Miscellany

Logic

A nice article about dark energy by Rich Monastersky in the Chronicle of Higher Education this week, unfortunately only available to subscribers. But I think it falls under fair-use doctrine for me to quote this one paragraph:

In the space of seven years, the dark-energy revolution has rewritten textbook entries on how the universe operates and what will ultimately happen to the cosmos. Yet dark energy is a nebulous concept, one that has thus far flummoxed some of the smartest researchers on the planet. “The fundamental physics of dark energy is a complete mystery to us right now,” says Sean Carroll, an assistant professor of physics at the University of Chicago.

Now, strictly speaking, what the paragraph says is that the smartest researchers on the planet are flummoxed by this problem, and also that I am flummoxed by this problem. So we cannot conclude, using the rigorous dictates of logic, that I am one of the smartest researchers on the planet. But if we look beyond the surface to the subtle subtextual implications, I think the message is clear.

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Grief and truth

An interesting story from Killing the Buddha, linked yesterday at 3quarksdaily.

A famous Buddhist story tells of Kisa Gotami, a young mother from the Buddha’s clan whose baby boy died suddenly. Grief-stricken, she carried his corpse with her everywhere, wailing and wondering aloud why her child had left her. People pitied her, and eventually she was told to go to the Buddha for advice. When she reached his retreat, she demanded that the Buddha bring her boy back to life. Somewhat surprisingly, the Buddha agreed to do so, but first asked Gotami to do something. “Anything, anything,” she cried in desperate hope. The Buddha told her to go into the village and bring back a mustard seed from a house which had never known death.

Kisa Gotami went from house to house, still clutching the limp body of her child, asking for mustard seeds. People readily agreed to give her one, but when she asked if anyone had died in the house, every time the occupants nodded sadly. In each house there had been some sort of loss—a father, a sister, an aunt, a baby. As Gotami made her way through the village, she gradually began to understand that death was an absolute fact of existence, that no one escaped it, not in the meanest hut or in the palace itself. Finally, she took her child’s body to the charnel ground and left it, returning to the Buddha to be ordained as a nun. Realizing that the Buddha never meant to resurrect her boy but was teaching her a more important religious lesson, she released her attachment and with newfound wisdom, committed herself to a life of spiritual awakening.

It’s a good story, although not without the usual shortcomings of the Buddhist-parable genre. For one thing, the protagonist is rather literal-minded; how many homes did she really have to visit before figuring out that death was universal? Also, “kill-the-Buddha” exhortations notwithstanding, these stories inevitably end up portraying the Buddha as a smugly wise man surrounded by rather simple folk (much like physicists’s stories about Feynman).

Still, I like the story and its moral. But then, a little twist:

I’ve read or been told this story dozens of times. Before, I always marveled at the truth of this tale, its brave acceptance of the way of things, the contrast between Jesus’ improbable miracles and the Buddha’s humble demonstration of a spiritual fact more important than the healing of flesh. I’ve told this story more times that I can recall, confident in its correctness and value. But then Grandmother died, and without my knowing it, the story completely changed. The first time I read about Kisa Gotami again after Grandmother’s death, I immediately thought, “If Buddha had played a trick like that on me, I would’ve torn his goddamn head off.”

The truth is, I’d much rather have Grandmother back than to acquire some sort of spiritual insight. I’d eagerly trade in all my books and statues, my altar, and all the teachings I’ve attended and blessings I’ve received. If Jesus had been around handing out resurrections, I would’ve surely picked him over do-nothing, it’s-a-learning-experience Buddha. Hard-won religious understanding is a very poor substitute for the love and support of someone close to you. But whether or not it takes second place, it’s all you end up with. Everyone is going to die on you, until the day that you die on whoever is left. So learning from the worst, immutable parts of life, or just continuing to revolve in painful ignorance, is the only choice we get. Buddha’s story may have a disappointing punch-line, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t right.

That’s exactly right, isn’t it? In the midst of great grief, the overpowering sorrow that comes with an unexpected loss, you aren’t in any mood for pious teachings about inevitability and acceptance — you want a miraculous escape, a for-real deus ex machina. Nevertheless, the miracles aren’t forthcoming. Wishing for them is both perfectly understandable, and ultimately fruitless.

