So now an official boycott has been organized, and is gaining steam — if you’re a working scientist, feel free to add your signature. Many bloggers have chimed in, e.g. Cosma Shalizi and Scott Aaronson. Almost all scientists want their papers to be widely accessible — given all the readily available alternatives to Elsevier (including the new Physical Review X), all we need to do is self-organize a bit and we can make it happen.

Show this to your local climate denialist when they get confused about the distinction between “climate” and “weather.” Not that it will change their minds, but the dog is cute.

Dear Chancellor Katehi:

With a heavy heart and substantial deliberation, we the undersigned faculty of the UC Davis physics department send you this letter expressing our lack of confidence in your leadership and calling for your prompt resignation in the wake of the outrageous, unnecessary, and brutal pepper spraying episode on campus Friday, Nov. 18.

The reasons for this are as follows.

• The demonstrations were nonviolent, and the student encampments posed no threat to the university community. The outcomes of sending in police in Oakland, Berkeley, New York City, Portland, and Seattle should have led you to exhaust all other options before resorting to police action.

• Authorizing force after a single day of encampments constitutes a gross violation of the UC Davis principles of community, especially the commitment to civility: “We affirm the right of freedom of expression within our community and affirm our commitment to the highest standards of civility and decency towards all.”

• Your response in the aftermath of these incidents has failed to restore trust in your leadership in the university community.

We have appreciated your leadership during these difficult times on working to maintain and enhance excellence at UC Davis. However, this incident and the inadequacy of your response to it has already irreparably damaged the image of UC Davis and caused the faculty, students, parents, and alumni of UC Davis to lose confidence in your leadership. At this point we feel that the best thing that you can do for this university is to take full responsibility and resign immediately. Our campus community deserves a fresh start.

Sincerely,

Andreas Albrecht (chair)
Marusa Bradac
Steve Carlip
Hsin-Chia Cheng
Maxwell Chertok
John Conway
Daniel Cox
James P. Crutchfield
Glen Erickson
Chris Fassnacht
Daniel Ferenc
Ching Fong
Giulia Galli
Nemanja Kaloper
Joe Kiskis
Lloyd Knox
Dick Lander
Lori Lubin
Markus Luty
Michael Mulhearn
David Pellett
Wendell Potter
Sergey Savrasov
Richard Scalettar
Robert Svoboda
John Terning
Mani Tripathi
David Webb
David Wittman
Dong Yu
Gergely Zimanyi

I am generally a fan of the two-party system. Sadly, at the moment in this country, one of the parties is completely crazy.

Update: Sorry that the video isn’t available outside the U.S. Note that Lisa Randall was a guest earlier on the show.

Explain why people shouldn’t try to form their own physics opinions, but instead accept the judgements of expert physicists, but they should try to form their own opinions on economic policy, and not just accept expert opinion there.

(I suspect the thing he wants me to explain is not something he thinks is actually true.)

There are two aspects to this question, the hard part and the much-harder part. The hard part is the literal reading, comparing the levels of trust accorded to economists (and presumably also political scientists or sociologists) to the level accorded to physicists (and presumably also chemists or biologists). Why do we — or should we — accept the judgements of natural scientists more readily than those of social scientists?

Although that’s not an easy question, the basic point is not difficult to figure out: in the public imagination, natural scientists have figured out a lot more reliable and non-obvious things about the world, compared to what non-experts would guess, than social scientists have. The insights of quantum mechanics and relativity are not things that most of us can even think sensibly about without quite a bit of background study. Social scientists, meanwhile, talk about things most people are relatively familiar with. The ratio of “things that have been discovered by this discipline” to “things I could have figured out for myself” just seems much larger in natural science than in social science.

Then we stir in the matter of consensus. On the very basics of their fields (the Big Bang model, electromagnetism, natural selection), almost all natural scientists are in agreement. Social scientists seem to have trouble agreeing on the very foundations of their fields. If we cut taxes, will revenue go up or down? Does the death penalty deter crime or not? For many people, a lack of consensus gives them license to trust their own judgment as much as that of the experts. To put it another way: if we talked more about the bedrock principles of the field on which all experts agreed, and less about the contentious applications of detailed models to the real world, the public would likely be more ready to accept experts’ opinions.

None of which is to say that social scientists are less capable or knowledgable about their fields than natural scientists. Their fields are much harder! Where “hard” characterizes the difficulty of coming up with models that accurately capture important features of reality. Physics is the easiest subject of all, which is why we know enormously more about it than any other science. The social sciences deal with fantastically more complicated subjects, about which it’s very naturally more difficult to make definitive statements, especially statements that represent counterintuitive discoveries. The esoteric knowledge that social scientists undoubtedly possess, therefore, doesn’t translate directly into actionable understanding of the world, in the same way that physicists are able to help get a spacecraft to the moon.

There is a final point that is much trickier: political inclinations and other non-epistemic factors color our social-scientific judgments, for experts as well as for novices. On a liberal/conservative axis, most sociologists are to the left of most economists. (Training as an economist allegedly makes people more selfish, but there are complicated questions of causation there.) Or more basically, social scientists will often approach real-world problems from the point of view of their specific discipline, in contrast with a broader view that the non-expert might find more relevant. (Let’s say the death penalty does deter crime; is it still permissible on moral grounds?) Natural scientists are blissfully free from this source of bias, at least most of the time. Evolution would be the obvious counterexample.

The more difficult question is much more interesting: when should, in completely general terms, a non-expert simply place trust in the judgment of an expert? I don’t have a very good answer to that one.

I am a strong believer that good reasons, arguments, and evidence are what matter, not credentials. So the short answer to “when should we trust an expert simply because they are an expert?” is “never.” We should always ask for reasons before we place trust. Hannes Alfvén was a respected Nobel-prizewinning physicist; but his ideas about cosmology were completely loopy, and there was no reason for anyone to trust them. An interested outsider might verify that essentially no working cosmologists bought into his model.

But a “good reason” might reasonably take the form “look, this is very complicated and would take pages of math to make explicit, but you see that I’ve been doing this for a long time and have the respect of my peer group, which has a long track record of being right about these issues, so I’m asking you to go along this time.” In the real world we don’t have anything like the time and resources to become experts in every interesting field, so some degree of trust is simply necessary. When deciding where to place that trust, we rely on a number of factors, mostly involving the track record of the group to which the purported expert belongs, if not the individual experts themselves.

So my advice to economists who want more respect from the outside world would be: make it much more clear to the non-expert public that you have a reliable, agreed-upon set of non-obvious discoveries that your field has made about the world. People have tried to lay out such discoveries, of course — but upon closer inspection they don’t quite measure up to Newton’s Laws in terms of reliability and usefulness.

Social scientists are just as smart and knowledgable as natural scientists, and certainly have a tougher job. But trust among non-experts isn’t demanded, and shouldn’t be based on credentials; it is given on the basis of a long track record of very visible success. Everyone would be in favor of that.

Walk through the halls of UC Irvine’s astronomy wing after dinner on a weeknight and you will find roomfuls of young graduate students, crammed into small desks, solving equations, writing computer code and developing innovative ways to analyze data. They do not have to be here. These are people with career options. They are scary-smart, creative and hardworking. Yet they have come here from all over the country and the world to sit in windowless offices and make a fifth of the money they could make back home or up the street. Why? They want to unlock the universe.

The United States is still the scientific light of the world. Ours is the society responsible for discovering humanity’s place in the universe, that we live in a galaxy called the Milky Way, one among billions of other galaxies stretched across the cosmic landscape. A hundred thousand years from now, if humans make it that long, the U.S. will be remembered for this, and historians will point to the immense contribution of the Hubble Space Telescope, with its miraculous visible-light images, the most detailed pictures of the cosmos yet produced by humankind.

Sadly, U.S. scientific leadership is beginning to fade. There is a sense of fear among our leaders that we can’t afford to invest in our future, just the kind of fear that endangers thoughtful debate about big-picture priorities.

One testament to our changing priorities is our commitment to the Hubble telescope as compared to its successor. The Hubble is, in every way, a monument to scientific exploration. Thanks to the Hubble, orbiting 350 miles overhead, we know that the universe began just under 14 billion years go. The age of the cosmos, once believed to be unknowable, is now available at the click of a mouse and has made it into schoolbooks in all 50 states. Astronomers have used the Hubble to determine the chemical makeup of planets that orbit distant stars and to discover dark energy, a mysterious substance propelling the universe to expand at an accelerating rate.

Many of the graduate students filling astronomy departments at University of California campuses, as well as Caltech and Stanford, have come to the state to explore and analyze terabytes of Hubble data. These data involve complex digital images, created in raw form onboard the orbiting telescope, and then decomposed into precise component colors. The Hubble beams this information to receivers around the world, where it is processed and made available for download. A graduate student working in Irvine can transfer Hubble images to a computer and then develop software to process and analyze the images’ meaning.

The goal is to squeeze information out of the gathered light that will help us discern the size, structure and chemical composition of objects that are almost always too far away for humans to ever hope to visit. The people who do this work are both creative and technically gifted. They must take what the universe provides — a shred of light collected by the Hubble — and discern implication from its signal.
We want these intelligent, dedicated people to live in our cities, to make their discoveries at our universities and to raise their families — the next generation of bright minds — right here.

Read the whole thing here. And then write your Senators and Representatives. JWST, and with it, US scientific leadership, and an amazing opportunity to fill in the contours of the history and physics of our Universe, is really at risk. Very possibly only an outcry of the kind that saved Hubble will be enough to launch Hubble’s successor.

