Sean Carroll

Author: Sean Carroll

  • Making Demands of the Foundation of All Being

    Quote of the Day: David Albert, philosopher of science at Columbia. He was interviewed for, and appeared in, What the Bleep Do We Know?, the movie that tried to convince people that quantum mechanics teaches us that we can change physical reality just by adjusting our mental state. After seeing the travesty that was the actual movie, he complained loudly and in public that his views had been grossly distorted; this quote is from one such interview.

    It seems to me that what’s at issue (at the end of the day) between serious investigators of the foundations of quantum mechanics and the producers of the “what the bleep” movies is very much of a piece with what was at issue between Galileo and the Vatican, and very much of a piece with what was at issue between Darwin and the Victorians. There is a deep and perennial and profoundly human impulse to approach the world with a DEMAND, to approach the world with a PRECONDITION, that what has got to turn out to lie at THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE, that what has got to turn out to lie at THE FOUNDATION OF ALL BEING, is some powerful and reassuring and accessible image of OURSELVES. That’s the impulse that the What the Bleep films seem to me to flatter and to endorse and (finally) to exploit – and that, more than any of their particular factual inaccuracies – is what bothers me about them. It is precisely the business of resisting that demand, it is precisely the business of approaching the world with open and authentic wonder, and with a sharp, cold eye, and singularly intent upon the truth, that’s called science.

    Read the whole thing. The use of emphases is characteristic of David’s writing style, which is also on display in his fantastic books on quantum mechanics and the arrow of time.

    The only really misleading part of the above quote is choosing “the Victorians” as Darwin’s foil; things haven’t changed all that much, sadly.

  • Conservapedia

    Everyone is having their fun with Conservapedia, a rightward-tilting alternative to Wikipedia that aims to ensure that future generations of conservatives grow up really dumb. A mildly-close look reveals that the major biases of Wikipedia that made this new project worth launching are (1) their insistence in using “CE” (Common Era) rather than “AD” (Anno Domini) in giving dates, and (2) the occasional Anglicized spelling. For some great examples of the way self-professed conservatives view the world, see Jon Swift, or a roundup of sciencey responses by Mark Chu-Carroll.

    Here are my personal favorites, after five minutes of clicking around. Links to specific versions, as they keep changing, of course. But these look sincere, not the result of vandalism by naughty liberals!

    • Atheism
      Atheism is the disbelief in the existence of any supernatural deity. This disbelief can take a number of forms, such as the assertion that deities do not exist, or the absence of any belief in any deity.

      Stalin and Richard Dawkins are prominent atheists. Dawkins wrote a book, called “The God Delusion”. Stalin is now dead, having killed millions of people in the name of Marxis-Leninism (which is predicated on atheism).

      Since atheists have no God, as a philosophical framework atheism simply provides no logical basis for any moral standard. They live their lives according to the rule that “anything goes”. In recent years, this has led to a large rise in crime[1], drug use, pre-marital sex, teenage pregnancy,[2] pedophilia[3] and bestiality.

    The road from atheism to bestiality is shorter than you think!

    • Stalin
      Josef Stalin was an atheist communist Russian dictator during World War II. He was defeated by Adolf Hitler, despite Hitler also being an atheist.

    That’s the entire entry. I can’t decide which is more amusing — the amazement that one atheist could defeat another in battle, or the judgment that Hitler defeated Stalin.

    • Albert Einstein
      Einstein’s work had nothing to do with the development of the atomic bomb. Nothing useful has even been built based on the theory of relativity. Only one Nobel Prize (in 1993 and not to Einstein) has ever been given that even remotely relates to the theory of relativity. Many things predicted by the theory of relativity, such as gravitons, have never been found despite much searching for them. Many observed phenomenon, such as the bending of light passing near the sun or the advance of the perihelion in the orbit of Mercury, can be also predicted by Newton’s theory.

    Can’t make this stuff up.