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Auger North

Speaking of massive technological undertakings to explore high-energy particles, the Pierre Auger Observatory has announced that they’ve chosen the site of their northern-hemisphere location, which will be in Colorado. Auger uses a multi-technique approach to detect ultra-high-energy cosmic rays. There is a mystery about these UHECR’s, namely that one experiment (AGASA) claims to observe them at higher energies (> 1020 electron volts) than should be possible. That’s because the distribution in the sky looks the same in all directions, which seems to indicate that they are coming from far outside our galaxy (since galactic events should be concentrated in the plane of the Milky Way). But the universe is somewhat opaque to very high-energy cosmic rays; they tend to bump into the low-energy photons of the Cosmic Microwave Background and lose energy themselves. This should put an upper limit on the energy, known as the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin cutoff. If AGASA is right that they have detected events above the GZK limit (and maybe they’re simply mistaken), then something funny is going on, either in the origin of cosmic rays or in the way they interact with ordinary photons.

The southern site for Auger is well underway in Argentina (as shown in the picture). They are presently collecting data, but with the first science results yet to come. Perhaps the northern counterpart will also have cows.

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CERN

I’ve been meaning to write a little about my tour of the experiments when I visited CERN a few weeks ago. Sadly (or perhaps happily) I realize now that everything I was hoping to say was already said, at a level of precision I wasn’t intending to reach, by Jacques in a report of his own visit to CERN. I’ll say it anyway, but read his post for more details.

CERN, nestled in the Alps on the Swiss/French border by Geneva, is going all-out to complete the Large Hadron Collider by the target date of 2007. This is a giant ring that will accelerate protons in opposite directions, ultimately to smash into each other and (hopefully) create a bunch of new particles for us to explore. The energy of the collisions will be 14 TeV, where one TeV is about one thousand times the rest energy of a single proton; so there is more than enough energy available to see all sorts of fun things.


The LHC will have two large general-purpose experiments, ATLAS and CMS, and I had a chance to see each of them. (There will also be a nuclear-physics experiment, ALICE, and a B-physics experiment, LHC-b.) Both are truly amazing feats of engineering and physics. For one thing, they are big; each is of order 10,000 tons, and fits into a room the size of a large cathedral.

Here is a picture of ATLAS at the early stages of construction; to see its current state, check out the mandatory webcam.


CMS (which also has a webcam) is actually more impressive to see up close, as it is being put together as a series of slices, while ATLAS is being constructed more as concentric layers.


Interestingly, the reason why the experiments have to be so big is simply because of quantum mechanics. What we are really interested in is what is happening at extremely tiny distances. But the uncertainty principle tells us that we can’t probe small distances without reaching very large momenta, or equivalently ultra-high energies. At the energies probed by the LHC, the particles produced in each collision come zooming out at tremendous speeds, and the extraordinary sizes of CMS and ATLAS are necessary to capture and analyze all of these many energetic particles. Each detector is a series of concentric layers that serve to measure the properties of different kinds of particles — electrons and photons are easy, strongly-interacting particles (quarks and gluons) create elaborate jets, and muons require special treatment so that they don’t just punch right through the detector. Other particles (W and Z bosons, tau leptons) decay rapidly and are diagnosed by what they decay into. Still others (neutrinos, not to mention various hypothetical new species) zip right out of the detector completely unseen, but their presence can be inferred from “missing energy,” if the total energy of the reconstructed event is less than that of the initial collision.

As a theorist (and one who grew up in astronomy departments), one of the most fascinating concepts in high-energy experiments is that of a trigger. Each detector will witness approximately one billion collisions per second, which is a lot. You might imagine that you’re faced with two problems: simply recording all the data from each event, and then sifting through them for the interesting bits. You’re right, but it’s much worse than you think. That’s because each event isn’t just a few bytes if data; it’s of order one megabyte per event. There’s simply no way you could record all of the data.

Instead, you try to figure out which events are “interesting,” and record those — perhaps 100 events per second. That’s where the trigger comes in. While the data from each event are still streaming through the hardware, they are rapidly analyzed to see if they are worth keeping. This happens in levels; you do an ultra-rapid scan at the hardware level to see if anything potentially interesting is going on, and are able to cut down a billion events to about ten thousand. That’s the level-1 trigger; the level-2 trigger is a sophisticated piece of software that looks at more precise characterizations of the events (much like an ER doctor making a preliminary rapid diagnosis, then homing in with more delicate tests) to get you down to the one hundred events that are actually recorded for later analysis. (This is all part of the great computing challenge that Mark discussed a while back.)

Why are some events more interesting than others? Quantum mechanics again. Particle physics doesn’t predict what will happen at each event, only the probability that certain things will happen. The interesting bits (new physics, or events that help improve our understanding of established physics) will be swamped by well-understood processes, known affectionately as the “background.” (A generation or two of physicists worked tirelessly to establish the gleaming edifice we know as the Standard Model, and now we think of it as simply “background.”) As you might guess, a lot of hard thought (and spirited, collegial disagreement) goes into deciding which events to keep and which to toss away!

