April 2005

The Catholic Church does not allow women to be priests, bishops, cardinals, or Pope. Precisely because this fact is so familiar, it’s easy to lose sight of how bizarre and retrograde it really is. Only two countries in the world prohibit women from voting and holding office — Saudi Arabia and Kuwait — and that might be changing. The only reason the Church can even imagine getting away with its overt sexism is that it’s a religion, and gets instructions from God. (In particular, the Holy Spirit, who seems to be the messenger in these matters.) This is why the factual incorrectness of the religious view of the universe is not simply a matter of empty metaphysics: it leads directly to a warrant for nonsensical ethical claims.

It’s taken hundreds of years of struggle, but Western society has been gradually improving its stance toward women and sexuality ever since the Enlightenment. It’s on these issues — women priests, abortion, birth control, homosexuality — where the differences between the Church and secular Europeans and Americans are most pronounced. And if anyone doesn’t believe that these differences aren’t a major factor in the decline in the numbers (and activity) of Catholics in Europe and North America, they’re fooling themselves.

So what does the Church do? Elects it’s most visible advocate of hard-line retrenchment on these issues as Pope. There could be some logic there; if the cardinals think that compromise on issues of sexuality is simply morally wrong, they could think it wise to make their position as explicit as possible. But then you get things like this (via Crooked Timber):

These sessions were also covered by an oath of secrecy. But several cardinals made clear on Wednesday that the march of secularization across Western Europe was the number one problem on their minds, and that Ratzinger seemed to be part of the solution.

The new pope, said George, the Chicago archbishop, “understands Western society” and “is very well prepared” for the task of revitalizing Christianity in affluent, secular cultures.

That seems to be the exact opposite of the truth. Charging forward with condemnations of homosexuality and abortion will not — I’m going out on a limb here — revitalize Christianity in affluent, secular cultures. If that’s what Pope Benedict thinks, his understanding of Western society needs an upgrade.

One obvious side-effect of the decline of high-energy physics in the U.S. is that we will be attracting fewer talented scientists from outside the country. But why limit ourselves to such indirect measures? Now the Department of Commerce wants to make it much more difficult for foreigners to get research done in the U.S. The idea is to require a special license for each foreign national who will be doing research with an “export controlled instrument” — a vague category that depends on what country you’re from, but might include things like powerful computers. So if your Chinese grad student wants to use a supercomputer to model the growth of structure in a cosmological simulation, they will have to wait until a license comes through, which will probably take a few months.

Here’s an email from Judy Franz, Executive Officer of the American Physical Society, to physics department chairs (of which I am not one, but it’s being forwarded around). This change would make many foreign students and visiting scientists into second-class citizens, and further diminish the reasons anyone might have to come to the U.S. to do research.

Date: Fri, 22 Apr 2005 08:53:07 -0400
From: Judy Franz
Subject: Urgent: Proposed Dept. of Commerce rules pose threat to research

Dear Chairs of PhD-granting Physics Departments,

I am writing to alert you to a possible threat to research in your department and to urge you and your faculty to write to the Department of Commerce (DOC) in response to its “Advance notice of proposed rulemaking” published in the Federal Register on March 28, 2005. The notice calls for comments that must be received by May 27, 2005. As discussed below, the leadership of the American Physical Society feels this issue is so important that you should seek to provide thoughtful and accurate responses by your university administration, your department and individual faculty who might be affected by the recommended changes. We believe that your comments can make a difference.

The proposed rulemaking by the DOC is a response to recommendations presented by the Department’s Inspector General. Implementation of these recommendations would cause two major changes:

1) The operation of export-controlled instrumentation by a foreign national working in your department would be considered a “deemed export”, even if that person were engaged in fundamental research. As a consequence, a license would be required for each affected foreign national (student, staff or faculty member) and for each export controlled instrument. Typical export-controlled instruments are high-speed oscilloscopes, high-resolution lithography systems, high-end computers and GPS systems. The situation is complicated by the fact that the list of instruments is different for each country.

2) U.S. organizations would be required to apply for a deemed export license for students, employees or visitors who are foreign nationals (but not U. S. naturalized citizens or permanent residents) and have access to controlled technology if they were born in a country where the technology transfer in question would require an export license, regardless of their most recent citizenship or permanent residency. For example, transfer of technology to a Chinese scientist who has established permanent residency or citizenship in Canada would be treated, for export licensing purposes under the proposed guidelines, as a deemed export to a Chinese foreign national. (The list of export-controlled instruments for Chinese nationals is particularly extensive.)

