Blogs / Cosmic Variance

The latest Twitter phenomenon is FakeAPStylebook, an amusing take on guidelines to proper journalistic writing. Some tips include:

• STAR WARS Episodes IV-VI are to be referred to as “The Original Trilogy.” Episodes I-III are not to be referred to at all.
• Always capitalize Satan. You don’t want to get dead goats from those people.
• The correct spelling is “Rocktober,” not “Roctober,” which is the month of giant birds.
• Replace “situation deteriorated/worsened” with “shit [just] got real.” Ex: On day three of the hostage crisis, shit got real.

Amusing enough, but I have to admit that I originally read “Fake AP Stylebook” as “Fake APS Stylebook,” as if it were the (fake) American Physical Society rather than the (fake) Associated Press that was handing out advice. After all, the real APS is quite a bit quirkier than the AP; they insist that no article title begin with “The,” and for a while there they were insisting that “Lagrangian” be spelled “Lagrangean.” (Everyone has their quirks; Nature has banned the words “paradigm” and “scenario” from its pages entirely.)

So I’m sure we can do better. Any good suggestions for improved physics style? I promise to tweet anything sufficiently amusing.

A philosophy professor of mine used to like to start a new semester by demanding of his class, “How many facts are in this room?” No right answer, of course — the lesson was supposed to be that the word “fact” doesn’t apply directly to some particular kind of thing we find lying around in the world. Indeed, one might go so far as to argue that what counts as a “fact” depends on one’s theoretical framework. (Is “spacetime is curved” a fact? What if spacetime isn’t fundamental in quantum gravity?)

Nevertheless, people sometimes use the word. A recent post by PZ reminded me of how it comes up especially in arguments over evolution, which is occasionally accused of being “just a theory.” I’ve tried to make my own view clear — when we as scientists use these words, we shouldn’t pretend they have some once-and-for-all meanings that were handed down by Francis Bacon when he was putting the finishing touches on the scientific method. Rather, we should be honest about how they are actually used. “Theory,” in particular, isn’t cleanly separate from words like “law” or “hypothesis” or “model,” and doesn’t have any well-defined status on the spectrum from obviously false to certainly true. And “fact” — well, that’s a word scientists hardly use at all. We use words like “data” or “evidence,” but the concept of a “fact” simply isn’t that useful in scientific practice.

But you know what would really be useful here? Some facts! Or at least some data. There’s one repository of professional scientific communication that I know very well — SPIRES, the high-energy physics literature database run by SLAC. (My hypothesis guess is that any other field would turn up similar results.) I don’t know an easy way to search entire papers, but it’s child’s play to search the titles. So let’s ask it — how often do scientists (as represented by high-energy physicists) use the word “fact”?

find t fact or t facts
120 records

Okay, they clearly use the word sometimes. What about some competitors?

find t data
9909 records

Ha! Now that’s the kind of word scientists like to use. And the others?

find t evidence
4396 records

find t observation or t observations
10924 records

You get the picture. Scientists prefer not to talk about “facts,” because it’s hard to tell what’s a fact and what isn’t. Science looks at the data, and tries to understand it in terms of hypothetical models, which rise or fall in acceptance as new data are gathered and better theories are proposed. Just for fun:

find t theory
42285 records

find t model
45977 records

find t hypothesis
578 records

find t law
1293 records

So I’m happy to say evolution is “true,” or is “correct,” but I’ll leave “facts” to Joe Friday.

What do you call snail locomotion?

(Walking is obviously not right. Slithering is closer. Sliming?)

A quick reminder to submit your favorite blog posts to this year’s incarnation of Open Lab, the anthology of the best science blogging. (Printed on honest to goodness dead trees, suitable for placing on bookshelves.) You can also buy copies of the editions for 2006, 2007, and 2008. This year’s editor is Scicurious of the Neurotopia blog. There is already a formidable list of nominees, but they could always use more. Submission form is here; if you’re a blogger, feel free to submit your own best stuff, and if you’re a blog reader, make sure none of your favorite posts are being ignored.

