Miscellany

Sometimes the truth just slips out. (Via atrios.)

“We’ve been attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of the culture.”

That would be Patror Ray Mummert, who wants to put Intelligent Design creationism in the schools of Dover, PA. Let’s hope that segment keeps attacking.

I will go one tiny step further than Ogged and claim that it actually is funny, and perhaps even ironic: China’s Human Rights Report on the U.S.

And of course, because this is the internet, the obvious cannot be repeated clearly enough: yes, the United States has a much better record on human rights than China does, or indeed than many parts of the world. And the Chinese report is not exactly a paragon of objective analysis. Doesn’t mean we’re perfect, and certainly no reason to be happy about our own situation. Any American who is not angry and embarrassed at the conditions of African-Americans in this country is just not paying attention.

Another great American holiday is upon us: the Final Four. In which the flower of our nation’s youth, in the form of the best men’s college basketball teams in the land, engage in fierce combat for hoops supremacy.

The NCAA men’s basketball tournament is easily one of the most entertaining sports events we have, far surpassing the overhyped Super Bowl for actual excitement. The one-and-done format with sixty-five teams leads to thrilling games, especially because on any given night some plucky underdogs can get it together to topple a heavily favored basketball power. Except, of course, when you have to play seven-on-five, because the referees are blantantly against you. Such an episode occured on Friday, when the valiant Wildcats of Villanova were completely robbed in their upset bid against haughty North Carolina, when the referee hallucinated a traveling violation against Allan Ray in the final seconds. The Tar Heels will go on to play Michigan State on Saturday.

The other game will feature Louisville against the University of Illinois. The latter is the state university of my adoptive home, so I should be rooting for them. But I won’t. The reason why is a long-standing embarassment that the university refuses to abandon: the tradition of Chief Illiniwek dancing around at halftime.

As you might expect, there are those who take offense at some white college student in face paint and fake feathers pretending to be a Native American chieftain (who never really existed) in order to fire up the fans at a basketball game. There are others who smirk at this excess of political correctness, and will argue with a straight face that the Chief is actually honoring the strength and determination of the native tribes of Illinois.

Except, here’s the funny thing. It’s kind of hard to argue that the Chief’s dance is in honor of Native Americans, if you look at the history of the thing. You see, the Chief’s halftime show dates back to 1927, a time when the Civilization Act of 1819 was still law. You remember the Civilization Act, don’t you? Among other things, it made it illegal for any actual Native Americans to perform their own tribal dances, since that amounted to a practice of their religion, which was banned. (Thanks to Philip Phillips for telling me about some of the history.) So, it’s hard to construe the dancing white guy in face paint as anything other than an offensive caricature.

Everyone knows this; the faculty and the student goverment of the university have voted resoundingly to drop the Chief as their mascot. Not to mention Native American groups, of course. These bodies, unfortunately, are not the ones of primary importance to the university trustees; and the alumni (who donate money) love the Chief. And Native Americans don’t have nearly the visibility or clout that other groups have; it’s easy enough to imagine the uproar if various other racial stereotypes were used as sporting mascots.

Who knows, maybe the heightened publicity from the Final Four will finally force Illinois to do something about the Chief. That was Larry Summers’ secret plan to get people talking about women in science, wasn’t it?

John Holbo shares a quote from Thomas Mann’s Felix Krull, Confidence Man, about Felix’s days as a pimp. My favorite part of the book was the account of Felix getting an impromptu lesson about cosmology.

. . . Meanwhile, Being celebrated its tumultuous festival in the measureless spaces that were its handiwork and in which it created distances congealed in icy emptiness. And he spoke of the gigantic setting of this festival, the universe, this mortal child of eternal Nothingness, filled with countless material bodies, meteors, moons, comets, nebulas, unnumbered millions of stars that swayed one another, were ordered by the effect of their gravitational fields into groups, clouds, galaxies, and super-systems of galaxies, each with enormous numbers of flaming suns, wheeling planets, masses of attenuated gas, and cold rubbish heaps of ice, stone, and cosmic dust . . .

While the Earth wheeled around its sun, so I was privileged to hear, that earth and its moon wheeled around each other, and at the same time our whole local star system moved, and at no mean pace, within the framework of a vaster but still very local star group. This gravitating system in turn wheeled with almost vulgar velocity within the Milky Way; the latter, moreover, our Milky Way, was traveling with unimaginable rapidity in respect to its far-away sisters, and they, the most distant existing complexes, were, in addition to all their other velocities, flying away from one another, at a rate that would make an exploding shell seem motionless — flying away in all directions into Nothingness, thereby in their headlong career projecting into it space and time.