The Department of Commerce officials who have the responsibility for developing new policies and practices in response to the Inspector General’s recommendations are anxious to determine what the impact of implementing those recommendations would be. They must seek a balance between increases in national security that might result from the implementation of the new rules and the decrease in national security that would result from negative impacts to US research and development.

In initial discussions by the APS Panel on Public Affairs (POPA) it was thought likely that consequences would be: a) research would slow down significantly due to the need to obtain licenses for each foreign national and, particularly, Chinese student, staff member, postdoc, or faculty member using export controlled instrumentation. We believe that a separate license would have to be obtained for each instrument. In this regard, it should be noted that the relevant DOC office has the staff to handle about 800-1000 license requests per year. Present times to process a license request are typically 2-3 months. b) instruments would have to be secured to ensure that those who do not have the required license could not use them. c) the number of Chinese and other foreign national students would decrease markedly as their “second-class” status on campus became apparent, thus ultimately weakening the nation’s science and technology workforce. d) the administrative costs of research would rise markedly. e) national security would ultimately be weakened as a consequence of a loss of leadership in economic and technology development.

We urge you, therefore, to have faculty members who are experimentalists respond to the DOC’s notice by estimating, as accurately as possible, the impact on their research. This would involve a determination of which instruments are probably export controlled for each nation “represented” by foreign nationals in the laboratory. (The person responsible for export control administration in the institution should be able to help with this.) You should then send the DOC either a comment from the department as a whole or, better yet, individual comments, which state the number and types of instruments involved, the number of students, staff or postdocs from each affected nation and the likely number of licenses to be requested if the recommendations are implemented. It would also be helpful if comments contained a brief description of the type of research performed in the laboratory. Estimates of the consequences of three months delays in research for each new foreign national student and each new export controlled instrument will also be valuable.

You may regard this as rather burdensome, but it is our belief that implementation of the Inspector General’s recommendations will be far more burdensome. Therefore, we hope that you will get every experimentalist to reply.

To submit your comments, you can go to www.regulations.gov and enter the Key Phrase “Revision and Clarification of Deemed Export Related Regulatory Requirements.” You can also view the proposed new regulation at this site and note what a large effect changing an “and” to “or” can make.

Best regards,
Judy Franz
Executive Officer
APS

First ten songs that come up on the iPod.

1. Ute Lemper, La Vie en Rose
2. Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers, Along Came Betty
3. Jeff Beck, Thelonius
   
4. Typhonie Monique & Neal Alger, Harlem Blues
5. Badi Assad, Ica
6. Bobby Bland, Two Steps from the Blues
7. LaVay Smith & Her Red Hot Skillet Lickers, One Hour Mama
8. John Coltrane, Blue Trane
9. Mahavishnu Orchestra, Meeting of the Spirits
10. Herbie Hancock, Chameleon

Whew, that’s a lot of blues, in the songs and right in the title. Has anyone developed a Tarot-card kind of system where we can use the iPod shuffle to augur the future?

You have no idea how shocked we professional physicists were when one of our own was named Person of the Century by Time magazine. Of course, it was Einstein, who is something of a unique figure. Now we are celebrating the World Year of Physics in honor of the centenary of Einstein’s Miraculous Year in 1905, when he wrote a handful of papers that turned the world of physics upside down.

Alan Boyle has written an enjoyable overview of what Einstein accomplished, and what it means for us today, over at MSNBC. By “enjoyable” I mean “quotes me a lot.” At first I couldn’t remember ever actually being interviewed by Alan, but then I remembered the press conference at the AAAS meeting, which I think is where these nuggets of rich wisdom were mined. (It has been suggested that I use this blog as a forum for puffing myself up. And?)

Another fun article by Alan is on Einstein’s successors, specifically that an increasing number of them are women. Anecdotal evidence and individual stories don’t prove anything, of course, but it’s nice to see talented people overcoming the obstacles that are strewn in their way.

