Sean Carroll

Author: Sean Carroll

  • Sanctity of Human Life Day

    Today is the 33rd anniversary of Roe v. Wade. It is also Blog for Choice Day. It has also, by way of a sharp stick in the eye to those who believe women should be the ones to choose to have abortions or not, been declared National Sanctity of Human Life Day by President Bush. This is from the President’s proclamation.

    National Sanctity of Human Life Day, 2006
    A Proclamation by the President of the United States of America

    Our Nation was founded on the belief that every human being has rights, dignity, and value. On National Sanctity of Human Life Day, we underscore our commitment to building a culture of life where all individuals are welcomed in life and protected in law.

    America is making great strides in our efforts to protect human life. One of my first actions as President was to sign an order banning the use of taxpayer money on programs that promote abortion overseas. Over the past 5 years, I also have been proud to sign into law the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act, the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, and a ban on partial-birth abortion. In addition, my Administration continues to fund abstinence and adoption programs and numerous faith-based and community initiatives that support these efforts.

    When we seek to advance science and improve our lives, we must always preserve human dignity and remember that human life is a gift from our Creator. We must not sanction the creation of life only to destroy it. America must pursue the tremendous possibilities of medicine and research and at the same time remain an ethical and compassionate society.

    It’s funny, but try as I might, I can’t “remember” that my life is a gift from a mythical Creator. And I wish the President would stop trying to enshrine his personal beliefs as national policy.

    But the Culture of Life does crack me up. In this week’s New York Review, Garry Wills reviews the latest book by Jimmy Carter, on the hijacking of moral values by conservatives.

    Yet the anti-life movement that calls itself pro-life protects ignorance by opposing family planning, sex education, and informed use of contraceptives, tactics that not only increase the likelihood of abortion but tragedies like AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. The rigid system of the “pro-life” movement makes poverty harsher as well, with low minimum wages, opposition to maternity leaves, and lack of health services and insurance. In combination, these policies make ideal conditions for promoting abortion, as one can see from the contrast with countries that do have sex education and medical insurance. Carter writes:

    Canadian and European young people are about equally active sexually, but, deprived of proper sex education, American girls are five times as likely to have a baby as French girls, seven times as likely to have an abortion, and seventy times as likely to have gonorrhea as girls in the Netherlands. Also, the incidence of HIV/ AIDS among American teenagers is five times that of the same age group in Germany…. It has long been known that there are fewer abortions in nations where prospective mothers have access to contraceptives, the assurance that they and their babies will have good health care, and at least enough income to meet their basic needs.

    The “culture of life” idea traces its origin to the Catholic doctrine that life is a seamless garment, to be respected from conception to grave — but its American incarnation has dropped some of the inconvenient bits, like opposition to the death penalty. As Governor of Texas, Bush presided over a record spree of executions, while ridiculing death row inmates’ pleas for clemency. Wills continues:

    Capital punishment is also a pro-death program. It does not protect life. It aligns us with authoritarian regimes: “Ninety percent of all known executions are carried out in just four countries: China, Iran, Saudi Arabia—and the United States” (emphasis added). Execution does not deter, as many studies have proved. In states that abolished it, Carter writes, capital crimes did not increase:

    The homicide rate is at least five times greater in the United States than in any European country, none of which authorizes the death penalty. The Southern states carry out over 80 percent of the executions but have a higher murder rate than any other region. Texas has by far the most executions, but its homicide rate is twice that of Wisconsin, the first state to abolish the death penalty. It is not a matter of geography or ethnicity, as is indicated by similar and adjacent states: the number of capital crimes is higher, respectively, in South Dakota, Connecticut, and Virginia (all with the death sentence) than in the adjacent states of North Dakota, Massachusetts, and West Virginia (without the death penalty).

    How can a loving religion or a just state support such a culture of death? Only a self-righteous and punitive fundamentalism, not an ethos of the gospels, can explain this.

    On its anniversary, Roe v. Wade is threatened as never before. Perhaps it will have to be eviscerated beyond recognition before the American public will make an effort to preserve abortion rights.

  • You would constantly be depressed and tired

    From the BBC, via 3 Quarks Daily, a survey of British schoolchildren on their views about scientists.

