That popularity really bugs some people. Sales figures notwithstanding, Larsson’s books fall pretty dramatically short on several conventional metrics of literary quality, such as “elegance of writing” and “plausibility of plot.” Early in the first novel, before we really know what’s going on or have been properly introduced to most of the characters, we are treated to a scene that consists of one character telling another about a long series of complicated and shady European business deals, complete with obscure acronyms and names that will never be mentioned again. This keeps up for what seems like pages. And it’s just a hint of the various stylistic crimes Larsson will gleefully commit throughout the series. He loves piling on meaningless details, especially about what his characters are eating and the clothes they are wearing. The prose is clunky and often wearying. The series effectively evokes the brooding coldness of Scandinavian winters, but that’s not always a good thing.

And yet — the books are impossible to put down, as approximately 9 million readers will testify. (I haven’t seen the American movie, although I did see the Swedish one, which wasn’t anywhere near as gripping as the original novel.) So we have a fairly common occurrence in publishing: books that are fantastically popular, but nevertheless are not very “good” by many agreed-upon criteria. In very different ways, think of Dan Brown, JK Rowling, or Stephenie Meyer.

Faced with such a puzzling phenomenon, one can go two ways. One is to go all-out curmudgeon: take Michael Newman’s review of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest (many spoilers). It’s not so much a review as an extended whine of incomprehension: How can something so terrible be so beloved by so many people?

The other way, much more interesting, is to actually try to answer that question, rather than just repeat it in an increasingly petulant tone. What is it about these books that makes them so irresistible? In our electronically-focused age, when some good old-fashioned printed books reach dizzying heights of popularity, perhaps the thing to do isn’t to complain that they don’t fit into our pre-existing criteria, but to figure out what they are actually doing right. I personally loved Larsson’s books, and am quite fond of the Harry Potter series, but I would ask the same question about The Da Vinci Code or the Twilight books (the first of which I thought was terrible, and the second of which I was never tempted to pick up). It’s a commonplace to bemoan what a “bad writer” Dan Brown is, but that can’t really be true. People read the books with enjoyment and keep coming back for more; he must be doing something right. Not everything, of course — I doubt that it’s necessary to distort history and science so dramatically just to write a compelling thriller. (A special case would be something like Ayn Rand, whose writing is uniformly off-putting; people keep coming back for the politics, not for the prose.)

In the case of Stieg Larsson, Laura Miller gets it right in her own review of Hornet’s Nest. Say what you will about lumbering prose and distracting minutiae; Larsson has created unforgettable characters and put them in compelling situations. This isn’t a cheap skill that anyone can just pull off, or we’d all be living high off our royalty checks. (Or our heirs would be fighting over them.) When books work for people, it makes more sense to appreciate the craftsmanship than to complain that they don’t fit our criteria. I still don’t know how Dan Brown makes people want to compulsively turn the pages, but it’s no mean trick. More power to him.

So we’re very happy to welcome Lisa aboard to guest blog about her new book, just out today: Knocking on Heaven’s Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World. (Among other virtues, this book has the single most impressive collection of blurbers of any book ever written, from Bill Clinton to Carlton Cuse.) From personal experience I can verify that writing a book doesn’t just happen; it’s a tremendous commitment over an extended period of time, and once it’s done there’s not much chance to go back and change it. So deciding to write a book at all, and more importantly how exactly to target the writing, is a delicate and critical process.

While Lisa hasn’t yet become a regular blogger, she is active on Twitter, where you can follow her at @lirarandall.

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In conjunction with the publication of Knocking on Heaven’s Door, I thought I’d take advantage of Sean’s kind invitation to post on Cosmic Variance to explain my motivations in writing my book. I haven’t done a lot of blogging myself but I am impressed at the care and interest that go into science blogs. They are a way of sharing developments as they happen and an opportunity to have meaningful discussion of results.

