Sean Carroll

Author: Sean Carroll

  • I Get Email

    Few things warm the heart of a scientist more readily than a query from a young, curious mind, eager to learn about our universe. Why, just now I received this inquiring email:

    R xxxxxx xxxxxx@hotmail.com to me

    Sean,

    Neutrons have no chemical properties and reflect no light, but they do have mass and occupy space =matter, and clouds of them will never be visible in space!

    I find it difficult to believe people who are supposed to be so smart are suck fucking retards!

    Cheers Retard ,

    Robert

    For the curious:

    Always happy to help a fellow seeker of knowledge.

  • Greetings from Qatar

    Not much blogging this week, as I’m at the World Conference of Science Journalists in Doha, Qatar. I’m informed that the technical term describing my role here is that of trailing spouse. But I did give a little talk on upcoming discoveries we should be looking forward to in particle physics and cosmology.

    I’ll try to put up a more full report later. Right now I’ve just been guilted into blogging because I’m listening to a sexy and exciting panel about science blogs, staring Mo Costandi, Maryn McKenna, Jennifer Ouellette, Ed Yong, and Mohammed Yahia. And just to prove I’m here, I can show you what a sign inside Starbucks looks like in an Arab country.

    Afterwards I’ll be headed to the souk to shop for scimitars.

  • Miss USA Contestants on Teaching Evolution

    Now that Twitter and Facebook have been invented, I don’t usually put up blog posts that simply link to someone else’s posts. (Although I wonder if that policy is a mistake.) But this morning I put up a link to a post at Jerry Coyne’s blog, and it was almost immediately deleted from Facebook. (The Twitter entry was fine, of course.) I wouldn’t even have known, except that someone commented that it had been “flagged as inappropriate by Facebook users.”

    Of course, Facebook being Facebook, I have no idea whether this is a nefarious conspiracy or simple incompetence. Probably both. In any event, you should go check out the post, which comments on this YouTube video.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkBmhM0R2A0

    It’s a compilation of the answers given by contestants in the Miss USA contest to a simple question: “Should evolution be taught in schools?” Miss California, Alyssa Campanella, who eventually won the contest, gave a strong pro-science answer that will bring a smile to your face. At least, if you are finished crying and throwing objects at your computer monitor after seeing some of the other answers. Due to the vagaries of alphabetical order, Miss Alabama comes first, and it’s not pretty.

    For the most part, the contestants are interested in being good politicians and keeping everybody happy, not in staking out courageous stances in the science/religion debates. But that’s exactly what’s so depressing: here we are, in the most advanced country in the world (albeit in its waning years), and it’s considered controversial whether we should teach science to our children. The question wasn’t even “should we teach creationism,” which is actually a harder issue (although still very easy). It was just whether we should teach straightforward science at all. Very sad indeed.

  • Snobby Connoissuership

    xkcd raises an interesting issue or three. Click to see the exciting conclusion, starring Joe Biden.

    Naturally, in less time than it takes to eat a sandwich there was a Tumblr account dedicated to Joe Biden eating.

    But one can’t help but ask — is it true? Does it really not matter what it is we choose to lavish our attentions upon? Would we find as much depth and complexity in different cans of Diet Dr. Pepper as oenophiles would claim are lurking in a bottle of fine Bordeaux?

    I think we have to say no. Some things really are more complex and nuanced than other things. I could provide examples, but they aren’t any better than ones you can imagine yourself.

    That’s okay, it doesn’t make the comic any less funny. And there is a clever point that remains true: people pick and choose the things on which they lavish their attention. To one person, all jazz is just noise; another would say the same about classical, and another about punk. The real issue isn’t the existence of complexity, it’s how we choose to recognize and value it. If we went through life taking note of every fact around us, we’d go insane within minutes. Making sense of existence relies heavily on coarse-graining.

