Blogs / Cosmic Variance

John Archibald Wheeler embodied the golden age of physics. He was perhaps unique in having made foundational contributions to both pillars of modern physics: quantum mechanics and general relativity. He helped develop the theory of nuclear fission, and then was an important participant in the Manhattan project. He discussed quantum mechanics with Bohr, relativity with Einstein, and electrodynamics with his student, Feynman. One of Wheeler’s particularly nice calculations (on asymmetrical nuclei) got scooped because Bohr sat on it too long. The person that scooped them, James Rainwater, subsequently won the Nobel prize for the result. In Feynman’s Nobel lecture, he credits Wheeler with many of the key insights. Wheeler mentored over one hundred students, and those students (and grand-students) now populate leading physics departments throughout the world. In addition to his facility with physics, Wheeler displayed a wondrous command over language. His career is partially encapsulated in his coinages: wormhole, black hole, the planck length and time, quantum foam, the sum over histories, the S-matrix, It from Bit, the wavefunction of the Universe.

John Wheeler passed away almost exactly a year ago. In commemoration of his tremendous contributions to physics, the current edition of Physics Today (the monthly magazine of the American Physical Society) is dedicated entirely to his memory. [Sadly, only select articles are public, which I find incomprehensible.] The issue includes an article on Wheeler’s early work on particles (written by Ken Ford), as well as one on his later work on fields, gravity, and information (by Charlie Misner, Kip Thorne, and Wojciech Zurek). There are also two reprints of articles authored by Wheeler, one on nuclear fission (describing his pioneering work with Niels Bohr), and one “introducing” black holes (written with Remo Ruffini). As a sign of Wheeler’s enduring legacy, the magazine ends with an article (by Terry Christensen) focused on his tremendous mentorship.

It is impossible to summarize Wheeler’s impact, both as a physicist and as a human being. How do you reduce someone to a few paragraphs, or a few articles, or a few interviews? Wheeler was unique in his insight, his breadth, his generosity, and his humanity. For those that were fortunate enough to spend time with him, he left an indelible mark. As one of Wheeler’s students put it in the acknowledgment to their thesis:

It is a pleasure to acknowledge the tremendous support and encouragement given to me by John A. Wheeler. Over the last two years he has introduced me to the world of physics research and shaped the way I think about physics. I have benefited greatly, both as a physicist and as a person, from his example, and will carry this with me always. John Wheeler has had a profound impact on my life and I am deeply indebted.

I wrote that over 15 years ago, and it is no less true today.

Quick! What do the following kinds of people have in common?

• Rebel
• Hypocrite
• Masturbator
• Atheist
• Slave
• Diva
• Fornicator
• Porn Addict
• Homosexual

Answer below the fold.
(more…)

Various things that have been piling up in the “Bloggable” folder. But together they tell their own story.

Part of the stimulus package includes money for high-speed rail. That’s good — if the government is going to be spending piles of money in an attempt to kick-start the economy, it would be nice to get something of lasting value in return, and mass transportation connecting distant cities is certainly of lasting value. Of course opponents are playing politics with it, which is to be expected. And here is their fun strategy: to highlight on such proposed high-speed rail line, between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and label it the “Sin Express.” Get it? Real Americans don’t travel between those two dens of iniquity, only shady reprobates who want to divert stimulus dollars from hard-working blue-collar Midwesterners who would never step foot inside a shiny Vegas casino.

Unfortunately, it’s not even true — there is no money set aside for high-speed rail between LA and Vegas, and it’s not listed as a high priority on the Federal Railroad Administration’s list of officially designated high-speed rail corridors. Which is too bad, as I’ve driven along several of those hypothetical routes, and the one between LA and Vegas is certainly one of the more useful places to plunk down some high-speed rail.

Read Jessica Valenti on “hook-up culture.” In case you don’t know what that is, it’s a catchphrase invented by cultural conservatives who would like you to believe that kids today are disrespecting America’s Puritan heritage by having sex with each other. And they may be right! I suspect that some kids are having sex with each other. Sex is fun. But it is also something to be careful about, with possible unintended consequences ranging from emotional pain to disease to unplanned pregnancies. So we might hope that responsible cultural conservatives would want to equip young men and women with the knowledge necessary to avoid those pitfalls while enjoying the fun parts of sex. But that agenda seems to be well-hidden under a campaign to shame people, under the theory that other people having sex is a dirty and disgusting thing.

