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.

The market drop is indeed relevant, not as a sign of what Obama will do to the financial markets, but rather, what the financial markets will do to Obama. We are in an era of immense volatility and huge losses. In other times a 4% drop would be highly unusual and notable. But, sadly, in the present climate it has become routine. The economic downturn will almost certainly impact essentially every aspect of Obama’s time in office.

As it happens, the weather can also play an important role in the inauguration of a President. It was bitter cold for President William Harrison’s inauguration in 1841. His speech lasted for almost two hours (a record length), with him standing outside with little shelter. He caught pneumonia, and within a month was dead. There was undoubtedly little correlation between the cold and his death. But it makes for a perfect apocryphal story.

This crisis of self-confidence was brought on by reading Michele Hanson’s article, as part of Cif charades “:A special Christmas series in which Cif regulars write about a counterintuitive topic suggested by our readers” I’ve looked at others in this series, but unfortunately they haven’t provided me with the appropriate humor/bullshit compass necessary to divine the meaning of Hanson’s column. I’ve even checked myself against coumns that I know to be humorous, such as David Mitchell’s recent fun rant, but I can’t find a problem.

So maybe it’s me. Maybe I’ve lost the ability to tease out the dark humor in

Quantum physics is a bit of a black hole to me. You jump in and where do you get? Nowhere.

or

I wonder whether there weren’t better things physicists could have been doing over the last century. Just look where their work has got them. Niels Bohr, whose research led to quantum mechanics theories, went off to work on the Manhattan Project, and we all know where that got us. Thank you Oppenheimer, Bohr et al for the atom bomb.

For a moment, I thought I recognized something familiarly jolly in Hanson’s closing remarks

I asked another friend out with her dog. Her knowledge of plain, never mind quantum, physics was fairly basic. “Apples fall on your head,” she said. “Heat rises except in my oven, and E = mc².”

I can manage that, except for the last equation. Let’s not go there.

until I realized they just reminded me of a lazy undergraduate who claims they can’t do addition because they’re “not a math person”.

So I’m stumped. Surely The Guardian wouldn’t green-light a thoughtless and meaningless column by a patently ignorant and anti-intellectual author, would they? So how come I’m not finding it funny?

A huge hero of mine is Walter Baade. Baade was the guy who essentially took over observations at Mt Wilson during the blackouts of WWII. With the lights of Los Angeles snuffed out, and unable to serve in the military himself, he pushed the telescopes on Mt Wilson to their limits, and established the study of stellar populations in nearby galaxies.

There are some terrific pictures of Walter Adams working at Mt Wilson. In the picture below, he’s holding the telescope controls used for guiding. During an astronomical observation, you have to move the telescope to compensate for the earth’s rotation. Nowadays, your computer can take care of it by adjusting the position to keep a bright star at a fixed position on a CCD camera. Back then, you looked through a little spotting scope, and manually adjusted the telescope position to keep it pointed at the right part of the sky. If you let it drift, your image would be blurry. No pee breaks for you, Dr. Adams!

The guy kneeling in the figure below is Gerard Kuiper, working on a telescope at McDonald Observatory. He was a planetary astronomer, and the guy for whom the “Kuiper Belt” in the outer solar system was named, although Edgeworth probably deserved more credit for it. (Kuiper actually does have an airborne observatory named after him).

And you have to love this picture of Frank Drake, working at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Greenbank West Virginia. You really can never have enough toggle switches. FYI, Drake is the guy behind the “Drake Equation”, used to estimate the likelihood of contact with extraterrestrial civilizations.

And finally, a wonderful overhead shot of the 100″ telescope at Mt. Wilson

The pictures above are a tiny fraction of the available pictures of working scientists. Cancel your afternoon appointments and dive in.

It is remarkable to me to see such a collection of children, from every corner of the planet, gathered in my home country; a tiny island off the coast of mainland Europe. Their personal tales are intriguing – some heartwarming, others heartbreaking – and provide a sampling of some of the world’s recent history.

