Sean Carroll

Author: Sean Carroll

  • DonorsChoose Challenge

    Each year, DonorsChose does a Blogger Challenge, where they harness the power of the internet to bring money to deserving classrooms in public schools across the U.S. In the past we have wimped out and supported other bloggers, but this year we’re stepping up to the plate. Big time.

    Cosmic Variance Challenge 2008

    It’s a simple and compelling model: individual classrooms isolate a pressing need, and donors can choose which projects to support. We’ve picked out a number of great projects that will help students learn about science in fun, hands-on ways, and we’re going to be adding a few more soon.

    We’ve set a fundraising goal of $10,000 over the next month. That sounds like a lot, but it is enormously less than the capacity of our readers; we get about 5,000 hits per day, so that’s a pitiful $2/visitor. But most visitors, we understand, are wimps. So if we get $20/person from the 10% of visitors who are not wimps, we hit the goal. But it’s okay to go over! If we fall short, you should all feel embarrassed.

    Mostly we just want to crush the folks at ScienceBlogs, who have put together their own challenge. Crush them, I say. Sure, they have a zillion blogs, several of whom have many times our readership. So what? This is a matter of how awesome the reader are, not how many of them there are. We will also be asking other friendly bloggers to either set up their own donation pages, or hop aboard our bandwagon — if anyone wants to advertise the challenge, we can list them as an affiliate on the challenge page.

    And don’t think that we don’t appreciate your efforts. Once all is said and done, we’ll put up a post that lists and explicitly thanks anyone who donates more than $100 (unless you ask not to be listed). And if anyone donates more than $500, I’ll send a copy of my Teaching Company Lectures on dark matter and dark energy. Which aren’t cheap, let me tell you.

    Reading through the list of projects is guaranteed to break your heart. In a world where we can “lose” $15 billion through fiscal malfeasance in Iraq, it’s painful to see public-school teachers go begging for a frikking LCD projector or a couple of microscopes. It’s not that hard to click the link and send a few dollars their way. The classrooms make a special effort to write back to every donor to thank them — it will put your heart right back together again.

  • Register to Vote

    For American citizens, there is a Presidential election fast approaching. (Have you heard about it?) Election Day is Tuesday, November 4. It’s time to register to vote. The Obama campaign has set up a great tool that let’s you figure out whether you are already registered, and if not, prints out a form you can mail in to do so:

    It works for Republicans, too! Even Republicans who want to vote for a Republican this time around, although those are increasingly scarce.

    If you think this election is important, you can go even further and donate money. Ad buys are crucial, of course, but get-out-the-vote efforts will be equally important, and they don’t come cheap.

    There are also various third party candidates. Sadly, the Socialist Workers Party has nominated Róger Calero, who was born in Nicaragua, and is therefore ineligible to be President. If he wins, it will be quite the constitutional crisis!

    For those who can’t make it to a polling station on Election Day, deadlines are very fast approaching for absentee voting. Start here:

    Note that there’s nothing stopping you from absentee voting even if you could vote in person on Election Day; if you’re feeling motivated right now but might be lazy on November 4, why not vote right away?

  • Professor Danger

    Let’s see. The bailout bill was scuttled.

    The stock market is tanking.

    The Hubble repair mission is delayed.

    The LHC is on ice until the spring.

    John McCain is still running for President.

    But that’s all okay, because:

    Michael Bérubé is back.

  • The Blue Screen of Nonsense

    If you’ve run across Microsoft’s new ads, which aim to counter the witty “I’m a PC, I’m a Mac” series by Apple, you might have noticed this tweedy academic-looking guy near the end:

    Years back, I had the idea that Apple should include more famous-for-academia types in its Think Different ads. Ed Witten, Jacques Derrida, Amartya Sen, people like that. But I didn’t actually call up any ad agencies to make the pitch. So I figured that Microsoft had the same idea, and was including some professor-type among its self-declared PC’s in order to lend some gravitas to the proceedings.