This interdependent whirling and circling, this convolution of gases into heavenly bodies, this burning, flaming, freezing, exploding, pulverizing, this plunging and speeding, bred out of Nothingness and awaking Nothingness — which would perhaps have preferred to remain asleep and was waiting to fall asleep again — all this was Being, known also as Nature, and everywhere in everything it was one.

Published in 1955, the year Mann died. He didn’t know about dark matter and dark energy, but that’s okay.

Today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day is one of my favorite images — a composite view of the Crab Nebula, created by combining images from the Hubble Space Telescope and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory.

The real nebula wouldn’t look precisely like this, unless you have X-ray vision. (When I was growing up, pictures of the Crab Nebula looked like this. And we thought it was cool when they started to look like this. Kids today are so spoiled.) The blue part of the image comes from the X-rays observed by Chandra, while the red part is the optical light measured by HST; you can easily make out a disk, several light-years across, as well as a jet being emitted perpendicular to the disk. The energy driving the emission comes from a pulsar at the center of the disk. The pulsar is a rapidly rotating neutron star, the remnant of a supernova explosion observed here on Earth in 1054. Interestingly, the event was recorded by astronomers in China and also by Native Americans, but not by any European or Arab astronomers.

Don’t miss the movies of ripples propagating through the jet and disk.

On Sunday I gave the Literary Lecture for the performance of Charlotte Jones’ play Humble Boy at Remy Bumppo Theatre Company. The acting and presentation are great, it’s well worth seeing if you’re in the area. One of the many relatively small-scale companies that make Chicago such a fantastic theater town.

My job was to chat a little about the science background of the play. The protagonist, Felix, is a theoretical physicist at Cambridge, trying to use string theory to unify gravity and quantum mechanics. (The author was inspired by hearing an interview with Brian Greene.) Felix is presented as rumpled, stuttering, socially awkward, tending to appeal to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle in difficult situations — pretty much your typical physicist. I talked a little about the use of scientific concepts as fertile source material for metaphors; in this case, the irreconcilable differences between gravitation and quantum mechanics are presented as analogous to the irreconcilable differences between Felix’s mother and father.

Felix: It’s like my mother was the big force — gently warping everything around her. And my father was the little force, fizzing away quietly on a microscopic level. But I can’t bring them together. I mean, I know the geography of it. It was outside the exam halls of the school of B-biology, London University. My father had just finished his Finals and he walked out and my mother was just p-passing. She’d p-paused to light a cigarette. She was on her way to sign up to a modeling agency. He went up to her and asked her if she’d dropped from the sky. She never got to the agency.

Rosie: That doesn’t sound so extreme.

Felix: But that’s not the physics! The physics of what attracted them and what kept them together.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the two forces came together outside the biology building. When I gave my talk at the Santa Barbara conference, I noticed that this was a consistent theme: writers seem to enjoy hinting that physicists would have an easier time unifying the forces of nature if only they would get out and have more sex. From the audience, Steve Girvin chimed in with “Wouldn’t hurt to try.”

Look, I’m as big a fan of the rule of law as the next guy. So I sympathize when people get upset because the religious right wants to toss the law out the window when it appeals to them; for a not-notoriously-liberal example see Andrew Sullivan (via uggabugga).

But, let’s be honest. Imagine that something I thought was terribly immoral was happening, in full accordance with the rule of law. Laws banning gay marriage, for example. Then I would work as hard as I could to get the laws changed. As Will Baude points out, that’s basically what DeLay and his cronies are trying to do in the Terri Schiavo case; they’re working fully within our constitutional machinery, trying to alter the laws to get the outcome they desire. (Of course, they’re doing it for ghoulish political reasons, not moral ones. And they’re not doing a very good job, passing legislation that is blatantly unconstitutional, ignoring separation of powers, and so forth. But because these are such shoddy and desperate measures, they will ultimately fail; that’s the way the system works. Nobody is manning the ramparts and ruling by force.)

Put another way: let’s imagine that an actually qualified doctor (and no, random Nobel Prize “nominations” don’t count) invented a miracle cure that could truly restore Schiavo to her pre-heart-attack state, with full mental faculties. Then I would be all in favor of keeping her alive until the cure could be tried, no matter what Michael Schiavo wanted to do, or was allowed to do by the law. And toward that end, if I were a legislator, I’d be trying everything I could think up to keep her alive.