You may have heard that Michael Phelps, former paragon of American purity and might and speediness in water, has been uncovered as a shocking moral degenerate. Apparently he intentionally inhaled the fumes from a slowly-burning psychoactive herb, funneled through some sort of device designed expressly for that purpose, while “chilling” with his “buds.” Now all of his recent success at the Beijing Olympics must be called into question — how do we know that his fantastic performances in competitive swimming weren’t artificially aided by “toking” on a “doobie” before hopping in the pool? Naturally, Phelps has been suspended from competition, stripped of lucrative sponsorship deals, and forced to wear a sackcloth and ashes while parading around the town square with a giant scarlet “M” hanging around his neck.

Here is the letter Michael Phelps should have written. If only.

This is Annette Obrestad from Norway, one of the best poker players in the world. She is also a young woman, and a great role model for girls in what has traditionally been a boy’s game. She burst on the scene when she was only 15 years old, winning online tournaments in Europe. At the age of 18 she proved that her prowess extended to live play, winning $2 million by taking first place at the World Series of Poker Europe Main Event.

But Obrestad can’t legally play poker for money in the United States. She’s too young, and will have to wait another year until she turns 21. You can join the army, or vote, or sign multi-million-dollar basketball contracts if you are 20 years old, but you can’t play poker for money. (Michael Phelps participated in the 2000 Olympics at the age of 15.) America is afraid of poker. The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, smuggled through Congress in 2006, led many online poker sites to stop accepting money from U.S. players, no matter how old they are.

I’m not sure what it is that makes America so puritanical, compared to Western Europe. (It’s also substantially more religious, but the direction of the causal arrows is not clear.) Hopefully we can scold the country into taking a more grown-up attitude toward sex, drugs, gambling — maybe even, someday, rock and roll. A few more blog posts like this one should do it.

One of our guiding principles here at CV has always been that disciplinary barriers are meant to be leapt across. So, to mark the passing of an influential writer of fiction, who better than an influential writer of quantum field theory textbooks? We’re happy to have Michael Peskin contribute a guest post on the passing of John Updike.

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John Updike (1932-2009)

John Updike, one of the great American writers, died on Tuesday. The Cosmic Variance bloggers might seem to write incessantly, but they had nothing on him. Updike produced 26 novels, 9 poetry collections, and, it seemed, a short story in the New Yorker every other week. There was no aspect of culture that he did not know. Yesterday, I saw him celebrated on the sports page of the San Francisco Chronicle for his classic on Ted Williams’ last at bat, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu”. We scientists should also acknowledge our gratitude and send our friends out to read his work.

Every particle physicist knows Updike’s poem “Cosmic Gall,” the number one popularization of neutrinos:

At night, they enter at Nepal
and pierce the lover and his lass
From underneath the bed …

Readers of Cosmic Variance will find much more interesting his 1986 novel Roger’s Version. In Chapter One, the scruffy fundamentalist computer science graduate student Dale Kohler walks into the office of the comfortably middle-aged Harvard professor of divinity Roger Lambert and shatters his worldview by explaining that new discoveries in physics and cosmology require intelligent design. The characters in the story that follows personify all points of view in the science versus religion debate, until — but I shouldn’t ruin the surprise.

