Miscellany

Back in Chicago, for a day or two before flying off once more, after an enjoyable couple of days in New York (and DC before that). I was visiting the Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics, which is an active and fun place to think about fundamental physics and the universe. NYU has been on a hiring binge lately, and the CCPP has the demographics to prove it: Glennys Farrar (PhD 1971) is the sage leader, and the other six faculty members have all received their PhD’s since 1992. So they’re all at the top of their game, and are helping to make NYU one of the major players in this field. (In a couple of decades they’ll just be a collection of old faculty members taking up space; but won’t we all? Be old, I mean, not a collection of faculty members.) (Update: Astronomers, apparently, can be useful for quite a long time.)

While in New York, I got to see this blog in the newspaper: there is an article about academic blogging in this week’s Village Voice. It’s written by Geeta Dayal, who runs the Proven By Science blog. Looks like fellow Chicagoan Eszter Hargittai (of Crooked Timber fame) and I have learned the same lesson from blogging: that you have to actually think through what you are going to say, since it will be read by a bunch of people! Can’t be quite as casual as you are when you’re just expostulating over coffee. (Readers can judge for themselves how careful I actually am.)

One of the great things about academic blogs is the chance to see through the conventions of scholarly writing and peek at the extracurricular concerns of the flesh-and-blood people who comprise the professoriate. Here is as good an example as you will ever find: Michael Bérubé describing his son Jamie’s mastery of Beatles arcana. Jamie, if you aren’t familiar with the backstory, has Down’s syndrome, but don’t let that fool you; when it comes to the lyrics of the John songs and the Paul songs, Jamie will kick your ass.

By Tom Toles.

I’m still at NYU, giving a seminar this afternoon on inflation and the arrow of time. Tomorrow it’s back to Chicago, where I’ll be hosting Neal Lane, former White House Science Advisor. He’ll be giving our Physics Colloquium, with the the provocative title: “One perspective on American science – some trouble ahead!”

Then it’s off to Florida for the APS Meeting. I’m the organizer for a session on “Cosmological Constraints on Theories of Gravitation and Fundamental Physics,” featuring talks by Arthur Kosowsky, Hiranya Peiris, and fellow cosmologist/blogger Mark Trodden. Should be fun.

Not that any of this traveling is an excuse for flimsy blogging, but there you have it.

Among other responses to the post about fundamental physics in the U.S., there was a position that one occasionally hears: “Who cares about particle physics, we can just do astrophysics instead, it’s cheaper and more fun.” I’ve heard this claim even (especially?) from people who have been experimental particle physicists themselves, and have decided to move into astrophysics. This is actually quite an established career path, although not always the easiest one.

The truth is: that’s a fine philosophy if your concern is with the employment prospects of physicists, but not if your concern is understanding deep truths about nature. Both astronomy and accelerator-based experiments can teach us something about fundamental physics, but there is no sense in which one is a replacement for the other. That’s the point of the surveillance vs. interrogation metaphor. Astrophysics is like eavesdropping: you can overhear things that you wouldn’t learn under direct questioning, but you have to take what you can get. Astrophysicists take advantage of the fact that the universe provides higher energies and longer timescales than anything we can duplicate in the lab. But if there’s something specific you’d like to know, but it isn’t an important astrophysical process, you can’t learn anything about it. Particle physics is like interrogation: there are some questions that Nature will clam up and refuse to answer, but at least you can ask very detailed queries under well-controlled conditions.

To be somewhat less allegorical: imagine that we are able to detect dark matter, either “directly” (when we detect the collision of a dark matter particle with material in an underground cryogenic detector) or “indirectly” (when we observe radiation from the annihilation of dark matter particles in the centers of galaxies). Either scenario is quite plausible, if the dark matter is a weakly-interacting massive particle. But then you might like to know, so what is that particle? Is it the lightest supersymmetric partner? Is it a Kaluza-Klein state in a theory with universal extra dimensions? Is it something exotic and different, that we haven’t already theorized about? Astrophysical observations will never tell us the answer to these questions. You need to not only see the particle, but to measure its interactions with other particles, known and yet-to-be-discovered. The only way to do that is to push the energy frontier forward at particle accelerators. Similar stories can be told for questions about baryogenesis, extra dimensions, technicolor, and any other theory of physics beyond the Standard Model; Mark has posted about this, and I have a talk I gave a while back.

To be sure, particle physics has issues. Mostly, it’s extremely expensive. After the LHC at CERN, we’ll want to build the International Linear Collider, for which the numbers look like eight billion dollars or so. That’s a lot of cash to devote to pure intellectual curiosity. I think it’s well worth the cost, but others might not. That’s okay; it’s a debate worth having, and I’d be happy to defend the side of devoting some tiny fraction of our wealth to discovering the laws of nature. But it should be clear that this is the choice with which we are faced: spend the money, or don’t make the discoveries. Looking through telescopes will always be a complement to colliding particles, never a replacement.

