Miscellany

Last night we went to a concert by the Chicago Sinfonietta in honor of Martin Luther King Day. The Sinfonietta is not the international powerhouse that the Chicago Symphony Orchestra is, but is an exciting and talented ensemble in its own right. A focus of the Sinfonietta is on diversity, both in terms of the musicians and in terms of the works performed. Last night’s program was a typical mix of new works and classics, with two pieces by contemporary composers specifically in honor of King, and two old favorites by Schubert and Tchaikovsky. My favorite was Michael Abels’ Dance for Martin’s Dream, which moved engagingly between folk melodies, African rhythms, and traditional classical structures. The whole idea of the Sinfonietta is a great way to bring classical music to audiences that don’t normally get to experience it.

The best part was the finale, which wrapped up the evening in an appropriate fashion: everyone in the audience joined hands and sang We Shall Overcome. Okay, not a professional performance, but enthusiasm counts for something; it was a very moving moment. I was at first concerned that I didn’t know the words, but it turns out that we only sang the first verse, which is not so hard:

We shall overcome

We shall overcome

We shall overcome some day

Oh, deep in my heart

I do believe

We shall overcome some day.

The University of Chicago doesn’t take the day off for Martin Luther King Day, but here at Preposterous we are an independent outfit and can take off whenever we please. So today we celebrate MLK’s legacy by just quoting from other blogs.

Pharyngula, via feministing, points to an article in the Boston Globe about the opinions of the President of the World’s Greatest University.

CAMBRIDGE — The president of Harvard University, Lawrence H. Summers, sparked an uproar at an academic conference Friday when he said that innate differences between men and women might be one reason fewer women succeed in science and math careers. Summers also questioned how much of a role discrimination plays in the dearth of female professors in science and engineering at elite universities.

Nancy Hopkins, a biologist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, walked out on Summers’ talk, saying later that if she hadn’t left, ”I would’ve either blacked out or thrown up.”

Among the highly rigorous studies quoted by Summers were his own observations of his daughter, who named her toy trucks “daddy truck” and “baby truck.” That pretty much cinches the case for genetic determinism as far as I’m concerned.

Elsewhere, Wonkette fills us in on how they celebrate in Mississippi.

We are honoring Martin Luther King Day as we always do, by staying in bed until noon and starting drinking at one. In fact, we like to think of every day as Martin Luther King Day. The folks in Mississippi, on the other hand, prefer not to think about MLK day much at all! If you — as reader J. did — call the Mississippi tax commission today (601-923-7000), you’ll find that the office is closed ” in observance of Robert E Lee’s and Martin Luther King’s birthdays.” We love this. We imagine it was floated as a way to get the bigots to observe a federal holiday and avoid being targeted by Chuck D — a compromise about as meaningful as the Missouri one, really. If this is the case, we wonder what other kinds of intrastate racial tit-for-tat deals might be in the works. What about, “you can date our daughters as long as we can whip you for it after?”

NOTE: Really, no shit: That is the number of the Mississippi tax commission.

Okay. Well. Let’s give the Reverend the last word:

We cannot walk alone. And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall march ahead. We cannot turn back. There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, “When will you be satisfied?” we can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro’s basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.

Eugene Volokh points to some useful advice from Microsoft’s MapPoint: driving directions from Haugesund, Norway to Trondheim, Norway.

Total Distance: 1685.9 Miles Estimated Total Time: 47 hours, 31 minute. But the scenery is very relaxing.

Dispatches from the scientific frontiers. At Unscrewing the Inscrutable, Brent Rasmussen is blogging about the landing of the Cassini-Huygens probe on Saturn’s moon Titan. (He was liveblogging, but it’s a little too late to actually get it live, unless you have a time machine, in which case contact me. On second thought, don’t.) “Cassini” is the NASA spacecraft, “Huygens” is the ESA probe that actually went to the surface. Fantastic science, not to mention cool pictures, all for quite a bit less than the $500 billion it will cost to send people to Mars.