The book ended up with a pretty fun collection of epigraphs for each chapter. But there are a lot more good quotes about time than chapters in the book. Here are some of the quotes I did not end up using. Further examples are hereby solicited — who knows when they might turn out to be useful?

“Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.” — George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah

“Time is the longest distance between two places.” — Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

“The future’s not ours to see.” — Doris Day

“Time rushes toward us with its hospital tray of infinitely varied narcotics, even while it is preparing us for its inevitably fatal operation.” — Tennessee Williams, The Rose Tattoo

“Time, you old gypsy man,
Will you not stay,
Put up your caravan
Just for one day?”
– Ralph Hodgeson

“Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.”
– T.S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton” (Four Quartets)

“Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river that carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.” — Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths.

Apparently you have to be extremely careful when it comes to poetry; fair use doesn’t necessarily extend very far.

The world is not magic. At least, that is, the actual real world around us. That’s the great insight we’ve achieved over the course of centuries of scientific investigation into the universe. It all follows rules; everything has an explanation (which is not the same as everything having a reason).

So I was struck by this blog post by screenwriter John August. He talks about the movie Groundhog Day, in which Bill Murray’s weatherman character is stuck in a time loop of unspecified duration. For a film that seemed fairly inconsequential at the time, it’s really a great starting point for all sorts of conversations — I use it in my book to talk a bit about time-travel paradoxes. (Did I mention I’m writing a book?)

But August uses it to illustrate the cinematic usefulness of unexplained magic. Even in a fictional universe, you don’t want it to be completely magical — there need to be rules, otherwise it’s impossible to have a coherent drama in which the characters struggle to achieve some goal. In Groundhog Day, the goal is to win the love of Andie MacDowell, although different stories make different choices.

But the central conceit of the movie — Bill Murray is stuck in an endless loop, trying to get out — remains completely unexplained. In an early version of the script, apparently, there was some talk of a voodoo spell that set the time loop in motion. Removing that bit of explanation was an incredibly smart decision. If it had been included, the focus on the story of the protagonist’s journey would necessarily have been diluted by the attention paid to the voodoo spell. The movie worked much better with that little bit of magic remaining unexplained.

You can just imagine if Murray’s character had been a physicist instead of a TV personality. Forget about winning someone’s love; the guy would have spent millions of years trying to figure out the mechanism behind his travel in a time loop. It’s great when scientists talk to Hollywood, but thank goodness they haven’t taken over.

I wasn’t going to mention Thomas Pynchon’s latest book, a noir detective novel set in 1970 LA called Inherent Vice. Not because of any suspected problems with the book — it sounds great, and I’m looking forward to reading it. Only because we previously enthused back on this very blog when Pynchon’s last book, Against the Day, came out — and I still haven’t gotten around to actually reading it. Bad blogger.

But this is too cool not to mention (via Andrew Jaffe) — the good folks at Penguin Books have come out with a “trailer” for Pynchon’s new book.

In case you’re wondering — yes, that’s Pynchon reading the voice-over. The man doesn’t like having his picture taken, which is perfectly understandable, but there’s no reason not to lend some authorial authority (as well as the actual text) to a video attached to one’s work.

I notice that Tom Levenson also did a trailer for Newton & the Counterfeiter. Wave of the future, I suppose.

A few days ago the world witnessed a rare and precious event: a dispute on the Internet. In this case, it was brought about by a Bloggingheads episode of Science Saturday featuring historian of science Ronald Numbers and philosopher Paul Nelson. The controversy stemmed from the fact that Nelson is a Young-Earth Creationist — someone who believes that the Earth was created by God a few thousand years ago. You can read opinions about the dialogue from PZ Myers, Jerry Coyne, or for a different point of view Nelson himself.

I was one of the people who found the dialogue extremely inappropriate (especially for “Science Saturday”), and as someone who is a fan of Bloggingheads I sent a few emails back and forth with the powers that be, who are generally very reasonable people. I think they understand why scientists would not be happy with such a dialogue, and I suspect it’s not going to happen again.