    • Anything Goes
      “Anything Goes” is the title of a 1934 musical production written by Cole Porter. Popular songs from the musical include “You’re the Top,” “I Get a Kick Out of You,” and “Anything Goes.”

      Because Porter was a homosexual, we can conclude that ‘anything goes’ was also his philosophy of life. Many atheists have adopted the song as a description of their “moral” code.

    Getting the message yet?

    • Sex
      1. The process by which offspring are conceived.
      2. Another term for gender.

    Again, that’s the entire entry. But it says so much, don’t you think?

  • Red Hot Optics

    Would you be shocked to hear that the readership of general-circulation science magazines is overwhelmingly white, male, and middle-aged? Probably not. Of course, you might comfort yourself with the thought that lack of interest in such magazines is programmed into the DNA of women, young people, and non-Caucasians, despite evidence that the relevant genetic information is apparently evolving awfully rapidly.

    Would it surprise you to learn that overtly sexualized images of women cause tangible harm to adolescents and young women? Maybe it would. Not that there’s anything wrong with sexy images of people of any gender in appropriate contexts, but in the actual context in which children grow up in our culture, the way in which these images appear enacts a vastly disproportionate toll on young girls.

    Are you at all taken aback by the cover of the latest catalogue for Edmund Optics, purveyor of scientific optical equipment?

    Edmund Cover

    The same image appeared in ads in Physics Today. Which, by the way, is not a biker magazine.

    This sales pitch has caused a bit of consternation, including a lot of conversation on the AASWomen mailing list. But it’s not just those uppity wymyn who are upset. Geoffrey Marcy of Berkeley has written to the company to complain:

    Dear Mr. Radojkovic and Mr. Delfino and Mr. Dover,

    As representatives of Edmund Optics, I hope you will pass the following message to the appropriate management at Edmund Optics.

    I just saw the images from the Edmund Optics catalog that show a woman in a tight red skirt lounging next to some optical devices, some with the caption, “Red Hot”. I hope Robert Edmund and the board of directors of Edmund can be alerted to this problem.

    As a scientist and professor at UC Berkeley I am embarrassed on behalf of the many female science students coming along. I wonder what message such images of sex objects in your ads send to bright young scientists
    of both genders.

    Moreover, after decades of overt discrimination against women in the physical sciences, including precluding their admission to the best universities and the denial of access to the world’s best telescopes, your ad represents a setback. It reminds us of a dark era of clear discrimination against women, a time that I’m sure Edmund Optics hopes is long gone. If so, you have made a very serious error that insults the scientific community.

    As you can imagine, your ad has already generated extraordinary discussion in the scientific community, analogous to the discussion over the comments by Harvard’s president who implied that women might not have what it takes to be great scientists. In short, your company has left open the question of your equal and unbiased treatment of women in your company and in your contracts.

    Sincerely,
    Geoffrey Marcy
    Professor of Astronomy, UC Berkeley
    Elected Member, United States National Academy of Sciences

    To which Bill Dover at Edmund replied, in a classic example of “not getting it”:

    Hi Geoff,

    Thank you for your feedback regarding the EO catalog and our recent cover. No need to be embarrassed for the many female science students coming along. Rather, encourage them to celebrate that another smart, young, and attractive female has joined the ranks of women in a technical field, which breaks the pattern of discrimination you describe. You see, the woman featured on the cover is a six-year employee of Edmund and our Trade Show Manager and Spokesperson. Over the years we’ve received numerous positive comments and she has proven herself to possess the needed technical and social ability to successfully coordinate our tradeshows that showcase our products.