    Yeah, not so much. The somber mug above belongs to none other than Deepak Chopra, celebrated purveyor of quantum nonsense. He did, of course, win the 1998 IgNobel Prize in Physics for “for his unique interpretation of quantum physics as it applies to life, liberty, and the pursuit of economic happiness.” So there is that. (In certain religious circles, there is an increasingly popular teaching known as the Prosperity Gospel. I wonder if I could make money writing a book about “The Prosperity Hamiltonian”?)

    The construction of jokes comparing Deepak Chopra’s understanding of quantum mechanics to Microsoft’s understanding of software is left as an exercise for the reader.

  • Telescoper

    From Andrew Jaffe, I just learned that Peter Coles has a new blog:

    Peter is a theoretical cosmologist at Cardiff, in the UK, and the author of various interesting books.

    And in case you didn’t notice it in John’s last post, there is a new blog by particle theorist Ben Lillie:

    Ben’s thesis advisor was our very own JoAnne, so this is practically our blog-offspring. And it also reminds me that I never properly introduced the blog of my own former student, Eugene Lim:

    Finally, for those who don’t scan the comments as well as the posts themselves, CV commenter (and distinguished string theorist) Moshe Rozali has joined David Berenstein at

    Putting them all together, amount of blogging by respectable physicists has taken a substantial leap forward. We still have a long way to go to catch up to the economists.

  • Want

    I have a birthday coming up, and this is definitely going on my Amazon.com wish list.

    That is Swiss pilot Yves Rossy, flying at a height of about 6000 ft across the English Channel in his personal jetpack yesterday. He reached speeds of up to 125 mph before releasing his parachute and landing in England. Via.

    This would make my morning commute quicker. More science would get done, and the world would benefit. Let’s start taking up a collection, right?

  • Templeton and Skeptics

    On the theory that it is good to mention events before they happen, so that interested parties might actually choose to attend, check out the upcoming Skeptics Society conference: Origins: the Big Questions. It will be at Caltech, and will take just one day, Saturday October 4, with a pre-conference dinner the previous night, Friday the 3rd. The day’s events are divided into two parts. In the morning you get a bunch of talks on the origins of big things — I’ll be talking on the origin of time, Leonard Susskind on the origin of the laws of physics, Paul Davies on the origin of the universe, Donald Prothero on the origin of life, and Christof Koch on the origin of consciousness.

    Then in the afternoon they change gears, and start talking about science and religion. Names involved include Stuart Kauffman, Kenneth Miller, Nancey Murphy, Michael Shermer, Philip Clayton, Vic Stenger, and Hugo Ross. It’s this part of the event that has stirred up a tiny bit of controversy, as it is co-sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation, famous appliers of lipstick to the pig that is the interface between science and religion. It’s legitimate to wonder why the Skeptics Society is getting mixed up with Templeton at all, and it’s been discussed a bit in our beloved blogosphere: see Bad Astronomy, Pharyngula, and Richard Dawkins.

    I am on the record as saying that scientists should be extremely leery of accepting money from organizations with any sort of religious orientation, and Templeton in particular. (Happily, in this case the speakers aren’t getting any money at all, so at least that temptation wasn’t part of the calculation.) But it’s by no means a cut-and-dried issue, as we’ve seen in discussions of the Foundational Questions Institute.

    Personally, I prefer not to have the chocolate of my science mixed up with the peanut butter of somebody else’s religion, and certainly not without clear labeling — peanut allergies can be pretty severe. But if someone wants to explicitly put on a peanut butter cup conference, that’s fine, and I don’t have any problem with participating. The problem with the Templeton Foundation is not that they coerce scientists into repudiating their beliefs through the promise of piles of cash; it’s that, by providing easy money to promote certain kinds of discussions, those discussions begin to seem more prominent and important than they really are. Perhaps, without any Templeton funding, the Origins conference would have devoted much less time to the science-and-religion questions, leaving much more time for interesting science discussions. This would have given outsiders a more accurate view of the role that religion plays in current scientific work on these foundational questions: to wit, none whatsoever.