National Poetry Month continues. (And I am still on the road, currently shifting from D.C. to NYC.) So here is a prose poem from Paris Spleen by Charles Baudelaire, translated by L.M. Friedman.

Unhappy perhaps is man, but happy the artist torn by desire.

I am burning to paint her, that enigmatic woman whom I had glimpsed so rarely and who fled so quickly, like something beautiful regretfully left behind by a traveler swept off into the night. Ah, how long it has been already since she vanished!

She is lovely, and more than lovely: she is astonishing. Darkness abounds in her, and she is inspired by everything deep and nocturnal. Her eyes are two caverns in which mystery vaguely flickers, and a sudden glance from her illuminates like a flash of lightning — an explosion in the dark of night.

I would compare her to a black sun, if only one could conceive of such a star pouring forth light and happiness. But it is the moon, rather, to which she is more readily likened; it is the moon that has marked her indelibly with its redoubtable influence; not the stark white moon of romantic idylls, that icy bride, but the sinister, inebriating moon suspended in the depths of a stormy night and brushed by racing clouds; not the peaceful, discreet moon visiting the sleep of guiltless men, but the moon ripped from the heavens, defeated and rebellious, that the Thessalian witches cruelly compelled to dance on the terrified grass.

In her little skull dwell a tenacious will and a love of prey. And yet from the lower part of that disturbing face, beneath restless nostrils eagerly inhaling the unknown and the impossible, laughter will burst out suddenly and with ineffable grace, and her wide mouth, all redness and whiteness — and delectable — makes one dream of the miracle of a superb flower blossoming in a volcanic soil.

There are women who fill men with a desire to conquer them and have their way with them; but this woman inspires a longing to die slowly under her gaze.

Greetings from Washington, D.C., where I gave a colloquium yesterday at Goddard Space Flight Center. Had fun catching up with old friends, and listening to NASA scuttlebut. (Science-wise, things are looking pretty gloomy right now, although not completely hopeless.) Less fun was when my laptop, for the first time ever, balked at transmitting my talk to the projector. I managed to convert my OpenOffice presentation to PowerPoint, saved it to a flash drive, transferred it to another laptop, and used that. (I don’t have PowerPoint on my computer, and nobody else has OpenOffice.) So it was salvageable, but about 10% of my figures didn’t show up, which was disconcerting.

In lieu of substantive blogging, the good news is that I am now empowered to participate in everyone’s favorite blog game: the Friday Random Ten, in which you put your iPod (or whatever) on shuffle and list the first ten songs that show up. I think I saw it first at Rox Populi (who disowned it, but can’t seem to give up), but also at Feministe, Pandagon, Pharyngula, Grammar.police, Majikthise, Yglesias, and Crescat — so an eclectic crowd indeed. After buying the damn iPod six months ago, I have finally gotten around to downloading my CD’s to it (half of them, anyway), and am now equipped to play along. Day late, dollar short, whatever.

1. Pat Metheny Group, Double Blind
2. Maria Papadopoulou, Maskaremeni
3. Aretha Franklin, Hello Sunshine
4. Cecilia Bartoli, E’ Amore Un Landroncello
5. Living Colour, Time’s Up
6. PJ Harvey, Is That All There Is?
7. Duke Ellington, Wig Wise
   
8. Yes, South Side of the Sky
9. Isaac Hayes, Chocolate Chip
10. Lauryn Hill, I Used To Love Him
    

Not sure how accurate a window into my soul this is supposed to provide. But any technology that juxtaposes Yes with Isaac Hayes can’t be all bad. The world needs more progressive soul. (Or hot-buttered pretension, depending on your view.)

Book royalties are not subject to self-employment taxes. Hey, I don’t make the rules.

Tavis Smiley is a hard worker, hosting talk shows on both PBS and public radio. (He’s no longer doing a daily show on NPR, but will be starting again with a weekend show for Public Radio International.) Tavis can be goofy at times, but I owe him big time for introducing me to Oscar Brown Jr.

Born in Chicago in 1926, Brown is probably most famous as a singer, songwriter, and lyricist. But he has also been active in television, and at the age of 26 hosted the nation’s first Black radio news show. His masterpiece is his first album, Sin and Soul from 1960. The songs are a mixture of styles, from the deadly serious to the lushly beautiful to the cheerfully frivolous. The most well-known is Afro Blue, a tune that started life as an instrumental written by Mongo Santamaria. It became famous when John Coltrane recorded it, but became a standard after Brown wrote lyrics for it.