But it’s worth laying out the precise source of my own unhappiness — I’ll let other scientists speak for themselves. One potential source of discomfort is the natural reluctance to give credibility to creationists, and I think that’s a legitimate concern. There is a long-running conversation within the scientific community about whether it’s better to publicly debate people who are skeptical about evolution and crush them with superior logic and evidence, or to try to cut off their oxygen by refusing to meet them on neutral ground. I don’t have strong opinions about which is the better strategy, although I suspect the answer depends on the precise circumstances being contemplated.

Rather, my concern was not for the credibility of Paul Nelson, but for the credibility of Bloggingheads TV. I’m fairly sure that no one within the BH.tv hierarchy is a secret creationist, trying to score some public respect for one of their own. The idea, instead, was to engage in a dialogue with someone who held radically non-mainstream views, in order to get a better understanding of how they think.

That sounds like a noble goal, but I think that in this case it’s misguided. Engaging with radically different views is, all else being equal, a good thing. But sometimes all else isn’t equal. In particular, I think it’s important to distinguish between different views that are somehow respectable, and different views that are simply crazy. My problem with the BH.tv dialogue was not that they were lending their credibility to someone who didn’t deserve it; it was that they were damaging their own credibility by featuring a discussant who nobody should be taking seriously. There is plenty of room for debate between basically sensible people who can argue in good faith, yet hold extremely different views on contentious subjects. There is no need to pollute the waters by engaging with people who simply shouldn’t be taken seriously at all. Paul Nelson may be a very nice person, but his views about evolution and cosmology are simply crackpot, and don’t belong in any Science Saturday discussion.

This thought has led me to introduce what I hope is a helpful graphical device, which I call the Grid of Disputation. It’s just a reminder that, when it comes to other people’s views on controversial issues, they should be classified within a two-dimensional parameter space, not just on a single line of “agree/disagree.” The other dimension is the all-important “sensible/crazy” axis.

There’s no question that there is a place for mockery in the world of discourse; sometimes we want to engage with crackpots just to make fun of them, or to boggle at their wrongness. But for me, that should be a small component of one’s overall rhetorical portfolio. If you want to play a constructive role in an ongoing cultural conversation, the sizable majority of your disputational effort should be spent engaging with the best people out there with whom you disagree — confronting the strongest possible arguments against your own view, and doing so with a respectful and sincere attitude.

This strategy is not universally accepted. One of the least pleasant aspects of the atheist/skeptical community is the widespread delight in picking out the very stupidest examples of what they disagree with, holding them up for sustained ridicule, and then patting themselves on the back for how rational they all are. It’s not the only thing that happens, but it happens an awful lot, and the joy that people get out of it can become a bit tiresome.

So I disagree a bit with Richard Dawkins, when he makes this suggestion:

I have from time to time expressed sympathy for the accommodationist tendency so ably criticized here by Jerry Coyne. I have occasionally worried that – just maybe – Eugenie Scott and the appeasers might have a point, a purely political point but one, nevertheless, that we should carefully consider. I have lately found myself moving away from that sympathy.

I suspect that most of our regular readers here would agree that ridicule, of a humorous nature, is likely to be more effective than the sort of snuggling-up and head-patting that Jerry is attacking. I lately started to think that we need to go further: go beyond humorous ridicule, sharpen our barbs to a point where they really hurt.

Michael Shermer, Michael Ruse, Eugenie Scott and others are probably right that contemptuous ridicule is not an expedient way to change the minds of those who are deeply religious. But I think we should probably abandon the irremediably religious precisely because that is what they are – irremediable. I am more interested in the fence-sitters who haven’t really considered the question very long or very carefully. And I think that they are likely to be swayed by a display of naked contempt. Nobody likes to be laughed at. Nobody wants to be the butt of contempt…

I emphatically don’t mean we should use foul-mouthed rants. Nor should we raise our voices and shout at them: let’s have no D’Souzereignty here. Instead, what we need is sarcastic, cutting wit. A good model might be Peter Medawar, who would never dream of shouting, but instead quietly wielded the rapier. …

Maybe I’m wrong. I’m only thinking aloud, among friends. Is it gloves off time? Or should we continue to go along with the appeasers and be all nice and cuddly, like Eugenie and the National Academy?

