Miscellany

Discover the Nutwork!

Via Bitch, Ph.D. (although I would have found it at Crooked Timber, honest): Discover the Nutwork, John Holbo’s brilliant counterpoint to the helpful guide to leftism compiled by everyone’s favorite disillusioned leftist, David Horowitz. It’s an important contribution, since we all need to keep track of the secret connections tying together the conspiracy of patriots on the Right.


The Glove! I had almost forgotten about him. Thank goodness for the internet.

I bet this was the most fun anyone ever had making a web page, ever.

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Black hole/deity factory on track

The good news is: the first superconducting magnet has been lowered into the tunnel for the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. It was a big one, coming in at 15 meters long and 35 metric tons. Now there are only 1,231 identical magnets left to install. The magnets will be used to accelerate beams of protons zipping in opposite directions around a 27-kilometer tunnel, before they collide with an energy of about 14 trillion electron volts. (For comparison purposes, using E=mc2, the energy of a proton at rest is about one billion electron volts.)

The project is a few months behind schedule, which can cause problems for an undertaking of this magnitude:

Rossi said he was delighted to be able to proceed with the installation. The delay has left CERN with a massive backlog of equipment — 800 huge magnets that had to be stored outside because there were no buildings large enough to warehouse them.

But the hope is to get back on track and start colliding particles on schedule in 2007.

The bad news comes in the form of the cringe-worthy sound bites that accompany the articles. One tech-blog posting is entitled CERN’s Black Hole Maker LHC on Track, which is a tad misleading. There is a chance, if various optimistic speculations all come out just right, that we might be able to make black holes at the LHC; but it’s an awfully small chance, and you don’t want that to be your standard of success. The BBC refers to the Higgs boson as the God particle, a horrible quip for which we can all blame Leon Lederman. Unlikely as black holes may be, I’m quite certain we won’t be making God at the LHC. Yet another article is entitled New physics tool 27 kilometres long, accompanied by an unmistakably phallic picture. Those crazy Canadians.

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the lesson of the moth

This is by John McKay’s namesake archy, as typed to Don Marquis.

i was talking to a moth
the other evening
he was trying to break into
an electric light bulb
and fry himself on the wires

why do you fellows
pull this stunt i asked him
because it is the conventional
thing for moths or why
if that had been an uncovered
candle instead of an electric
light bulb you would
now be a small unsightly cinder
have you no sense

plenty of it he answered
but at times we get tired
of using it
we get bored with the routine
and crave beauty
and excitement
fire is beautiful
and we know that if we get
too close it will kill us
but what does that matter
it is better to be happy
for a moment
and be burned up with beauty
than to live a long time
and be bored all the while
so we wad all our life up
into one little roll
and then we shoot the roll
that is what life is for
it is better to be a part of beauty
for one instant and then cease to
exist than to exist forever
and never be a part of beauty
our attitude toward life
is come easy go easy
we are like human beings
used to be before they became
too civilized to enjoy themselves

and before i could argue him
out of his philosophy
he went and immolated himself
on a patent cigar lighter
i do not agree with him
myself i would rather have
half the happiness and twice
the longevity

but at the same time i wish
there was something i wanted
as badly as he wanted to fry himself

archy

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Hans Bethe

As you already know if you read any other physics blogs, Hans Bethe passed away Sunday at the age of 98. His remarkable career included work on the Manhattan project as well as providing the crucial insights into how stars are powered by nuclear fusion. He was a constant source of inspiration within the community for how he remained active at the cutting edge of research through such a long career.

Bethe was one of the many physicists of Jewish heritage who fled Germany in the 1930’s, and his moral and political convictions remained a primary motivating factor in his life. As mentioned in the New York Times obituary, Bethe was “the liberal counterpoint (and proud of it) to Edward Teller, the physicist and conservative who played a dominant role in developing the hydrogen bomb.” David Appell has a representative quote: “Whether or not their governments respond to their advice, scientists have an obligation to speak out publicly when they feel there are dangers ahead.” Although he fought against development of the hydrogen bomb, he was an advocate of the peaceful uses of nuclear power.

