Miscellany

If you’re an icon as famous as Albert Einstein without, people will always take delight in pointing out your shortcomings. That doesn’t mean the shortcomings aren’t real, of course. In the case of Einstein, two things stand out: his stubborn search for a unified theory gravitation and electromagnetism (ignoring the lessons of quantum mechanics), and his treatment of women. In an interview at Edge.org, Dennis Overbye wonders whether the two aren’t related.

I know lots of people like Albert. I might be like him myself. He was a hopeless romantic, he lived on anticipation. He was always yearning for the next thing. He was always envisioning some wonderful life with somebody else, while grimly enduring life with the woman he was with. If I think about it, I would say that that was kind of the key to his psychology, that he had the lure of the perfect situation, the perfect person. Of course if you’re Einstein, you want everything that you want your way and then you want to be left alone. So you want love, and you want affection, you want a good meal, but then you don’t want any interference outside of that, so you don’t want any obligations interfering with your life, with your work. Which is a difficult stance to maintain in an adult relationship; it doesn’t work. Everything has to be a give and take.

Einstein always felt Paradise was just around the corner, but as soon as he got there, it started looking a little shabby and something better appeared. I’ve known a lot of people like Albert in my time, I have felt lots of shocks of recognition. I feel like I got to know Albert as a person in the course of this, and I have more respect for him as a physicist than I did when I started, I have more a sense of what he accomplished and how hard it really was to be Einstein than I did before. It’s a great relief to be able to think of him as a real person. If he was around I’d love to buy him a beer ….. but I don’t know if I’d introduce him to my sister.

For more, check out Dennis’s book Einstein in Love.

In the comments to the previous post, PZ complains (rightfully) about creationists who claim that only intelligence can lead to the decrease in entropy of an open system that is required to explain the complexity of life. A crazy claim, of course, since the Second Law only applies to closed systems, so open systems are perfectly free to have their entropy go up or down (as they do all the time).

Fortunately, last week we had a nice physics colloquium by Ron Walsworth, who provided a simple example on which we can test the hypothesis that only intelligence can decrease entropy (or disorder, or whatever). Consider the following system: a rectangular container filled part way with tiny spheres, some of them made of glass and some of brass. All the spheres have equal size, but the brass ones are heavier than the glass ones. Okay, now please tell me which of these configurations has the lowest entropy (or highest order, or greatest complexity, or whatever it is that you think only intelligence can bring into existence):

• Brass spheres on top, glass on the bottom
• Glass spheres on top, brass on the bottom
• Spheres perfectly mixed
• Some interesting striped pattern

Have you made your choice? Good. Now we do the following experiment: we just jiggle the container. There are a few free parameters here — the amplitude and frequency of the jiggling, along with the density of gas in the container. It seems to me that your hypothesis has led to a prediction: namely, that whatever configuration you think is low-entropy (or highly ordered, or most complex, or whatever) will not be achieved by simple jiggling, it would require an intelligent agent to bring it about. So, make sure you’ve made a clear choice about which it is, and we’ll do the experiment.

And the answer is: you’re wrong. No matter what configuration you picked. The plain truth is, each of the various configurations is achieved by simply jiggling the system, for some value of the free parameters. Nothing intelligent went into it. Since you have now been proven incorrect, I am confident that you won’t be bringing up this canard any more.

Actually, I’m quite confident that this little demonstration will have no effect on you at all. I’m sure you will somehow fix up your definitions so that this example doesn’t apply, just as you would do for any other example. People who want to disbelieve in natural selection aren’t swayed by logical arguments and the scientific method; they are wedded to their convictions with a passion that transcends mere rationality. But we can try.

PZ Myers has too much fun over at Pharyngula. He gets to make fun of a steady stream of creationists, each seemingly more clueless than the last. Swatting them down might get boring after a while because it’s just not that challenging, but why not enjoy yourself while doing a service as well.

The latest victim is Babu G. Ranganathan at a site called Intellectual Conservative. While it is considerate of the site to distinguish itself from ordinary conservatives, it is certainly asking for trouble to label yourself “intellectual” and then write things that are not only spectacularly incorrect, but hoary old chestnuts that have been debunked over and over again. This time, it’s the old “evolution is inconsistent with the Second Law of Thermodynamics” canard.