So the crux of the matter is really that there is no such miracle cure. Terri Schiavo, the person, is gone. Her cerebral cortex has been destroyed. There is no possible way for her to be restored. It’s really an appreciation of this fact about how reality works, rather than an abstract respect for the rule of law, that separates the different sides of this issue. Those who think that Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube should be removed, in accordance with her own wishes and those of her legal guardian, understand the blunt fact about her state, namely that she is for all important purposes dead. Those who think there is a moral imperative to keep the tube in are under the misimpression that there is still a functioning person there, and that letting her die would be murder.

Those people are wrong. Over at Shakespeare’s Sister there is an interesting discussion of how secular and religious liberals can relate to each other. I think that to many of us secular types, we can easily get along with religious liberals on almost any issue; but there will always be an underlying difference, because (to us) they are getting wrong some basic features about how the universe works. Most religious liberals are not in favor of dramatic intervention in the Schiavo case, but it wouldn’t be intellectually inconsistent for them to be — perhaps God will somehow work a miraculous cure. An acceptance of the fact that the laws of nature really are laws, and that the universe isn’t going to put them aside for occasional interventions in our personal interests, sometimes does affect how we live our everyday lives.

Update: For discussion of what it means to be lacking higher-brain functions, read Chris at Mixing Memory.

The folks at Wonkette, finger on the pulse as usual, have noticed this important Business Week poll concerning the Presidential prospects of leading statespeople of a certain gender. You know, the gender that some people don’t think have as much intrinsic aptitude at science (or blogging about politics, it would appear) as that other gender. Whatever, one day one of those folks is going to be President, and we should decide now who it’s going to be.

Like Wonkette, this blog is impressed with Business Week’s ability to think outside the box in including Ms. Jolie among the list of Presidential aspirants. Unlike Senators Clinton and Dole, she first made a name for herself on her own merits, rather than through a relationship with a powerful male figure. (Although her relationships have been rather public and somewhat, um, colorful.) And unlike Secretary Rice, her expertise is in helping refugees, not in starting preemptive wars. (Both have impressive fashion sensibilities, one must admit.) And unlike any of the other contenders, Ms. Jolie has won an Academy Award and multiple Golden Globes. Which is better than Ronald Reagan ever did.

Apostropher has a revealing quote from Representative Chris Shays (R-CT):

“My party is demonstrating that they are for states’ rights unless they don’t like what states are doing,” said Representative Christopher Shays of Connecticut, one of five House Republicans who voted against the bill. “This couldn’t be a more classic case of a state responsibility.”

“This Republican Party of Lincoln has become a party of theocracy,” Mr. Shays said. “There are going to be repercussions from this vote. There are a number of people who feel that the government is getting involved in their personal lives in a way that scares them.”

Meanwhile, Sisyphus Shrugged documents the strange alliance between conservative Republicans and the ACLU, brought together by the overreaching provisions of the Patriot Act:

It was a Washington rarity to see the American Civil Liberties Union line up with conservative lions like David Keefe of the American Conservative Union and former Rep. Bob Barr, R-Ga. But they were among those at a Washington press conference held to assail such Patriot Act provisions as those allowing law enforcement agents to look at library users’ records or to conduct unannounced “sneak-and-peek” searches on homes or private offices.

“It is not, and never should be necessary, to surrender our rights under the Bill of Rights to fight the war on terrorism,” said Barr, who as a House member voted for the Patriot Act, which passed overwhelmingly in the House and provoked only one dissenting Senate vote.

I think the Democratic campaign philosophy in the next few elections should be obvious: smaller government. A government that is more responsible, less intrusive, more humble. Under the Bush administration, the national debt has escalated alarmingly; we have become aggressively unilateralist abroad, alienating people worldwide; protections of the privacy and human rights of citizens have been steadily eroded; and the federal executive and legislative branches have been increasingly willing to trample on prerogatives of the states and the judiciary. It’s time to put some grownups in power who know how to balance a budget and will keep their noses out of people’s personal lives.

The universe is accelerating, and we don’t know why. The most straightforward explanations involve dark energy — some source of energy that is spread smoothly throughout space, and whose density constant (or nearly so) as the universe expands. But there are problems with the dark energy idea, especially in its magnitude; a back-of-the-envelope calculation says that the amount of energy in the vacuum should be larger than what we observe by a factor of about 10¹²⁰. Inexcusable, even by cosmology standards.