While I enjoyed the actual discussion, I confess to finding it disconcerting to have a recording of myself floating around the internet. I still have a bit of the anxious 13 year old stuck in my head, replaying years-old conversations where I wish I hadn’t said something, or said something different. The rational 40 year old part of me knows these conversations were long forgotten by everyone but me, but with the internet, they’re actually not. Instead, people can replay them over and over, and (even worse) comment on whether or not I misused a particular word (I did — I said “spurious” when “serendipitous” would have been more appropriate), or whether or not it’s distracting that a hunk of my hair tends to fall down and cover my one non-functional eye. It’s like my middle school nightmares actually coming true. I’ve progressed enough in the intervening two decades that I’m not paralyzed or depressed over it, but the desire to get everything just right, and feeling faint flips in the stomach when you fall just a little bit short, has never completely gone away.

Years back, I had the idea that Apple should include more famous-for-academia types in its Think Different ads. Ed Witten, Jacques Derrida, Amartya Sen, people like that. But I didn’t actually call up any ad agencies to make the pitch. So I figured that Microsoft had the same idea, and was including some professor-type among its self-declared PC’s in order to lend some gravitas to the proceedings.

Yeah, not so much. The somber mug above belongs to none other than Deepak Chopra, celebrated purveyor of quantum nonsense. He did, of course, win the 1998 IgNobel Prize in Physics for “for his unique interpretation of quantum physics as it applies to life, liberty, and the pursuit of economic happiness.” So there is that. (In certain religious circles, there is an increasingly popular teaching known as the Prosperity Gospel. I wonder if I could make money writing a book about “The Prosperity Hamiltonian”?)

The construction of jokes comparing Deepak Chopra’s understanding of quantum mechanics to Microsoft’s understanding of software is left as an exercise for the reader.

Ben Lillie, a theorist from Argonne/Chicago who attended the premiere, wrote a very thoughtful review and captures a lot about what folks have been saying. Julia Keller wrote an article about it two days before hte show for the Chciago Tribune. The film was shown at Fermilab yesterday, and overall we’ve gotten a lot of great positive feedback on it.

Robin and I only saw the movie the night before the premiere for the first time, and had only 24 hours to get over the weird feeling of seeing yourself in a movie. But Clayton and Monica did a great job of picking out some of the more interesting and intelligent things we had to say, and they fit well into the overall story line of the film.

This is a truly new approach to making a science documentary, rarely if at all pedagogical about the science itself, but rather digging a level deeper into what it’s like to do what we do, what motivates us, and the never ending struggle to maintain funding. There is kind of a bittersweet feeling at the end – no Higgs, no funding – but the fact that we all still hope that we will break through some day soon to the next level of understanding about our universe is palpably present at the end.

The film will be shown on PBS’s Independent Lens on Nov. 25. Bravo, Clayton and Monica and all the rest at 137 Films!

Neither. I am an illiterate who has to reply on my wife for all of the assistance I can get.

Now come some even more impressive quotes in an interview with the New York Times.

He said, ruefully, that he had not mastered how to use the Internet and relied on his wife and aides like Mark Salter, a senior adviser, and Brooke Buchanan, his press secretary, to get him online to read newspapers (though he prefers reading those the old-fashioned way) and political Web sites and blogs.

“They go on for me,” he said. “I am learning to get online myself, and I will have that down fairly soon, getting on myself. I don’t expect to be a great communicator, I don’t expect to set up my own blog, but I am becoming computer literate to the point where I can get the information that I need.”

…

Mr. McCain said he did not use a BlackBerry, though he regularly reads messages on those of his aides. “I don’t e-mail, I’ve never felt the particular need to e-mail,” Mr. McCain said.

I know the internets are confusing and all, but I’m frankly a bit baffled by this. He needs help “getting on”??? To read newspapers? Hard to imagine that there’s not a computer he could use somewhere, already attached to the internet, and probably even with the browser already installed. I’m guessing he wouldn’t have to learn how to set his DNS servers in order to read the New York Times. Is it typing the URL that’s difficult? My grandmother, by the way, who is more than a decade older than McCain, seems to have figured this out just fine, even without a campaign staff to help.

The level of cluelessness here is deep — not only does he admit that he’s completely illiterate, he demonstrates a basic lack of familiarity with the terminology (he also mentioned that his staff shows him Drudge, because “Everybody watches, for better or for worse, Drudge.”), much like his colleague Senator Ted “series of tubes” Stevens, opposer of net neutrality.