    The recent cover photo emphasized a new product launch by Edmund. Our Trade Show Manager coordinated the showcase of these products at Photonics West last month. Had you happened by our booth for a visit, you would have had the opportunity to meet and speak with her about our Kinematic mounts as well as receive additional technical information from two other smart, young, and attractive, female optical engineers present at the time. So that you know, this line of Kinematic Optical Mounts, Table Platforms, and Mechanical Accessories are technically situated to become the standard for optical positioning equipment in the marketplace. We are excited about the quality, features, and price of these products and know that they will be very difficult to compete with and we chose our Trade Show Manager to help commemorate their release.

    Professor Geoff, please encourage ALL of your female students to join the technical, engineering, and science ranks. There are too many that fall prey to the stereotypical concepts of what a person should look like or dress like which keep them from significant contributions in our society. That said, we value the opinions of our customers and we evaluate the feedback in developing our future strategies. I appreciate the time you have taken to mention your concerns here. I hope you will take the opportunity to encourage your female students to meet our female optical engineers at Edmund Optics. I think they, and you, will be impressed with their ability to support and represent woman [sic] in engineering.

    Best Regards,
    Bill

    As far as I can tell, he’s saying that “she” is smart (so smart that she doesn’t need a name, apparently), so it’s okay! This is America, so any talented and attractive young woman with an interest in engineering can grow up to be a Booth Babe. He forgot to mention that “Better Performance. Better Price.” is the kind of slogan that any female should be proud to be associated with!

    Actually it’s not okay. We’re not going to see this any time soon:

    A little parity goes a long way, though. I have a vision of the next catalog cover–it features a handsome young man, maybe in chinos or a nice pair of jeans, barefoot, shirt halfway unbuttoned, an alluring gleam in his eye. Maybe a caption like “Well Oiled Mounts.”

    And even if we did, it still wouldn’t be okay. (Although it would be highly amusing.) These images don’t appear in a vacuum; as long as the way that women and men are put on display in a wider cultural context remains dramatically imbalanced, a little equal-opportunity cheesecake here and there isn’t going to fix things.

    Feel free to email Bill Dover (wdover-at-edmundoptics.com) and VP of Marketing Marisa Edmund (medmund-at-edmundoptics.com) to let them know what you think. (Thanks to Chaz Shapiro for the pointer.)

  • Cosmology FAQ Open Thread

    John’s post on light-induced sonic booms has set a bad precedent of actually answering questions. (And it’s been a big hit around the internets, so our server keeps overheating.) Sensing an opportunity, commenters hungry for knowledge have chimed in to ask all sorts of perfectly good questions about cosmology. To keep things on track, let’s divert those questions to this separate thread. So this is the chance to ask all of those questions about the universe you’ve always wondered about. For example:

    Q: If I plug in Hubble’s law for the velocity of a galaxy in terms of its distance (v = Hd, where H is the Hubble constant), at large enough distances the velocity will be greater than the speed of light! Doesn’t that violate relativity?

    A: Yes, it would be greater than the speed of light, but no, it doesn’t violate relativity. What relativity actually says is that two objects can’t pass by each other at a relative velocity greater than the speed of light. The relative velocity of two distant objects can be whatever it wants. In fact, to be more of a stickler, the relative velocity of two distant objects is completely ill-defined in general relativity; you can only compare velocity vectors of objects at the same point. The notion of “velocity” almost makes sense in cosmology, but you have to keep in mind that it’s only an approximate concept. What’s really going on is that the space between you and the distant galaxy is expanding, which redshifts the photons traveling from there to here, and that reminds you of the Doppler shift, so you (and Professor Hubble, so you’re in good company) interpret it as a velocity. But it’s not a Doppler shift; both you and the galaxy are essentially “stationary” (although that concept is also not precisely defined), it’s just that the space between you is expanding.

    In fact I already have a Cosmology FAQ that you’re encouraged to check out, and Ned Wright also has one. But feel free to ask questions here; I’m sure Mark will be happy to answer them.

  • I’m Running Anyway

    A recent Gallup poll, via Daily Kos:

    If your party nominated a well-qualified Candidate For WH ’08 who was _, would you vote for that person?