The participants were me, David Gregory, Paul Davies, and John Haught. But there were also short video interventions from Jennifer Wiseman, William Stoeger, and Michio Kaku. Actually seeing the program made me even more frustrated about the lack of time and inability to discuss any issue in depth. Also, while the makeup of the original panel seemed fair (committed atheist, wishy-washy physicist, Catholic theologian), the pre-recorded videos all took the line that science shouldn’t be talking about God. That gave the final program more of a “gang up on the atheist” feel than I would have really liked. I don’t think the videos added much, other than to eat into our valuable time. An hour-long program would have been better, and it probably would have been a much sharper conversation if there had just been two panelists rather than three. But again, credit to Discovery for having the event at all.

Specific thoughts on the participants:

• David Gregory: I thought he did fine. Not sure why some people were complaining about the questions; his job was just to get the conversation going and keep it moving, which he did with admirable professionalism.
• John Haught: He actually had a very difficult job, since his take on the nature of God isn’t easy to boil down to a sound bite. Still, I personally don’t think there’s any there, there. If you can’t imagine a universe in which God doesn’t exist, you need to work on your imaginative skills.
• Paul Davies: A very clear speaker and strong communicator, but again not a sound-bite kind of guy. He did win the Templeton prize, but isn’t very explicitly religious. (At least, not that one can discern, which is part of the problem.) But he does strongly believe that it’s not okay to simply say “the universe is like that” — he thinks there is necessarily a deeper explanation for the laws of physics.
• Jennifer Wiseman and William Stoeger: Neither really even tried to argue in favor of God’s existence. They just took the angle that religion talks about value while science talks about facts. I think it’s important to get the facts right before you start talking about values, and said as much, but we didn’t have time to dig into that issue.
• Michio Kaku: I tease Michio. The guy is a brilliant science communicator, but I don’t think he added anything of value here.
• Me: This isn’t an easy format, and I would probably grade myself a generous B. I don’t feel like taking back anything I said, but I definitely could have been more forceful about it. Still looking to improve at things like this — any suggestions?

Okay here are the videos, judge for yourselves. First the panel, in two parts:

Here’s the episode of Curiosity, hosted by Hawking, in four parts.

The meeting begins tomorrow, and a new and interesting event taking place on the first day is a lunch-time forum (noon to 1:30pm) on Physics and Modern Media. University of Washington Professor Gordon Watts, who blogs over at Life as a Physicist, and University of Nebraska-Lincoln Professor Ken Bloom, who blogs at Quantum Diaries, were nice enough to ask me to be on this panel. But unfortunately my travel constraints mean I’m almost certain to miss it, and so I had to decline. Despite this crushing blow, they’re going ahead anyway, and have invited several others to discuss how physicists interact with the public in the world of blogs, tweets, and other social media. Their intention is to discuss some general issues, such as how these can be used to better communicate science to the public, as well as tackling some of the better known controversies, such as the appearance of unofficial “results” from particle physics experiments on blogs.

As if this acknowledgement of the modern world wasn’t enough, the DPF has also encouraged its members to use Twitter to engage other DPF members and the broader public during the conference, using the hash tag #DPF2011. They intend to monitor this through the forum and relay comments to the panel. While I don’t tweet myself, this certainly seems like an efficient way to get questions in real time to the moderators. I know a lot of you out there have strong opinions on these issues, one way or another, and I hope you’ll take this opportunity for an open discussion.

I’ll be back later to report on the meeting, but for now let me just wish Gordon and Ken luck with this new addition to the DPF meetings.

There’s a lot to say about these shows, and in particular there’s a huge amount that we didn’t have time to say during the panel. So as I sit in front of the TV, I’ll be live-blogging along by adding updates to this post. This will be the early show, so the fun will happen 8pm-9:30pm Eastern. Hey, Nathan Fillion live-tweets during Castle, so why not me? There is also a chat going on at the Discovery site.

The main attraction of Hawking’s program is not that he has disproven the existence of God. Certainly I don’t think he’s going to be changing the minds of many religious believers. His argument is essentially that the universe is self-contained, and doesn’t really have “room” for God (nor any need to invoke a creator). It’s very easy to wriggle free of that conclusion, if you are inclined not to accept it.

But “changing people’s minds” isn’t the only reason to talk about something, even about controversial issues. Religion, like sex and death, is one of those topics where it’s very difficult to simply have a dispassionate discussion without making people uncomfortable. It can happen within a group of similarly-minded people, of course, but once a wider range of views gets involved, it’s hard to maintain comity. (Comedy, on the other hand, is pretty easy.) I don’t mean everyone has to agree — just the opposite. We should be able to talk about things we completely disagree on, while still maintaining level heads.

That’s why I think this episode of Curiosity is potentially important. It’s a forthright statement of a view that doesn’t often get aired in American media. Even if nobody’s mind is changed, simply talking rationally about this issues would be a step forward.

Pre-show update: I should note ahead of time that I was not wearing a tie. Haught, Davies, and Gregory were all wearing ties. But Hawking wasn’t. Maybe atheists don’t wear ties? (Although I’m pretty sure Jesus never wore a tie, either.)

Start: We begin with a disclaimer! These are Stephen Hawking’s opinions, not those of Discovery.

4 minutes: I hope the analogy here is clear. “People who believe God made the universe are kind of like the Vikings shouting at the Sun to stop a solar eclipse.”

8 minutes: Snark aside, the message here is a fundamental one. Nature obeys laws! Something that’s certainly not a priori obvious or necessary, but a really profound truth.

14 minutes: I wasn’t able to find an independent confirmation of this story about Pope John XXI condemning the idea of “laws of nature.” (It’s true that he did die when the roof collapsed.) Presumably this refers to the Condemnations of 1277.

20 minutes: The universe is a big, messy, complicated, and occasionally quite intricate place. On the face of it, the idea that it’s all the working-out of some impersonal patterns of matter and energy, rather than being constructed by some kind of conscious intelligence, is pretty remarkable. (But true nonetheless.)

27 minutes: Hey, a tiny ad for Discovery Retreats!

28 minutes: Hawking says Einstein might be the greatest scientist ever. He has long favored Einstein over Newton, I’m not sure why. Hawking appeared on an episode of Star Trek: TNG, where he was a hologram playing poker with Einstein, Newton, and Data. He actually wrote the script, and Newton doesn’t come off well.

36 minutes: Ah, negative energy. Depends on what you mean by “energy,” but this isn’t the venue to get overly technical, obviously. Roughly, matter has positive energy and gravity has negative energy. That’s hopefully enough to help people swallow the crucial point: you can make a universe for nothing. There isn’t some fixed resource, out of which we can make a universe or two, before we hit Peak Universe. There can be an infinite number of universes.

41 minutes: People on Twitter are asking why Hawking doesn’t have a British accent. He easily could, of course; voice-synthesis technology has come quite a way since he first got the system. But he’s said that he now identifies with that voice he got years ago, and doesn’t want to change it; it’s identified with him.

47 minutes: Okay, here’s the payoff. He’s saying that generally we’re used to effects being caused by pre-existing events. (The first step toward a cosmological argument for God’s existence.) You might think that a chain of causation takes you back to the Big Bang, which then requires God as a cause. But no! The Big Bang can just … be.

50 minutes: The point of the black hole discussion is to get to the idea of a singularity, a conjectural point of infinite curvature and density. The Big Bang, in classical general relativity, is also a singular moment. But classical GR isn’t right. We need quantum gravity. Hawking believes that quantum gravity smooths the singularity and explains how there was no pre-existing time. (At least in the TV show, unlike A Brief History, he doesn’t start talking about “imaginary time.”)

56 minutes: Ultimately Hawking’s argument against God is pretty simplistic. He assumes that if God created the Big Bang, God must have existed before the Big Bang, but there was no “before the Big Bang,” QED. It’s easy enough to simply assert that God doesn’t exist “within time” (if that means anything). It would have been better (IMHO) to emphasize that modern cosmology has many good ideas about how the universe could have come to be, so there’s no need to rely on a divine creator.

58 minutes: Final thought from SWH: no life after death! Enjoy it while you’re around, folks. An important message.

Panel discussion starts: Forgot to mention that Paul Davies has shaved off his moustache. Disconcerting.

4 minutes: Also disconcerting: watching myself on TV. Hate it. But I persevere for the greater good.

5 minutes: Here’s Michio Kaku, not saying very much.

7 minutes: Jennifer Wiseman and I were actually grad students together! She’s good people, even if we disagree about the whole God thing.

9 minutes: I come out in favor of basing purpose and meaning on reality. But I’m pretty sure a longer remark was cut off there. Arrrrgh! Nothing nefarious, we intentionally recorded a bit more than they had time to show. But enormously frustrating that there was so little time.

13 minutes: Not sure why we kept talking about the multiverse. Hawking didn’t bring it up, did he?

17 minutes: I thought a lot of what Haught said was not even really trying to argue in favor of God’s existence, but simply expressing a desire that he exist. “God is the grounding of hope” isn’t evidence for God’s existence.

22 minutes: Haven’t said anything completely silly yet, so that’s good. But so little time…

27 minutes: Always time for more Michio!

30 minutes: Arrrrgh again, this time for real: in the live conversation, I had the last word and it was a pretty good one. In the televised program, not so much. Had to end wishy-washy.