And it’s important. At the risk of stating the obvious: Internet policy has direct relevance for our most fundamental rights, including freedom of expression, privacy, and democratic access to information. Computing is increasingly critical to our increased understanding of the Universe, financial markets, and disease. The internet and social networking tools are rapidly revolutionizing the way we interact with each other, citizen’s access to and engagement in government, and government accountability. These things are central not only to innovation and the global economy, but to 21st century democracy in America and the world. It’s really hard to see how you can fully appreciate these issues if you don’t know the most basic things about operating a computer. Leadership matters.

Barack Obama, on the other hand, has a twitter account. (He also hired one of the Facebook founders to start his myBarackObama site, which has clearly been responsible for a good deal of his internet fundraising and organizing.) He gets it.

When it comes to opinionmongering, though, we are faced with a completely different kettle of fish — ones with sharp teeth and short tempers. Journalism requires work, but anyone can have an opinion, and most everyone does. Not everyone has opinions that are interesting, or the ability to defend them persuasively using information and rational argument. That, in principle, is why we have pundits in the first place; they are supposed to be better-informed than average, and generally capable of intelligently articulating the opinions they have. The best pundits, presumably, should be those that have the most interesting opinions, and are the best at explaining and arguing for them.

Problem is, these are subjective criteria. What typically happens in the MSM is that, by some quite mysterious process, an editor or publisher decides that some particular person with opinions would make a good pundit, whether its because of the sparkle of their prose or the cut of their jib. A column or regular TV appearances are granted. And then, amazingly, they’re in forever. Rarely are columnists fired for not making sense; once they claim that status, they tend to keep it, no matter how pointless or uninformed their work turns out to be. It’s as if the NBA drafted players straight out of high school, but then they never had to play a game; they all just received long-term contracts, with salaries based on how good they look during lay-up drills and dunk contests. Maureen Dowd will be taking up space on the New York Times Op-Ed pages for decades to come.

Blogs work on a different model. Despite various well-documented biases and ossification of hierarchies, the blogosphere is still largely a meritocracy, in which success is driven by the free market of links. Say things that are interesting, well-informed, and thoughtfully presented, and someone will link to you. Word will spread, and you can be a success. Admittedly, you can also be a success by spouting complete nonsense, if you do it in a way that enough people approve of. The point is not that what rises to the top is exclusively meritorious; it’s that merit is one of the ways in which you really can rise to the top.

Joe Klein, longtime columnist for Time magazine and anonymous author of Primary Colors, is doing his best to inadvertently prove the dramatic superiority of the blog model for developing pundits. Klein has never been a favorite among lefty bloggers; although purportedly liberal himself, he comes off more as a smug apologist for accepted Washington consensus than as a shrewd analyst. On the Iraq war in particular, he’s shown something other than courage; in fact, what ever the opposite of courage is, he’s pretty much shown that. Now that the war has turned out to be a disaster on all fronts, he insists that he was against it all along. Which is funny because, in all of those columns he regularly penned for our largest-circulation newsweekly during the time when the wisdom of going to war was actually being debated, he forgot to mention it. He was asked about the issue point-blank at the time, by Tim Russert on Meet the Press, and replied “This is a really tough decision. War may well be the right decision at this point. In fact, I think it–it’s–it–it probably is.” Somewhat short of a full-throated denunciation.

But what’s a little weak-kneed simpering among friends? You don’t have to go on the Sunday talk shows every week, and in a few months whatever you said at the time will be forgotten anyway. But now Klein has embarked on a new adventure — he’s blogging, as part of Time’s group effort called Swampland. We begin to perceive the outlines of an actual conversation; there are comments on his posts, and other bloggers can link to him and offer critiques (with explicit citations) practically in real time. And they’ve been calling Joe Klein on his crap. (Or, I should say, “calling him on his shit,” since one of the standard fallacies wielded against bloggers is that they shouldn’t be taken seriously because they use curse words.) It’s like all those young draft picks had to suddenly start playing games, and not against the Washington Generals, either.