The simple fact is that the law of entropy precludes macro-evolution from ever occurring. Entropy is the measure of increasing disorder in a system. The natural (or spontaneous) tendency of matter and of all of energy is toward greater disorder — not toward greater order or complexity as evolution would teach. This tendency towards disorder that exists in all matter can only be temporarily overcome if there exists an energy converting and directing mechanism to develop and maintain order.

Ugh, that is just horrible. But the entire article is redeemed for me by this bit:

It doesn’t matter whether a system is open (unlimited energy) or closed (with limited energy), entropy occurs in both systems. In fact, scientists discovered entropy here on our very earth, which is an open system in relation to the sun. It is not enough just to have sufficient energy (an open system) for greater order to develop. There also has to be an energy converting and directing mechanism.

Wow! Scientists have discovered entropy here on our very earth! Stop the presses!

PZ points to the talk.origins article on this issue. But actually I think the discussion is not precisely on point; while it’s true that “entropy” is not a precise synonym for “disorder,” it’s not a completely misleading definition, and it’s not the essence of the mistake that is being made by creationists. The mistake is one that Ranganathan seems to know he is making, yet insists on making anyway: the Second Law only says that entropy increases in closed (isolated) systems, which the Earth is not. For an open system such as the Earth, the Second Law simply has nothign to say, one way or the other. If, on the other hand, you were to take a living organism and completely isolate it by putting it in a sealed box, guess what: it would die, increasing its entropy all the while.

Life on Earth is possible because we are very far from thermal equilibrium, a state of maximal entropy. The Sun is a hot spot in a very cold sky; that means that the Earth can absorb high-energy photons from it, and radiate them away at lower (infrared) wavelengths. This process greatly increases the overall entropy of the Solar System, no matter what the piddling little organisms here on Earth are doing. Imagine what would happen if the situation were different, without a hot spot in a cold sky — if the entire sky were the same temperature, everything on Earth would quickly equilibrate at precisely that temperature, and motion and life would be impossible.

It’s a characteristic feature of crackpots in any field, as seen in the Einstein skeptics as well — a sneaking suspicion that the so-called experts could be so completely stupid as to miss a point that is so obvious any high-schooler could come up with it. Or an Intellectual Conservative.

Update: via Chris C Mooney and the Poor Man, news that Tech Central Station is now also publishing pro-creationism pieces. This one is also quite enlightening, as it makes clear the extent to which Intelligent Design not only involves a logical fallacy (who designed the designer?), but insists that the designer is something we don’t know anything about, and explains precisely nothing.

Tom DeLay is miffed that his name was taken in vain on an episode of Law & Order.

WASHINGTON – House Majority Leader Tom DeLay is upset that a popular NBC crime drama used his name as part of its show.

DeLay wrote NBC to complain that one of the characters on “Law & Order: Criminal Intent” invoked his name in a story line about the shooting death of a federal judge. “Maybe we should put out an APB for somebody in a Tom DeLay T-shirt,” the fictional police officer said.

DeLay, in a letter to NBC Universal Television chief Jeff Zucker, called that reference a “slur.”

“This manipulation of my name and trivialization of the sensitive issue of judicial security represents a reckless disregard for the suffering initiated by recent tragedies and a great disservice to public discourse,” he said.

DeLay, R-Texas, criticized the federal judiciary after the courts refused to stop the death of Terri Schiavo. “The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior,” he said in a statement on March 31, hours after Schiavo died.

DeLay apologized the next week, saying he had spoken in an “inartful” way and meant that Congress should increase its oversight of the courts.

“This isolated piece of gritty ‘cop talk’ was neither a political comment nor an accusation,” NBC Entertainment President Kevin Reilly said. “It’s not unusual for L & O to mention real names in its fictional stories. We’re confident in our viewers’ ability to distinguish between the two.”

Creator/executive producer Dick Wolf added: “But I do congratulate Congressman DeLay for switching the spotlight from his own problems to an episode of a television show.”

My blog-reading has been spotty of late, but I can’t believe I missed this. A post at Crooked Timber by Eszter Hargittai points out that physicists can occasionally be, how shall we say, somewhat less than fully aware of work done in fields outside their own. Willfully ignorant, you might almost say. The example she uses is work on social networking and “small worlds,” the study of connectivity between various networks. A fascinating topic to social scientists, obviously, but also amenable to study by physicists interested in complex systems and power-law behavior. Unfortunately, the two groups don’t seem to talk that much. Here’s a graph of an interesting example of a social network — in this case, researchers working on social networks! They fall neatly into two mutually exclusive groups of self-citers, physicists in black and others in white.

