Miscellany

So it will be North Carolina against Illinois for all the marbles tonight. As Michael Bérubé notes, the Illini victory against Louisville was probably abetted by the fact that they left Chief Illiniwek at home.

Here’s a short essay about the Chief by Philip Phillips, a physicist at UIUC. Philip was one of the Illinois faculty who won a legal case against the University administration after the latter tried to forbid them from contacting athletes the University was trying to recruit. It was a brilliant idea, really: just call up all the high school basketball and football players that were targeted by UIUC, and explain to them the travesty of the Chief. Stuff that would normally go under the protection of “free speech,” but the University claimed that it would be in violation of NCAA regulations. Usually those regulations are trying to limit the ability of different schools to attract athletes, not keep them away, but it was a convenient excuse.

My favorite historical Pope is Celestine V, one of the Bad Popes described so entertainingly in E.R. Chamberlin’s book of the same name.

In 1294 the Papacy wielded a great deal more power than it does today, and the great families of Rome were constantly jockeying to put their own upon St. Peter’s throne. Deliberations by the College of Cardinals would often drag on interminably, and this time was especially bad, having reached eighteen months as a deadlock between the Colonna and Orsini families seemed unbreakable. In frustration, one of the Cardinals nominated Pietro di Morrone, a holy hermit who preferred to live in small, dirty mountain caves, even as he grew in renown among the most devout. In even greater frustration, the rest of the College agreed, and Pietro was dragged out of his cave to become Celestine V.

But not dragged back to Rome; he refused to go, and (encouraged by King Charles of Naples) set up court at Castello Nuovo in the South. He had a small wooden cell constructed, resembling a cave, where he could hide himself. His followers rejoiced that the dominance of sin and corruption was at an end, to be replaced by a reign of love guided by the Holy Spirit. But Celestine was an awful pope; he issued contradictory orders, granted any request he received, and allowed the papal bureaucracy to crumble into disarray.

Finally, listening to the urgings of Cardinal Benedict Gaetani, Celestine took the unprecedented step of resigning as Pope, after a reign of just fifteen weeks. The College met again, and within twenty-four hours Gaetani was elected Pope, taking the name Boniface VIII. The ambitious lawyer was faced with a problem, however; Celestine, even though abdicated and desiring nothing other than to return to obscurity, could serve as a rallying point for the new Pope’s enemies. So Boniface had him transported back to Rome, but Celestine and some of his supporters arranged an escape along the way. Eventually, in the course of an attempted crossing of the Adriatic to Greece, he was caught and dragged back to the Holy City, where he was imprisoned in the isolated fortress of Fumone. He died less than a year later, but not before offering a prophesy to Boniface: “You have entered like a fox, you will reign like a lion — and you will die like a dog.” Boniface ruled for nine years, putting down numerous rebellions by competing families, eventually locking himself in the Lateran palace, where he died in despair, planning insane revenges against his enemies.

Celestine was canonized in 1313. There has been no Celestine VI. Maybe the next Pope will choose to rehabilitate the name.

April is National Poetry Month, as diligent readers of the Preposterous blogroll have already been told by Lauren, Roxanne, and Amanda (at the least — I’m not the most diligent reader myself). Since we already have occasional poetry around here, let’s celebrate by dipping into the classics. How about Shakespeare’s 18th Sonnet?

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st,
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Perhaps you’ve heard this one before, but it holds up. It’s on my mind due to a scene from Tom Stoppard’s Travesties, currently playing at the Court Theatre at UofC. In the play, Dadaist poet Tristan Tzara creates a new work by cutting the sonnet into fragments and pulling them randomly out of a hat.

Darling–
shake thou thy gold buds
the untrimmed but short fair shade
shines–
see, this lovely hot possession growest
so long
by nature’s course–
so … long — heaven!
And declines,
summer changing, more temperate complexion …

Quite a compelling result — but something tells me the version presented in the play wasn’t really produced quite so randomly.

What will they think of next? Google ride finder. See where taxis are throughout Chicago, in real time. (Probably they have other cities as well.)

No time for substantive blogging, as today is the Open House for prospective grad students in both Physics and Astronomy and Astrophysics here at UofC. My duty is to convince everyone that this is the best place in the world, which fortunately isn’t such a hard sell.

I do find myself explaining that my own trajectory is not a good role model. I’m one of the few physics professors you’ll find without any degrees in physics (I was in Astronomy departments for both undergrad and grad school). In my day (late 80’s, early 90’s), it wasn’t clear where to specialize if you were interested in particle physics and/or cosmology — there weren’t any specialties that were especially lively. Now there are too many — inflation and its connections to the CMB and large-scale structure, dark matter theory and experiment, dark energy theory and experiment, ultra-high-energy cosmic rays, galaxy clusters and the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect, accelerator-based particle physics, numerical relativity and field theory, particle phenomenology, string theory and cosmology, pure string theory, gravitational-wave astrophysics, and a couple dozen areas outside the realm of field theory and cosmology. All of these areas are more exciting than they were fifteen years ago. Kids today don’t know how good they have it.