I talk about a lot of science in my book. So I thought rather than summarizing it all—at least in this post—I’d focus on the question of why I wrote this particular book. I waited several years before even considering embarking on a second book project. I certainly didn’t want to simply repeat the content of my previous book, and my own personal goal is always to branch out into new arenas—in this case into new types of writing–while still remaining true to my physics roots. I didn’t know the exact book I was after but I did know some of the topics I considered important and timely.

These topics fell into several categories. First, I wanted to give an accurate picture of what is happening in particle physics and cosmology today—both with experiments and with theory. Particle physicists know this to be the era of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the machine that is colliding together protons at unprecedented energies to test the nature of matter and forces at smaller distances than ever explored. The interactions between theorists and experimenters is more intense than it has been during the time I’ve been actively pursuing physics. That is because everyone realizes this interactions are essential with these challenging experiments to get to the right answers. I wanted to convey the excitement and implications of the research taking place there, so when discoveries are made, anyone interested can understand what was found and what it could mean.

Cosmologists too find this is an important time and I wanted to share some of the interest in that major topic as well. One arena that both particle physicists and cosmologists are excited about are experimental studies of the nature of dark matter. Many find this topic perplexing, whereas even if difficult to tackle experimentally, the underlying idea really is not. I wanted to explain a bit how I think about dark matter and how experiments are searching for its feeble and elusive effects.

But I wanted to do more than just summarize the physics. The second important category of ideas I wanted to address has to do with the nature of science itself, and how active scientists go about advancing their field. After writing my first book, I was struck by how we take for granted the key underlying principles in our research, and don’t always remember to share these basic, sometimes subtle, and critical ideas.

Although perhaps I shouldn’t admit this, I had an even more ambitious agenda in mind. The ideas that underlie science are critical to rational thinking in general and should be widely known, even by those silly few who don’t care about any specific science research topic. These ideas are broad and deep, and it would make a difference in many of today’s debates if they were more widely understood and applied.

So interwoven with the physics story I wanted another story about the way science works. At this point, you might have surmised that the book I ended up writing included these topics, so rather than talk about what I wanted to write, I’ll just tell about a few of the topics I cover in the book I eventually settled on.

I begin with some key ideas–frequently introduced through anecdotes. One such concept that is essential to the way physicists in particular go about their work is an “effective theory,” which tells us to focus on what is measurable when making predictions. The underlying ideas here are the notions of “scale” such as energy or distance scales, and what it means to be right and wrong—both themes that resonate in other topics I’ll later address. I’ll later use scale to categorize what we know about matter— from the interior of an atom to the remote edges of the cosmos–and how the LHC and other particle accelerators, as well as various astrophysical probes, help us access successfully more remote scales.

The first section also expands on the nature of science, taking Galileo, whose work recently held its four hundredth birthday, as a departure point. Given my book’s title, I figured I also had to address the relation of religion and science (though that is not what the title really refers to). Aside from the obvious historical relevance, what I was really interested in were the questions of why we have this debate, as well as how thinking about scale as a way of categorizing what science really tells us helps us understand and clarify some of the confusions

There are many other ideas about science including risk and uncertainty that are woven into chapters with more detail than you might even want about the actual physics. General discussions of truth and beauty and how physicists suggest models of matter or the universe, as well as top-down versus bottom-up physics and how model building contrasts with string theory are used to frame discussions of how we theorists go about our business. The book also delves into the role of creativity in science and the relation between science and technology–both important topics I enjoy thinking about.

Yes Knocking on Heaven’s Door covers a lot of territory. But it’s a big story, and one well worth telling And in case you were wondering, the title refers to accessing the edges of knowledge—a worthy goal for all of us.

I was glad he picked Dennis Overbye’s Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, which is one of my favorite books about science and scientists. It manages to show the human side of science in all its quirky glory, without either creating fake scandals or putting anyone on a pedestal.