People who are serious about literature claim that these works have merely intellectual interest. If you are in that group, there are also Updike novels that will move you with the depth of his empathy. His masterwork is the set of four Rabbit Angstrom novels, a thousand pages in all, one novel every ten years from 1960 to 1990. The greatest moments of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom’s life came in high school, when he was a star basketball player in his small town in upstate Pennsylvania. When the first novel opens, that part of his life is already over. He has an uninspiring job, a tiny apartment, and a baby who dies in the first few pages. Harry has no introspection. The glow that surrounded him on the basketball court brings him women, and, one after another, they push him into all varieties of trouble. Harry’s wife Janice is tougher and recognizes that the two are stronger together than apart, but she cannot control his whims. In Rabbit, Run, he wanders in and out of his new marriage and an affair with a girl from the town. In Rabbit, Redux, he takes in a runaway teen and her drug habit. In Rabbit is Rich, he inherits his father-in-law’s Toyota dealership and samples the country-club life. In Rabbit at Rest, he tries to retire to Florida, but the bad choices of the past three books — and one astonishing new one — follow him. Harry also seduces his readers. We stay one step ahead of him in anticipating the next catastrophe, but we also watch through his eyes the panorama of America in Updike’s era.

If this is too heavy to carry, you could pick up the short, early novel The Centaur. A father, a high school science teacher, sacrifices himself for his son. It is a brief story, told with great pathos. But also, magically, just under the surface, the story unfolds as a Greek myth, and, in the end, the father, Updike’s father, ascends to the heavens.

It may not be true for those who blog, but those who put pen to paper will always be with us. Enjoy!

John Updike Image (c) Michael Mundy

So, the media and my fellow bloggers have been shocked that although the skeleton of Lucy has come all the way from Ethiopia to Seattle, Seattleites have not exactly flocked to see it. The fall-out has been rough for the Pacific Science Center, which has lost a ton of dough. Commonly mentioned culprits are the terrible weather during Christmas (and yeah, it was indeed awful) and poor advertising.

My experience with the exhibit suggests that the problem is more likely to be price. Getting into the Pacific Science Center is already pretty spendy — $38 bucks for a family of four. Including the Lucy exhibit was an additional raises the price to $20.75 per adult, and $16.25 for kids over 6 (Sorry PSC — misread the fine print on the web site, but it’s still expensive). So, grand total for a family trip?

About 75 Well over a hundred bucks.

For an experience where there is a 50% chance that the kids are going to get bored in 15 minutes and start begging to hit up the gift shop for mood rings and pneumatic rockets.

So paint me not surprised that people did not exactly flock to the exhibit. Maybe if they’d made it free for kids, more of the adults would have been willing to drag them in to satisfy their own curiosity. But spending an extra $4074 bucks to see Lucy when the less civilized members of the family would rather go watch the PSC’s colony of naked mole rats just doesn’t seem like a rational decision to most parents.

(and yeah, I know that people without kids like science too, but I’m guessing that 90% of the visitors to science centers consist of parents taking their kids to an entertaining weatherproof space where the kiddos can run around and not break stuff).

My theory is that Barack Obama, among his various superpowers, has the ability to reach out to groups of people across the world and subtly re-arrange their DNA. How else are we to explain this?

In the study made public on Thursday, Dr. Friedman and his colleagues compiled a brief test, drawing 20 questions from the verbal sections of the Graduate Record Exam, and administering it four times to about 120 white and black test-takers during last year’s presidential campaign.

In total, 472 Americans — 84 blacks and 388 whites — took the exam. Both white and black test-takers ranged in age from 18 to 63, and their educational attainment ranged from high school dropout to Ph.D.

On the initial test last summer, whites on average correctly answered about 12 of 20 questions, compared with about 8.5 correct answers for blacks, Dr. Friedman said. But on the tests administered immediately after Mr. Obama’s nomination acceptance speech, and just after his election victory, black performance improved, rendering the white-black gap “statistically nonsignificant,” he said.

The study hasn’t yet been published (or accepted), and doesn’t seem to be online; here is the press release.

Via DougJ at Balloon Juice, who says everything that needs to be said. Including that this is no surprise at all, at least to people who recognize the phrase “stereotype threat.” Studies have shown that simply reminding women or minorities that they are women or minorities causes them to do statistically worse on tests involving subjects that they are, stereotypically, supposed to be bad at.

One is almost tempted to conclude that scores on standardized tests might be influenced by factors other than one’s genetic background. Who could have guessed?

Continuing the end-of-year purge of things I don’t have time to properly blog about: be sure not to go to dinner with this guy. He might lash out at you as everyone is heading home.