Meanwhile, in association with the World Year of Physics, we have something Einstein couldn’t have anticipated: Quantum Diaries (also noted by Peter Woit) is a collection of year-long blogs by particle physicists, giving you a glimpse into their sexy and exciting daily lives. They are mostly experimentalists, so those of you who hang out at blogs like this one can see how the other half lives. I will give a shout-out to Stephon Alexander, who is on record as saying that my GR book is “off the hook.”

A lot of well-meaning people want to accept the successes of science as well as the comforts of religion. There is some obvious tension here, since religions typically seem to make strong claims about the way the world works, and these claims tend to be incompatible with the lessons of science. In the face of this tension, a common strategy is to declare that science and religion simply exist in separate spheres, and cannot in principle come into conflict. This is the move made by Jesse at Pandagon, not to mention Stephen Jay Gould in Rocks of Ages. Gould even invented a clunky acronym to encompass this position: the Principle of NOMA, or Non-Overlapping Magisteria.

The problem with this position is that it is manifestly incorrect. Or at least, to make it correct, one needs to distort the definition of “religion” beyond recognition. Religion has a number of components: ethical ones, spiritual ones, social ones. But without a doubt it has a cosmological component — making certain definite claims about the nature of reality. These claims differ from religion to religion, but typically involve the existence of supernatural forces, some notion of an afterlife, a creation myth, and so on. All of these topics fall squarely under the scope of scientific investigation (and the science story never agrees with the religion story). How to wriggle out of this? By limiting “religion” to some very thin ideas about ethics and spirituality. Gould makes it through half of his book before he comes clean and gives a definition of what he means by religion, at which point we discover it is what most of us would call “moral philosophy.” At which point, why call it “religion” at all? Does anyone believe that the folks who invented these religions felt that they had nothing to say about the deep workings of the universe? That’s just a later interpretation, designed to cover up the dramatic failure of scripture to tell us anything correct about how the world really works. Why not just admit that the lessons we learn by reading the Bible are on precisely the same footing as those we learn from reading Homer or Shakespeare, and enjoy them for the messy fallible things they are, rather than insisting on some special metaphysical status?

Of course you can be both religious and scientific, plenty of people are. But if so, you should face up to those bits of both which tend to disagree. Pretending that they don’t exist is a cop-out.

We’re all done looking for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; apparently it was all some sort of misunderstanding. The bigger story, of course, is that CBS news has completed its investigation of the memogate scandal. If anyone’s keeping track, the (newly enaged!) Poor Man has a scorecard.

The staff here at Preposterous is holding our breath — in another month and a half, we will have successfully passed through an entire year of existence without being nominated for any blog awards of any type. (“It’s” breath? Should “staff” plural or singular? See, this is why we never get nominated for anything.) That’s okay. Our position in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is sufficiently lofty that we don’t depend on such tokens of external recognition.

But the awards can be a great idea, since let’s face it, there are a lot of blogs out there and we can’t read them all. It’s nice to be pointed to the ones that are most amusing or useful. But one problem is the weird (although diminishing) domination of the blogosphere by conservatives, who tend to walk away with awards handed out by popular vote. So the Koufax awards are aimed at the lefty faction of the blogosphere. (Sandy Koufax was a lefty, get it?) They are administered by the selfless folks over at Wampum, and are well worth checking out and participating in. (See, we end sentences with prepositions, too. Amazing we are still allowed to publish at all.)

The voting procedure is a little chaotic, and the lists of nominees in various categories are scattered around different posts. As far as I can tell, voting is now open in the categories of Most Humorous Post, Most Deserving Wider Recognition, Best Writing, Best New Blog, Best Expert, and Best Single Issue Blog. Whether you vote or not, have fun clicking on the nominees; there’s some great stuff there.

This week the American Astronomical Society is meeting in San Diego. (No, I’m still here in Chicago, thank goodness.) The AAS meetings are huge, impersonal affairs, very different in character from a smaller conference devoted to a particular specialty. But they serve at least one important purpose — to provide a forum where astronomers can announce newsworthy findings, knowing that there will be a healthy collection of journalists available to tell their stories.

That’s why the second week in January is always filled with fun astronomy stories in the news. Interesting results this week include a claim that the Chandra X-ray satellite observatory has found evidence for thousands of black holes near the center of the Milky Way, and that ripples in the large-scale distribution of galaxies — predicted to result from the same acoustic oscillations that give rise to preferred scales in microwave background temperature anisotropies — have been reliably measured in data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. And many more.