Oedipus and the Riddle

Quadruped in the dawn, erect at noon,
and wandering on three legs across the blind
spaces of afternoon; so the eternal
Sphinx saw her inconstant brother, Man.
And to her rocky silence came a man
who unlocked the riddle in the mirror;
terrified, he saw the shattering image
of his destruction and his error.
We are Oedipus, doomed as he, to be
the triple beast: child, saviour, suppliant-
all that we will be, all that we have been.
It would annihilate us in an instant
to glimpse our monstrous being; mercifully
God grants us issue and oblivion.

Sadly, God grants us nothing of the sort. But happily, we are not annihilated by glimpsing our monstrous being. We may be disappointed, disillusioned, or discombobulated; but those are temporary conditions that we can strive to overcome. Embrace your monstrous being! It’s the only true strategy in the face of Time’s relentless march.

They asked me about relativity and cosmology, and I decided it would be more helpful to pick recent books that would bring people up to date rather than go for the classics I was reading back in the 70′s. Some of these books aren’t light reading, but it’s a matter of dedication rather than preparation; I think an interested and intelligent person who didn’t know anything about relativity or cosmology could read these and come away with some deep insights.

For more thoughts, check out the full interview.

Update: for obvious reasons, it wouldn’t be considered quite kosher to recommend one’s own books in an interview like this. This has led to the misimpression that I think my books are less than the very best. Not so!

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.

The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman’s lime.

The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather’s wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.

And I am dumb to tell the lover’s tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.

Which brings me to Michelangelo’s poems. I am sufficiently uncultured that I always thought of Michelangelo as basically a sculptor, perhaps a bit of a painter. But then I reviewed a book for Princeton University Press, and they offered as recompense to let me choose a few volumes from their back catalogue; that’s where I came upon his Complete Poems. Who knew?

Michelangelo was not exactly writing Hallmark cards. Think early Leonard Cohen. He specialized in sonnets and madrigals, and while there are a number of love poems, usually he ranges from grumpy and forlorn to deep existential despair. Here’s a sunny little ditty you can reach for whenever you feel your own artistic endeavors are falling short. (Translation by Creighton Gilbert.)

I keep a hornet in a water jar,
Inside a leather sack some strings and bones,
And in a canister three balls of tar.

My pale blue eyes are powdered into grounds,
My teeth are like keys on an instrument,
So, when they move, my voice is still or sounds.

My face has the shape that causes fright;
In wind when there’s no rain my clothes would scare
Crows from the seed, without another dart.

A spider web is nestled in one ear,
All night a cricket in the other buzzes;
With spitting breath I do not sleep, but snore.

Love, and the flowered grottoes, and the muse,
My scrawls for tambourines or dunces’ caps,
Go to innkeepers, toilets, bawdy houses.

What use to want to make so many puppets,
If they have made me in the end like him
Who crossed the water, and then drowned in slops?

My honored art, wherein I was for a time
In such esteem, has brought me down to this:
Poor and old, under another’s thumb,

I am undone if I do not die fast.

I don’t like it—

two massive Black Holes
each twirling at the core of
                      two merging galaxies

get close enough
to fuse together

then quick as a wink
just as they are melting into a New Black Hole Blob

they undergo something called a "spin-flip"

they change the axes of their spins
and the fused-together Black Hole Blob
gets its own

          quick as a cricket’s foot

Don’t like it at all

And then the new Black Hole Blob sometimes
bounces back and forth inside
                              its mergèd Galaxy

till it settles at the center

but sometimes a "newly" up-sized Black Hole

leaves its Galaxy
to sail out munchingly on its own
                                 into the Universal It

I don’t like it

Nothing about it
in the Bhagavad Gita
the Book of Revelation
Shakespeare, Sappho, or Allen Ginsberg

Why physics and poetry? For purposes of this discussion they’ve been united under the banner of “The Nature of Observation.” That’s not just a saucy provocation — there’s something substantive underneath. We observe the world all the time, in ways both automatic and reflective. Both physics and poetry have as a primary motivation the attempt to improve upon our superficial observations of the world. In physics we simplify and quantify, looking for formal patterns underlying how reality works; in poetry we illuminate and suggest, using the power of metaphor and imagery to draw connections that aren’t immediately obvious. In both cases, we’re trying to deepen our understanding by subjecting the world to closer scrutiny than it ordinarily gets.