Update: In the original version of this post, I remarked on how female physicists tended to be more attractive than their male counterparts. It’s been pointed out that discussions of this sort can serve to undermine women’s status as talented scientists. Which is, of course, true. My hope was to be sufficiently clear that I meant to do nothing of the sort, and that we needn’t be so deadly earnest all the time. But perhaps such nuance is impossible to convey in this kind of medium, or perhaps just impossible period, or perhaps the intentions are not the point. So either I am being pilloried on the basis of an ungenerous misreading, or I am unwittingly contributing to a very real problem. In either case, not what I intended, and it’s better not to run the risk of exacerbating the obstacles women face in this field.

Now, of course, reactionaries will accuse me of buckling under to the pressure of political correctness. But that I don’t mind at all. Henceforth I’ll just stick to less controversial topics, like basketball and religion.

By Charles Simic. (It’s still poetry month, you know. And I’m still on the road. And I’m working on corrections for a new printing.)

Where it says snow
read teeth-marks of a virgin
Where it says knife read
you passed through my bones
like a police-whistle
Where it says table read horse
Where it says horse read my migrant’s bundle
Apples are to remain apples
Each time a hat appears
think of Isaac Newton
reading the Old Testament
Remove all periods
They are scars made by words
I couldn’t bring myself to say
Put a finger over each sunrise
it will blind you otherwise
That damn ant is still stirring
Will there be time left to list
all errors to replace
all hands guns owls plates
all cigars ponds woods and reach
that beer-bottle my greatest mistake
the word I allowed to be written
when I should have shouted
her name

This morning I drove from Chicago to Notre Dame to give a seminar and to speak tomorrow at a conference in honor of Ernan McMullin. He is a widely respected philosopher of science, and was the PhD advisor of Jack Doody, who taught me philosophy at Villanova.

So I stop at a fast-food place on I-90 along the way, and there’s a TV showing white smoke and pealing bells. I stuck around a little to see who would be the new Pope, but eventually had to get going before he was revealed. Of course now we know who it is.

“Ratzinger is a polarizing figure to many, who seems to prefer combativeness to compromise and compassion,” Mary Grant of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests said in a statement.

[…]

In a 2004 document, Ratzinger denounced “radical feminism” as undermining the family and natural differences between men and women.

My goodness. They’ve elected Larry Summers as Pope.

A little morality tale, in which our hero resists the lure of easy money and emerges with his self-respect somewhat intact.

Charles Townes is an accomplished scientist. He won the Nobel Prize in 1964 for inventing the laser (something a little more tangible than, say, demonstrating that spontaneously broken non-abelian gauge theories are renormalizable). He is also this year’s winner of the Templeton Prize for “progress towards research or discoveries about spiritual realities.” The Prize is awarded each year by the Templeton Foundation, and quite deliberately involves an amount of money (about 800,000 British pounds) that is larger than that for winning the Nobel Prize. Townes is one of those rare scientists who is overtly religious, and would like to see closer connections between science and religion. He sincerely believes that, by investigating the natural world, we are led to belief in a higher power.

The Templeton Foundation was founded by Sir John Templeton, one of the world’s most successful investors. Its primary purpose is to encourage a reconciliation between science and religion. It has been fantastically successful, at least with respect to public relations. In recent years there has been a spate of stories in major news outlets about how new discoveries in science are bringing modern science closer to religion. There have been no such discoveries, of course. What there has been is money — buckets and buckets of money, largely from the Templeton folks, to give prizes and host conferences and support scientists who will say nice things about religion.

I personally am in no danger of winning the Templeton Prize, having gone on record repeatedly as saying that science and religion are intellectually inconsistent, and that taking science seriously as a method for understanding the world is incompatible with honest religious belief. (Yes, I know, not everyone agrees with me.) But I recently received an invitation to speak at Amazing Light, a conference in Berkeley in honor of Charles Townes. The conference is devoted to science, not anything about religion, and I was asked to give a standard review talk about dark matter and dark energy. But the timing was suspiciously close to the announcement of Townes’ Templeton Prize, and a quick glance at the conference web page revealed that it was indeed receiving funding from the Templeton Foundation. It is being organized by something called the Metanexus Institute, and is part of a program known as Foundational Questions — organizations that are somehow associated with the Templeton web.

So I thought about turning down the invitation, since I didn’t want to get mixed up with this group with whose purpose I completely disagree. But the conference program seemed innocuous, and the impressive list of participants is full of good and smart people, so eventually I accepted. I figured that there wasn’t a moral obligation to completely dissociate myself from any activity involving people with whom I have disagreements. After all, some of my best friends are even Republicans.