The good news is: Brad DeLong was right. Madeleine Peyroux does an amazing cover of “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go.” Sufficiently good that I went out and got the whole CD, which is a treat. Peyroux sounds like a young Billie Holliday (sometimes too much so, but okay, you could pick worse role models), with just the hint of a French accent. Simply but jazzy arrangements of clever songs, sung with a sly inflection. “Don’t Wait Too Long” and “Weary Blues from Waitin'” are other highlights.

The bad news is: After getting the CD and congratulating myself for finding new music in such an esoteric fashion (I mean, what’s hipper than reading blogs by economists?), I go to grab a coffee and find that Peyroux is in heavy rotation at my local Starbucks. And there’s the CD for sale, prominently displayed at the checkout counter. Just another commodity being pushed by the corporate machine.

I will never be cool.

(On the other hand, part of this post was written while connected via wireless in the waiting room of my local auto shop, where I am getting a flat tire fixed. So that’s pretty cool. Not the flat, but having wireless in the auto shop.)

Okay, I suppose there is no official “conservative platform” that people get together and vote on. But it’s clear that mainstream conservatism is increasingly comfortable with the idea of attacking science and supporting creationism. The latest indication is this notice for an upcoming Heritage Foundation event (from Pharyngula and Political Animal):

A growing number of scientists around the world no longer believe that natural selection or chemistry, alone, can explain the origins of life. Instead, they think that the microscopic world of the cell provides evidence of purpose and design in nature — a theory based upon compelling biochemical evidence. Join us as Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, a key design theorist and philosopher of science, explains this powerful and controversial concept on the mysteries of life.

What a blatant pack of lies. And not lies about contestable political opinions, either. (You will not be surprised to learn that Dr. Meyer has no degrees in biology.)

The Heritage Foundation isn’t a fringe group devoted to promulgating superstition — it’s one of the most influential conservative think tanks. I know there are plenty of people who are educated and intellectually honest and think of themselves as conservative — at what point do their heads begin to explode?

For those of you interested in the attempt by Kolb, Matarrese, Notari, and Riotto to do away with dark energy, some enterprising young cosmologists (not me, I’m too old to move that quickly) have cranked through the equations and come out defending the conventional wisdom. Three papers in particular seem interesting:

• Éanna Flanagan, hep-th/0503202
  “Can superhorizon perturbations drive the acceleration of the Universe?”
• Christopher Hirata and Uros Seljak, astro-ph/0503582
  “Can superhorizon cosmological perturbations explain the acceleration of the universe?”
• Ghazal Geshnizjani, Daniel Chung, and Niayesh Afshordi, astro-ph/0503553
  “Do large-scale inhomogeneities explain away dark energy?”

I think the general lesson seems basically in line with my earlier suspicions. (Not that I’m claiming any sort of priority; the people who do the work should get the credit.) I mentioned the idea of the vacuole models, which give you exact solutions for large-scale perturbations without any spatial gradients. In that case you recover precisely the ordinary Friedmann equation governing cosmological evolution, just with a set of cosmological parameters that differ from the background values. Of course this isn’t the end of the story, because in general perturbations will have spatial gradients, even if they are expected to be small for very long-wavelength modes. If they’re not small, they should probably show up in other ways — as spatial curvature, or as large-scale anisotropies.

The new papers seem to demonstrate that this is indeed the case. (See also comments by Jacques and Lubošš.) You can use a GR trick (the Raychaudhuri equation) to define what is basically the “locally measured Hubble constant and deceleration parameter,” and relate them to the locally measured energy density and pressure, as well as the “shear” and “vorticity” of the fluid filling the universe. The important thing, of course, is that everything is defined at each tiny region of spacetime, without appealing to what is happening far away. For a perfectly homogeneous and isotropic universe, the shear and vorticity vanish, and you recover the ordinary Friedmann equation (that’s the lesson of the vacuole models). Perturbations with spatial gradients will generically induce both shear (stretching) and vorticity (twisting) of the fluid, and these can indeed lead to deviations from the Friedmann relation. But the effect of shear is always to make the universe decelerate even faster, not to make it accelerate. Vorticity can lead to acceleration, but it is usually small; indeed (as mentioned by Hirata and Seljak), in the KMNR set-up the vorticity is zero all along. So there can’t be any acceleration. In fact Hirata and Seljak claim to have found exactly where the higher-order perturbative analysis of KMNR went astray; I haven’t checked it myself, but they’re most likely right.