During my visit, the LHC folks seemed cautiously optimistic that they would really turn on the accelerator in 2007, and start taking useful physics data in 2008. All that will be necessary is the superhuman efforts of an army of physicists and engineers working twenty hours a day. But it will be worth it, as the LHC should revolutionize our understanding of the subatomic world. For the last 25 years or so, particle physics has been in an extremely unusual position — the theory just worked so well that all the new experiments kept finding particles that had already been predicted. This is the opposite of the historically common state of affairs, in which experimenters keep coming up with unexpected new phenomena that the theorists have to scramble to understand (as we’ve seen in cosmology in the last decade). I fully expect the tables to turn once again when CMS and ATLAS start releasing new results. We have lots of ideas about what might be around the corner — one or more Higgs bosons, supersymmetry, extra dimensions, various forms of strong dynamics — but my suspicion is that what we see won’t fit perfectly well into any pre-existing framework, at least not at first. That’s when we theorists will really have to earn our salaries, and physics at the high-energy frontier will be as exciting as it ever was.

CERN Read More »

Plugging

For those of you still looking for the perfect Father’s Day or graduation gift, your prayers have been answered. Amazon.co.uk has wisely decided to offer my book in a special deal along with Lisa Randall’s new book, Warped Passages (as noticed by Lubos).


To be honest, one book doesn’t lead naturally into the other; Lisa’s is a popular-level exposition of branes and extra dimensions, while mine is a graduate-level text in general relativity. But hey, you could do worse.

What I want to know is: who are John Neely and Richard Kibbe, and why does amazon.co.uk think they are co-authors of my book? I’m pretty sure I’ve never heard of these guys. Hope they’re not cutting in on my substantial royalties.

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Rotting undead corpse of irony stalks again

I can’t say it much better than Sisyphus Shrugged.

You know, frequently I think I’ve come to the point where the rotting undead corpse of irony will no longer stalk through my newsreading experience, shedding body parts and looking for sexually indelicate teenagers to eat, but somehow I always find that I’m wrong.

The government has been arguing that we shouldn’t release the videotapes of prisoners being tortured in Abu Ghraib because

wait for it

it would violate the prisoners’ rights under the Geneva Convention.

Those would be the prisoners who are languishing without representation in Abu Ghraib because it is the official position of the american government that they aren’t covered by the Geneva Convention.

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iChing

The Friday Random Ten idea needs some spicing up. Since nobody else runs with my ideas, let’s follow up on the suggestion that we can use the iPod as a divination device. Simple enough — just use the first ten songs that show up randomly exactly as you would use Tarot cards, and peek fearlessly into the future.

Here is the most common Tarot Spread, the Celtic Cross, as explained by Byzant Mystical. Each position plays a role in elucidating the larger story.

  1. The Covering: The important events, issues, attitudes or influences around the question or current situation
  2. The Crossing: Current obstacles, problems, conflicts and opposition that the questioner must deal with
  3. The Crown: The best that can be achieved or attained from current circumstances
  4. The Root: Past events or influences that have played an important part in bringing about the current situation
  5. The Past: Events or influences from the more recent past that have influenced the present but are now passing away
  6. The Future: Future events and fresh influences about to come into play that will operate in the near future
  7. The Questioner: The questioner’s attitude and how they relate to the current situation
  8. The House: How other people around the questioner affect and view matters in hand
  9. The Inside: The questioner’s hopes, fears and expectations with regard to the question or the current situation
  10. The Outcome: The eventual outcome of events shown by the other cards

Okay, so let’s consult the iPod oracle and see what we get. (Really it’s better to ask a specific question, but this is just a proof-of-concept.)

  1. The Covering: Pretenders, Back on the Chain Gang
  2. The Crossing: Isaac Hayes, Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic
  3. The Crown: Cream, Toad
  4. The Root: Von Freeman, Blues for Sunnyland
  5. The Past: Either/Orchestra, Born in a Suitcase
  6. The Future: Howlin’ Wolf, Built for Comfort
  7. The Questioner: Led Zeppelin, The Wanton Song
  8. The House: Dexter Gordon, Our Love is Here to Stay
  9. The Inside: Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington, Cottontail
  10. The Outcome: Living Colour, Elvis is Dead

Well. Of course we skip right to the Outcome, which is kind of ambiguous. Although Elvis is Dead doesn’t seem like a cheery title, the point of the song is to get over it and move on, which doesn’t sound like such a bad point of view. The Future, Built for Comfort, can’t argue with that. I will choose to overlook the implications of The Wanton Song popping up in the Questioner slot. Overall, I think the oracle paints an interesting if somewhat tentative picture of a hedonistic individual, facing some constraints from events of both the recent and distant past, but striving gamely to overcome them, even if the energetic-but-nonsensical scat of Cottontail indicates a certain confusion about current priorities.