Upon further review, I’ve changed my mind, and decided not to go to the conference after all. (As of right now my name is still on the list of participants, but it will go away eventually.) I talked to Mark, with whom I’ve discussed these issues before, and he made an argument that seems pretty convincing. The point is that the entire purpose of the Templeton Foundation is to blur the line between straightforward science and explicitly religious activity, making it seem like the two enterprises are part of one big undertaking. It’s all about appearances. You have a splashy scientific conference featuring a long list of respected participants, and then you proudly tout the event on a separate web page for your program to bring science and religion together. It doesn’t matter that I am a committed atheist, simply giving a talk on interesting findings in modern cosmology; my name would become implicitly associated with an effort I find to be woefully misguided. There are plenty of conferences, with less objectionable sources of funding; I can give this one a pass.

Perhaps this is much ado about nothing, and I shouldn’t be so fastidious about where conferences get their funding (which is not exactly plentiful these days). But, to me, these are issues of absolutely paramount importance, and the stakes are too high to permit any possible misunderstanding. I appreciate that the Templeton Foundation is actually, in its own way, quite pro-science, and is not nearly as objectionable as the anti-scientific crackpots at the Discovery Institute. And I have tremendous respect for friends of mine who are sincerely and fervently religious. I just think they are wrong. Religious belief is the Big Lie of our contemporary intellectual life, and scientists more than any other group should be intellectually rigorous about the absolutely real differences between science and faith. It might not be the most politically expedient stance to take, but those of us who fancy ourselves scholars rather than politicians have a duty to the truth more than anything else.

In fact I’ve already been to a conference that had some support from Templeton — the Notre Dame symposium where I spoke on why cosmologists are atheists. I have no regrets about that; it was a group of academic philosophers and theologians, explicitly discussing questions of religion and cosmology, and I was up there stating clearly what I thought (i.e., that it was all wrong). Everything was out in the open, there was no real danger of my position being misconstrued. Somewhat paradoxically, it’s the conference focused strictly on science that seems more problematic, because that’s where there is a danger that mere participation can be construed as implicit approval of the background agenda.

The unfortunate aspect of this late-blooming twinge of conscience is that none of the buckets of money being thrown around will be thrown at me. The honorarium for giving a talk at the Townes conference is $2,000 (over and above travel expenses), and writing a contribution to the proceedings gets you an extra $6,000. A guy could have quite the weekend in Vegas with that kind of scratch.

I used to think that the Bush administration was deeply classical, denying the profound truths of quantum mechanics. But, perhaps in celebration of the World Year of Physics, they seem to be studying up on some of the deep insights of twentieth-century science. Unfortunately, their information appears to come from What the #$*! Do We Know!?, a movie that explains how quantum mechanics is all about a deep connection between our consciousness and physical reality, and how we can actually alter reality itself by shifting our mental states.

Can there be any other explanation?

Bush administration eliminating 19-year-old international terrorism report

WASHINGTON – The State Department decided to stop publishing an annual report on international terrorism after the government’s top terrorism center concluded that there were more terrorist attacks in 2004 than in any year since 1985, the first year the publication covered.

[…]

According to Johnson and U.S. intelligence officials familiar with the issue, statistics that the National Counterterrorism Center provided to the State Department reported 625 “significant” terrorist attacks in 2004.

That compared with 175 such incidents in 2003, the highest number in two decades.

The statistics didn’t include attacks on American troops in Iraq, which President Bush as recently as Tuesday called “a central front in the war on terror.”

The intelligence officials requested anonymity because the information is classified and because, they said, they feared White House retribution. Johnson declined to say how he obtained the figures.

(From Big Brass Blog and DailyKos; Michael Bérubé has an improved version.)

You can’t deny the beauty of the strategy. If you stop thinking about terrorism, there won’t be any terrorism! Why didn’t we try this sooner?

I just thought you should know that Allen Iverson is currently ranked #1 in the NBA in scoring (30.8 per game), #2 in steals (2.44), and #5 in assists (8.0). He will be the first person to rank in the top five in all three categories since — well, since ever. Nobody has ranked in the top five in those categories since steals were first kept as an official statistic in 1972.

Also, he will join Wilt Chamberlain, George Gervin, and Michael Jordan as the only players to win four NBA scoring titles. And they were all at least six inches taller than he is. But he has a lot of tattoos, so he must be a bad person.