    But there’s yet another issue! (Yes I know I’m spending too much time analyzing a single comic — or am I deviously making a point?) The cartoon didn’t choose Diet Dr. Pepper as its example, it chose pictures of Joe Biden eating sandwiches. And you know, there really is a lot of depth there. There’s a lot you could say about a large collection of such photographs. So the question is — are any of those things worth saying? Complexity might be necessary for great art, but it doesn’t seem to be sufficient. Paying attention to certain kinds of details seems rewarding in a way that paying attention to others is not.

    Anyone have a simple demarcation between the two? When is complexity deserving of study, and when does it merit being ignored? I’m sure aestheticians have argued about this for centuries, and I’m not trying to break any new ground here. I’m just at a loss for a good theory, which isn’t a condition I like to be in.

  • Back Through the Wormhole

    Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman, the hit (as these things go) show from the Science Channel, has commenced with its second season. It shows Wednesdays at 8 p.m. Eastern/Pacific time. If you watch tomorrow night’s episode, “Is Time an Illusion?”, there’s a good chance you will see me in a bar fight. Or at least in a bar, with fighting going on around me. And I’m pretty sure that if you wait until July 27th’s “Can We Travel Faster Than Light?”, you’ll see me throwing a Slurpee out of the window of a car to demonstrate addition of velocities. (What you won’t see is the long discussion we had about whether we should call it a “Slurpee” or a “Slushee.”)

    I appeared on one episode of the show last year, and I’ve been on a few other science documentaries. But I don’t usually plug them ahead of time; not, as anyone who reads the blog will attest, out of any general reluctance to plug my stuff, but because you typically don’t get to see these shows before they air. And I’d just as soon not be associated with a complete piece of garbage.

    But on the basis of what I’ve seen so far — last week’s episode, and several from last year — as well as talking to the show’s creators, I genuinely think that Through the Wormhole is well above the usual standard of quality one expects for these endeavors. Not that anything is perfect — there are one or two times when you’ll be thinking “how in the world did that person get interviewed here?” But there’s clearly been a lot of effort made to get the science largely right, and more importantly to take on big topics and tell something approaching a coherent story about them. Programming like this is growing thin, even on Discovery and the Science Channel, so when it appears and succeeds it should be applauded.

    Also? Morgan Freeman read my book. So I at least owe him this much of a plug.

  • Charity Pitches

    Don’t worry, we’re not asking for money. Admittedly, that’s what usually happens when the word “charity” appears, i.e. at our Donors Choose challenges. But now I have a whopping $100 burning a hole in my pocket, due to my plucky third-place finish in the 3 Quarks Daily contest. Back when I was a struggling grad student or post doc, this would have gone straight to pay for Ramen noodles or whatever. But now that I am a faculty member who lives in a nice house and drives a fancy car, I can pay it forward a bit.

    Thus, I’m going to take the $100 and match it myself, donating $200 to charity. (Yes I know, the big spender. Hey, it was only 3rd place.) There are plenty of charities I know about already, but I thought that since these ill-gotten gains were based on the blog, I should ask the blog for advice.

    So in comments I’d like to get your pitches for a worthy cause I might not have heard of. The winner — in a contest judged only by me — will get the $200. It will be most effective if you leave both an explanation of why this charity is so great, and a link to an easy way to donate.

    Of course there is a hidden agenda here — while I’m giving away this huge pile of money, anyone else who reads the list is welcome to be inspired to donate as well. No pressure, except that you would be a better person and feel good about yourself.

    Pitch away.

  • Chirality and the Positron’s Mustache

    Woke up this morning to the happy news that my post “The Fine Structure Constant is Probably Constant” walked away with the Charm Quark (i.e., tied for third place) in this year’s 3QuarksDaily science blogging prizes. Many thanks to Lisa Randall for judging and Abbas Raza and the 3QD crew for hosting. And of course congrats to the other winners:

    1. Top Quark: SciCurious, Serotonin and Sexual Preference: Is It Really That Simple?
    2. Strange Quark: Anne Jefferson, Levees and the Illusion of Flood Control
    3. Charm Quark: Ethan Siegel, Where Is Everybody?