That’s my line, anyway. Jane Hirshfield is a wonderful poet, and the discussion should be a lot of fun. I wanted to include one of her poems, but I couldn’t decide which one, so here are two. If you like them, there are more where those came from.

Balance

Balance is noticed most when almost failed of –

in an elephant’s delicate wavering
on her circus stool, for instance,
or that moment
when a ladder starts to tip but steadies back.

There are, too, its mysterious departures.

Hours after the dishes are washed and stacked,
a metal bowl clangs to the floor,
the weight of drying water all that altered;
a painting vertical for years
one morning — why? — requires a restoring tap.

You have felt it disappearing
from your own capricious heart –
a restlessness enters, the smallest leaning begins.

Already then inevitable,
the full collision,
the life you will describe afterward always as `after’.

The Illuminist

Even in his glass cabin you can see
the man driving the snowplow
is whistling, happy. He races
one road, then the next, moving new snow.

A monk patiently hammering gold-leaf,
before him the world grows pliably, steadily brighter.

And if more will fall again tonight,
no matter.
He will put on his hat, his gloves,
and make again order.

All day the plow’s sound rises,
a pre-Gregorian chanting singing its singer.
Gold of winter sun grows thinner and thinner.

Now
he can lay it right with the little plow.

The scriptorium darkens over white vellum.
His puttering ink-stroke, lengthening,
glows.

I lived in the first century of world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane,
The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
The news would pour out of various devices
Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.
I would call my friends on other devices;
They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.
Slowly I would get to pen and paper,
Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.
In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,
Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,
Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.
As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,
We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,
To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile
Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,
Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means
To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,
To let go the means, to wake.

I lived in the first century of these wars.

I haven’t carefully perused all of the entries. As you do, please chime in with any that you think we should all be paying attention to. At a brief glance, here are some that caught my eye:

• Robert Sapolsky, The Lure of a Good Story
• Jonathan Haidt, Contingent Superorganism
• Danny Hillis, Possibility Spaces
• Kevin Hand, The Gibbs Landscape
• Ross Anderson, Science Versus Theatre
• Gerd Gigerenzer, Risk Literacy
• Amanda Gefter, Duality
• Joshua Greene, Supervenience!
• Carl Zimmer, Life as a Side Effect
• Rob Kurzban, Externalities
• Richard Foreman, Negative Capability is a Profound Therapy

I have a contribution of my own, The Pointless Universe, after Steven Weinberg’s quote. Need to come up with better branding if this idea is really going to take off.

The story is about Ibn al-Haytham (sometimes Latinized to Alhazen), a pioneering Muslim scientist from around the year 1000. A story is appropriate because we just don’t know too many details of al-Haytham’s life. What we do know is that he was placed under house arrest in Cairo after disappointing the Caliph by failing to control the floods of the Nile.

There was an unanticipated advantage to house arrest, at least in Jennifer’s retelling — al-Haytham was denied his precious books, so he couldn’t engage in the usual work of scholars, which was taken to be commenting on classic texts. Instead, he hit upon the idea of doing experiments on his own. The amazing result was a seven-volume Book of Optics. Long story short, this was the work that really established the idea that sight relies on rays of light stretching from objects to the eye, as well as introducing the camera obscura and discussing the physical mechanism of sight.

After ten years of arrest, the Caliph died and al-Haytham was released. But he didn’t slow down, producing “scores” (according to Wikipedia) of other works on physics, astronomy, mathematics, and medicine. Kind of makes my own C.V. seem pretty puny by comparison; better get back to work.