    The Science Learning Centre in London asked 11,000 pupils for their views on science and scientists. Around 70% of the 11-15 year olds questioned said they did not picture scientists as “normal young and attractive men and women”. The research examined why numbers of science exam entries are declining. They found around 80% of pupils thought scientists did “very important work” and 70% thought they worked “creatively and imaginatively”. Only 40% said they agreed that scientists did “boring and repetitive work”.

    Over three quarters of the respondents thought scientists were “really brainy people”. The research is being undertaken as part of Einstein Year. Among those who said they would not like to be scientists, reasons included: “Because you would constantly be depressed and tired and not have time for family”, and “because they all wear big glasses and white coats and I am female”.

    We obviously need to start posting more pictures of ourselves in our cool black leather lab coats. This white-lab-coat stereotype cannot stand.

    Update: In the comments, Anna points to a fun site at Fermilab, describing the impressions that kids have of scientists both before and after visiting the lab. These drawings are by Amy.

    Impressions of scientists

    The pictures are great, but the written descriptions are even better. Here is Beth, before::

    The scientist has big square-shaped glasses and a big geeky nose with brown hair and blue eyes. I see a scientist working in a lab with a white lab coat . . . holding a beaker filled with solutions only he knows. Scientists are very interesting people who can figure out things we don’t even know exist.

    And after visiting:

    My picture of a scientist is completely different than what it used to be! The scientist I saw doesn’t wear a lab coat. . . . The scientists used good vocabulary and spoke like they knew what they were talking about.

    Note “spoke like,” not simply “knew what they were talking about.” That Beth is a smart cookie.

  • Could have predicted this

    Man, I go away for a couple of days and all my co-bloggers choose to take a siesta. I’m going to have to give them a good talking-to, I tell you.

    Now I’m stuck in Philadelphia for one night more than planned, due to an unforeseen outbreak of weather back in Chicago. The City of Brotherly Love has greatly come up in the world since I grew up in the suburbs a couple of decades ago — the Rittenhouse Square neighborhood, where I’m staying, is a really lively and engaging downtown environment.

    Nothing of substance to report, so I’ll point you to this takedown of astrology by Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy fame, which is worthy of some contemplation. We all know that astrology is nonsense, but it’s worth the exercise to try to explain to people who aren’t well-versed in science why we know that astrology can’t work even without doing elaborate double-blind tests. Phil’s argument is the same one that I’ve given before: we really do know something about the forces of nature, and there is absolutely no room to fit paranormal phenomena into what we know. There’s much we don’t know, and much we do; sometimes we even have a pretty good idea of where the boundary is.

  • Smith on Mozart

    Zadie Smith, in her novel On Beauty, describing Mozart’s Requiem:

    Mozart’s Requiem begins with you walking towards a huge pit. the pit is on the other side of a precipice, which you cannot see over until you are right at its edge. Your death is awaiting you in that pit. You don’t know what it looks like or sounds like or smells like. You don’t know whether it will be good or bad. You just walk towards it. Your will is a clarinet and your footsteps are attended by all the violins. The closer you get to the pit, the more you begin to have the sense that what awaits you there will be terrifying. Yet you experience this terror as a kind of blessing, a gift. Your long walk would have no meaning were it not for this pit at the end of it. You peer over the precipice: a burst of ethereal noise crashes over you. In the pit is a great choir, like the one you joined for two months in Wellington in which you were the only black woman. This choir is the heavenly host and simultaneously the devil’s army. It is also every person who has changed you during your time on this earth: your many lovers; your family; your enemies, the nameless, faceless woman who slept with your husband; the man you thought you were going to marry; the man you did. The job of this choir is judgement. The men sing first, and their judgement is very severe. And when the women join in there is no respite, the debate only grows louder and sterner. For it is a debate — you realize that now. The judgement is not yet decided. It is surprising how dramatic the fight for your measly soul turns out to be.

    Smith’s title, by the way, is derived from Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just, a thought-provoking if not always transparent little book.

  • Explaining America in movies

    Found at Majikthise, Lawyers Guns and Money, and Lance Mannion, and apparently originating here: choose ten movies that you would show to someone to explain America to them. Here’s my list, off the top of my head, making some effort not to duplicate the others.