Thanks for tuning in. Wouldn’t it have been wonderful to have the time for a real conversation? But big ups to Discovery for hosting the panel at all — it’s a rare event on TV.

The Hawking special is the kick-off episode to a major new Discovery program, called simply Curiosity. I predict it will make something of a splash. The reason is simple: although most of the episode is about science, Hawking clearly goes all-in with “God does not exist.” It’s not a message we often hear on American TV.

The atheistic conclusion is really surprisingly explicit. I had a chance to talk to someone at Discovery, who explained a little about how the program came about. The secret is that it was originally produced by the BBC — British audiences have a different set of expectations than American ones do. My completely fictional reconstruction of the conversation would go something like this. Discovery: Hey, blokes! Do you have any programs we could use to launch our major new series? BBC: Sure, we have a new special narrated by Stephen Hawking. Discovery: Perfect! That’s always box office. What’s it about? BBC: It’s about how there is no God. Discovery: Ah.

[Update: Alas, reality is intruding upon my meant-to-be-funny imaginary dialogue. The episode was actually originally commissioned by Discovery, not by the BBC, although it was produced in the UK. More power to Discovery!]

At first, I will confess to a smidgin of annoyance that an opportunity to talk about fascinating science was being sacrificed to yet another discussion about religion. But quickly, even before anyone else had the joy of pointing it out to me, I realized how spectacularly hypocritical that was. I talk about religion all the time — why shouldn’t Stephen Hawking get the same opportunity?

The more I thought about it, the more appropriate I thought the episode really was. I can’t speak for Hawking, but I presume his interest in the topic stems from similar sources as my own. It’s not just a coincidence that we are theoretical cosmologists who happen to go around arguing that God doesn’t exist. The question of God and the questions of cosmology arise from a common impulse — to understand how the world works at its most fundamental level. These issues naturally go hand-in-hand. Pretending otherwise, I believe, probably stems from a desire on the part of religious believers to insulate their worldview from scientific critique.

Besides, people find it interesting, and rightfully so. Professional scientists are sometimes irritated by the tendency of the public to dwell on what scientists think are the “wrong” questions. Most people are fascinated by questions about God, life after death, life on other worlds, and other issues that touch on what it means to be human. These might not be fruitful research projects for most professional scientists, but part of our job should be to occasionally step back and look at the bigger picture. That’s exactly what Hawking is doing here, and more power to him. (In terms of his actual argument, I’m sympathetic to the general idea, but would take issue with some of the particulars.)

Nevertheless, Discovery was not going to feature an hour of rah-rah atheism without a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down. Thus, our panel discussion, which will air immediately after the debut of Curiosity (i.e., 9pm Eastern/Pacific). The four of us had fun, and I think the result will be an interesting program — and hopefully I did the side proud, as the only legit atheist participating. Gregory seemed to enjoy himself, and joked that he might have to give up politics to do a weekly show about cosmology. (A guy can dream…) But we all agreed that it was incredibly frustrating to have so little time to talk about such big issues. The show will run for half an hour; subtract commercials, and we’re left with about 21 minutes of substance. Then subtract introduction, questions, some background videos that were shown … we three panelists had about five minutes each of speaking time. Not really enough to spell out convincing answers to the major questions that have troubled thinkers for centuries. Hopefully some of the basic points came across. Let us know what you think.

A lot of what is in the article will be well known to anyone who is a beer connoisseur. And these days, given the proliferation in the U.S. of great beer of every type imaginable, I find such people everywhere. However, for the rest of us it does provide a great primer on what’s going on to produce that frothy glass of deliciousness in front of us.

Science aside, there are other fascinating tidbits in the article, such as

Many cultures have seen beer as a gift from God (a medieval English term for yeast was godisgoode)

After reading Connelly’s article, I realized he’s been writing similar ones for some time now. You can find out about the science of

• Whisky Making
• Cheesemaking
• Breadmaking
• Cake
• and … Cinder Toffee!

Ok, got to go – I’m hungry now!

So what are the core ideas of science? They are all listed in the summary report, and divided into three categories. The first category is “Scientific and Engineering Practices,” and includes such laudable concepts as ” Analyzing and interpreting data.” The second category is “Crosscutting Concepts That Have Common Application Across Fields,” by which they mean things like “Scale, proportion, and quantity” or ” Stability and change.” It’s great that the organizational scheme emphasizes ideas that stretch across disciplinary boundaries, but there is definitely a danger that the resulting items come off as a bit vague. The secret to success here will be how they can be implemented, with concrete examples.

The third category is the nitty-gritty, “Core Ideas in Four Disciplinary Areas,” namely “Physical Sciences,” “Life Sciences,” “Earth and Space Sciences,” and “Engineering, Technology, and the Applications of Science.” (Math is not within the report’s purview.) And here are the actual core ideas proposed for the physical sciences:

• PS 1: Matter and its interactions
• PS 2: Motion and stability: Forces and interactions
• PS 3: Energy
• PS 4: Waves and their applications in technologies for information transfer

These mostly seem like good choices. If you’re wondering where the universe and solar system fit it, remember that “Earth and Space Sciences” is a separate category. The crucial fact that matter is made of atoms appears in PS 1, and the forces of nature appear in PS 2. Personally I think that it would be nice to have something more explicit about the relationship between the idealized physics-teacher’s world and the messy real world — entropy, friction, dissipation, complexity, etc. But you can’t keep everyone happy.

Having “waves” in there is a great idea. This was an addition to the other points, all three of which were spelled out in related previous reports. From a strictly conceptual point of view (although perhaps not from a pedagogical one), I would love to see “waves” replaced by “fields” — a field is an entity which takes a value at every point in some space, while a wave is simply a ripple in a field. There is a very fundamental duality between particles/objects and fields/waves, which would be nice to make clear at an early stage. (Mathematically speaking, the worldline of a particle is a map from the real line to spacetime, while a simple field is a map from spacetime to the real line. But you don’t have to go that deep.) Fields are not intrinsically an advanced concept; temperature is a field, as is the velocity or any other feature of the air, as is the altitude of a topographical map, or of course the height of ocean waves. Not to mention gravity, electricity, and magnetism. Someday maybe this will be seventh-grade stuff.

Whether or not these concepts and the grander conceptual scheme actually turn out to be useful will depend much more on implementation than on this original formulation. The easy part is over, in other words. The four ideas above seem vague at first glance, but they are spelled out in detail in the full report, with many examples and very specific benchmarks. (“By the end of grade 8. All substances are made from some 100 different types of atoms, which combine with one another in various ways.”) Sadly, the U.S. is burdened by a laughably inefficient system of local control of public schools, so any form of large-scale change is extremely difficult. But it will never happen if we don’t try.

These are the brainchild of John Hendricks, the founder of the Discovery Channel and a host of science and education related programming. Taking place at Gateway Canyons Resort (yes, I know, sometimes we’re spoiled), these are several day events at which people come for vacation time in a stunning environment, mixed with lectures, panel discussions, star-gazing, and open discussion events. This inaugural retreat was titled “Secrets of the Universe”, at which Sean (who was organizing the scientific part of the event) gave the introductory overview of cosmology, Janna spoke about black holes, Risa discussed dark matter in the universe, I talked about dark matter and cosmic acceleration, and Jennifer gave a fascinating and fun talk on science and hollywood.

For me, by far the most enjoyable science part of the event was the panel discussion. Janna had left at this point, but we were joined by Nick Sagan, who provided his perspective as a science fiction author. Jennifer moderated this, and had a well thought out sequence of questions that guided us through a set of popular topics. However, it is always interesting to see what topics the audience is most fascinated by, even though they are often the ones you would have suspected. We were led through the nature of the big bang singularity, the ideas of inflation, string theory, the question of whether the universe has an edge, and a bunch of other big issues that frequently arise when one gets into chats about cosmology. We certainly had a great time – I hope the audience did.

One of the more fun non-science events was a tour of John’s extensive car museum at the resort. Here are Janna and I sitting in front of one of the many beautiful exhibits

In many ways this first retreat was a bit of a dry run, in which we were feeling out the right format and exploring the mix of scheduled and free time. There are going to be more of these events, not just focused on cosmology but on the frontiers of other scientific areas. Hopefully our first attempt wasn’t just fun, but also gave enough feedback that these future attempts work as well as possible.

Of course, Facebook being Facebook, I have no idea whether this is a nefarious conspiracy or simple incompetence. Probably both. In any event, you should go check out the post, which comments on this YouTube video.

It’s a compilation of the answers given by contestants in the Miss USA contest to a simple question: “Should evolution be taught in schools?” Miss California, Alyssa Campanella, who eventually won the contest, gave a strong pro-science answer that will bring a smile to your face. At least, if you are finished crying and throwing objects at your computer monitor after seeing some of the other answers. Due to the vagaries of alphabetical order, Miss Alabama comes first, and it’s not pretty.

For the most part, the contestants are interested in being good politicians and keeping everybody happy, not in staking out courageous stances in the science/religion debates. But that’s exactly what’s so depressing: here we are, in the most advanced country in the world (albeit in its waning years), and it’s considered controversial whether we should teach science to our children. The question wasn’t even “should we teach creationism,” which is actually a harder issue (although still very easy). It was just whether we should teach straightforward science at all. Very sad indeed.

Unlike TRON: Legacy, where we came in after the screenplay had been drafted, on Thor we came in near the beginning. Marvel had done a lot of work on the idea, but there wasn’t yet a script. The Exchange set up a consult meeting with director Kenneth Branagh, the screenwriter, and few people on the design and production side of things, along with three scientists — Jim Hartle from USCB, Kevin Hand from JPL, and myself.