Via Daily Kos, a Washington Post article about the new warm-and-fuzzy Larry Summers.

Last week, Summers (who is addressing the Harvard Club in Washington this evening) struck a very different tone.

“You know, universities like ours were structured in their basic structure many years ago, and it’s probably an exaggeration but not too much of one to say that they were designed by men for men,” he said. He announced that he had five points, and then spoke extemporaneously for almost half an hour, his mind clicking through the main issues, adding examples drawn from as far afield as the physics of electrical charges and orchestra auditions. But he also spoke with a personal touch, noting that he himself had to draw a strong red line around his private family time, and that he, like everyone, had biases that he was only just learning about.

“I know that there is one additional thing that I’ve learned and that is that what Harvard does and says has an enormous resonance that goes beyond Zip code 02138,” he said near the end. That remark was meant, no doubt, in all humility. Throughout the past months, one consistent criticism of Summers, coming from his supporters and detractors alike, is that you can’t just flap your mouth like a brash undergraduate when you’re the president of Harvard. But, as with so many things about Harvard and about this particular president of Harvard — right down to the car he arrives in — there is a (perhaps) unintentional arrogance to it.

Summers’s talk was greeted warmly by those present last week. His light touch, his hints at self-deprecation, his embracing of ideas about discrimination and bias that he seemed to dismiss in January were reassuring. Everyone who has made any effort at developing a theory of Larry Summers — and that includes most people at Harvard — would find in this talk evidence that, at worst, he has some rough edges, that his reputation for arrogance is a quirk that he can, through effort, compensate for with charm. But there are many theories of Larry floating around, and for those who hold the darkest of them — those who parse every word he utters for evidence of malign intent — this wasn’t a new Larry, but merely a guy choosing his words very carefully for public consumption.

I don’t know whether the contrition is honest, or just political positioning; but I don’t see any reason not to give him the benefit of the doubt. Not that I’m in any hurry for people to forgive and forget; in the meantime, other universities are benefiting as top scholars gradually leave Harvard for more peaceful pastures, such as the return of political scientist Michael Dawson to Chicago.

Defenders of Summers’ original remarks consistently miss the point. They would like to pretend that his critics were arguing either that there are no differences between men and women, or (even worse) that we aren’t allowed to talk about such questions. Rubbish. As I mentioned long ago, of course there are differences between men and women. Some of them might even be relevant to being a scientist. Some of them might even favor men! It’s really hard to tell, since the signal is so incredibly tiny and hard to measure.

It is also not the point. The point (for those who have missed it) is whether such intrinsic differences have anything to do with the actual disparity in the representation of men and women in science. And the truth is, they don’t, at least not at any significant level. You can use this hypothesis to make predictions, and they all come out wrong (for example, the under-representation of women should be nearly uniform from place to place and over time, which is dramatically off, even if progress is slow). And you can actually study the factors that keep women away from science, and you find beyond the shadow of a doubt that a slew of systematic biases are to blame. Talk all you want about intrinsic differences, but don’t fool yourself into thinking that you’re explaining anything about the current situation.

The idea that Summers’ critics want to stifle investigation of the truth is even sillier. There are many social scientists who work precisely on the existence and impact of innate differences between men and women; these people are real scholars, and nobody is trying to get in their way. The criticism of Summers was never that he was telling an unpleasant truth, it’s that he was wrong. It’s okay to be wrong when you’re an assistant professor and minor-league blogger like myself; the rules are different when you are the president of a university. In particular, if you choose to turn a blind eye to a substantial degree of discrimination in your midst, which you really should be leading the fight to do away with, and you are clearly unfamiliar with the basics of what you’re talking about, don’t be surprised when people are upset.

To be perfectly unambiguous, at the risk of being somewhat repetitive: the point is not that certain hypotheses shouldn’t be entertained. The point is that, if you are in a position of great influence and authority, and you haven’t carefully looked into the subject matter, and you’re wrong, and you’re wrong in a way that is potentially damaging to a great deal of people — you’re going to get into trouble. (People are welcome to disagree with me that Summers was wrong; but to pretend that anyone was attempting to stifle free inquiry is simply dishonest.) If Summers had come out in favor of creationism or astrology, the reaction would have been very similar. Maybe he’s learned a lesson; at least he has people talking about the issues.