    1. The Player (1992)
    2. Cool Hand Luke (1967)
    3. Training Day (2001)
    4. Metropolitan (1990)
    5. Easy Rider (1969)
    6. A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)
    7. Hoop Dreams (1994)
    8. The Sting (1973)
    9. Glory (1989)
    10. Dr. Strangelove (1964)

    I thought at first it would be hard to think of ten good ones, but I ended up having to leave out Fargo, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Thelma and Louise, The Conversation, The Untouchables, Blue Velvet, and a bunch more. I’m not providing any explanations for my choices — figuring it out should be half the fun.

  • The wrong side of history

    Here at CV we occasionally pat ourselves on the back at the high quality of some of our comment threads. So it’s only fair that we acknowledge our dismay at the depressingly consistent character of the discussions about women in science; posts by Clifford and me being just the most recent examples. What a depressing exercise to poke a finger into the turgid world of pseudo-scientific rationalizations for inequality that people will believe so that they can feel better about themselves. Among other things, it makes it nearly impossible to have a fruitful discussion about what we could realistically do about the problem; it’s as if Columbus were trying to equip his ships to voyage to the Indies and a hundred voices kept interrupting to point out that the world was flat.

    There’s no question: a lot of people out there truly believe that there isn’t any significant discrimination against women in science, that existing disparities are simply a reflection of innate differences, and — best of all — that they themselves treat men and women with a rigorous equality befitting a true egalitarian. A professor I knew, who would never in a million years have admitted to any bias in his view of male and female students, once expressed an honest astonishment that the women in his class had done better than the men on the last problem set. Not that he would ever treat men and women differently, you understand — they just were different, and it was somewhat discomfiting to see them do well on something that wasn’t supposed to be part of their skill set. And he was a young guy, not an old fogey.

    Who are these people? A lot of physicists grew up as socially awkward adolescents — not exactly the captain of the football team, if you know what I mean — and have found that as scientists they can suddenly be the powerful bullies in the room, and their delight in this role helps to forge a strangely macho and exclusionary culture out of what should be a joyful pursuit of the secrets of the universe. An extremely common characteristic of the sexist male scientist is their insistence that they can’t possibly be biased against women, because they think that women are really beautiful — as if that were evidence of anything. If they see other men saying anything in support of women’s rights, they figure it must be because those men are just trying to impress the babes. They see women, to put it mildly, as something other than equal partners in the scholarly enterprise.

    These are the same people who used to argue that women shouldn’t have the right to vote, that African slaves couldn’t be taught to read and write, that Jews are genetically programmed to be sneaky and miserly. It’s a deeply conservative attitude in the truest sense, in which people see a world in which their own group is sitting at the top and declare it to be the natural order of things. They are repeating a mistake that has been made time and time again over the years, but think that this time it’s really different. When it comes to discrimination in science, you can point to all the empirical evidence you like, and their convictions will not be shaken. They have faith.

    The good news is that they are on the losing side of history, as surely as the slaveholders were in the Civil War. Not because of any natural progression towards greater freedom and equality, but because a lot of committed people are working hard to removing existing barriers, and a lot of strong women will fight through the biases to succeed in spite of them. It’s happening already.
    Women's Physics Degrees Get used to it, boys.

  • Scientific blogtopia

    No sooner does one empire crumble than another rises in its place; such is the way of the blogosphere.

    The folks at Seed magazine (who have their own blog at Sciencegate) have launched ScienceBlogs, a project to bring together a bunch of different science-oriented blogs at a single site. Several of our favorite sites have picked up and moved over to the new digs, including Pharyngula, Chris Mooney’s The Intersection, Uncertain Principles, and Dispatches from the Culture Wars. The content of each site won’t be changing, but the various site owners have decided it would be nice for someone else to worry when the server crashes. To me, the great thing about the project is that it will bring more attention to some blogs I don’t already know about. (We here at CV enjoy nothing more than complaining to our host when the server crashes, so we’re going to stay a plucky little independent.)

    Meanwhile, the bloggers at Quantum Diaries have shut off the lights and gone home. You can still read the archives, but no new posts or comments. Some of the QD bloggers have moved to their own little corners of cyberspace: Peter Steinberg is now at Entropy Bound, while Gordon Watts is now at Life as a Physicist. Anyone else? There have to be more diarists who have caught the bug and started their own blogs.