We bandied around lots of issues relating to the Thor universe and how it fit in with Marvel’s bigger plans. Once there was a script, I came in to read it and offer some more comments. Since that time, the script was re-written by the dynamic duo of Ash Miller and Zack Stentz, and I haven’t actually seen the film yet, so I can’t speak to what kind of impact we had in the end. Let’s just say that there was one thing in particular that they were planning on doing in the movie that drove all the scientists batty — I think we convinced them to fix it, but we’ll have to see. And once filming started, they recruited Caltech student Kevin Hickerson to help with the tech-gadgetry end of things. So I have high hopes. (Early reviews are very positive. And of course, Agent Coulson returns, with a larger role than in the Iron Man films. Everyone loves Agent Coulson.)

You might be wondering, where is there room for any sort of science in a comic-book movie about a Norse god in a red cape who swings a magical hammer? Well I’m glad you asked. Actually there were a couple of different things where the movie people were very interested in our input. One was constructing a coherent framework for the Marvel universe — ultimately, this story about Thor the thunder god is going to have to be compatible with Tony Stark’s Iron Man world, since the two characters are both part of the Avengers. (I also got to read the script for that, and yes — it is as great as the rumors suggest.)

Kevin Feige, president of production at Marvel Studios, is a huge proponent of having the world of these films ultimately “make sense.” It’s not our world, obviously, but there needs to be a set of “natural laws” that keeps things in order — not just for Iron Man and Thor, but all the way up to Doctor Strange, the Sorcerer Supreme who will get his own movie before too long. The thinking here is very much based on Arthur C. Clarke’s “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” In the trailer above, Thor basically gives exactly this pitch to Jane Foster.

That’s the other area where we science consultants were able to help out: in shaping Natalie Portman’s character of Jane Foster. In the original comic books Foster was a nurse, but they wanted to update her considerably for the movie. So they hit on the idea that she could be a scientist, but what kind of scientist? (I argued that she be an experimental physicist.) What kind of position would she hold? Could there be tension with her academic supervisor? What kind of posters does a young physicist have on her apartment wall?

Again, I haven’t seen the movie, but I’m very hopeful that Jane Foster ends up being a strong character and a good representation of scientists. Natalie Portman seems to think so — you can read here and here about how she feels this role was an opportunity to do something different and important.

“Ken and I talked a lot before we started about how to make Jane a realistic scientist on screen — (and) not just make her (like) Denise Richards in Bond who wears . . . glasses and so she’s a real scientist,” Portman said. “We talked about how real scientists are like artists: They are able to imagine things that aren’t there. And to give (Jane) this sense that she’s sort of frazzled and she’s often thinking in abstractions.”

I do know people like that, yes. And who knows what young person might see the movie and get some inspiration? Portman again:

“I got to read all of these biographies of female scientists like Rosalind Franklin who actually discovered the DNA double helix but didn’t get the credit for it,” she said. “The struggles they had and the way that they thought — I was like, ‘What a great opportunity, in a very big movie that is going to be seen by a lot of people, to have a woman as a scientist.’ She’s a very serious scientist. Because in the comic she’s a nurse and now they made her an astrophysicist. Really, I know it sounds silly, but it is those little things that makes girls think it’s possible. It doesn’t give them a [role] model of ‘Oh, I just have to dress cute in movies.’”

Right on. We all know that no amount of superhero blockbusters are going to suddenly create a science-literate public. But a positive portrayal here and there can help lower the barriers between scientists and everyone else. Any movie that can inspire young girls and feature a magical flying hammer that smashes things is okay in my book.

This year’s winner is Sir Martin Rees, one of the world’s leading theoretical astrophysicists. Like everyone else, I have nothing but enormous respect for Sir Martin’s work. He focuses mostly on “physical” cosmology — that part that involves actual known laws of physics, like galaxy formation — but is more willing than most folks in that game to think about speculative ideas concerning the multiverse and the Big Bang. He describes himself as non-religious but church-going, and would rather science and religion just get along than be constantly at each other’s throats. You can read an extremely awkward interview with him by Ian Sample in the Guardian — it’s clear Rees has no interest at all in talking about science/religion issues, but that’s going to come up when you win the Templeton prize.

But the really telling thing is this companion piece at the Guardian‘s website by Mark Vernon. (Another piece by Jerry Coyne provides some balance.) The real problem with the Templeton Foundation, in my view, is that it works very hard to give people a false impression that science and religion are actually reconciling, not just that they should be. If you want to see the publicity machine at work, this piece is a perfect example. Here’s the money paragraph:

But with Rees’s acceptance, the substantial resources of the Templeton Foundation have, in effect, been welcomed at the heart of the British scientific establishment. That such a highly regarded figure has received its premier prize will make it that little bit harder for Dawkins to sustain respect amongst his peers for his crusade against religion.

There you go — now that such a distinguished and respectable scientist has accepted the Templeton Prize, we may conclude that “the British scientific establishment” is rejecting Dawkins and his fellow noisome atheists in favor of warm and fuzzy Templetonianism. That’s exactly the publicity effect they are hoping for.

In unrelated news, Mark Vernon spent time at Cambridge in a journalism fellowship paid for by the Templeton Foundation. Have to hand it to them, these guys know how to get a message out.

The decline effect is troubling because it reminds us how difficult it is to prove anything. We like to pretend that our experiments define the truth for us. But that’s often not the case. Just because an idea is true doesn’t mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn’t mean it’s true. When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe.

I don’t particularly disagree with any of this. But it’s completely besides the point, and to untutored ears can be immensely misleading. The article is a perfect example of precisely the effect it seeks to describe (there must be a catchy word for this? Intellectual onomatopoeia?). The article gives a few examples of people finding interesting results, only to have them disappear on sustained scrutiny. It makes it sound like there is an epidemic of declining confidence:

One of the first demonstrations of this mysterious phenomenon came in the early nineteen-thirties. Joseph Banks Rhine, a psychologist at Duke, had developed an interest in the possibility of extrasensory perception, or E.S.P. Rhine devised an experiment featuring Zener cards, a special deck of twenty-five cards printed with one of five different symbols: a card was drawn from the deck and the subject was asked to guess the symbol. Most of Rhine’s subjects guessed about twenty per cent of the cards correctly, as you’d expect, but an undergraduate named Adam Linzmayer averaged nearly fifty per cent during his initial sessions, and pulled off several uncanny streaks, such as guessing nine cards in a row. The odds of this happening by chance are about one in two million. Linzmayer did it three times.

Rhine documented these stunning results in his notebook and prepared several papers for publication. But then, just as he began to believe in the possibility of extrasensory perception, the student lost his spooky talent. Between 1931 and 1933, Linzmayer guessed at the identity of another several thousand cards, but his success rate was now barely above chance. Rhine was forced to conclude that the student’s “extra-sensory perception ability has gone through a marked decline.”

This all sounds quite impressive. I don’t know the details of how many cards he was going through, but it sounds like it’s easily thousands. I calculate the odds of a 9 card streak as a tenth of a percent if you go through a couple of thousand cards. This is much more likely than 1 in 2 million (which is relevant only if you only look at 9 cards, one time). No doubt getting 9 in a row three times over a period of a few weeks (or even years) would be a large statistical anomaly. But it’s a long way from something I would issue a press release about. Carl Sagan summed it up best: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. If you’re going to claim some “extra-sensory perception” that would require a new physical force, and fundamentally alter all of modern physics, you might need more than a one-time statistical fluke. How about a whole series of controlled, double-blind experiments? Lo and behold, when this is done, the effects vanish. But by then the original results are published, and the damage is done. We’re still talking about this one “experiment” 80 years later. But if we integrate over all the equivalent subsequent experiments, there’s no doubt that the effect regressed to the mean, and can be ignored. So how is this even remotely interesting?

It takes Lehrer six pages to finally get around to the topic of publication bias. Suppose you do an experiment and find a sensational, Earth-shattering result. Human nature being what it is, you’re likely to try to publish it (and journals like Nature are likely to publicize it). Fads happen all the time in science. It’s a human activity after all. And then you (and the rest of the community) do a lot more work, and if it’s a statistical fluke, or poorly analyzed data, or a poorly conceived or biased experiment, the result will fade into oblivion. The “decline effect” that this article is making a fuss about is precisely the process by which the scientific method works. The truth will out.

On the other hand, suppose you do an experiment and find the result you (and everyone else) would expect. For example, you drop a ball and, indeed, it falls to the floor, exactly in accordance with our theory of gravity. You’re unlikely to write up the results. You’re even less likely to be able to get them published. And you’re certainly not going to spawn a whole bunch of follow-up experiments trying to duplicate your “null” results. So there’s no “incline effect”. This is not a surprise. It’s not a sign that science is broken. It’s a sign that we try to be selective and efficient in our experiments.

None of this is to say that there aren’t legitimate concerns. It’s one thing for publication bias and poor data to lead to a (temporarily) incorrect measure of the Hubble constant, and hence the age of the Universe. It’s an entirely different matter when a statistical fluke (encouraged by huge sums of money) engenders useless (or worse) medical treatment for millions of people. The only way to address this is by ever more careful and thorough application of the scientific method. (Obama’s Comparative Effectiveness Council, one of the many positive aspects of his new healthcare bill, is a good example of this.)