Let me first note how … reasonable Dawkins is being here. He’s saying “well, I’ve been thinking about it, and maybe we should do X rather than Y — what do you folks think?” Not quite consistent with the militant fire-breathing one might expect from hearing other people talk about Dawkins, rather than listening to Dawkins himself.

Nevertheless, I don’t agree with the suggestion. There is an empirical question, of course: if the goal is actually to change people’s minds, is that accomplished more effectively by sweetly reasoning with them, or by ridiculing their incorrect beliefs? I don’t think the answer is especially clear, but very few people actually offer empirical evidence one way or the other. Instead, they loudly proclaim that the mode to which they are personally temperamentally suited — calm discussion vs. derisive mockery — is the one that is clearly the best. So I will just go along with that fine tradition.

My own goal is not really changing people’s minds; it’s understanding the world, getting things right, and having productive conversations. My real concern in the engagement/mockery debate is that people who should be academic/scholarly/intellectual are letting themselves be seduced by the cheap thrills of making fun of people. Sure, there is a place for well-placed barbs and lampooning of fatuousness — but there are also people who are good at that. I’d rather leave the majority of that work to George Carlin and Ricky Gervais and Penn & Teller, and have the people with Ph.D.’s concentrate on honest debate with the very best that the other side has to offer. I want to be disagreeing with Ken Miller or Garry Wills and St. Augustine, not with Paul Nelson and Ann Coulter and Hugh Ross.

Dawkins and friends have done the world an enormous service — they’ve made atheism part of the accepted cultural landscape, as a reasonable perspective whose supporters must be acknowledged. Now it’s time to take a step beyond “We’re here, we’re godless, get used to it” and start making the positive case for atheists as sensible, friendly, happy people. And that case isn’t made most effectively by zooming in on the lower left corner of the Grid of Disputation; it’s made by engaging with the lower right corner, and having the better arguments.

The Romantic period (roughly 1770-1830) was better represented by poetry than by science. On the poetic side, you had Keats, Shelley, Byron, Coleridge, Blake, Wordsworth, Goethe, Schiller, Pushkin, and more. On the science side, you had Michael Faraday, William Herschel, Humphry Davy, Erasmus Darwin; no slouches, to be sure, but you wouldn’t pick out this period as one of the golden ages of science.

But the interesting thing about this era, according to Richard Holmes’s new book The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, is that the scientists and the poets were deeply interested in each others’ work. That’s what I gather, anyway — not having read the book yet myself — from Freeman Dyson’s review in the New York Review of Books. It’s a provocative look into the cultural mindset of another time, when the power of science to discover new things about the world wasn’t yet quite taken for granted. Dyson quotes a stanza from Byron’s Don Juan:

This is the patent age of new inventions
      For killing bodies, and for saving souls,
All propagated with the best intentions;
      Sir Humphry Davy’s lantern, by which coals
Are safely mined for in the mode he mentions,
      Tombuctoo travels, voyages to the Poles,
Are ways to benefit mankind, as true,
Perhaps, as shooting them at Waterloo.

Scientists and poets don’t talk to each other as much any more (although there are exceptions). I tend to lament the fact that science doesn’t mingle more comfortably with other kinds of cultural currents of our time. Maybe it’s just not possible — we’ve become too specialized, leaving no room for a writer like Coleridge to proclaim “I shall attack Chemistry like a Shark.” But the more we scientists take seriously to share our ideas with the wider world, the more those ideas will take root.

Children of light and children of darkness is the vision of physics that emerges from this chapter, as from other branches of physics. The children of light are the differential equations that predict the future from the present. The children of darkness are the factors that fix these initial conditions.

– Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler, Gravitation (1973), p. 555.