    While we’re at it, let’s point to a couple of other physics-oriented blogs that recently were added to our blogroll: BioCurious by Andre Brown and Philip Johnson, and Thoughts on Science and Life by Kasper Olsen, who recently made the switch from Blogspot to WordPress. We heartily approve.

  • Evolving dark energy?

    Don’t be surprised if you keep reading astronomy stories in the news this week — the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society is underway in Washington DC, and it’s common for groups to announce exciting results at this meeting. Today there was a provocative new claim from Bradley Schaefer at Louisiana State University — the dark energy is evolving in time! (Read about it also from Phil Plait and George Musser.)

    Short version of my own take: interesting, but too preliminary to get really excited. Schaefer has used gamma-ray bursts (GRB’s) as standard candles to measure the distance vs. redshift relation deep into the universe’s history — up to redshifts of greater than 6, as opposed to ordinary supernova studies, that are lucky to get much past redshift 1. To pull this off, you want “standard candles” — objects that are really bright (so you can see them far away), and have a known intrinsic luminosity (so you can infer their distance from how bright they appear). True standard candles are hard to find, so we settle for “standardizable” candles — objects that might vary in brightness, but in a way that can be correlated with some other observable property, and therefore accounted for. The classic example is Cepheid variables, which have a relationship between their oscillation period and their intrinsic brightness.

    Certain supernovae, known as Type Ia’s, have quite a nice correlation between their peak brightness and the time it takes for them to diminish in brightness. That makes them great standardizable candles, since they’re also really bright. GRB’s are much brighter, but aren’t nearly so easy to standardize — Schaefer used a model in which five different properties were correlated with peak brightness (details). The result? The best fit is a model in which the dark energy density (energy per cubic centimeter) is gradually growing with time, rather than being strictly constant.

    GRB Hubble Diagram

    If it’s true, this is an amazingly important result. There are four possibilities for why the universe is accelerating: a true cosmological constant (vacuum energy), dynamical (time-dependent) dark energy, a modification of gravity, or something fundamental being missed by all us cosmologists. The first possiblity is the most straightforward and most popular. If it’s not right, the set of theoretical ideas that physicists pursue to help explain the acceleration of the universe will be completely different than if it is right. So we need to know the answer!

    What’s more, the best-fit behavior for the dark energy density seems to have it increasing with time, as in phantom energy. In terms of the equation-of-state parameter w, it is less than -1 (or close to -1, but with a positive derivative w’). That’s quite bizarre and unexpected.

    GRB w plot

    As I said, at this point I’m a bit skeptical, but willing to wait and see. Most importantly, the statistical significance of the finding is only 2.5σ (97% confidence), whereas the informal standard in much of physics for discovering something is 3σ (99% confidence). As a side worry, at these very high redshifts the effect of gravitational lensing becomes crucial. If the light from a GRB passes nearby a mass concentration like a galaxy or cluster, it can easily be amplified in brightness. I am not really an expert on how important this effect is, nor do I know whether it’s been taken into account, but it’s good to keep in mind how little we know about GRB’s and the universe at high redshift more generally.

    So my betting money stays on the cosmological constant. But the odds have shifted, just a touch.

    Update: Bradley Schaefer, author of the study, was nice enough to leave a detailed comment about what he had actually done and what the implications are. I’m reproducing it here for the benefit of people who don’t necessarily dip into the comments:

    Sean has pointed me to this blog and requested me to send along any comments that I might have. His summary at the top is reasonable.

    I’d break my results into two parts. The first part is that I’m putting forward a demonstration of a new method to measure Dark Energy by means of using GRBs as standard candles out to high red shift. My work is all rather standard with most everything I’ve done just following what has been in the literature.

    The GRB Hubble Diagram has been in print since 2003, with myself and Josh Bloom independently presenting early version in public talks as far back as 2001. Over the past year, several groups have used the GRB Hubble Diagram to starting putting constraints on cosmology. This prior work has always used only one GRB luminosity indicator (various different indicators for the various papers) and for no more than 17 GRBs (neglecting GRBs with only limits).