Lehrer’s article is a dramatic example of the problem he decries. The title and subtitle, and the first few pages, make it sound like there’s something profoundly and mysteriously wrong with the scientific method. Far into the article the obvious and rational explanations appear. Really, the article should be titled “Science works”, with a subtitle “The scientific method conquers all (eventually).” But that would be a lot less sexy, and my guess is that the New Yorker wouldn’t have published it. So there’ll be a bunch of people out there who misread or cherry-pick the article (Deepak Chopra: “Watch out, the truth is slipping away”), and end up convinced that the scientific method is broken. And they won’t vaccinate their children, and they’ll make important life decisions based on their horoscopes, and they’ll continue to believe that the world is magic. The scientific method is healthy and well. The problem is a society that, to a surprising degree, doesn’t pay much attention to it. And this article is a brilliant example of how things go wrong.

Senator Lamar Alexander
Ranking Member
Energy & Water Appropriations Subcommittee

March 1, 2011

Dear Chairman Feinstein and Sen. Alexander,

We write in regards to the current proposed budget cuts on science, and the impact the cuts would have on the competitiveness of this nation, both in the short and long term. The economic health and world leadership of this country depends on an unbroken cycle of innovation, rooted in our ability to attract and educate new waves of creative young scientists and engineers, each year. It is this cycle of innovation, whose continuation depends on funding for basic research, that drives both basic and applied sciences, and the creation of new technologies and treatments that define and improve the quality of everyday life.

In order for the cycle to remain unbroken, and for the nation’s position of leadership to continue, basic research needs to be supported, even when the times demand strict fiscal responsibility. One never knows where the next transformative breakthrough will emerge, or who the next young scientist will be that creates it.

The proposed cuts to the Department of Energy Office of Science, the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Standards and Technology would result in the immediate cessation of many scientifically critical activities, due in part to the layoff of thousands of scientists and engineers. The cuts would have a severe impact on cutting-edge research in areas such as biotechnology, nanotechnology, high-speed computing, advanced materials and photonics, as well as high energy physics, nuclear physics and fusion energy sciences.

At a time when we are seeking to spark economic growth and encourage talented young people to pursue careers in science and engineering, reducing federal support for science research and education is counterproductive. It is basic research that motivates many young people to study science. Such cuts will only hurt our competitiveness, especially at a time when emerging economies such as China and India are ramping up their investments in scientific research and education, and are learning to form their own generations of young innovators.

As young scientists and our mentors, we ask that you make science a priority and fund basic research at a level that provides long term growth as an investment, both in our future and our nation’s future. There are many exciting questions that we can only address if provided sufficient resources, not only this year but in the coming years as well. The tools and techniques that we develop in pursuit of these answers will have a lasting benefit to our country and society.

