discussion groups from Monday were supposed to report to the workshop, not on the answers they had arrived at (who’s going to solve any of these foundational questions in a day?) but rather on the questions that their discussions had raised. Our group meandered around a little in our presentation, but homed in on what is, perhaps, the only clearly defined question: Why did our universe begin in such a low entropy state? (Something we’ve discussed here at Cosmic Variance on a number of occasions. See also Sean’s discussion at Preposterous Universe).

That evening there were no organized activities, and so I had dinner with my friends Lawrence Krauss and his wife Kate at The Pearl restaurant, which overlooks Reykjavik and executes a complete rotation every two hours. Great fun indeed.

Wednesday was mostly an excursion day and, I should say, one of the more amazing of these that I’ve ever been on. The buses took us first to Thingvellir National Park, where the Icelandic parliament - one of the oldest in the world - was founded in 930. We had only a little time to survey the spectacular scenery, before moving on to Geysir National Park, home of the original geyser, after which all others are named. That one has essentially stopped spurting now, but another still goes off every 5-7 minutes. This was a good place for a quick lunch, with the geyser periodically spurting in the background.

Back on the bus, we drove out across an alien landscape of boulders and black sand until we were within a half-mile of the Langjokull glacier. Here we stopped and were supplied with heavy-duty ski suits, overshoes, gloves and helmets, before being shuttled down to the glacier itself on a huge specially-designed vehicle.

At the glacier, we paired up and were supplied with snowmobiles and a brief lesson on how to drive them. Here I am before actually driving one.

A mutual realization that it was better to be paired with someone who appeared to be paying attention to this lesson than with one of those who were gazing at the landscape ensured that Valerie Jamieson and I rode together.

This really was a remarkable trip. We rode out until all that one could see in any direction was the glacier, with the mountains and volcanoes in the distance. It was spectacular. We stopped at the halfway point and took photographs. Some of our group got into a snowball fight (a rock-and-iceball fight really). In the photograph below you can see Valerie and me on our vehicle, with some of the perpetrators in the background, most notably Wojciech Zurek (with beard), who turned out to be quite an iceball marksman.

After driving back and shedding our glacier-wear, we spent some time on science again, getting split up into new groups and assigned to discuss our new questions during the rest of the day and the evening. I ended up in a fun group with Anton Zeilinger (of quantum teleportation fame), Dmitry Budker, Markus Aspelmeyer, Valerie Jamieson and John Donoghue (who abandoned us for another group he’d already been discussing with) to discuss the question of whether we should expect that the physical constants should be changing over time.

We began this discussion on our bus on our way to the next mind-blowing destination, in this case Gullfoss (the Golden Waterfall). The photo below, taken from the Wikipedia site about Gullfoss, does a good job of conveying the splendor of this two-level waterfall that terminates in a ravine

As you might imagine, we were all pretty hungry after this. Dinner didn’t disappoint. Held at a rustic restaurant at Stokkseyri, a black sand beach on the southern coast, our lobster banquet was some of the best seafood I’ve ever had.

Thursday morning we were back to serious work, debating the results of the previous day’s group discussions. Well, as serious as work can be when the debaters must wear viking hats! Watching Lawrence Krauss and Fred Adams debate in this way, one brandishing a sword and the other an axe, has to be seen to be believed (sorry - I have no photos). The presentations were a little spotty but there were some definite highlights including, for me, the group that had debated the interpretation of quantum mechanics and the one that had talked about eternal inflation, although the latter didn’t get as much time as I’d have liked to see.

This was a fascinating and intellectually stimulating conference in an unusual and dramatic location; so I’m glad I went. Perhaps best of all, there wasn’t a hint of any religion, spirituality, or any such non-science about the whole meeting, which I was delighted with. I returned exhausted, however. The conference itself was full with planned activities and talks, and it was nice to finish up the days with a beer in the bar with friends. But this left plenty of sleep time, and I’d hoped to take advantage of this because life has been a little hectic recently, with a ridiculous number of papers approaching completion. I’ll probably blog about them in a month or so when they’re done.