Count me with those who think this is an incredibly dumb move. The motivation is clear, and quite sensible — high-school teachers who have assigned the book have found that many young black students react viscerally to the word, and have trouble putting it into a harmless historical box. I can believe that’s true. But if, in the judgment of the teachers, this creates such a barrier that it does more harm than good to assign the book, the answer is extremely obvious — don’t assign the book. Maybe you can encourage your students to read the book on their own, with appropriate warnings about the content and explanations of its historical context. I think it’s a good book for everyone to read, but that’s different from insisting that the reading be mandatory.

What you absolutely don’t do is change the book to fit your idea of what is appropriate. It’s cowardly, untrue to history, and massively unfair to Mark Twain. Personally I suspect that students have a better ability to appreciate historical context than their teachers give them credit for. But there are many good books that have been written over the centuries, and there’s no excuse for bowlderizing a classic to make your life a little more comfortable.

Since today is Casual Friday, I’d like to put science aside and do a review of Jonathan Franzen’s new book, Freedom: A Novel. I am hampered in that goal by the fact that I haven’t read the book, and don’t plan to any time soon. (I think Franzen is a great writer, but I’m very behind in my reading list.)

So instead I’ll outsource this one to Washington Post book reviewer Ron Charles, who delivers his critique in video format. It gives me some ideas. (Hat tip to Ariel Kalil.)

pi appears as a constant in many formula of physics. General relativity says that it isn’t constant. Is it the origin of the pi particle, aka pion?

A curmudgeonly literalist might, when faced with a question such as this, harrumph a simple “No.” A more loquacious sort might explain that general relativity does not say that π is not a contstant. Pi is not a parameter of physics like the fine-structure constant, which could conceivably be different or even variable from place to place. It’s a universal answer to a fixed question, to wit: what is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, as measured in Euclidean geometry? The answer is of course 3.141592653589793…, or any number of representations in terms of infinite series.

But the point of the question is that GR says we don’t live in Euclidean space; we move through a curved spacetime manifold. That’s okay. In a curved space, we could imagine defining the “diameter” of a circle as the maximum geodesic distance connecting two of its points, and taking the ratio of the circumference with that diameter, and indeed it would typically not give us 3.14159… But that doesn’t mean π is changing from place to place; it just means that the ratio of circumference to diameter (defined this way) in a curved space doesn’t equal π. If the circumference/diameter ratio is less than π, you are in a positively curved space, such as a sphere; if it is greater than π, you are in a negatively curved space, such as a saddle. Geometry can also be much more complicated than that, with different ratios depending on how the circle is oriented in space, which is why curvature is properly measured by tensors rather than by a simple number.

Taken from Mathematics Illuminated, which says that pi really does depend on the geometry of space, which is crazy.

(Parenthetically, one of the dumbest mathematical arguments ever given was put forward by the world’s smartest person, Marilyn Vos Savant. The columnist wrote an entire book criticizing Andrew Wiles’s proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem. Her argument: Wyles made use of non-Euclidean geometry, but what if geometry is really Euclidean? Touche!)

However … despite the fact that π doesn’t really change from place to place in general relativity, the geometry does change from place to place, and there is a particle associated with those dynamics — the graviton. Although the formulation of the original question isn’t accurate, the spirit is very much in the right place. And I, for one, will henceforth be perpetually sad that the physics community missed a chance by attaching the word pion to the lightest quark-antiquark bound state, rather than to the particle associated with deviations from Euclidean geometry. That would have been awesome.

It is the story of the scandalous Paris salon run by Baron Paul Thierry d’Holbach, a philosophical playground for many of the greatest thinkers of the age. Its members included Denis Diderot (most famous as the editor of the original encyclopedia, but, Mr Blom argues, an important thinker in his own right), Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the father of romanticism, and the baron himself; even David Hume, a famous Scottish empiricist, paid the occasional visit.

I have a special fondness for these guys, having taught a course about them. As much as I am a forward-thinking person, the modern mode of expression by freethinkers (pounding out passionate diatribes on our keyboards) isn’t quite as much fun as gathering in a salon among good food and drink to denounce hypocrisy and spread the Enlightenment message.