    The Templeton Foundation has every right to exist, and sponsor conferences. And there is undoubtedly a danger among atheists that they get caught up in a “holier than thou” competition — “I’m so atheist that I won’t even talk to people if they believe in God!” Which gets a little silly. I don’t think there’s anything explicitly wrong with the Origins conference; the Templeton-sponsored part is clearly labeled and set off from the rest, and it might end up being interesting. (Also, the conference concludes with Mr. Deity — how awesome is that?) Michael Shermer’s own take is here. But I look forward to a day when discussions of deep questions concerning the origin of the universe and of life can take place without the concept of God ever arising.

  • Giant Steps

    Today would have been John Coltrane’s 82nd birthday. Here he is playing Naima.

    And here is an interview from 1960. “The reason I play so many — maybe it sounds angry, because I’m trying so many things at one time, you see — I haven’t sorted them out. I have a whole bag of things that I’m trying to work through and get the one essential, you know?”

    Here is a computer animation, to the tune of Giant Steps.

    And here is a robot playing the Giant Steps solo. Not as good as the original.

    Coltrane died in 1967, at the age of 40.

  • The Domino Effect

    I gave a talk yesterday at the Center for Inquiry branch here in LA. It was a popular-level spiel on The Origin of the Universe and the Arrow of Time; click for slides. If I had been thinking, I would have advertised the existence of the talk before I had given it, rather than afterward. Either that, or I was trying to smoke out time-travelers.

    But the real reason I’m even bringing it up is to give credit to this great YouTube video, found via Swans on Tea.

    I was literally zipping through blogs yesterday morning while drinking coffee and preparing for the upcoming talk, when up popped this wonderful illustration of entropy and the arrow of time, which naturally I showed at the talk. And it features a kitty. (Schrodinger has his own cat, why shouldn’t Boltzmann?)

  • No Blank Check

    Strictly speaking, $700 billion dollars (a couple of dollars for every star in the Milky Way) is not a completely blank check. But it’s pretty close. And that’s what the Treasury Department is asking for to buy mortage-related assets (“toxic waste”) from failing banks.

    There is plenty of reason to believe that something dramatic has to be done, before our entire financial system up and dies. Talk all you like about punishing the heartless capitalists behind the mess, but if a long string of banks goes belly-up, nobody will benefit.

    But, as Paul Krugman says, this is not the right deal. Mostly because of this paragraph in the proposed legislation:

    Sec. 8. Review.

    Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

    You’re kidding, right? Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson might be a smart guy, but he remains a cog in the Bush administration. The people who brought you the Iraq war, the Katrina response, Alberto Gonzales, Harriet Myers, and Guantanamo Bay. I don’t know about you, but when faced with a terrible crisis demanding immediate action, my first response is not “Let’s give those guys nearly unlimited power, with no oversight whatsoever.” An action that would be unique in American history, and possibly the largest transfer of power from Congress to the Executive branch ever.

    More substantively, though, the plan is outrageous on the face of it. It is a feature of late capitalism that the government will occasionally have to bail out failing institutions. But typically the way that happens is for the government to simply take over the institution entirely, and sell off what it can. Here, the plan is to simply pay huge amounts of money for terribly bad assets — leaving the companies (and their managers) to get on with their lives and their valuable assets. As Josh Marshall put it: this is moral hazard on steroids. Taxpayers swallow the toxic waste, and Wall Street breathes a sigh of relief.

    There’s no question that part of the idea here is “Something needs to be done in a hurry — let’s smash something through that gives us unchecked power, while everyone is panicking and not likely to ask too many questions.”

    No economist, left or right, likes the plan. Obama is against the blank check, although doesn’t seem to be putting his foot down. McCain is thundering righteously against the robber barons on Wall street, as he has been doing — well, for at least the last week, before which he tended to thunder righteously against overzealous government regulators who were restraining Wall Street’s creativity. Change you can believe in.