What really worries me is The Crown. If the best I can hope for is the allegorical equivalent of a minutes-long Ginger Baker drum solo, I’m in trouble.

iChing Read More »

Dark unification

I understand that it’s getting harder to tell — so, just to be clear, what appears below really is a parody, courtesy of The Poor Man. Not that the real Corner is that much different.

GOLDBERG VS. WEINBERG, PART XXIII [Jonah Goldberg]

I know everyone’s probably sick of hearing about it, and, judging by the email I’m getting, it’s pretty clear that I’ve scored a KO on this issue, but I’ve got to just put this one last email in:

As someone who has been collecting Star Wars figurines for over two decades, let me say that Professor Steven Weinberg is clearly an idiot and has absolutely no idea what he’s talking about when it comes to theoretical physics. There are NOT four fundamental forces of nature in the Standard Model, as he arrogantly asserts. There is only The Force, which has a light and dark side – but, as we learned in the classic novel Sith Lords of The Final Jedi, these two sides are really just different ways of looking at the same thing. So I don’t know why he’s babbling on about gauge fields or whatever, since everyone knows that we discovered a unified theory of The Force a long, long time ago. However, like a typical cowardly liberal, he would rather hide behind a mountain of titles, professional awards and ground-breaking research than debate the real issues.

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Feminists

I like the theme of “lists made by conservatives that confirm that your worst fears weren’t nearly bad enough.” At Feministe, Lauren points to a post on a pro-life site that responds to her query about what “feminist” means. This list doesn’t come from a panel of distinguished experts, so it’s completely unfair to pretend that all conservatives think this way. But too many do.

Feminists:

1. Worship Contraception.
2. Believe in Abortion.
3. Celebrate Euthanasia.
4. Support Gays, Lesbians and Homosexual Marriage.
5. Believe that the Family oppresses women.
6. Will divorce at the drop of a hat.
7. Want the total destruction of marriage.
8. Believe that Family should defy biology.
9. Believe that Men and Women are the same.
10. Hate Men.
11. Believe that all sex is rape.
12. Believe that Pope Ratzinger is a woman hater.

A short step from believing that contraception is okay to celebrating euthanasia, apparently. It’s funny, when I look in the dictionary, I find that feminism is the “belief in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes,” which was somehow crowded off the list by “Hate Men.” (Interesting choices of what words to capitalize, too.) There are people who really believe this stuff, and no amount of acquaintance with reality will sway them from their conviction.

But they are even-handed enough to admire Lauren’s web design. It’s exactly like the folks who are convinced that they’re not sexist because they think that women are really pretty.

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Dangerous reading

Brad DeLong (after artfully denying that he would ever read Wonkette) points to an enlightening list at Human Events Online — the Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries. As voted on by leading conservative thinkers!

  • The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels
  • Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler
  • Quotations from Chairman Mao, Mao Zedong
  • The Kinsey Report, Alfred Kinsey
  • Democracy and Education, John Dewey
  • Das Kapital, Karl Marx
  • The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan
  • The Course of Positive Philosophy, August Comte
  • Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche
  • General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, John Maynard Keynes

I love it. Mein Kampf snuggling right up there with The Feminine Mystique and The General Theory. (Because it’s Keynes, you know, who is responsible for our huge budget deficit. Those damned liberals, always running budget deficits.)

But the list of runners-up is where it really gets good.

  • The Population Bomb, Paul Ehrlich
  • What Is To Be Done, V.I. Lenin
  • Authoritarian Personality, Theodor Adorno
  • On Liberty, John Stuart Mill
  • Beyond Freedom and Dignity, B.F. Skinner
  • Reflections on Violence, Georges Sorel
  • The Promise of American Life, Herbert Croly
  • Origin of the Species, Charles Darwin
  • Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault
  • Soviet Communism: A New Civilization, Sidney and Beatrice Webb
  • Coming of Age in Samoa, Margaret Mead
  • Unsafe at Any Speed, Ralph Nader
  • Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir
  • Prison Notebooks, Antonio Gramsci
  • Silent Spring, Rachel Carson
  • Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon
  • Introduction to Psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud
  • The Greening of America, Charles Reich
  • The Limits to Growth, Club of Rome
  • Descent of Man, Charles Darwin

Some of it is just amusing — I mean, you might not be happy with Unsafe at Any Speed or Silent Spring, but “the most harmful books of the 19th and 20th centuries”? And what’s up with John Stuart Mill, anyway?

But it’s Darwin’s appearance that is most telling. If this really does represent mainstream conservatism, its intellectual bankruptcy is showing.

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