“We’re going to split the bill,” said the organizer at my friend’s ninth grade birthday party. I didn’t think much of it until I ended up paying $40 for a $10 entrée. I felt cheated because I didn’t order a drink like most others. I was afraid to ruin the party mood, so I concealed my own anger, and that ended up ruining the night for me.

Now, I almost have sympathy; if you’ve ever gone to dinner with a collection of scientists, you’ll find that their vaunted mathematical skills tend to whither under the pressure of calculating tax and tip, and the person who volunteers to collect the money often ends up chipping in extra to cover the shortfall. But Mr. Talwalkar goes far, far overboard, devising an elaborate scheme by which everyone in the party receives emails ahead of time informing them that they will be strictly limited in the menu options once they reach the restaurant. It’s a common syndrome among people with something of a quantitative bent; fixating on the relationship between the money they are paying and the tangible goods in front of them in the form of food and drink, they completely discount the goods associated with having a good time in a social atmosphere and not worrying too much about who had how many bites out of which appetizer.

Admittedly, this guy probably gets more enjoyment out of solving a game theory problem and enforcing conformity with his rules than he would by relaxing and telling stories at dinner. That’s why you have to choose your dining companions carefully.

It seems that archeologists have definitively identified the remains of Copernicus, using a combination of forensic reconstruction and DNA matching. Historians were pretty sure that he was buried in a particular church, but weren’t quite sure where within it the grave actually was. They found a likely set of bones a few years back, and a reconstruction of the face from the skull sure looked an awful lot like Copernicus. (It also happened to look an awful lot like James Cromwell, the actor who played Farmer Hoggett in Babe, but he’s still alive).

While exercises like this are of historical interest, to me they’ve always raised the question as to when a set of remains becomes fair game for mucking about. If you were to dig up poor great aunt Edna, extract her skull, and sent it off to a lab in Sweden, you might be looked upon as being disrespectful or worse. But, digging about to find the remains of Copernicus is apparently completely OK, and was actually ordered by the local Catholic bishop. So when does this happen? Is there something like the copyright system where the right to be outraged by disturbance of a grave expires after a certain number of years? Is it more like radioactivity of the soul, where the connection to something sacred fades with an e-folding time?

It’s certainly a culturally loaded question as well. Locally, a set of 9000 year old remains found in the Pacific Northwest were the subject of dispute. Local tribes claimed Kennewick Man as one of their ancestors, and requested that the remains be given back to the Umatilla tribe for reburial. Scientists, on the other hand, wanted to continue to study the remains, and argued that testing showed that the skeleton was unlikely to have actually been a member of one of the tribes. There are on-going law suits to repatriate native american skeletons to their tribes. So obviously different cultures have different standards for when it’s acceptable to study their dead, and Copernicus lost out.

What a day. History being made.

After voting, I celebrated with a bacon-wrapped hot dog from a local street vendor. Mustard and onions. America, baby.

Let’s take this country for a spin and see what it can do!

Via Sociological Images.

That’s why you should become scientists, kids! (Because engineers don’t have sex. You want me to spell it out for you?)

I really should just leave it at that, but the sprawling, multifaceted stupidity of this public service announcement — apparently having sex, like smoking the wacky weed, kills brain cells and will cripple your SAT scores, or something — is difficult to let pass without comment. The immaturity of our cultural attitudes toward sex is flat-out embarrassing. There are real concerns that adolescents should be taught about — disease and the risk of unwanted pregnancy being the obvious ones. But they should also be taught that, as long as you are careful about such things, there is nothing wrong with having sex. Done correctly, it can be fun! Sure, there can be emotional trauma, awkward moments, broken hearts, impetuous late-night phone calls that you wish you could take back the next day. But these are downsides associated with life, not with sex per se.

But as a society, we’re too uptight and hypocritical to say these things. Instead, we get stuff like abstinence-only sex ed, with predictable results. And adolescence, which isn’t going to be an easy time of life for most people no matter how much sensible advice they are given, becomes just that much more agonizing and uncertain.

Except for engineers, of course! They have it figured out.