Blogs / Cosmic Variance

I’m happy to announce that the first review of From Eternity to Here has appeared, over at Michael Bérubé’s blog. It has also appeared at Crooked Timber, a phenomenon that can ultimately traced to the holographic non-locality inherent in quantum descriptions of space as well as time.

Readers of underdeveloped imagination will wonder how a review could appear when the book has not yet been written. When one has mastered the mysteries of time, should anyone be surprised?

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

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John Updike (1932-2009)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Updike Image (c) Michael Mundy

Over at Reality Base, Melissa has invited Adam Frank to contribute a series of guest posts related to his new book: The Constant Fire: Beyond the Science vs. Religion Debate. Adam is an astrophysicist at Rochester, a smart guy, and a great science writer; he interviewed me for this story in Discover, and it was the most conscientious bit of science journalism I’ve been involved with.

There is a copy of Adam’s book lying around here somewhere, but I can’t find it right now; I’ve looked through it, but admittedly haven’t read it closely. You can get some feeling for where he’s coming from by checking out his blog devoted to the book. Roughly: “Sure, simple-minded creationism and a naively interventionist deity is crazy. But there is something valuable in notions of the sacred and spiritual endeavor that captures something important about being human, and it’s a mistake to simply dismiss it all under the same umbrella.” There is a family resemblance to the argument made (in very different words) by Stuart Kauffman in his recent book Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion. Kauffman points out an indisputably true fact: there is such a large number of possible configurations of the genetic material in a complex organism that we will never come anywhere close to exploring every possible arrangement. Therefore (he leaps), we have to look beyond simple determinism to understand our world. There is (he bravely continues) a radical contingency in the way life actually plays itself out, and it makes sense to grapple with this contingency by turning to concepts such as “the sacred.”

Let’s get the agreement out of the way first. There is certainly no question that the techniques of fundamental physics are not sufficient for dealing with getting us through our everyday lives. Even if we are hard-core determinists, and think that every particle and quantum field does nothing but march to the tune of the universal Schrodinger equation, that fact isn’t very helpful when it comes to fixing the economy or listening to music. We deal with complicated human experiences, and a different set of concepts and vocabulary is required, even if it’s nothing but the laws of physics underlying it all. And it would indeed be nice if atheist/materialist thinkers spent more time putting forward a positive agenda of living human life, in addition to their undoubtedly successful programs of understanding the natural world and highlighting the inadequacy of traditional religious belief.

So I’m very happy to have creative and intelligent people like Frank and Kauffman address these hard issues from the perspective of someone who takes the laws of nature seriously. However, I continue to be baffled about why they would ever think it was a good idea to invoke words like “spiritual” or “sacred” as part of that endeavor.

The problem is, words have meanings. When you start talking about “spirituality,” people are going to take you to mean something that goes beyond the laws of nature, in the sense of being incompatible with them, not just “hard to understand in terms of them” — something supernatural. Now, you may not want them to make that association; that might not be a connotation you wish to invite. (Or maybe it is, in which case I’ve completely misunderstood.) And you are free, as was Humpty Dumpty, to insist that words mean whatever you say they mean. But it’s a very good strategy for guaranteeing that people will misunderstand you.

The puzzles of human life, and our mutual sense of wonder, and a feeling of awe when confronted with the cosmos, are all perfectly respectable topics for discussion. And there exists perfectly respectable vocabularies for discussing them, that don’t come laden with unfortunate supernatural overtones: literature, anthropology, psychology, the arts, and so on. There is a huge disadvantage to throwing around words like “sacred” and “spiritual,” in that you will very frequently be understood (misunderstood, one hopes) to be talking about the supernatural. So if you really want to rehabilitate those words in the eyes of a cheerful naturalist such as myself, your task is clear: give very specific examples and contexts in which we gain some sort of understanding by using that vocabulary that we would not gain by sticking to words without those unfortunate connotations. I’m happy to admit that such a context might be possible, but I haven’t seen anything close to a persuasive argument, so I’ll remain extremely skeptical until one comes along.

And then, one can’t leave this territory without bringing up Richard Dawkins for some good bashing. Here is where Adam has a go. “Dawkins only addresses a naive and simplistic view of religion,” etc. We’ve talked before about how “sophisticated” approaches to religion are not any better, and how Dawkins has served an extremely valuable rhetorical purpose. But there is a deeper point, which is consistently missed by the gentle-minded/accommodationist/agnostic/liberal-religious/sophisticated-theology segment of the debate: It’s Not About You. Richard Dawkins was not addressing this kind of touchy-feely non-interventionist religion, for the excellent reason that it doesn’t match up with what the overwhelming majority of religious believers actually believe.