Apparently Blom’s historical account has a contemporary message:

Even today, and even in secular western Europe, the bald and confident atheism and materialism of Diderot and Holbach seems mildly shocking. We still cling stubbornly to the idea of an animating soul, a spiritual ghost in the biological machine. For Mr Blom, the modern, supposedly secular world has merely dressed up the “perverse” morality of Christianity in new and better camouflaged ways. We still hate our bodies, he says, still venerate suffering and distrust pleasure.

This is the message of Mr Blom’s book, hinted at but left unstated until the closing chapters. He believes the Enlightenment is incomplete, betrayed by its self-appointed guardians. Despite all the scientific advances of the past two centuries, magical thinking and the cultural inheritance of Christianity remain endemic.

Sounds pretty darn accurate. Let’s order some bottles of wine and get this job finished!

A weird commotion has broken out in the comments on Mark’s post. Unfortunately not about new forces and interactions in the dark sector, which would be great, but about the grave evil done by the profiteering meanies at Scientific American and their witting collaborators, Mark and Jonathan Feng. These two upstanding physicists have apparently written an article that you have to pay to read. It appears that the article is in some sort of “magazine,” an archaic collection of periodic writings that traditionally charge fees for people to access. Bizarre! (The comedy is kicked up a proverbial notch by people blaming the argument on “the extreme left.”)

There is an interesting and important discussion to be had about the best way to efficiently organize an economy of writers and readers in the internet age. This isn’t that discussion. The interesting discussion would consider the tradeoffs between systems with fees, paywalls, advertising, sponsorship, subscriptions, micropayments, and so on. This discussion, in contrast, was kicked off by “paying money for knowledge is plain idiotic” and went downhill from there. (Of all the Laws of the Internet, the firmest is the Second Law of Commentodynamics: in an isolated comment thread, disorder and waste heat only increase with time.)

Paying for knowledge happens all the time. We buy books and magazines, we pay to enter museums, we pay tuition at colleges and universities, and so on. Information on the internet is not, in principle, any different. There’s a lot that is available for free, and that’s great. It does not follow that it should all be free.

If enough resources are free on the internet, it will certainly become more difficult for outlets such as traditional newspapers and magazines to charge for content. They have to both 1) make the case that they add some sort of substantive value, and 2) make the fees small enough and unobtrusive enough that people won’t mind paying. It’s not the only model; at the moment, giving things away but associating them with advertising seems to be more prevalent. We live in an era when the timescales over which technology is changing are substantially less than the time it takes for new economic structures to emerge and mature into equilibrium. This doesn’t change the basic fact that people like getting paid for the work they do, or they might not do it. Which, if that work consists of providing useful services like interesting articles about science addressed to the general public, would be too bad.

We should celebrate with a contest or something — I have a few copies of the paperback that could be given away, but no clever ideas to spark a competition. Best short story about the arrow of time? Limericks are out, but perhaps sonnets? Or just for the biggest contributors to our Donors Choose campaign? Suggestions welcome. (Best suggestion for a contest? How deliciously meta.)

At the moment Amazon is offering a bargain price on the hardcover, even cheaper than the paperback (presumably to clear out inventory). They are also pushing their Kindle editions, presumably to help stave off the iPad onslaught. Truth is, there are a lot more books available for Kindle than in the iBooks store, so like many people I read books on my iPad using the Kindle app.

Anyway, Amazon is allowing readers to peruse the first chapters of some of their Kindle books — so here you go! I wish it had been the second chapter, to be honest; that is where we get into some of the mysteries of entropy and the arrow of time. Chapter One is a bit more scene-setting (but it’s a pretty awesome scene).

Actually, looking at the sample more closely, they seem to have included the Prologue and some of Chapter Two. Even better! Note you can click the “Aa” icon near the top of the viewer to change the font size and line spacing, if you like to read more than twenty words of text at a time.