If anything, the flaw in the album is that Brown has too much range, and will juxtapose a jaunty ditty with something deadly serious. An example of the latter is my favorite song on the album, Bid ‘Em In. Brown sings it almost a cappella, in the style of an auctioneer, accompanied only by the percussive rap of a gavel. It tells the story of the auction of a slave girl.

Bid ’em in! Get ’em in!
That sun is hot and plenty bright.
Let’s get down to business and get home tonight.
Bid ’em in!

Auctioning slaves is a real high art.
Bring that young gal, Roy. She’s good for a start.
Bid ’em in! Get ’em in!

Now here’s a real good buy only about 15.
Her great grandmammy was a Dahomey queen.
Just look at her face, she sure ain’t homely.
Like Sheba in the Bible, she’s black but comely.
Bid ’em in!

Gonna start her at three. Can I hear three?
Step up gents. Take a good look see.
Cause I know you’ll want her once you’ve seen her.
She’s young and ripe. Make a darn good breeder.
Bid ’em in!

She’s good in the fields. She can sew and cook.
Strip her down Roy, let the gentlemen look.
She’s full up front and ample behind.
Examine her teeth if you’ve got a mind.
Bid ’em in! Get ’em in!

Here’s a bid of three from a man who’s thrifty.
Three twenty five! Can I hear three fifty?
Your money ain’t earning you much in the banks.
Turn her around Roy, let ’em look at her flanks.
Bid ’em in!

Three fifty’s bid. I’m looking for four.
At four hundred dollars she’s a bargain sure.
Four is the bid. Four fifty. Five!
Five hundred dollars. Now look alive!
Bid ’em in! Get ’em in!

Don’t mind them tears, that’s one of her tricks.
Five fifty’s bid and who’ll say six?
She’s healthy and strong and well equipped.
Make a fine lady’s maid when she’s properly whipped.
Bid ’em in!

Six! Six fifty! Don’t be slow.
Seven is the bid. Gonna let her go.
At seven she’s going!
Going!
Gone!
Pull her down Roy, bring the next one on.
Bid ’em in! Get ’em in! Bid ’em in!

The song enjoyed a rediscovery last year, when it was made into a short animated film by Neal Sopata. The film is astonishing and powerful, although I would give most of the credit to the song itself. Hopefully publicity from film will turn a new audience onto the work of this master.

Scientists who work on fundamental physics, especially in the U.S., are feeling a kind of urgency these days — we have to hurry up and get as much research done as we can before the government puts us completely out of business. Belle Waring complains about the shutdown of the Voyager mission, which is indeed a shame, if mostly for sentimental reasons. A much harder hit is NASA’s cancellation of the Astrophysics Data Analysis and Long Term Space Astrophysics programs. These programs were a main way to support young scientists (grad students, postdocs, junior faculty) working on theory and data analysis with broad application to NASA’s satellite observatories. In other words, in the midst of a golden age of new theories and experiments, we are strangling the field at the point where new blood is entering.

For those of you with more Earth-based concerns, you should know that the U.S. is also basically abandoning experimental particle physics (pdf version if that one is inaccessible). The Tevatron at Fermilab will run through the end of the decade, after which there is basically nothing left in the budget for high-energy physics in the U.S. By that time the focus will move to the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva, and the traditional brain-drain of bright physicists from Europe to the U.S. will reverse its direction. My real interest is in the health of the field, not in maintaining U.S. dominance, but it will be hard for the field to stay very healthy if the U.S. isn’t a major player. Our best hope for a turnaround is if the U.S. makes a serious bid to host the International Linear Collider; but that’s a long way off, and the tea leaves don’t look so promising. (Update: Just noticed that Peter wrote about the same thing.)

But okay, I don’t want to be gloomy all the time, so here’s some good news: the LIGO gravitational-wave observatory continues to make progress toward their design goals. LIGO, the Laser Interferometric Gravitational-wave Observatory, consists of two facilities — one in Hanford, Washington, and the other in Livingston, Louisiana. Each facility shoots lasers down two four-kilometer evacuated tubes, where they bounce off suspended mirrors and come back. By comparing the phases of the light from each tube, you can look for tiny changes in their length, which would signal a passing gravitational wave.

Of course, you’re looking for really tiny changes in length; about one part in 10²¹ or so. Which, over four kilometers, adds up to significantly less than the size of a single atomic nucleus. So you have to be pretty sensitive. LIGO has been operational for a few years now, and they are steadily beating down the noise curve — the amount of irreducible jiggle in the detector that you can’t get rid of. The idea is that anything you observe on top of the noise is an actual signal, such as a pair of inspiraling neutron stars giving off gravitational waves. According an update by David Shoemaker in the most recent Matters of Gravity, the LIGO folks are making significant progress in eliminating various noise sources, such as trucks rolling by.