Dawkins was, rather, addressing the kind of religion professed by Congressman Paul Broun (R-GA). Rep. Broun is shown here, accompanied by two ministers, anointing a doorway in the U.S. Capitol building with oil. It was the doorway that Barack Obama would walk through on the way to his inauguration, and these well-meaning gentlemen understood that a carefully placed dab of oil might make God look more charitably on the new President.

This is what Richard Dawkins was arguing against. This is a member of the U.S. Congress, who in fact is a member of the House Committee on Science and Technology, who believes that some sort of esoteric rite is going to curry favor with an omnipotent being. Dawkins is worried about them, not about people who are occasionally impressed with the grandeur of the cosmos. If the oil-anointers were a tiny minority of religious believers rather than the vast majority, I suspect Dawkins would spend his time worrying about other things.

Given the current DEFCON 1 level of anxiety about recommendation letters, and my belief that more transparency is usually a good thing, I thought it would be informative to assemble a word cloud of about 10 years of recommendation letters written for undergraduates applying to graduate schools or fellowships (with names and schools omitted).

As you can see, the top three themes are “research”, “project”, and “work” indicating that the letters are highly weighted towards what students have actually accomplished, rather than just pure intellectual firepower. The cloud for graduate students applying to postdoctoral positions would be more biased towards words like “thesis” and “papers”, but would again emphasize what one has done, not how intelligent one is.

So, if you are a student thinking about graduate school, you should make sure you get involved in research, and, when you do, make sure you get something done!

You know what the world really needs? A good book about time. Google tells me there are only about one and a half million such books right now, but I think you’ll agree that one more really good one is called for.

So I’m writing one. From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time is a popular-level book on time, entropy, and their connections to cosmology, to be published by Dutton. Hopefully before the end of this year! I’ve been plugging away at it, and have shifted almost into full-time book-writing mode now. (Note to collaborators: I promise not to abandon you entirely.)

I have my own idiosyncratic ideas about how to account for the arrow of time in cosmology, but those are going to be confined to passing mentions in the last chapter. Mostly I’ll be discussing basic ideas that most experts agree are true, or true ideas that everyone should agree on even if perhaps they don’t quite yet, or the implications of those ideas for knotty questions in cosmology. Hopefully we can at least shift the conventional wisdom a little bit.

Naturally there is a web page with some details. Here is the tentative table of contents, although I’ve been cutting and pasting pretty vigorously, so who knows how it will end up looking once all is said and done. One thing is for sure, some of these chapter titles need sprucing up.

0. Prologue

Part One: Time, Experience, and the Universe

1. The Heavy Hand of Entropy
2. The Beginning and End of Time
3. The Past is Present Memory

Part Two: Einstein’s Universe

4. Time is Personal
5. Time is Flexible
6. Looping Through Time

Part Three: Distinguishing the Past from the Future

7. Running Backwards
8. Entropy and Disorder
9. Information and Life
10. Recurrent Nightmares
11. Quantum Time

Part Four: Natural and Unnatural Spacetimes

12. Black Holes
13. The Life of the Universe
14. The Past Through Tomorrow
15. Epilogue: From the Universe to the Kitchen
    Appendix:  Math

If anyone out there is friends with Oprah, maybe drop her a line suggesting that this would make a good book-club choice. I hear that’s helpful when it comes to sales.

Update: And now you can buy it.

Let’s say you wanted to know whether a certain concept was being invoked more frequently in the public sphere these days than it had been in the recent past. You might, for example, look at the archives of the New York Times, and ask how many articles mentioned that concept.

But there’s an obvious problem: maybe there are just more or fewer articles in the NYT from year to year. So you want to control for that. But maybe you don’t know the total number of articles.

So the sensible strategy is to pick some other word that should appear with the same frequency from year to year, and divide the number of articles with you meaning-laden word by the number with that neutral word. Here, from Eric Rauchway at Edge of the American West, is the ratio of appearances of the word “God” to the word “January” in the New York Times, between 1901 and 2005. Methodology borrowed from Gentzkow, Glaeser, and Goldin. Click for closeup.

I’m still not sure about the choice of “January,” though; see original thread for methodological hashing-out. What if there are more articles in the sports section, and they tend to refer to dates more frequently?

Also, we seem to be talking about God a lot more these days.

One of the other good choices made by Obama’s inaugural planners was inviting Elizabeth Alexander to compose and deliver a poem. It’s not a well-established tradition. Only two other Presidents have featured poets at their inaugurations: John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton. And, of course, the mere mention of “poetry” gives folks an opportunity to burnish their anti-intellectual credentials by pulling excerpts out of context and proudly proclaiming that they don’t get it.

Ta-Nehisi Coates reprints Alexander’s best-known poem: The Venus Hottentot (1825). The title refers to Saartjie Baartman, an African woman who was brought to Europe in 1810, where she was exhibited in circuses and at private salons for the wealthy.