                             Yes   No                  

    Catholic                  95%  4%                          

    Black                     94   5  

    Jewish                    92   7    

    A woman                   88  11        

    Hispanic                  87  12    

    Mormon                    72  24  

    Married for third time    67  30  

    72 years old              57  42

    A homosexual              55  43    

    An atheist                45  53

    Nothing new, of course.

    But what if the race were between an atheist and a black Mormon lesbian, huh? What then?

  • Awwwwwwww

    Jennifer tries to take the high road with her Valentine’s Day post. A little science, a dash of poetry, a bit of cute archeology.

    But it’s all just a distraction to prevent people from noticing this picture in Nature. That’s one she’ll never live down!

    Nor will I.

  • Thank You, Richard Dawkins

    A few years ago, as a newbie assistant professor, I was visited in my office by an editor at The Free Press. He was basically trolling the corridors, looking for people who had interesting ideas for popular-science books. I said that I liked the idea of writing a book, but I didn’t really want to do a straight-up cosmology tome. I had a better idea: I could write a book explaining how, when you really think about things scientifically, you come to realize that God doesn’t exist. I even had a spiffy title picked out — God Remains Dead: Reason, Religion, and the Pointless Universe. It’s not any old book that manages to reference both Steven Weinberg and Friedrich Nietzsche right there on the cover. Box office, baby.

    The editor was actually intrigued by the idea, and he took it back to his bosses. Ultimately, however, they decided not to offer me a contract, and I went on to write another book with more equations. (Now on sale at Amazon!)

    All of which is to say: I totally could have been in on the ground floor of all this atheism chic. These days, between Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Victor Stenger, you can’t swing a cat without hitting a prominent publicly-outspoken atheist of one form or another. That could have been me, I tell you.

    These guys have gotten a lot of attention — especially Dawkins, who was recently voted Person of the Year by at least one reputable organization. Of course, some of the attention has been negative, especially from folks who are unsympathetic to the notion of a harsh, materialistic, godless universe. But even among self-professed atheists and agnostics (not to mention your wishy-washy liberal religionists), some discomfort has been expressed over the tone of Dawkins’s approach. People have been known to call him arrogant. Even if you don’t believe in God, so the argument goes, it can be a bad strategy to be upfront and in-your-face in public about one’s atheism. People are very committed to their religious beliefs, and telling them that science proves them wrong will lead them away from science, not way from God. And if you must be a die-hard materialist, at least be polite about it and respect others’ beliefs — to be obnoxious and insulting is simply counterproductive. Apart from any deep issues of what we actually should believe, this is a separate matter of how we could best persuade others to agree with us.

    I’m sympathetic to the argument that atheists shouldn’t be obnoxious and insulting; in fact, I think it’s a good strategy in all sorts of situations. You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, etc. But it does not follow that we should keep quiet about comforting illusions because those are the only things standing between the poor dears and overwhelming existential anxiety. If people ask whether, as scientists, we believe in God, we should respect them enough to tell the truth — whatever we think that is. That doesn’t mean we have to go door-to-door spreading the good word of the laws of nature. It just means that we should be honest about what we actually think, giving the best arguments we have for whatever that may be, and let people decide for themselves what to believe.

    Arrogant or not, as a matter of fact Dawkins and company have done a great service to the cause of atheism: they have significantly shifted the Overton Window. That’s the notion, borrowed from public-policy debates, of the spectrum of “acceptable opinion” on an issue. At any given time, on any particular question, the public discourse will implicitly deem certain positions to be respectable and worthy of civilized debate, and other positions to be crazy and laughable. The crucial part of this idea is that the window can be shifted by vigorous advocacy of positions on one extreme. And that’s just what Dawkins has done.