    What I am doing new is I am using much more data and I’m directly addressing the question of the change of the Dark Energy. In all, I am using 52 GRBs and each GRB has 3-4 luminosity indicators on average. So I’ve got a lot more data. And this allows for a demonstration of the GRB Hubble Diagram as a new method.

    The advantages of this new method is that it goes to high redshift, that is, it looks at the expansion history of the Universe from 1.7-6.3 in redshift. It is impervious to extinction. Also, I argue that there should be no evolution effects as the GRB luminosity indicators are based on energetics and light travel time (which should not evolve). Another advantage is that we have the data now, with the size of the data base to be doubled within two years by HETE and Swift.

    One disadvantage of the GRB Hubble Diagram is that the GRBs are lower in quality than supernovae. Currently my median one sigma error bar is 2.6-times worse in comparing a single GRB and a single supernova. But just as with supernovae, I expect that the accuracy of GRB luminosities can be rapidly improved. [After all, in 1996, I was organizing debates between the gradaute students as to whether Type Ia SNe were standard candles or not.] Another substantial problem that is hard to quantify is that our knowledge of the physical processes in GRBs is not perfect (and certtainly much worse than what we know for SNe). It is rational and prudent for everyone to worry that there are hidden problems (although I now know of none). A simple historical example is how Cepheids were found to have two types with different calibrations.

    So the first part of my talk was simply presenting a new method for getting the expansion histoy of the Universe from redshifts up to 6.3. For this, it is pretty confident that the method will work. Inevitably there will be improvements, new data, corrections, and all the usual changes (just as for the supernova).

    The second part of my talk was to point out the first results, which I could not avoid giving. It so happens that the first results point against the Cosmological Constant. I agree with Sean that this second part should not be pushed, for various reasons. Foremost is that the result is only 2.5-sigma.

    Both parts of my results are being cast onto a background where various large groups are now competing for the a new dedicated satellite.

  • Slowly digested

    Professor Stephen Bainbridge (via Orin Kerr) looks at the evidence and notices something:

    After catching up on the first day of the Alito hearings, one conclusion seems inescapable; namely, that Alito is more machine now than man; twisted and evil. He yearns to take liberals, women, minorities, gays, small children, and puppies to the Dune Sea, and cast them into the pit of Carkoon, the nesting place of the all-powerful Sarlaac, in whose belly they will find a new definition of pain and suffering as they are slowly digested over a thousand years. (Or maybe it’s the slavering maw of Cthulhu the Great. I zoned out for awhile during Durbin’s opening remarks.)

    What he somehow neglected to mention was:

    Senate Democrats, in response, considered staging a filibuster to thwart the nomination, but decided it would not be dignified.

    [Bonus pedantic explanation, since it’s the internet: Bainbridge, who supports Alito, was being sarcastic. That bit about the all-powerful Sarlaac? Not actually true. He is therefore implicitly urging that Alito be confirmed, since apparently not throwing puppies into the pit of Carkoon is now the standard for being elevated to the Supreme Court. I, in turn, was being counter-sarcastic, implicitly suggesting that spineless Democrats wouldn’t necessarily do their best to thwart a nomination even if those poor puppies lives were at stake. Putting up a fight might be worth a try.]

  • Fine-tune your Cosmic Variance!

    Someone at MetaFilter doesn’t like us. At least, some of us. Twenty percent of us, to be specific. They want to know how to read CV while — horror of horrors — excluding one of the authors. (Thanks, caek, for being too polite to say which one of us it is!)

    Turns out it’s quite possible; WordPress is smarter than you think. You all know that

    http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/?author=2

    gives you nothing but posts by me. What you might not know, but have undoubtedly been wondering about, is that either

    http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/?author=-2

    or

    http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/?author=3,4,5,6

    will give you posts by everyone but me. The second version is probably better if you just enjoy the posts by Clifford, Risa, JoAnne, and Mark; the first one is better if you like posts by almost anyone conceivable except for me, so that if we ever add authors numbered 7 and above you won’t be left out. (Author number 1 is so mysterious that they don’t exist.)

    And it works for RSS feeds, as well.

    http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/feed/?author=-2

    lets you enjoy Sean-free blogging from the convenience of your newsreader.