Sincerely,

1. Robert Roser, Fermilab, Batavia IL
2. Ben Kilminster, Fermilab, Batavia IL
3. Katherine Copic, Columbia University, New York, NY
4. Andrey Elagin, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX
5. Elisabetta Pianori University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA
6. Robyn Madrak, Fermilab, Batavia IL
7. Daniel Whiteson, UC Irvine, Irvine CA
8. Farrukh Azfar, Oxford, Batavia IL
9. Satyajit Behari, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore <d
10. Tom Schwarz, UC Davis, Davis CA
11. Ford Garberson, University of Chicago, Chicago IL
12. Andrey Loginov, Yale University, New Haven CT
13. Heather Ray, University of Florida, Gainseville Fl
14. Emma Alexander, Yale, Atlanta, Georgia
15. Jonathan S. Wilson, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio
16. Rob Forrest, UC Davis, Davis CA
17. Dr Charles Plager, UCLA, Los Angeles CA
18. Kai Yi, University of Iowa, Iowa City Iowa
19. Bodhitha Jayatilaka, Duke University, Durham NC
20. Matthew Heintze, University of Florida, Gainseville FL
21. Yen-Chu Chen Institute of Physics, Academia Sinica Taipei, Taiwan, Republic of China
22. Kyle Knoepfel, Fermilab, Batavia IL
23. Deepak Kar, University of Dresden, Dresden Germany
24. Alison Lister, UC Davis, Davis CA
25. Valeria Bartsch, University of Susex, Falmer UK
26. Harinder Singh Bawa, UC Fresno, Fresno CA
27. Heather Gerberich, University of Illinios, Urbana IL
28. Chang Seong Moon, Seoul National University, Seoul Korea
29. Tingjun Yang, Fermilab, Batavia IL
30. Sebastian Grinstein, IFAE Barcelona, Spain
31. Max Goncharov, MIT, Boston MA
32. Michal Kreps, University of Warwick, Coventry UK
33. Giulia Manca, University of Cagliari, Cagliari Italy
34. Mousumi Datta, Fermilab, Batavia IL
35. Bonnie T. Fleming, Yale University New Haven CT
36. Sasha Pronko, LBL, Berkeley CA
37. Efe Yazgan, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas
38. Diego Tonelli, Fermilab, Batavia IL
39. Sergo Jindariani, Fermilab, Batavia IL
40. Meghan McAteer, University of Texas, Austin TX
41. Olga Norniella, UIUC, Urbana Champaign IL
42. David Cox, UC Davis, Davis CA
43. Dongwook Jang, Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh PA
44. Justin Pilot, OSU, Columbus OH
45. Kirsten Tollefson, Michigan State, East Lansing MI
46. John Conway, UC Davis, Davis CA
47. Robin Erbacher, UC Davis, Davis CA
48. Leo Jenner, Fermilab, Batavia IL
49. Paola Garosi, University of Siena, Siena Italy
50. Xinchun Tian University of South Carolina, Columbia SC
51. Karen Bland, Baylor University, Waco Tx
52. Enrique Palencia, CERN, Geneva Switzerland
53. Joseph Walding, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg VA
54. Marcelle Soares-Santos, Fermilab, Batavia, IL
55. Prashant Subbaro, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA
56. Halley Brown, Fermilab, Batavia IL
57. J.P. Chou, Brown University, Providence RI
58. Sudhir Malik, University of Nebraska, Lincoln Nebraska
59. Christian Pascal Graf, UIC, Chicago IL
60. Matthew Worcester, University of Chicago, Chicago IL
61. Ritoban Basu Thakur, Fermilab, Batavia IL
62. Carley Kopecky, UC Davis, Davis CA
63. Zeynep Isvan, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh PA
64. Derek Strom, UIC, Chicago IL
65. Dr Christina Mesropian, Rockefeller University, NYC NY
66. Ayesh Jayasinghe, University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma
67. Gary Cheng, Columbia, NYC NY
68. Suneel Dutt, Panjab University, Chandigarh India
69. James Monk, UCL, London UK
70. Aaron Morris, Northern Illinois Univ. Dekalb IL
71. Jacob Linacre, Fermilab, Batavia IL
72. Ioana Anghel, UIC, Chicago IL
73. Ian Howley University of Texas, Arlington TX
74. Karolos Potamianos, Purdue University, West Lafayette IN
75. Shulamit Moed Sher, Harvard University, Boston MA
76. Jason St. John, Boston University, Boston MA
77. Bruno Casal, ETH Zurich, Zurich Switzerland
78. Gavril Giurgiu, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore MD
79. Alexander Paramonov, Argonne National Lab, Argonne IL
80. Bari Osmanov, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL
81. Jeffrey Kubo, Fermilab, Batavia IL
82. Adam Patch, Yale University, New Haven IL
83. Anna Mazzacane, Fermilab, Batavia IL
84. Michael Peter Cooke, Fermilab, Batavia IL
85. Benjamin Auerbach, Yale University, New Haven CT
86. Warren Clarida, University of Iowa, Iowa City IA
87. Ricky Fok, University of Oregon, Eugene OR
88. Samvel Khalatyan, UIC Chicago IL
89. Miguel Mondragon, Fermilab, Batavia IL
90. Federico Sforza, PISA University, PISA Italy
91. Jon Wilson, OSU, Columbus Ohio
92. Jonathan Asaadi, Texas A&M, College Station TX
93. Edward Laird, Princeton, Princeton NJ
94. Dean Andrew Hidas, Rutgers University, Piscataway NJ
95. Irkli Chakaberia, Kansas State University, Manhattan KS
96. Mark Mathis, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg VA
97. Alejandro de la Puente, Notre Dame, South Bend Indiana
98. Yaofu Zhou, IIT, Chicago IL
99. Sarah Lockwitz, Yale University, New Haven CT
100. Douglas Orbaker, University of Rochester, Rochester NY
101. Joseph Haley, Northeastern University, Boston MA
102. Steve Nahn, MIT, Boston MA
103. Harvey Newman, Caltech, Pasadena CA
104. Austin Napier, Tufts, Medford MA
105. Sarah Demers, Yale, New Haven CT
106. JoAnne Hewett, SLAC/Stanford, Stanford CA
107. Jean-Luc Vay, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA
108. Tatiana Rodriguez, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA
109. Evan Friis, UC Davis, Davis California
110. Anyes Tafford, UC Irvine, Irvine CA
111. Avto Kharchilava, SUNY Buffalo, Buffalo NY
112. Georgia Karagiorgi Columbia University, NYC NY
113. Aaron Mislivec, University of Rochester, Rochester NY
114. William J Willis, Columbia University, NYC NY
115. Michael Murray, University of Kansas, Lawrence KS
116. Victor Yarba, Fermilab, Batavia IL
117. Florencia Canelli, University of Chicago/Fermilab, Chicago IL
118. Stefan M.Spanier, University of Tennessee, Knoxville TN
119. Pushpa Bhat, Fermilab, Batavia IL
120. James Wetzel, University of Iowa, Iowa City Ia
121. John Penwell, Indiana University, Bloomington IN
122. Igor Gorelov, University of New Mexico, Albequerque NM
123. Barbara Alvarez Gonzalez, MSU, East Lansing MI
124. Mauro Donega, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA
125. Angela Galtieri, LBL, Berkeley CA
126. Josehp F Muratore, BNL, Upton New York
127. Julie Managan, Rice University, Houston TX
128. Elizabeth H. Simmons, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan
129. Elisa Pueschel, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA
130. Ben Brau, U. Mass., Amherst MA
131. Jennifer Klay , California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo CA
132. Daryl Hare, Rutgers University, Springfield NJ
133. Daniel McDonald, Rice University, Houston TX
134. Sridhara Dasu, University of Wisconsin, Madison WI
135. Steven Blusk, Syracuse University, Syracuse NY
136. Fabrizio Margaroli, Purdue University, West Lafayette IN
137. John Strologas, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque NM
138. Nathan Goldschmidt, University of Florida, Gainesville Fl
139. Eva Halkiadakis, Rutgers, Picsataway NJ
140. Howard Haber UC Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz CA
141. Hongliang Liu, UC Riverside, Riverside CA
142. Stephen Parke, Fermilab, Batavia IL
143. Joachim Kopp, Fermilab, Batavia, IL
144. Alan Fisher, SLAC, Menlo Park CA
145. Jacobo Konigsberg, University of Florida, Gainesville FL
146. Zeno D. Greenwood, Louisiana Tech University, Ruston LA
147. Harrison B. Prosper, Florida State University, Tallahassee FL
148. Nikolai Smirnov, Yale University, New Haven CT
149. Nick Evans, University of Texas, Austin TX
150. Michael E. Peskin, SLAC, Stanford University, Stanford, California
151. Lawrence S. Pinsky, University of Houston, Houston, Texas
152. Bo Fenton-Olsen, LBL, Berkeley CA
153. Carlo Dallapiccola, University of Massachusetts, Amherst MA
154. Ron Madras, LBL, Berkeley CA
155. Paddy Fox, Fermilab, Batavia IL
156. Lance Dixon, SLAC, Menlo Park CA
157. Douglas Wright, Lawrence Livermore National Lab, Pleasanton CA
158. Ian Shipsey, Purdue University, West Lafayette IN
159. Reid Mumford, Salt lake City Utah
160. Pamela Klabbers, University of Wisconsin, Madison Wisconsin
161. Richard A. Vidal, Fermilab, Batavia IL
162. Ankush Mitra, Academia Sinica, Taipei Taiwan
163. Robert Hirosky, University of Virginia, Charlottesville VA
164. Chris Neu, University of Virginia, Charlottesville VA
165. Lina Galtieri, LBL, Berkeley CA
166. Marco Trovato, University of PISA, PISA Italy
167. Elizabeth Worcester, University of Chicago, Chicago IL
168. Leo Sabato, University of PISA, PISA Italy
169. Yu Zeng, Duke University, Durham NC
170. Yine Sun, Fermilab, Batavia IL
171. Viktoriya Zvoda, Fermilab, Batavia IL
172. Hatim Hegab, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater OK
173. Alexey Naumov, Fermilab, Batavia IL
174. Andrei Khilkevich, Fermilab, Batavia IL
175. Azeddine Kasmi, Baylor University, Waco TX
176. Robert Zwaska, Fermilab, Batavia IL
177. Alexander Romanenko, Fermilab, Batavia IL
178. Denise C. Ford, Northwestern University, Evanston IL
179. Kenichi Hatakeyama, Baylor University, Waco TX
180. Geum Bong Yu, Duke University, Durham NC
181. Tim Maxwell, Northern Illinois, Dekalb IL
182. Jun Guo, Columbia University, New York, NY
183. Liang Li, University of California, Riverside, Riverside, CA
184. Gianluca Petrillo, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY
185. Dr. Tyler Dorland, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington.
186. Jesus Orduna, Rice University, Huston, TX
187. Mark A. Padilla, University of California Riverside, Riverside CA.
188. Zhenyu Ye, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Batavia, Illinois
189. Andrew Kobach, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL
190. Hang Yin, Fermilab, Batavia, IL
191. Ryan J. Hooper, Bradley University, Peoria, IL 61625
192. Ashish Kumar, SUNY Buffalo, NY
193. Kayle DeVaughan, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
194. Dennis Mackin, Rice University, Houston, TX
195. Avdhesh Chandra Rice University, Houston, TX
196. Juliette Alimena, Brown University, Providence, RI
197. Satish Desai Fermilab, Batavia, IL
198. Jadranka Sekaric University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas
199. Dale Johnston, University of Nebraska, Lincoln NE
200. Dr. Andrew Haas, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Menlo Park, CA.
201. Kathryn Tschann-Grimm, Stony Brook University Stony Brook, NY
202. Peter Renkel, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas.
203. Marc Buehler (PhD), University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA
204. Oleksiy Atramentov, Research Associate, Rutgers U., New Brunswick, NJ
205. Shabnam Jabeen, Brown University Providence, RI
206. Subhendu Chakrabarti, State University of New York, Stony Brook
207. Alex Melnitchouk, University of Mississippi, University, MS
208. Michael Eads, University of Nebraska – Lincoln
209. Michael Wang, Unversity of Rochester, Rochester, NY
210. Carrie McGivern, University of Kansas
211. Diego Menezes, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL.
212. Ioannis Katsanos, University of Nebraska – Lincoln
213. Trang Hoang, Florida State University, Tallahassee, IL
214. Sung Woo, Fermilab, Batavia, IL
215. Sehwook Lee, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa
216. Maiko Takahashi, Fermilab, Batavia, IL
217. Dmitry Bandurin, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida
218. Leah Welty-Rieger, Northwestern University, Evanston IL
219. Amitabha Das University of Arizona
220. Xuebing Bu, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Batavia, IL
221. Joseph G Haley Northeastern U Boston, MA
222. Bjoern Penning, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Batavia, IL
223. Andreas Jung, Fermilab, Batavia, IL
224. Daniel Boline , SUNY at Stony Brook, NY
225. Mandy Rominsky, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Batavia, IL
226. Michelle Prewitt, Rice University, Houston, TX
227. Kenneth Herner, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI
228. Mark Williams, Fermilab International Fellow, Chicago, Il
229. Yunhe Xie, Fermilab, Batavia, IL
230. Gabriel Facini, Northeastern University, Boston, MA
231. John Backus Mayes, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Menlo Park, CA
232. Harold Nguyen, Univ. of California Riverside, Riverside, CA
233. Anton Kravchenko, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC
234. Ryan M White, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC
235. David Doll, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA
236. Bradley Wray, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX
237. Alexander Rakitin, California Inst. of Technology, Pasadena, CA
238. Daniel Chao, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA
239. Alexander Palmer, University of Texas at Dallas, Dallas, TX
240. Gil Vitug, University of California at Riverside, Riverside, CA
241. Rajarshi Das, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO
242. Chih-hsiang Cheng, California Inst. of Technology, San Jose, CA
243. Bertrand Echenard, California Inst. of Technology, Pasadena, CA
244. Liang Sun, Univ. of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH
245. Ada Rubin, Iowa State University, San Jose, Ca
246. Mikhail Dubrovin, SLAC, Menlo Park, CA
247. Andy Ruland, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX
248. Jaclyn Schwehr, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO
249. Bryan Fulsom, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Menlo Park, CA
250. Chris Bouchard; University of Illinois; Urbana, IL
251. Daping Du; University of Iowa; Iowa City, IA
252. Gordan Krnjaic; Johns Hopkins University; Baltimore, MD
253. Tim Linden; University of California at Santa Cruz; Santa Cruz, CA
254. Mark Mattson, Wayne State University, Detroit MI
255. Robert Craig Group, University of Virginia, Charlottesville VA
256. Artur Apresian, Caltech, Pasadena CA
257. Donatella Toretta, Fermilab, Batavia IL
258. Kate Scholberg, Dune University, Durham NC