    Science Finds God In other words, by being arrogant and uncompromising in his atheism, Dawkins has done a tremendous amount to make the very concept of atheism a respectable part of the public debate, even if you find him personally obnoxious. Evidence: a few years ago, major newsmagazines (prompted in part by the efforts of the Templeton Foundation) were running cover stories with titles like Science Finds God (Newsweek, July 20, 1998). Pure moonshine, of course — come down where you will on the whole God debate, it remains pretty clear that science hasn’t found Him. But, within the range of acceptable public discourse, both science and God were considered to be undeniably good things — it wasn’t a stretch to put them together. God vs. Science? Nowadays, in contrast, we find cover stories with titles like God vs. Science (Time, Nov 13, 2006). You never would have seen such a story just a few years ago.

    This is a huge step forward. Keep in mind, the typical American thinks of atheists as fundamentally untrustworthy people. A major network like CNN will think nothing of hosting a roundtable discussion on atheism and not asking any atheists to participate. But, unlike a short while ago, they will eventually be shamed into admitting that was a mistake, and make up for it by inviting some atheists to defend their ideas. Baby steps. Professional news anchors may still seem a little befuddled at the notion that a clean, articulate person may not believe in God. But at least that notion is getting a decent public hearing. Once people actually hear what atheists have to say, perhaps they will get the idea that one need not be an amoral baby-killer just because one doesn’t believe in God.

    For that, Richard Dawkins, thank you.

  • None, I Think, Do There Embrace

    Archaeologists from Valdaro, Italy, have unearthed a pair of skeletons — a couple who died young, and have been hugging for the last five thousand years. Take that, Andrew Marvell!

    Skeleton Hug

    Commentators were unsure of many of the basic facts about the Neolithic couple — whether they died simultaneously or one followed the other, whether it was a sudden accident or a ritual sacrifice, or even whether they are man and woman or a same-sex couple.

    Opinion is unanimous, however, that they are awfully cute.

  • arxiv Find: Dark Matter and Sterile Neutrinos

    Another interesting abstract from the arxiv: astro-ph/0702173, “Dark Matter and Sterile Neutrinos,” by Biermann and Munyaneza.

    Dark matter has been recognized as an essential part of matter for over 70 years now, and many suggestions have been made, what it could be. Most of these ideas have centered on Cold Dark Matter, particles that are predicted in extensions of standard particle physics, such as supersymmetry. Here we explore the concept that dark matter is sterile neutrinos, particles that are commonly referred to as Warm Dark Matter. Such particles have keV masses, and decay over a very long time, much longer than the Hubble time. In their decay they produce X-ray photons which modify the ionization balance in the very early universe, increasing the fraction of molecular Hydrogen, and thus help early star formation. Sterile neutrinos may also help to understand the baryon-asymmetry, the pulsar kicks, the early growth of black holes, the minimum mass of dwarf spheroidal galaxies, as well as the shape and smoothness of dark matter halos. As soon as all these tests have been made quantitative in their various parameters, we may focus on the creation mechanism of these particles, and could predict the strength of the sharp X-ray emission line, expected from any large dark matter assembly. A measurement of this X-ray emission line would be definitive proof for the existence of may be called weakly interacting neutrinos, or WINs.

    The three flavors of neutrinos we know and love (the electron neutrino, muon neutrino, and tau neutrino, or equivalently [but differently] their mass eigenstates) interact through the weak nuclear force and gravity, but not through electromagnetism or the strong force. A sterile neutrino is one that doesn’t even interact through the weak force! As of yet completely hypothetical, such sterile neutrinos can play an interesting astrophysical role, depending on their masses; Alex Kusenko, as well as the above authors, has been investigating their properties for some time. This is a review paper that touches on a number of the novel possibilities.

    Some other interesting abstracts:

    Note that co-bloggers are welcome to post their own favorites, and commenters are welcome to suggest theirs! (At least one frequent commenter is a co-author of one of the papers above.)

  • indexed

    Jessica Hagy illustrates the vagaries of life via mathematical doodles on index cards.



    Blogs — what can’t they do?