But it turned out to be difficult for me to sleep in Reykjavik. At this time of year it doesn’t really get dark, but just becomes dusky for a few hours from around 11:30 until 2 or so. Although the hotel provides an eye mask, I found it uncomfortable and the light coupled with a little jet lag meant sleep didn’t come easily. On the plus side, I was able to get a few hours extra time to calculate and write each day. On the minus side, four hours sleep or so a night doesn’t really cut it.

Nevertheless, what a week!

(Others blogging about this trip include Eugene Lim and Scott Aaronson)

I got here to CERN a few days ago, and things are quieter than recently. It’s the start of vacation season and so the cafeteria is not so full and parking is plentiful. Lots of summer students are hanging around in the evening, and some of the meetings are sparsely attended.

In the CMS experiment, the folks who have labored long and hard to build the world’s biggest and most complex silicon-strip detector have earned a bit of vacation. As of about August 1, this billion-dollar baby will begin buttoning up for its journey underground into the heart of the experiment.

So I found myself alone in the room with this thing, in the Tracker Integration Facility, and it is hard not to hold it in awe. “It” comprises thousands of flat detectors, each a thin rectangle of silicon crystal with microscopic aluminum strips embedded in it. These strips sense the passage of charged particles like pions, muons, electrons, and so forth, passing the tiny charge they collect to custom-designed readout chips which send the data in digital form to an army of processors which gather all the information from a single 25 nanosecond “beam bunch crossing” into a nice tight wad for later processing.

If you unrolled and laid out all the silicon detectors in the CMS Tracker you could tile a tennis court. It’s mind bogglingly complex, the product of hundreds of people workng for a dozen years. But there it is, and you know what? It works. Its been put through its paces on the surface and it’s just about show time downstairs at LHC Point 5.

I call it a billion dollar baby but it’s hard to say what it really cost. That number takes into account at least some of the labor by engineers, technicians, physicists, and students all over the world, but probably not all of it.

With the testing of the tracker at an end and the transport not yet begun, I am here with my CMS pixel colleagues to take advantage of our last (and first, actually) chance at seeing if our detector will fit neatly inside the tracker.

We are working on the innermost detector in the CMS experiment, the pixels. Once you get so close to the collision that charged particles are millimeters apart, you can no longer use long strips to detect them but have to go to arrays of pixel sensors. Our detector may be a lot smaller than the tracker, but it has even more individual readout channels, around 45 million in total. Each pixel is 0.1 by 0.15 mm (100 by 150 microns) and is read out by a custom chip developed at PSI in Zurich, and bump bonded to the silicon sensors. (Enough jargon yet?) The data from pixels with charge above a preset threshold are sent out on a serial line, converted to an optical signal and digitized upon receipt in high speed electronics in an adjacent cavern underground, then sent up the data acquisition stream.

Anyway, when all this mumbo-jumbo is done we have a big set of three-dimensional space points along the trajectory of the same particles that have also passed through the tracker. But the pixel points allow us to see what happened very close to the primary proton-proton collision vertex. Combining the pixel hits along a track we can project back to the vertex with a resolution of about 10 microns. Given that the pixels are much larger than that this is quite a trick: we rely on the fact that particles split their signal among adjacent pixels, and we can use a sort of averaging trick to get much more precise than a single pixel width.

My task here, though is much more practical. We want to make sure that the pixel detectors we are building will fit inside the tracker, the two halves of the detector meshing neatly at the end of their grooves inside the tracker. Up until this point it’s been an engineering project, but now we have real hardware and we need to be sure that no parts will interfere mechanically with each other.

Stay tuned, and in a few days I will post some photos of that and tell you how it worked. Gulp!

Did you know that there is a new Wikipedia entry for ScienceBlogs? And that there is even an entire category for blogs about science?

And yet there is no entry for Cosmic Variance. Just an unobtrusive little mention at the bottom of the entry on the actual concept of cosmic variance (not the blog).

Hint hint.