See other posts by Matthew Nobes, Jacques Distler, Peter Woit, and Mok.

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Six scientists in search of an author

Here’s a simple way that academia could be greatly improved: humanities professors should stop reading their papers out loud, and start talking from notes like normal people. I will never understand why they do this in the first place. There is no reason why humanists, trained in the arts of rhetoric and communication, should be even worse at giving talks than scientists are. It’s certainly not because it’s easier to read a pre-written paper word for word; I tried it at an humanities conference once and found it to be utterly awkward and unnatural. I thought the Western tradition was supposed to valorize speech over writing. Does this go back to Plato’s battle vs. the Sophists or something?

So it was great fun talking to the humanists during coffee breaks at the STAR conference (consistent with conferences generally), but the highlights of the formal program came largely from the physicists and the theatre folks. There was only one talk about physics itself, a brief tutorial on quantum electrodynamics by Joe Polchinski. Joe got into the narratological spirit of things, presenting Feynman diagrams as little “stories” about the interactions of electrons and photons. Of course these stories have special properties — for one thing, every allowed version of the story actually happens, and reality arises as a sum of all of them. For another, the same story can be told in different ways, including different orderings of events in time. I’m not sure if anyone has tried to write a play whose dramatic structure was inspired by these features of quantum field theory, but there’s room for something interesting.

We also had several readings from works of fiction, including Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen, and Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams. But the most memorable performance was turned in by none other than David Gross, playing the role of Richard Feynman in Peter Parnell’s play QED. It’s difficult, in dramatic depictions of scientists, to get the science itself right, but even harder to get the voice right, the unmistakable dialect in which scientists talk about their work. But David’s Feynman was spot on (although he didn’t attempt the Far Rockaway accent). As Janna Levin said, it was the best dramatic performance of the conference.

David also made an interesting point during the discussion, when he claimed that both science and theatre have retreated from their ambitions over the last few centuries. Theatre, of course, had a somewhat loftier status during the Elizabethan period than it enjoys today. Science, we might think, has only been growing in importance over the years, but one could argue that it has backed off from its Enlightenment aspirations to remake the way we live. David pointed out that basic research in fundamental physics shares with art a certain purity in its search for underlying truth (accompanied by some snarky comments about the earthier pursuits of business and politics). He’s a big fan of E.O. Wilson’s Consilience, which argues for a reconciliation of the sciences, arts, and humanities. I think Wilson goes too far in leveling the very real differences between science and the other fields, but since I’m operating under the disadvantage of not actually having read the book, I should keep quiet.

Excerpts from Janna’s own book were read by Kate McConnell. How the Universe Got Its Spots is a unique work, combining an accessible introduction to certain ideas in modern cosmology with an honest portrayal of the real life of an actual scientist. Everyone should read it. Most science books don’t talk so much about the scientist’s personal life, but at least this one has a happy ending — Janna and Warren are now married and living in Manhattan with their little boy, and she is thinking of a good title for her next book.

I was the moderator for a panel on “Intertextual Einstein,” and one of the panelists was Dennis Overbye. Besides his regular gig as a science reporter for the New York Times, Dennis is the author of Einstein in Love, and he talked about how our image of Einstein as a cuddly genius is dramatically at odds with reality, especially in his relations with women. (There is a letter from Einstein to his first wife Mileva that must be seen to be believed — an itemized list of the conditions under which he would continue to live with her, including that she never bother him in his office or say anything bad about him to other people.) Dennis also wrote Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, one of my all-time favorite cosmology books. He confirmed the rumor I had heard long ago, that negotiations were underway to turn the book into a movie, with Tom Hanks starring as Alan Sandage. (As Dave Barry says, I am not making this up.) Sadly, it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen. But show business is unpredictable, so who knows?

At the end of the conference I suggested to David that, now that he had the Nobel Prize, perhaps it was time to conquer new worlds by moving to Hollywood and taking up acting. He admitted that he had dabbled in theatre in high school. He also noted that Feynman himself was constantly performing, and contributed quite consciously to his myth-construction. And then he pointed out that he himself was performing all the time, and he couldn’t help noticing that I did as well. (Moi?) Indeed, isn’t everybody? We are all postmodernists now.