So we might try to be even more dramatic — maybe Einstein was wrong, and we have to modify general relativity on cosmological scales. But of course we should keep in mind the possibility of less dramatic resolutions; maybe an explanation for the acceleration of the universe can be found in the context of conventional physics, without invoking dark energy at all. That’s the hope expressed in a recent paper by Kolb, Matarrese, Notari, and Riotto (KMNR).

The paper has already garnered some attention — here’s the press release, and a note at Peter’s blog. And it’s reached the media, albeit with some skeptical notes: here’s an article that quotes Michael Turner, and here’s one that quotes me. (Poor Rocky hasn’t even convinced his Chicago colleagues!)

Why the skepticism? My original notion was not to comment in any detail until I actually understood the paper better. But then I remembered — this is a blog. Withholding comment until I understood what was going on would be unbloggy of me.

So, even though I certainly haven’t gone through their equations, the basic idea seems to be clear. We often talk about the fact that our universe is very smooth (homogeneous and isotropic) on large scales, but of course it isn’t perfectly smooth. There are slight differences in the density of matter from place to place, even when we average over huge distances. It is convenient to think of the actual deviation of the density from its background value as arising from a sum of many contributions, each taking the form of a sine wave with some specific wavelength and amplitude; we can then describe the effects of each of these modes independently. These perturbations are thought to originate in the early universe, and are responsible for the existence of galaxies and clusters today.

The KMNR idea is simply this: there is some fluctuation mode with a wavelength that is much larger than the radius of our currently observable universe, that also has a large amplitude. The effect of this mode is to alter the relationship between our conventional cosmological parameters, such as the mass density and the expansion rate. In particular, it is possible to find realizations (so the claim goes) in which we would observe our local patch of universe to be accelerating, even if there weren’t any dark energy.

The derivation of this result involves a lot of math. But it should be possible to understand the reason why people are skeptical. In general relativity, no influence can travel faster than the speed of light. Since there is only a finite time since the Big Bang (14 billion years), there is only a finite piece of universe that possibly could affect what we see today. (The observable universe actually has a radius of about 46 billion light years, not 14 billion light years, because of sneaky expansion effects.)

Now, it’s certainly possible for some perturbation with a wavelength much larger than our observable universe to have an effect on us, but the effect only comes from the piece of that perturbation that is inside our patch. KMNR claim that the effect is to change the relationship between the observable cosmological parameters (such as the density, spatial curvature, expansion rate, etc.). I find it hard to believe. My hunch is that such a perturbation should change the values of the parameters, but they should keep the same relationships that they had before. For example, if we measure the density and the curvature of space, conventional cosmology tells us that we can figure out the expansion rate using the Friedmann equation. I think that an ultra-long-wavelength perturbation will shift the values of the density/curvature/expansion from their values in the unperturbed background, but will do so in a way to preserve the Friedmann equation. KMNR claim otherwise.

Even though I haven’t gone through their math, I do have some evidence on my side. A long time ago cosmologists developed the “vacuole” models as ways to understand cosmological perturbations. (See e.g. this paper paper by Hammer.) To make a vacuole, start with a spherical region of a perfectly uniform universe. Now take the matter inside your spherical region and squeeze it a little, rearranging it into a smaller uniform spherical distribution with a higher density. There will be a region in between your overdense sphere and the external universe that is completely empty. It turns out that you can solve Einstein’s equation exactly for this situation. The outside universe acts completely conventionally with whatever cosmological parameters it had to start, unaffected by your rearrangement. The empty thick shell you have created will be the Schwarzschild solution, since Birkhoff’s theorem says that any spherically symmetric vacuum solution to Einstein’s equation is Schwarzschild. And the interior region will behave exactly like a homogeneous and isotropic universe in its own right, except with different values of the cosmological parameters. These parameters will exactly obey the conventional Friedmann equation, and someone who lived inside there would have no way of telling that those parameters didn’t describe the entire universe.

This is by no means a proof that KMNR are wrong; the vacuole model describes one very specific type of perturbation, and it may be that only other kinds of perturbation give their effect. But before I buy into it, I would need to understand better how local physics inside my observable patch can violate the conventional Friedmann equation. The good thing about science is that there is a right answer; in the case of the accelerating universe, it’s well worth exploring all possible avenues to getting it.