The results haven’t been pretty. Atrios, in particular, has been tireless in combatting the idea that mainstream journalists are just liberal mouthpieces, and is quick to point out how often supposedly-liberal pundits like to carry water for Republicans. Most journalists probably do self-identify as liberals — but, much more relevantly, they are part of the professional political class. With a few notable exceptions, they tend to cozy up to power, and try their best to reflect the conventional wisdom of their friends in the same class. Smart political operatives have learned to play them like very loud fiddles, so that the desired message can be broadcast under the cover of neutral journalism.

Joe Klein is not pleased with how this conversation is going. He’s taken to frequent self-defensive meta-blogging, in which is primary concern is to defend his honor against the onslaught of the unwashed masses. The problem, not to put too fine a point on it, is that Joe Klein isn’t very good. He’s a fine wordsmith, but he’s not exceptionally smart, or analytic, or insightful. So he ends up lashing out, somewhat clumsily, at unnamed ideological extremists. The problem is that everyone knows he’s talking about Atrios, and everyone who can read knows that “ideological extremist” is a preposterously inaccurate label. Atrios, like Kos, is a partisan advocate, but both of them are unfailingly pragmatic in their goals. They are vociferous and combative, which polite liberals aren’t supposed to be, so their lazier critics prefer to write them off as blindly ideological. Atrios (whose real name is Duncan Black) couldn’t possibly be more sensibly center-left when it comes to actual policy prescriptions; the fact that he calls people “wankers” does not imply that he’s an organizer for the Socialist Worker’s Party. And anyone who has read Kos’s amusing takedown of Dennis Kucinich would be hard-pressed to describe him as a rabid leftist. These guys are devoted to the idea of getting Democrats elected, not promoting some sort of anarcho-communism.

Between the cozy covers of Time, you can let fly with the occasional unsupportable accusation without too much bother. But, this being the blogosphere, people called him out for not making sense. To which Klein, in an attempt to explain himself, responded with a list of things that make you a left-wing extremist. Suffice it to say, it is embarrassingly awful. A bizarre mixture of weird positions that none of his prominent critics actually holds (”believes in a corporate conspiracy that controls the world”), along with utterly irrelevant stylistic critiques (”regularly uses harsh, vulgar, intolerant language to attack moderates or conservatives”). Compounding the supercilious vapidity with weaselly ambiguity, he mentions that such extremists will exhibit “many, but not necessarily all” of these attributes, and protests that it would be “wildly stupid” to actually mention the names of anyone who might fit these characterizations. I’m pretty sure I remember these rhetorical strategies, from back in junior high.

In response to which, the blogosphere being what it is, much smarter people smack him down. Ezra Klein (no relation) and Scott Lemieux do the necessary dirty work, dissecting the fundamental dishonesty behind Joe Klein’s smears. All of which (this whole bloated post, really) is to say: wouldn’t the world be a much better place if Ezra Klein and Scott Lemieux were regular columnists in our major media outlets, instead of the people who are actually there? In the heated crucible of blogospheric debates, interesting and intelligent voices can percolate to the top, who might never have been heard if things were left to the whim of a small coterie of editors. Why not take advantage? How great would it be to see Shakespeare’s Sister and hilzoy on the pages of the New York Times, instead of Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich? We’re replacing “liberals” with liberals here, in the interests of ideological balance, but the same goes for conservatives. Orin Kerr and Tyler Cowen in place of George Will and David Brooks? One could go on.

The dearth of intelligent commentary and insightful analysis in the punditosphere as currently constituted is a contingent condition, not a necessary fact of life. There are really smart people out there who are doing a better job for free than that for which the professionals are handsomely compensated. Sadly, a lot more people are still getting their opinions from the MSM than from intelligent blogs. (And, to state the obvious, there are plenty of non-intelligent blogs.) But someday soon, I have to think, some forward-thinking editors and TV news-show directors are going to start taking advantage of the wealth of talent that is sitting there before them. Of course, they have to have the wit and discernment to recognize a good thing. To date, the highest-profile example of a blogger becoming a major columnist is Ana Marie Cox, the erstwhile Wonkette who has now joined Joe Klein at Time. Which is fine, except that Cox is a comedian, not a political analyst. Her success is a paradigmatic example of the idea that what matters is the cleverness with which you can turn a phrase, not the actual substance of what you have to say.

That’s old-school thinking. Here’s hoping that, amidst the sound and fury, the best of the blogosphere can help to elevate the discourse above what we’re used to.