    I already have a great nominee for next year’s contest. One of the most confusing things in particle physics is the notion of “chirality.” The related notion of a particle’s “helicity” is relatively easy to explain — is the particle spinning in a left-handed or right-handed sense when compared to its direction of motion? But a massive particle need not have a direction of motion, it can just be sitting there, so the helicity is not defined. Chirality is the same as helicity — left-handed or right-handed — for massless particles moving at the speed of light, but it’s always defined no matter how the particle is moving. It had better be, since the weak interactions couple to particles with left-handed chirality but not ones with right-handed chirality! (And the opposite for antiparticles.)

    It all gets a bit heady, and you can’t give a real explanation without going beyond simple pictures and actually talking about the quantum wave function. But Flip Tanedo at Quantum Diaries has given it an heroic effort, which I insist you go read right now. I don’t want to reproduce the whole thing — Flip was more careful and thorough than I ever would have been, anyway — but I will tease you with this one picture.

    Isn’t that the cutest pair of elementary particles you’ve ever seen? I smell a Quark in this lepton’s future.

  • Calamities of SuperNature

    Tony Piro, the artist behind the webcomic Calamities of Nature, explains the relationship between science and the supernatural better than I ever could.

    Click for the rest of the exciting story. Via Evolving Thoughts.

  • Why We Need the Higgs, or Something Like It

    In the comments to the previous post, Monty asks a perfectly good question, which can be shortened to: “Is the Higgs boson really necessary?” The answer is a qualified “yes” — we need the Higgs boson, or something like it. That is, we can’t simply take the Standard Model as we know it and extend it to arbitrarily high energies without new physics kicking in.

    The role of the Higgs field is to break the symmetry of the electroweak interactions, as discussed here. We think that there is a lot of symmetry underlying particle interactions, but that much of it is hidden from our low-energy view. In technical terms, the electroweak theory of Glashow, Weinberg and Salam posits an “SU(2)xU(1)” symmetry, that somehow gets broken down to “U(1).” That unbroken symmetry gives us electromagnetism, a force carried by a massless particle, the photon. The broken symmetries are still there, but their force-carrying particles become massive when the symmetry breaks — those are the W+, W–, and Z0 bosons.

    There’s no question that something breaks the symmetry. The question that is worth asking is: “Can we imagine breaking the symmetry without introducing any new particles?”

    (more…)

  • D0 Decides to be Debbie Downers

    Alliterative title stolen shamelessly from the lovely and understanding Jennifer Ouellette, who blogs background about the hunt for new particles at Discovery News.

    So here we have science, marching on. Just last week we heard that CDF, one of the big experiments at the Tevatron at Fermilab, had collected more data relevant to a mysterious bump they had previously reported around 150 GeV in collisions that produced a W boson and two jets. The new data (7.3 inverse femtobarns, up from 4.3 fb-1 previously) made the bump look even more prominent, rather than watching it regress back down to the mean. The discrepancy is now more than 4 sigma, giving license to get just a wee bit excited that new physics might be on the loose.

    Now D0, the other big experiment at the Tevatron, is ready to weigh in — and the “D” stands for “damper,” it appears. Here’s a blog post at symmetry, a link to the technical paper, and a webcast for a talk that will happen this afternoon at 4:00pm Central Time. You knew that Jester would be on the case, and he is.

    But this picture tells you all you need to know.

    With 4.3 fb-1 of data analyzed, the CDF bump should be just barely visible, as indicated by the dotted line labeled “Gaussian.” But there doesn’t seem to be anything there. And it’s not just you; the collaboration estimates that the probability that there is really a bump there is less than 10-5. Not very encouraging, really.

    But still — it does seem to be there in the CDF data. So what’s going on? At this point, it’s not clear. Both experiments are extremely mature and well-understood, and the collaborations are good at what they do, so it is likely to be something very subtle at work. It still could be new physics, that is somehow playing games with us, but certainly the prospects don’t look as good today as they did yesterday. Look like science is going to have to march on a bit more before everything is clear.