You will have noticed, of course, that there weren’t very many days in between the appearance of the original paper and the appearance of various refutations. I can imagine what these folks all went through, working diligently through the weekend. I did that myself once, when a misleading paper (much much worse than KMNR) was getting a lot of attention and needed to be set straight, but I’m glad it’s not my standard operating procedure.

What would be really nice, even if the ultimate consensus settles down to a judgment that KMNR weren’t right, is if people understood that this is the way science works. Individual papers may be right or wrong; but they are put out there for the community to debate about, different critiques are put forward, and eventually the truth comes out. Everyone is after the same thing, trying to figure out how the universe works. Something our creationist friends will never quite appreciate.

This Thursday I’ll be giving the physics colloquium here at UofC, on “Why is the Universe Accelerating?” Not that I know the answer, but I’ll be running through some of the possibilities. Talk at 4:15, cookies upstairs at 3:45; anyone in the area is welcome to drop by.

This announcement brought to you as part of the proud blogospherical tradition of shameless self-promotion. (In spite of which, the outside world manages to pretend that substantive liberal bloggers don’t exist. What do we have to do?)

Scientists, even more than most people, like to believe that appearance is irrelevant; it’s the substance of a person’s work that counts. Of course this is rubbish. Substance does count, but so does presentation. This maxim holds for everything from how you write papers (where a clear and honest presentation can make your paper much more influential than it would be if it were confusing) to how you dress from day to day. Whatever we might want to pretend, people will judge you by how you look. Of course, this truism is complicated by the fact that different people will judge you completely differently, but they’ll be judging you nonetheless.

As with many things about being a scientist, it’s significantly more problematic for women. Here is one woman’s take on the issue; this is an extract from an essay by Heidi Newberg, a physicist at RPI (and one of the few scientists you’ll find who’ve appeared in Glamour).

Women know that the way we dress has a big effect on others’ first impression of us, and there are many pitfalls involved with dressing to give a lecture. The most serious wardrobe mistake that can be made by a young woman giving a professional talk is to wear clothing that is designed to make men think about sex. While you might get away with plunging necklines, bare midriffs, low-cut pants, shirts without sleeves, mini-skirts, spiked heels, and overly dangly jewelry in other contexts, even in the workplace, this clothing is far too distracting for a presentation in which you are already the focus of attention. Wearing suggestive clothing is guaranteed to focus your audience on various parts of your anatomy, rather than listening to the message you are trying to communicate. This is confusing to young women, since women are routinely expected to wear such things when they dress up for a “formal occasion.” When men dress up for work, they wear a suit. When men dress up for romance, they wear a suit. Women must make a distinction here between appropriate professional clothing, which can look feminine and pretty but not sexy, and appropriate dating-wear, which is supposed to look sexy if you want it to work. I have been at talks in which a young woman has worn clothing that is so distracting that even I have had some difficulty paying attention to what she was saying – and of course when she was finished there was not a single question from the audience.

I think there is a lot of truth there, although I wouldn’t be as directly prescriptive as Heidi. The clear point, applicable to persons of any gender, is that, if you are wondering whether people judge you on the basis of how you look, the answer is an unambiguous “yes.” But it’s up to you to decide what to do with that fact. Maybe you want to be sexy, or maybe you just want to blend into the woodwork; but there is no simple neutral place to stand at which no judgments are being made of you. What do you want those judgments to be? Do you care?

There is a range of complex possibilities on both sides (you and whoever is looking at you). If you put some effort into your clothes, some people may judge you to be frivolous, while others will treat you with greater respect. Academics in general, scientists in particular, often implicitly attach a kind of moral superiority to nondescript clothing. If you look like you actually put some kind of an effort into how you look, you are automatically suspect. Especially if you are female, some of your colleagues will not take you as seriously if you are perceived as stylish, not to mention sexy. (For many people, one of the attractive features about science is that it can serve as an escape from all the terribly messy and ambiguous features of human interactions, and if you remind them of these things they can become insecure and defensive. Or jealous. Or intimidated.) At the same time, others might tend to take you more seriously, for better or for worse — they might perceive you as just a little bit more with-it and competent than your slovenly colleagues. The only certain mistake is to think that it doesn’t matter at all.

In a similar discussion, profgrrrrl concludes that “the most important thing is to be yourself.” After all, just because someone is judging you on the basis of how you dress, doesn’t mean you have to care. Only by flouting the various unwritten rules that surround us can we ever hope to change them. Whether that’s important to you is for only you to decide.