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Science, Theatre, Audience, Reader

Checking in from the auditorium of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics here in Santa Barbara (not to be confused with the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at Chicago, or the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology at Stanford — Fred Kavli gets around). The KITP, where I did my second postdoc, is a utopian space overlooking the Pacific Ocean, where theoretical physicists from around the world come together to drink coffee and discuss the universe under the steely but benevolent gaze of director David Gross.

For these few days, however, the KITP has been taken over by humanists, for the conference on Science, Theatre, Audience, Reader: Theoretical Physics in Drama and Narrative. Many of the participants are humanities professors of some form or another, but there are a number of hybrid types who are either physicists who write actual fiction, or writers who specialize in scientific themes, including Alan Lightman, Penny Penniston, Sidney Perkowitz, Janna Levin, Lauren Gunderson, and Jeremy Lawrence. And a few of us science types who have so far stuck to non-fiction.

One of the nice things about the conference is that there is little feeling of turning-the-crank, trudging through the rituals of a typical professional meeting. Bringing together writers and scientists and English professors in this kind of setting is pretty much new to everyone, and we’re all seeing how it goes. Despite the unavoidable presence of some less-than-gripping talks, I find the overall atmosphere quite exhilarating, since there is a tangible feeling of common intellectual pursuit. Although theoretical physics is a wildly impractical endeavor, compelling largely for the pure thrill of discovering how the universe works (at least on the fundamental-physics side of things), physicists don’t typically think of themselves as intellectuals in a broader sense. (Over-generalizing here, but okay.) It is much more common for them to be fairly focused on the technical aspects of their particular field of expertise, than to have wide-ranging interests in all sorts of scholarly activities.

This is despite the fact that there are certainly strong role models for theoretical physicists with broader academic interests, from Murray Gell-Mann and Steven Weinberg on down. The much more compelling counter-role-model is Richard Feynman, who was a brilliant physicist and charismatic figure, but resolutely non-intellectual. By which I mean not that he was obscurantist or non-rational (which would be crazy), but that he didn’t have wide-ranging intellectual interests outside of science, and indeed would cheerfully denigrate other fields without making any real effort to appreciate them. His acolytes will undoubtedly squawk with indignation, but it’s just what Feynman himself always said — he was a pretty narrow guy. And he’s the one who young physicists tend to hero-worship.

Don’t get me wrong — I don’t think there’s any real sense in which having broad interests would make someone a better physicist. Some of the best physicists out there are extremely narrow technicians. But it might make them better human beings, and there’s something to be said for that.

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Bubble chamber art

Via MetaFilter, via Syaffolee, something that is pretty cool, but also annoying, because it could have been so much cooler: bubble chamber art. Beautiful images generated to resemble pictures taken from bubble chambers, the devices that physicists used to use to observe elementary particle interactions before we switched to fancy electronics.


Here’s the problem: the particle identities don’t make any sense. “Axions exist in a slightly higher dimension and as such are drawn with elevated embossed shadows. Axions are quick to stabilize and fall into single pixel orbits axions automatically re collide themselves after stabilizing.” Nonsense both grammatically, and as physics. (Axions, if they exist at all, do so in our ordinary dimensions, but they are stable neutral particles, and as such they wouldn’t make any tracks in a bubble chamber at all.) I don’t mind if people take license with scientific truths in order to make interesting art, but here it just seems so gratuitous — the pictures would look just as beautiful if the interactions had made sense, and the descriptions would have sounded even more intriguing. Another lost opportunity for bringing the two cultures together.

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The formula for all the future

For the last two months I’ve been pretty good at staying in Chicago, with only the one jaunt to Aspen and DC. Now it gets hectic again, with multiple trips per month for the foreseeable future. But it’s going to be quite the world tour this year: France, India, Turkey, Canada, Korea, and China, not to mention various exotic domestic locales.

The fun begins today, when I fly to Santa Barbara for the previously-mentioned conference on Theoretical Physics in Drama and Narrative, where I get to pretend to be a literary critic. To set the mood, here’s a short excerpt from one of the central texts of the conference, Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia. (Thomasina is a precocious thirteen-year-old, and Septimus is her tutor; the year is 1809.)