259. Vito Di Benedetto, Università del Salento, Lecce, Italy.
260. Eric Feng, University of Chicago, Chicago IL
261. Tami Kramer, Fermilab, Batavia, Illinois
262. Nicholas Hadley, The University of Maryland, College Park, MD
263. Paul Sheldon, Vanderbilt Univerisity, Nashville, TN
264. Daniela Bortoletto, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana
265. Paul Padley, Rice University, Houston, TX.
266. Stanley Durkin, Ohio State University, Columbus OH
267. Kenneth Bloom, the University of Nebraska, Lincoln NE
268. Robert M. Harris, Fermilab, Batavia Illinois
269. Luc Demortier, The Rockefeller University, New York, NY
270. Greg Landsberg, Brown University, Providence RI
271. Tao Han Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin
272. Manfred Paulini, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA
273. Nikos Varelas, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, Illinois
274. Brad Cox, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA
275. J. William Gary, University of California, Riverside; Riverside, CA
276. Marcus Hohlmann, Florida Institute of Technology, Melbourne, FL
277. Daniel Elvira, Fermilab, Batavia, IL
278. Jun Miyamoto, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA
279. Wesley Smith, U. Wisconsin – Madison, Madison, WI
280. Norbert Neumeister, Purdue University, W. Lafayette, IN
281. Bruce A. Barnett, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD
282. David Saltzberg, UCLA, Los Angeles, California
283. Cecilia E. Gerber, University of Illinois, Chicago, IL
284. Robert Clare, University of California, Riverside, Riverside, CA
285. Alan Weinstein, Caltech, Pasadena CA
286. Hans P. Paar, University of California, San Diego
287. Edwin Norbeck, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA
288. Claudio Campagnari, University Of California, Santa Barbara, CA
289. Yasar Onel, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA
290. Ren-yuan Zhu, Caltech, Pasadena, CA
291. Colin Jessop, University of Notre Dame, South Bend, IN
292. Christopher G. Tully, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ
293. Marc Baarmand, Florida Institute of Technology, Melbourne, Florida
294. Liz Sexton-Kennedy, Fermilab, Batavia, IL
295. Dimitri Bourilkov, University of Florida, Gainesville
296. Guenakh Mitselmakher, Universtity of Florida, Gainesville, FL
297. Yuri Gershtein, Rutgers, Piscataway, NJ
298. William T. Ford, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO
299. Pierre Ramond, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL
300. Richard Lander, University of California, Davis, Davis CA
301. Jim Alexander, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York
302. Pete Markowitz, Florida International University, Miami, FL
303. Frank Wuerthwein, UCSD, La Jolla, CA
304. Cecilia Gerber, Univ. of Illinois-Chicago, Chicago, IL
305. Mitchell Wayne, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN
306. Kaori Maeshima, Fermilab, Batavia, IL
307. David Stickland, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ
308. Peter Elmer, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ
309. Lothar Bauerdick, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Batavia, IL
310. Igor Vorobiev, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA
311. Frank Geurts, Rice University, Houston TX
312. Vasken Hagopian, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL
313. Sharon Hagopian, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL
314. David E. Pellett, University of California, Davis, Davis, CA
315. Richard Breedon, University of California, Davis, Davis, CA
316. Dick Loveless, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI
317. Anders Ryd, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York
318. Vivek Sharma, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, Ca
319. Tim Doody, Fermilab, Batavia IL
320. Joe Incandela, UC Santa Barbara, Sanata Barbara, CA
321. Stanley J. Brodsky, Stanford University, Stanford, CA
322. Douglas Glenzinski, Fermilab, Batavia, IL
323. Marj Corcoran, Rice University, Houston, TX
324. Duncan Carlsmith, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI
325. Philip Baringer, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS
326. Jon A Bakken, Fermilab, Batavia, IL
327. Lawrence Sulak, Boston University, Boston, MA
328. Robert Harr, Wayne State University, Detroit MI
329. Virgil Barnes, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana
330. George Alverson, Northeastern University, Boston, MA
331. Don Reeder, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI
332. Michael Schmitt, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL
333. Kamal K. Seth, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL
334. André de Gouvêa, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL
335. Brian Heltsley, Cornell University, Cornell, NY
336. Suharyo Sumowidagdo, University of California, Riverside, Riverside CA
337. Weimin Wu, Fermilab, Batavia, Illinois
338. Andriy Zatserklyaniy, University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez, Mayaguez, PR
339. Philip D. Lawson, Boston University, Boston MA
340. Alexei Safonov, Texas A&M University, Colleeg Station TX
341. Christopher Neu, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia
342. Petar Maksimovic, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD
343. Keith Ulmer, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO
344. Selcuk Cihangir, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Batavia, IL
345. William Tanenbaum, Fermilab, Batavia, IL
346. Christopher Justus, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA.
347. Edmund Berry, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ
348. Aran Garcia-Bellido, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY
349. Remigius K Mommsen, Fermilab, Batavia, IL
350. David Stuart, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA
351. Salvatore Rappoccio, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD
352. Tia Miceli, University of California Davis, Davis CA
353. Sinjini Sengupta, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas
354. Sorina Popescu, Fermilab, Batavia IL
355. Andrew Askew, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL
356. Frank Chlebana, Fermilab, Batavia, IL
357. Nhan Tran, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD
358. Ted Kolberg, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN
359. Julia Yarba, Fermilab, Batavia IL
360. Kirk Arndt, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN
361. Jeffrey Temple, University of Maryland, College Park, MD
362. Robert L Stone, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ
363. Aram Avetisyan, Brown University, Providence, RI
364. Dorian Kcira, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA
365. Valentin Kuznetsov, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY
366. Nancy Marinelli, Univ. of Notre Dame – Notre Dame, IN
367. Jacob Anderson, Fermilab, Batavia, IL
368. Seth Cooper, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN
369. Andres Florez, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN
370. Yuriy Pischalnikov, Fermilab, Batavia, IL
371. Seema Sharma, Fermilab, Batavia IL
372. Alexi Mestvirishvili, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA
373. Yuyi Guo, Fermilab, Batavia IL
374. Jorge L. Rodriguez, Florida International University, Miami, Florida
375. Oliver Gutsche, Fermilab, Batavia, IL
376. Jeffrey Kolb, University of Notre Dame, South Bend, IN
377. Francisco Yumiceva, Fermilab, Batavia, IL
378. Roy Joaquin Montalvo, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX
379. Steven Lowette, UCSB, Santa Barbara, California
380. Igor Vodopiyanov, Florida Institute of Technology,Melbourne, FL
381. James Zabel, Rice University, Houston, TX
382. Yuriy Pakhotin, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX
383. Jason Gilmore, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX
384. Weiren Chou, Fermilab, Batavia, IL
385. J. Kandaswamy, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford, CA
386. Jordan M. Tucker, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA
387. Hongxuan Liu, Baylor University, Waco, TX
388. Christoph Paus, MIT, Cambridge, MA
389. Armando LANARO, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin
390. Tiesheng Dai, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan
391. Chi M. Lei, Fermilab, Batavia, IL
392. George S.F. Stephans, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts
393. Ye Li, Northwestern University, Evanston IL
394. Will Flanagan, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX
395. James Gainer, Northwestern University, Evanston IL
396. Kunal Kumar, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL
397. Bernadette Heyburn, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO
398. Don Summers, University of Mississippi, Oxford, MS
399. Eric Vaandering, Fermilab, Batavia IL
400. Dimitris Varouchas, LBNL, Berkeley, CA
401. Burton DeWilde, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY
402. Josh Cogan, SLAC/Stanford, Palo Alto, CA (voter in Indianland, SC)
403. M. Saleem, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK
404. Paul Jackson, SLAC/Stanford University, Menlo Park, CA
405. Devin Harper, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI
406. Mark Oreglia, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL
407. Darren Price, Indiana University, Bloomington IN
408. Kevin Finelli, Duke University, Durham, NC
409. John Stupak, SUNY Stony Brook, Stony Brook, NY
410. James Degenhardt, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA
411. Dilip Jana, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK
412. Krzysztof Sliwa, Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts
413. Hayes Dee Meritt, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH
414. Steven Farrell, University of California, Irvine, CA
415. Joseph Tuggle, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL
416. Tetteh Addy, Hampton University, Hampton, VA
417. Lashkar Kashif, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI
418. Ning Zhou, University of California, Irvine, CA
419. Seth Zenz, University of California, Berkeley, CA
420. Michael Werth, University of California, Irvine, CA
421. Jianrong Deng, University California, Irvine, CA
422. Dominick Olivito, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA
423. Joshua Moss, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH
424. Zachary Marshall, graduate of Calech, Malibu, CA
425. Andrew Nelson, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa
426. Tim Andeen, Columbia University, New York, NY
427. Robert Calkins, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL
428. Caleb Lampen, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ
429. Kevin Slagle, University of California, Irvine, CA
430. Louise Skinnari, University of California, Berkeley, CA
431. Fayez Mahmoud Abu-Ajamieh,Northern Illinois University, Dekalb, IL
432. Lauren Tompkins, University of California, Berkeley, CA
433. Kevin O’Connell, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA
434. Maxwell I. Scherzer, University of California, Berkeley, CA
435. Danial Slichter, University of California, Berkeley, CA
436. Woochun Park, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC
437. Jae Jun Kim, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC
438. Matthew Relich, University of California, Irvine, CA
439. Scott Aefsky, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA
440. Reza AmirArjomand, University of California, Irvine, CA
441. Shannon MacKenzie, University of Louisville, Louisville KY
442. Fabien Tarrade, Brookhaven National Lab, Upton, NY
443. Chad Suhr, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL
444. Xin Qian, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA
445. Jedrzej Biesiada, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA
446. Corrinne mills, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
447. Brokk Toggerson, University of California, Irvine, CA
448. Stephanie Majewski, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, NY
449. Rajivalochan Subramaniam, Louisiana Tech University, Ruston, LA
450. Andre M. Bach, UC Berkeley & Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Berkeley, CA
451. Hideki Okawa, University of California, Irvine, CA
452. Zhen Yan, Boston University, Boston, MA
453. Robert Harrington, Boston University, Boston, MA
454. Emily Thompson, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA
455. Christopher K. Vermilion, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY
456. William Edson, State University of New York at Albany, Albany, NY
457. William S. Lockman, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA 95064
458. Dmitri Smirnov, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, NY
459. James Saxon, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA
460. Matthew Hickman, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA
461. Kurt Brendlinger, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA
462. Bradley Dober, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA
463. Alex Long, Boston University, Boston, MA
464. Chris Potter, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR
465. Peter Radloff, University of Oregon, Eugene OR
466. W. Thomas Meyer, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa
467. Usha Mallik, The University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA
468. Simona Malace, Jefferson Lab, Newport News, VA
469. German Colón, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA
470. Therese Jones, University of California, Berkeley, CA
471. Jessica Metcalfe, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM
472. Anze Slosar, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton NY
473. Sarah Newman,University of California, Berkeley, CA
474. Shirley Ho, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA
475. Kyoko Yamamoto, Iowa State University, Ames, IA
476. Eyal Kazin, New York University, New York, NY
477. Alexander Tuna, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA
478. Regina Caputo, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY
479. Alfred Goshaw, Duke University, Durham, NC