Some of my best friends are physicists, but far be it from me to defend them against charges of insularity or arrogance. (Also, Eszter is not only a fellow Chicago-based academic blogger, but also a chocolate lover, so she gets the benefit of the doubt.) Cosma Shalizi gives the perspective of a physicist who actually knows something about this stuff. Since I don’t, I will go against type and keep quiet.

Mark Schmitt knows why the Senators were so happy to pound out a compromise on judicial nominees and the filibuster, and it’s actually a heartening analysis. His take is that legislators really live for the kind of intense negotiating parley that it takes to pound out and agreement of this sort, as opposed to fundraising and campaigning and the other necessary evils of political life. Unfortunately, these days there are very few opportunities for this kind of legislative gruntwork, which has been abandoned in favor of a heavy-handed dominance of the ruling party.

My most vivid memories of working in the Senate are of witnessing such interactions. I remember that as the welfare reform bill of 1996 moved toward passage, seeing Senators Dodd and Hatch just off the floor madly negotiating how to add more money for child care, in a kind of intense duet — and feeling sort of sad that my boss, in implacable opposition, couldn’t really be a part of it. I remember watching the bipartisan group that tried to salvage something from the Clinton health care debacle throw themselves into ten-hour days of learning and bargaining, and I have a feeling, just as a distant observer, that the process was still gratifying and thrilling despite failing to produce a result.

And they have really been denied the opportunity to engage in this basic Senatorial need for a long time. It’s a need that Frist doesn’t share or recognize, and that the culture of one-party rule has aggressively denied them. To use a very crude and obvious metaphor, they’re like people who been involuntary celibate for a long time and now they all have brand-new girlfriends and boyfriends. Of course they want to do it again and again!

The “boss” referred to above is Bill Bradley, so the guy knows what he’s talking about.

An interesting mention in the Straight Dope last week about the Armenian genocides earlier in this century. Just one of those incomprehensibly horrific tragedies that numb the sensibilities by the scope of their devastation. Our emotions simply lack the dynamic range to really appreciate what it means to have over a million people — the population of Detroit, Michigan — be killed by their fellow humans.

Here is a list of the human-initiated events of the twentieth century that left over one million people dead. Wars, genocides, and famines are all lumped together, for what it’s worth. The numbers are very much up for debate; I’ve taken these from the much more comprehensive discussion by Matthew White. Talking about such a subject is difficult, because it immediately veers off into quibbling about the numbers and pointless comparisons about whose tragedy is worse or more shamefully neglected. All of these events are unique and horrible, and the reason they are worth remembering is to prevent their like from ever happening again.