Dennis Overbye has written an article in today’s New York Times about blogging about the race for the Higgs (at the Tevatron, and between the Tevtron and LHC), the rumor mill, and all the rest.

Hmmm…I guess that makes this a blog about a news story about blogs. Or something. In any case I think it’s fair to say a good deal of it all started here at CV last January.

Overbye says this is a “summer of rumors, hope, and hype.” But the real message is that the Tevatron has a shot at finding the Higgs, at least if it’s produced at an enhanced rate such as is the case in supersymmetric theories. The article did a nice job of conveying that, I think.

As for the rumors, all I can say is I hear them too - show me the data! (We are working hard on ours, I can assure you…)

I’ll come back from vacation briefly to confess that I spent most of yesterday reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Verdict: I thought it was quite good, not without the inevitable rough patches but overall probably the best book of the series. Harry himself is still an insufferable git, willing to think the worst of his closest friends at the slightest provocation, but the teenage-angst stuff is kept to a minimum.

Best line, at least in context:

“NOT MY DAUGHTER, YOU BITCH!”

I got a bit misty in places, including that one. Rowling does a much better job at tugging on heartstrings here than in previous installments.

Let’s allow spoilers in the comments, so don’t read them if you don’t want to be spoiled.

Sixty-one degrees
In soaking rains, kids playing
jumprope with bull kelp

If you’ve spent time in a large university recently, you have undoubtedly run across the LaRouche Youth Movement. Invariably you’ll find a table hosted by earnest, good-looking college students, passing flyers to other less-interested-but-equally-good-looking college students. You’ll find odd posters on bulletin boards, asking if you know about Al Gore’s link to global warming. At first glance, it seems almost reasonable, but gets much weirder on close inspection.

Lyndon LaRouche, the head of the movement, was on my radar back in high school when his perennial presidential campaign was big. He was rather old even then, so I’d assumed he’d kicked the bucket quietly in the intervening years, while sitting in jail for mail fraud. He popped back into my consciousness, however, when our department lost a new grad student to him. The student showed up, started taking classes, and seemed to be integrating well into the department — at least until one day he dropped out to devote himself to the LaRouche movement full-time. I still see the former student occasionally, sitting at a table behind a stack of leaflets at the airport, or chatting up prospective new members on the main drag near campus. I’ve always wondered exactly how this apparently revived cult was operating, and thanks to a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed Inside Higher Ed, I now know quite a bit more without having to ask an earnest young cult member directly. Former cult members are also speaking out for themselves.

Now the bit that makes this whole thing bloggable on CV is that it turns out the LaRouche has a interest in physics. Messages from his followers started appearing on public blackboards in the UW Physics building, advertising a special seminar about the 3-body problem, about which apparently LaRouche has some deeply held beliefs. These beliefs seem to revolve around Newton being a plagarist, a failure of the world to appreciate the Socratic method, some gobbly-gook about time-reversal, and a devotion to the “LaRouche-Riemann Method” (which he graciously concedes should perhaps be called the “Leibnitz-LaRouche-Riemann Method”. Frankly, it’s all a bit hard for me to follow, and I don’t think it’s because I never took courses in string theory. Futher reading (click here if you dare) uncovers other obsessions with coulomb forces in nuclear fusion and a notion that space-time curvature sets humans apart as a species.

The screeds are all very impressive if you happen to know absolutely nothing about the topic under discussion. They’re filled with classical references and advanced literary and scientific vocabulary (to wit: “Is this merely the present author’s conjecture? Not at all. It would appear to be merely conjecture, only if one commits the blunder of accepting Aristotle’s fraudulent notion of the detached observer. Once we recognize that scientific knowledge is obtained, not by contemplating the universe, but by studying how we may generate those thoughts which enable us to efficiently act to change the universe, then the principles of cognition underlying the discovery of lawful physical principles, are the epistemological basis for defining the underlying determination of validatable physical laws.”). However, they simply make no sense, and fall well outside of Sean’s guidelines for alternate science respectability.

Of course, I probably could have guessed that from back when he said the Queen was dealing.