Here’s the graph of noise versus frequency, showing both the goal (solid line at bottom) and what levels they have achieved over time. (Click for larger size.) As you see, they are getting there, and have already decreased the noise by something like three orders of magnitude over the last couple of years. LIGO may or may not see anything in its current configuration; a planned upgrade to “Advanced LIGO” is much more likely to actually detect a gravitational wave. Once they do, it will open a completely new window onto the universe.

Paul Krugman states the obvious: one reason why academics tend to be liberals is that modern conservatism has become increasingly anti-reason and anti-intellectual.

Scientific American may think that evolution is supported by mountains of evidence, but President Bush declares that “the jury is still out.” Senator James Inhofe dismisses the vast body of research supporting the scientific consensus on climate change as a “gigantic hoax.” And conservative pundits like George Will write approvingly about Michael Crichton’s anti-environmentalist fantasies.

Think of the message this sends: today’s Republican Party – increasingly dominated by people who believe truth should be determined by revelation, not research – doesn’t respect science, or scholarship in general. It shouldn’t be surprising that scholars have returned the favor by losing respect for the Republican Party.

But honestly, this reasoning is a little self-congratulatory and superficial (even if it contains a lot of truth). The tendency of academics to be liberal runs much deeper than a reaction against the current wave of know-nothingism in the Republican party.

If we try to put in terms that are as value-neutral as possible, I think that it comes down to idealism and universalism. Conservatives tend to take pride in their tough-mindedness, a realistic and hard-nosed approach to the dog-eat-dog world we find ourselves in. Looking out for number one is not only a life strategy, but a moral good. Academics, meanwhile, tend to have a different set of values; not only do they value learning for its own sake (above more straightforward values of material success), but they develop an ability to understand and sympathize with people in different groups and circumstances. In the truest sense of the word, to be “conservative” is to cherish certain established verities, while a good academic is always questioning accepted ideas, and approaching alternatives in a spirit of open-mindedness. That’s why you’ll always find universities to be mostly liberal, even in the hard sciences (where even the most paranoid conservatives don’t think that faculty are hired on the basis of their political views). None of the legislation that David Horowitz tries to get passed will ever change that.

PZ Myers, presumably exhausted from smacking down the same tired arguments from creationists (I know I would be), has tossed one to me. It’s against Einstein instead of Darwin, so it’s my bailiwick, I have to admit. But this little piece of foolishness — a brief piece against special relativity on a website grammatically entitled Intelligent Design the Future — is so thoroughly clueless that’s it’s not even mildly diverting. If these people weren’t taking over the country, they wouldn’t even rise to the level of being amusing.

So, instead of going through the nonsense point-by-point, I thought it would be more useful for me to offer a little set of guidelines to the discerning reader: Signs That You Might Not Be Reading A Sensible Critique of Relativity.

1. Critic seems to get understanding of Einstein from an article in the New Yorker, rather than from Einstein (or a stylish textbook).
2. Critic suggests that Einstein “did away with change,” without explaining what that means.
3. Critic defends notion of simultaneity by repeated reference to stuff going on “right now.”
4. Critic claims that special relativity did away with Newtonian absolute time, but that it reappeared in general relativity.
5. That “right now” thing — okay, I just can’t get over that.
6. Critic wouldn’t recognize the Riemann tensor if it bit him on the nose. (Not explicitly stated in the article, but the signs are clear.)

Each sign, as you may guess, is displayed prominently over at ID the F. Sadly, the list is far from exhaustive; there are numerous ways to demonstrate cluelessness about modern physics that weren’t on display in this particular article. Perhaps we could keep a running tally?

Here’s the truth: Einstein proposed that the amount of time elapsed between two spacetime events depends (in a very definite way) on the path taken between those events. It is not simply a universal constant, as it would be in Newtonian physics. So the notion of “simultaneity” for distant events is just a useful approximation, valid when everyone is traveling slowly compared to the speed of light. And you know what? Einstein was right. It’s been verified over and over again, from the lifetimes of rapidly-moving subatomic particles to the time kept by atomic clocks moving in airplanes. Deal with it.

And here’s a little request for anyone else who wants to point out flaws in Einstein. Whatever else you might think, Einstein was a smart cookie. Nothing he said was sacred (my first published paper proposed a theory that violated some of Einstein’s ideas, as have several of my subsequent papers), but you should at least understand what he said before you claim to improve on it. So take a gander at the problem sets for my course in general relativity, and have a go. If you get an average of over 50% on all the sets (as all of the students in my class did), I’ll give your ideas a respectful hearing. Otherwise, you should go back and hit the books if you expect anyone to take you seriously.