1. Congo Free State, 1886-1908: 8,000,000 deaths. From disease and colonial atrocities. Some things, sadly, never change.
2. Mexican Revolution, 1910-1920: 1,000,000 deaths. The only 20th-century war to reach mainland American soil.
3. First World War, 1914-1918: 15,000,000 deaths. About 8,500,000 military deaths; of these, Austria-Hungary, Britain, France, Germany, and Russia each suffered over one million military deaths. The rest were civilians; both Russia and Turkey witnessed over two million civilian deaths, although the figure for Turkey is mixed in with the Armenian genocides.
4. Armenian Massacres, 1915-1923: 1,500,000 deaths. Suppression of the Christian minority by the Turkish government, relatively ignored in the West due to Turkey’s position as a crucial ally against Russia.
5. Russian Civil War, 1917-22: 9,000,000 deaths. Many (perhaps seven million) from famine and disease.
6. Stalin’s terror, 1924-1953: 20,000,000 deaths. Estimates vary widely, from fifteen to fifty million.
7. Nationalist China, 1928-1937: 3,100,000 deaths. Government led by Chiang Kai-Shek.
8. Second World War, 1937-45: 55,000,000 deaths. Approximately twenty million military deaths, the rest civilians. USSR with twenty million deaths, China with ten million. Hitler personally was responsible for about fifteen million deaths (not including indirectly the entire war), including of course six million Jewish deaths in the Holocaust.
9. Explusion of Germans from Eastern Europe, 1945-1947: 2,100,000 deaths. Mostly expelled from Poland.
10. Chinese Civil War, 1945-49: 2,500,000 deaths. Another hotly debated number, with estimates ranging from about one million to over six million.
11. North Korea, 1948 onward: 1,500,000 deaths. Highly uncertain figure.
12. Mao’s regime, 1949-1975: 40,000,000 deaths. Mostly famine-related deaths resulting from the “Great Leap Forward.”
13. Korean War, 1950-1953: 2,800,000 deaths. About half were North Korean deaths, mostly civilians.
14. Rwanda and Burundi, 1959-95: 1,350,000 deaths. Hutu and Tutsi back-and-forth genocides.
15. Indochina, 1960-75: 3,500,000 deaths. This is the wider conflict that includes the Vietnam War that the U.S. was involved in, but also includes civil wars in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam.
16. Ethiopia, 1962-92: 1,400,000 deaths. Two civil wars in the same country.
17. Nigeria, 1966-1970: 1,000,000 deaths. Post-colonial civil war.
18. Bangladesh, 1971: 1,250,000 deaths. Another highly uncertain figure.
19. Khmer Rouge, 1975-1978: 1,650,000 deaths. Pol Pot’s regime in Cambodia.
20. Mozambique, 1975-1992: 1,000,000 deaths. Fighting and famine devastated the country after independence in 1975, exacerbated by struggles in neighboring Zimbabwe and South Africa.
21. Afghanistan, 1979-2001: 1,800,000 deaths. The Soviet Union doesn’t want to lose its empire, and the U.S. and other countries funnel weapons to the Mujahideen.
22. Iran-Iraq War, 1980-1988: 1,000,000 deaths. The war in which Iranian volunteers were encouraged to wear white, in order to make their bloody martyrdom more telegenic.
23. Sudan, 1983-2005: 1,900,000 deaths. Fighting and famine. A comprehensive peace treaty was signed in January 2005.
24. Democratic Republic of Congo, 1998 onward: 3,300,000 deaths. Civil war, fueled by factions from neighboring countries.

I suppose there is some comfort in the fact that the total number of deaths was lower in the second half of the century than in the first. Not much.

Atrios is right (again, but in a different context): it is not necessarily illegal to read the Bible out loud in a public school.

PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) – A Pennsylvania school district violated the free-speech rights of a parent who was prevented from reading the Bible to her son’s kindergarten class, an attorney for the woman said on Monday.

The parent, Donna Busch, has filed a lawsuit against the Marple Newtown School District near Philadelphia, claiming her constitutional rights were breached when a school principal stopped her reading from the Bible in a class last October.

Busch, of Newtown Square, Pennsylvania, attended her son Wesley’s class as part of “Me Week,” which gave parents an opportunity to read aloud from their child’s favorite book.

Busch planned to read Psalm No. 118 but was told by the principal the reading would violate the separation of church and state, according to the suit filed earlier this month.

This is a case where church and state are simply supposed to be separate, not actively hostile. If the principal, or one of the teachers, were to read the Bible as a part of a regular school event (and not just a course that studied the Bible as literature and mythology), that would be completely inappropriate. But an individual parent has the right to come in and read what they like, even if they are clearly just trying to cause a stir. There really should be some straightforward set of guidelines that is handed out to all school officials who are faced with these issues — we shouldn’t have to go to the Supreme Court every time.

Of course, it would be just as okay for a parent to read from Why I Am Not a Christian, or any similar text. And I presume Ms. Busch would agree.

Buckets of money being offered to young physicists by the Templeton Foundation. I’ve sort of removed myself from the running, leaving the door open to other enterprising youngsters who might want to enter the competition.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: Julia Loving
215/789-2207, loving@metanexus.net

Over $100,000+ IN AWARDS OFFERED TO YOUNG PHYSICS RESEARCHERS
Prizes for bold and creative ideas, insights, innovations and inventions in physics.

PHILADELPHIA, USA…The Amazing Light Young Scholars Competition offers more than $100,000 in cash awards to “young” physics researchers under age 40 who are creating innovations in physics, inventing powerful new instruments for probing the nature of reality, developing new insights and inventions, and formulating bold and innovative ideas in physics. The competition is one part of a high-level international symposium, Amazing Light: Visions for Discovery that honors Nobel Laureate Charles Townes, inventor of the laser. The symposium will be held October 6-8, 2005, at the University of California, Berkeley.