That’s pretty much the same thing that happened when I visited a Chicago church back in the day. There’s obviously a selection effect at work: the kinds of churches that invite atheists in for conversations are generally ones that enjoy some kind of open dialogue. Not that it’s all warm hugs and pleasant disagreement; I noticed that the older generation in my audience was a lot less open to even thinking about some of the points I raised, while Jerry had to fend off someone who thought that math and science had led to Nazi Germany.

Jerry concludes that the harmful aspects of religion are correlated with the certainty displayed by its adherents. This is a true but subtle point, as of course there are those who love to accuse scientists and/or atheists of unwarranted certitude. I think the difference is that we feel relatively sure about some things, while we’re quite ready to admit that we don’t know the answer to other questions, and we have a clear notion of where the distinction lies. But I would think that, wouldn’t I?

Conversations like these are enormously helpful. The trick is that it’s much easier — on both sides — to be polite and interactive in person, while the temptation to lecture people from on high is irresistible in other contexts, where it’s easier to think of the opposition as cartoons rather than real people.

Ormell’s thesis is laid out at the start:

Mathematics tends to be both misunderstood and credited with magic powers, especially by those who are intelligent but not mathematically inclined. Arising from this, there is a perennial temptation for mathematicians to play to the gallery and to assume the role of magicians and, even more temptingly, high priests.

The worrisome sign here is not the explicit content, which is vague enough to be unobjectionable, but the gleeful indulgence in overgeneralization. It seems clear that what we are in for is a broad denunciation of mathematicians and their ilk, not a nuanced appreciation. The devil will be in the details.

We have seen blind faith in mathematics in action recently. In addition to the contribution of mathematical models to the great credit crunch of 2008, take physicist Stephen Hawking’s claim that philosophy is dead. The reason he gave was that philosophers have stopped bothering trying to understand modern mathematical cosmology. This cosmology is based on current mathematical physics, most of which has been in place for less than 100 years. It is an impressive edifice of concepts and mathematical models, but one that has not yet built up a track record for reliability over a thousand years, let alone a million years.

Hawking’s claim that philosophy is dead was silly, but not nearly as silly as this. I’m not sure what the implication is supposed to be — we shouldn’t trust sciences that don’t have a thousand-year track record of reliability? Since that includes almost all of contemporary science except for a bit of astronomy, we’d be living in primitive circumstances indeed. The “million years” criterion is even more awesome. That means we shouldn’t trust things like “writing,” or for that matter “human beings.”

Around 1900, various theorists wondered whether the velocity of light might be slowly changing. It was a pertinent question. If the velocity of light was changing very slowly, many of our astronomical calculations would have to go into the bin. Perhaps the gravitational constant might be slowly changing: that, too, would throw our calculations out.

I don’t know what Ormell is talking about here. I suppose it’s possible that there were people around 1900 who were questioning the constancy of the speed of light; I don’t know all of the relevant history. But certainly the famous part of the story was that people were looking for direction-dependent differences in the speed of light due to our motion through the aether, not a slow secular change.

Instead it was discovered that light does not travel in absolutely straight lines, but bends slightly due to the Earth’s gravitation. It is a minute effect and detectable only with great difficulty, but its consequences are deadly. If this degree of bending occurred in outer space, the light from the nearest star would have completed a circular trajectory on its way from its source to our telescopes.

There is some truth here, wrapped in the colorful garments of severe misunderstanding. Yes, light does not travel in absolutely straight lines. But this has nothing to do with its speed, only its direction. And it wasn’t simply “discovered”; it was first predicted by Einstein, and then verified by Eddington and others. (All of whom used math, by the way.) Its consequences are certainly not deadly. The bending is caused by gravity, which is not uniform through space, so the business about circular trajectories is just some earnest babbling.

But, but, but…we all tend to be quite sure that this is only fanciful thinking. Of course light travels in straight lines in outer space! We all have a degree of blind faith in mathematics. We have no reason to believe that merely travelling through space will cause light to bend, though the presence of dark matter in space would have a bending effect if that matter were not absolutely uniformly distributed. (As we know almost nothing about dark matter, it is a material assumption to suppose that it is absolutely uniformly distributed.)

Everything here is entertainingly wrong. Nobody who understands the subject believes this is fanciful thinking; we’re quite convinced of the reality of gravitational lensing. That is because of, not despite, our knowledge of mathematics. And dark matter is certainly not uniformly distributed; if it were, we wouldn’t have been able to find it in galaxies and clusters. Its non-uniformness is kind of the point. It’s very hard to tell what he is even trying to say here.

But now we reach the culmination.

So were the values of c and G – the speed of light and the gravitational constant – the same a million years ago as they are today? It must surely stick in the throat to say that we are quite sure about this. At one time people thought that the magnetic poles were absolutely fixed. Now we know that they are on the move.

Ah, yes. “Once some people were wrong about something, so there’s no reason to believe anything.” One of my favorite arguments.

So let’s admit that there is a minute element of doubt here, say 1 per cent. If so, we can be 99 per cent sure that these physical constants were the same 1,000,000 years ago as they are today. If we follow logic – and being blindly sure that the mathematics is right should hardly incline us to reject logic – then we can be only (0.99)² x 100 per cent sure that these constants were the same 2,000,000 years ago.

And (0.99)¹⁰⁰ x 100 per cent sure that they were the same 100,000,000 years ago. This is 36.6 per cent, a reasonable figure perhaps, given that 100,000,000 years ago was a long time ago.

Cosmologists assure us that the Big Bang happened 13.7 billion years ago, that is, 13,700 million years ago.

So what is the figure for the degree to which we can be sure that the constants c and G were the same then? Clearly it is (0.99)^13,700 x 100 per cent, which comes out as 1.59 x 10^-58 per cent.

One hardly knows where to begin. We could point out that dimensionful quantities like c and G can’t really change on their own, only with respect to some other dimensionful quantities — only dimensionless ratios are observable. But physicists often speak this way out of laziness, so we will cut Ormell some slack. Obviously there is no reason to attach at 1 percent uncertainty to the value of G a million years ago — that was pulled out of some orifice or another. The assumption that such an uncertainty can be independently assigned to every million-year period in the history of the universe is so woefully wrong that the feelings it conjures are closer to compassion than annoyance. (Don’t skip over “being blindly sure that the mathematics is right should hardly incline us to reject logic.” That’s a rare gem; treasure it.)

But the real point is this: after pushing around these nonsensical numbers, Ornell concludes with a flourish that we have essentially zero reason to believe that Newton’s constant of gravitation had the same value in the early universe that it has today. Put aside for the moment the question of whether this is “right” or “wrong.” The thing I want to highlight is: does he really believe this is something professional physicists have never thought of?

That’s the irksome bit. I am a firm believer that this is everyone’s universe, and every person has an equal right to think and theorize about it, regardless of their credentials or education. But when you are tempted to take those musings seriously — enough to write them up in an essay and present the results proudly in Times Higher Education — a reality check is in order. Scientists aren’t right about everything (far from it), but they do spend a lot of time thinking about these things. In order for them to have never considered a possibility like this, the whole lot of them would have to be in the grips of an extremely anti-scientific blindness to alternative possibilities. Which I suppose is Ormell’s thesis, but he is only proving that he believes it, not that it is true.

Nobody is harder on scientific theories than scientists are. That’s what we do. You don’t become a successful scientist by licking the metaphorical boots of Einstein or Darwin or Newton; you hit the jackpot by pushing them off their pedestals. Every one of us would love to discover that all of our best theories are wrong, either by doing an astonishing experiment or coming up with an unexpectedly clever theory. The reason why we have the right to put some degree of confidence in well-established models is that such a model must have survived decades of impolite prodding and skeptical critiques by hundreds of experts.

Questioning whether Newton’s constant G is really constant (with respect to some other measurable quantities) is an old game, going back at least to Paul Dirac. Many contemporary cosmologists have used data from the early universe to constrain any such variation — I’ve even dabbled in it myself. The answer is that the value of G one minute after the Big Bang is within ten percent of its value today. That’s from data, not theory; if it weren’t true, the expansion rate of the universe during primordial nucleosynthesis would have been different, and we wouldn’t correctly predict the abundance of helium that we observe in the universe.

The point of which is this: if your thesis requires that generations of scientists have completely missed some idea that, when you sit and think about it, is really pretty frikkin’ obvious — maybe you should do a little homework before using it as a jumping-off point for a rant about the intellectual shortcomings of others.

Ormell goes on to say more silly things. Apparently he has demonstrated that Goedel’s theorem undermines Cantor’s discovery of transfinite numbers. I’m sure the mathematics journals are eagerly awaiting his upcoming papers on this important result.

The irony here is that Ormell is trying to teach us two lessons: we need better mathematics education, and we should be less arrogant. Those are indeed good lessons to learn.