Baartman’s exotic physique and Khoikhoi ethnicity pushed all sorts of buttons in late Georgian England, where social reform movements jostled with the excitement of empire and a fascination with the Dark Continent. She died in Paris in 1815, where she was examined and dissected by naturalist Georges Cuvier, who later wrote articles arguing that the form of her labia was evidence of the primitive sexual appetite of African women. Baartman’s skeleton, brains and genitals were put on display at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris until 1974, when they were removed and put in storage; in 2002 her remains were repatriated to South Africa, where she was buried in the Gamtoos Valley.

Alexander’s poem is extremely moving, a mediation on a meditation on power and hope and rage, building to the devastating final lines:

If he were to let me rise up

from this table, I’d spirit
his knives and cut out his black heart,
seal it with science fluid inside
a bell jar, place it on a low
shelf in a white man’s museum
so the whole world could see
it was shriveled and hard,
geometric, deformed, unnatural.

My first reaction, however, was more exasperation than admiration. The poem opens in the voice of Georges Cuvier:

Science, science, science!
Everything is beautiful

blown up beneath my glass.
Colors dazzle insect wings.

You can guess where that’s going to go. Of all the things the world needs right now, “more mockery of science by humanities-oriented intellectuals” is not one of them. Yes, yes, we know: science is cold, and clinical, and dehumanizing. It also gave us penicillin, not to mention Mentos & Diet Coke, so cut some slack, okay? At the end of the day, anti-intellectualism is still anti-intellectualism.

But upon reflection, I decided that my first reaction was unfair. As Hilzoy very astutely points out, the poem’s opening in Cuvier’s voice is honestly beautiful and affecting, where it could have been nothing more than sarcastic. The beauty of science can coexist with a shriveled heart.

More importantly, as scientists we need to be able to take a little honest critique now and then and learn from it. Although anti-science attitudes within the humanities can often be little more than a cheap pose, that doesn’t mean that science shouldn’t ever be examined critically. Georges Cuvier’s crazy theories (he was also wrong about elephants, evolution, and continental drift, but did have some good ideas about dinosaurs) are just as much a part of the history of science as Newton or Darwin. And the impulses behind them are as real today as they ever were.

It’s a cliche, but science is a human endeavor, and individual scientists are human beings. Scientific theories stand independently from their originators, but the process of science and the motivations of its practitioners are neither more or less lofty, on average, than most other human activities. The great thing about science is that, in the long run, empirical realities always win; if your theories aren’t right, they can’t survive. But the long run can be pretty long, and in the short run there is a temptation to dress up one’s prejudices in the apparent objectivity of scientific practice. In ideal circumstances, the harsh testing ground of experiment should keep us from drawing conclusions that aren’t supported by the data; but that’s a goal to which we aspire, not a virtue we are granted automatically by our lab coats and fancy math.

Using the size of an African woman’s labia to draw conclusions about their primitive sexual appetites is no more sensibly “scientific” than believing that the proportion of women working as professional scientists (at this precise moment in history, in this precise part of the world) is a direct consequence of an underlying distribution of innate talents, unmediated by social factors. But there is no shortage of people who sincerely think that way. And the long run is sometimes longer than it needs to be.

Text of the poem below the fold.

(more…)

‘Tis the season when various academies, all the way up to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, decide which movies were most deserving of our admiration this year. The studios know this, and make a big push to win awards, which can translate into box office. For example, this being the Age of the Internet, a number of screenplays are available for download online (including some for movies that haven’t quite been released yet). Some interesting choices:

The Dark Knight

Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Frost/Nixon

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

WALL•E

You might not think that the script for WALL•E would be all that fascinating, since much of the movie was free of dialogue; but you’d be wrong.

INT. ABANDONED BNL SUPERSTORE – NEXT DAY

LOUIS ARMSTRONG’S “LA VIE EN ROSE” PLAYS

Eve scans through the market.
Wally follows from a safe distance.
A stray puppy-dog.

Eve glances over at him.
Wally panics.
Bumps into a RACK OF SHOPPING CARTS.
Creates an avalanche.

They chase him down a flight of stairs.
Wally reaches the exit doors.
Won’t open!
Carts pig pile on top of him.

It’s like a little poem. I laugh just thinking about that scene.

Here on the pulse of this new day
You may have the grace to look up and out
And into your sister’s eyes,
Into your brother’s face, your country
And say simply
Very simply
With hope
Good morning.

– Maya Angelou

The Guardian has carried out a quite fascinating project. They have identified children raised in Britain, but originating from almost every country in the entire United Nations’ list (omitted were San Marino, the Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, Naura, Paulu, the Central African Republic and North Korea), photographed them, taken their stories, and posted them on the Guardian web site.

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