Thomasina When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you stir backward, the jam will not come together again. Indeed, the pudding does not notice and continues to turn pink just as before. Do you think this is odd?

Septimus No.

Thomasina Well, I do. You cannot stir things apart.

Septimus No more you can, time must needs run backward, and since it will not, we must stir our way onward mixing as we go, disorder out of disorder into disorder until pink is complete, unchanging and unchangeable, and we are done with it for ever. This is known as free will or self-determination.

He picks up the tortoise and moves it a few inches as though it had strayed, on top of some loose papers, and admonishes it.

Sit!

Thomasina Septimus, do you think God is a Newtonian?

Septimus An Etonian? Almost certainly, I’m afraid. We must ask your brother to make it his first enquiry.

Thomasina No Septimus, a Newtonian, Septimus! Am I the first person to have thought of this?

Septimus No.

Thomasina I have not said yet.

Septimus `If everything from the furthest planet to the smallest atom of our brain acts according to Newton’s law of motion, what becomes of free will?’

Thomasina No.

Septimus God’s will.

Thomasina No.

Septimus Sin.

Thomasina (derisively) No!

Septimus Very well.

Thomasina If you could stop every atom in its position and direction, and if your mind could comprehend all the actions thus suspended, then if you were really, really good at algebra you could write the formula for all the future; and although nobody can be so clever as to do it, the formula must exist just as if one could.

Septimus (pause) Yes. (Pause.) Yes, as far as I know, you are the first person to have thought of this. (Pause. With an effort.) In the margin of his copy of Arithmetica, Fermat wrote that he had discovered a wonderful proof of his theorem but, the margin being too narrow for his purpose, did not have room to write it down. The note was found after his death, and from that day to this–

Thomasina Oh! I see now! The answer is perfectly obvious!

Septimus This time you may have overreached yourself.

They hadn’t, of course, read my ideas about the arrow of time. What I’m not quite sure of is, should they have been talking about “atoms” in 1809? (And I still don’t understand what’s up with the tortoise.)

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A bold move

Never let it be said that I don’t listen to the voice of the people.

I’m sure you’ve all heard the big news: my beloved Philadelphia 76ers, stuck playing .500 basketball and nipping at the edges of making the playoffs, made a bold move at the trade deadline when they dealt for Chris Webber. Philadelphia fans, hardened by generations of disappointment, will nevertheless consistently allow their hopes to be lifted by a big transaction, and this definitely qualifies.

As realistic as I might want to be, this was just about a perfect move for the Sixers. They gave up three solid players who just weren’t that important to the team (Kenny Thomas, Corliss Williamson, and Brian Skinner). In return, they get a five-time all-star who essentially addresses all of their major needs at once: height, passing, rebounding, and a second scorer to complement Allen Iverson. There is some risk, of course — both Webber and Iverson are aging, have huge contracts, and Webber in particular has knee problems that keep him from playing at 100% effectiveness. But if you can average 21 points, 9 boards, and 5 assists while playing on a bum knee, I’ll take it.

For the first time in a long while, the Sixers have a starting lineup that actually makes sense, with nobody playing out of position. Their two veteran stars are joined by three extremely talented youngsters — athletic prodigy Samuel Dalembert at center, sharpshooter Kyle Korver at small forward, and promising rookie Andre Igoudala at shooting guard. Sure, I’d like to see Dalembert play smarter, Korver be a little more versatile, and Igoudala be a little more aggressive on offense, but it’s great to know that we won’t be automatically outclassed at some position coming into most games. With veteran savvy coming off the bench (Aaron McKie, Marc Jackson, and Rodney Rogers), there’s absolutely no reason why this team can’t make serious noise in the playoffs. Suddenly, instead of wondering if we will make the postseason at all, we’re a contender to march through a weak Eastern Conference all the way to the NBA Finals. Where, as you know, anything can happen in a seven-game series. (Trying to fit in all the cliches I can here.) Kudos to general manager Billy King for pulling this one off. It will be remembered when he runs for Governor some day.

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