Eighteen finalists will be invited to the symposium for presentation of their research. In addition to having all travel and conference expenses paid, nine will receive cash awards-three 1st prizes at $20,000, three 2nd prizes at $10,000, and three 3rd prizes at $5,000. The deadline for submitting entries is June 30, 2005; entries require a cover letter, abstract, short paper (2,500 words), and biosketch, submitted to young.scholars@metanexus.net . All details for entering the competition, including judging criteria and a downloadable PDF are available at the conference Web site www.foundationalquestions.net/townes/ysc.

Entries must align with one of three topical areas:
1. Research yielding powerful new insights and innovative concepts based primarily on quantum mechanics
2. Research yielding profound new insights and perspectives toward answering “really big questions” in astrophysics, cosmology, and physics-related interdisciplinary research areas engaging with biophysics, physical chemistry, electronics, quantum computing, etc.
3. Technological innovation linked with new deep physical insights generating powerful, innovative new physics-related technologies and specific inventions

Amazing Light: Visions for Discovery is focused on exploring and advancing the future of innovative research in physics. The major themes for the three-day symposium were inspired by and derived from Professor Townes’ ideas and questions explored through his lifetime of research. In particular, the program will focus on the challenge of producing powerful new technologies that-like the laser for which Charles Townes won the Nobel Prize-may generate opportunities to open up whole new domains of advancement in experimental physics. Conference attendees will include distinguished research leaders from around the world whose work is focused on the challenges of exploring the deep structure of reality and the technological potentialities for investigating nature in the coming decades.

Amazing Light is hosted by the University of California, Berkeley, sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation and other corporate and foundation contributors, and administered by Metanexus Institute. Some Young Scholars Competition prizes have been sponsored by Research Corporation of Tucson, Arizona. In addition to the Young Scholars Competition and the three-day symposium, the Amazing Light project also includes the Amazing Light Laser Challenge Web site competition, the publication of an academic volume arising from conference proceedings, a gala celebration honoring Professor Townes, and the launch of a major multi-year research project into foundational questions in physics and cosmology. Details of the project, including registration information, are available at www.foundationalquestions.net/townes.

Good catch over at Pandagon — the Associated Press doesn’t know what to make of those scary atheists.

Just how tolerant of Christianity and other religions are the atheists?

“We don’t hate Christians,” said David Fitzgerald, 40, an insurance broker and member of San Francisco Atheists. “People in this country are free to believe in whatever they want.”

Nonetheless, during the Saturday night movie, the crowd booed and hissed when a photo of Pat Robertson was displayed on the screen.

Robertson, the founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network and a former U.S. presidential candidate, is a leader in the efforts by some religious groups to return America and its government to Christian values.

Fitzgerald offered no apologies. “Robertson and other theocrats scare the hell out of us,” Fitzgerald said. “They want to turn a democracy into a theocracy. Even Christians are afraid of that.”

Jesse says what needs to be said. So does David Fitzgerald, for that matter. But still — “nonetheless”? Booing Pat Robertson is supposed to be incompatible with tolerating religious belief? Is tolerance supposed to demand a positive judgment of any religious person, no matter how odious?

And I like how Robertson is identified, for those who don’t know him, as “a leader in the efforts by some religious groups to return America and its government to Christian values.” Why not say that Robertson is “a leader in the campaign to blow up the State Department“? Really, he’s given us so much source material for colorful descriptions. He’s a leader in the campaign to, you know, tolerate other religious beliefs:

“You say you’re supposed to be nice to the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians and the Methodists and this, that, and the other thing. Nonsense. I don’t have to be nice to the spirit of the Antichrist. I can love the people who hold false opinions but I don’t have to be nice to them.”–Pat Robertson, The 700 Club, January 14, 1991

Don’t forget his strong feminist credentials:

“NOW is saying that in order to be a woman, you’ve got to be a lesbian.”–Pat Robertson, “The 700 Club,” 12/3/97

“The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians.” — Pat Robertson, fundraising letter, 1992

A leading Constitutional scholar:

“There is no such thing as separation of church and state in the Constitution. It is a lie of the Left and we are not going to take it anymore.” –Pat Robertson, November 1993 during an address to the American Center for Law and Justice

And always with an eye to protecting the children:

“I think we ought to close Halloween down. Do you want your children to dress up as witches? The Druids used to dress up like this when they were doing human sacrifice… [Your children] are acting out Satanic rituals and participating in it, and don’t even realize it.”–Pat Robertson, “The 700 Club,” 10/29/82

I guess, when you’re as accomplished as Pat, it’s hard to be summed up in just a few words.