Sometimes, sadly, people get carried away. Here for example is an extremely cool result: evidence for spacetime dragging around a spinning black hole, from X-rays observed with the Rossi satellite. If you did nothing but read the nice story just linked to (by Robert Roy Britt, describing research by Jeroen Homan and Jon Miller), you’d be impressed at how much astronomers are able to learn about black holes. (The picture is an artist’s impression by Dana Berry, not an actual image of the source!) If on the other hand you chased down the press release for this work, you’d be surprised to hear the claim that the result, if confirmed, “would represent a new phenomenon that goes beyond Einstein’s general relativity.” Because it wouldn’t, actually. It’s a nice confirmation of a precise prediction of general relativity, in fact. Happily, the journalist for the above article either didn’t read the press release, or knew better than to write about the fake overthrow of Einstein. Sadly, not every journalist was so fortunate. This article from USA Today would have you believe not only that the black hole is “changing the dimensions of space,” but that the very possibility of a spinning black hole is “something never considered in Einstein’s theory of gravity.” Eeek. (Although I have a nice textbook he should buy.)

I’m usually reluctant to criticize science journalists and press officers, as they have a hard job and get little credit (at least compared to the glamorous life of the research scientist). But it’s important to get it right, and just takes a little extra effort. Lost in the confusion is the crucial point: that observations like these represent the first steps towards what will be a major project over the next couple of decades, mapping out the spacetime in the vicinity of black holes. Plans are in the works for ultra-high resolution X-ray satellites like Constellation X that will directly image the inner edge of accretion disks near black holes, and gravitational-wave observatories like LISA will open an incredibly precise new window on the way in which black holes curve spacetime. At least, if we can somehow find the money — and really good science stories have an important role in making that possible.

Speaking of the dissemination of scientific information, the latest edition of Tangled Bank is now up at Science and Politics. It’s full of scientific information. (Although I understand that the total entropy of the universe was increased in the process of bringing it together).

Besides Steve Hsu, another physicist-blogger I noticed at Crooked Timber is fellow cosmologist Andrew Jaffe. He has a couple of posts up about science publishing on the web. Of course, physicists have historically been in the vanguard of electronic dissemination of information, beginning spectacularly with the invention of the World-Wide-Web at CERN. In the particular case of scientific papers, Paul Ginsparg’s arxiv.org (originally based at Los Alamos, now at Cornell) had a revolutionary impact. Each morning you can read the titles and abstracts of every paper submitted the previous day, and download and print the full text of those that strike your interest. The increase in speed and convenience over ordinary journals seems slight, but the impact is huge. It used to be that researchers that were “in the loop” would receive preprints from their colleagues, giving them a noticeable advantage over more isolated workers who had to wait months for the journals to appear.

Equally important, although rarely mentioned, is the straightforward advantage of one-stop shopping — rather than leafing through a dozen journals, and still possibly missing some interesting papers, every paper worth reading goes to a single site. It is so convenient that plenty of people (myself included) will often go to arxiv.org to print out a copy of their own paper, rather than go through the effort of digging it up in a file. The convenience is enhanced considerably by the citation service of the SPIRES database in high-energy physics (and the similar NASA Astrophysics Data System), which tells you which papers have been cited by which other papers, constructing an instantly searchable network of references. (And, something also convenient but less obviously beneficial, a way to rate one’s worth as a scientist. [Which gives me a nice way to smoothly insert a link to the Hot Paper by Mark Hoffman, Mark Trodden, and me.])

One of the reason why these systems sprung up most easily in high-energy physics and astrophysics is because those subfields have very little commercial application! The stakes are (mostly) intellectual, and millions of dollars are not at risk if someone reads your paper before it is peer-reviewed. Indeed, workers in these fields are becoming increasingly convinced that peer review is kind of a nuisance, since the only people who care about these results are fellow researchers who can judge for themselves whether a paper is interesting or not. That’s why the Bogdanov affair (in which some French demi-celebrities were accused, incorrectly, of “spoofing” physicists by publishing nonsense papers) was more interesting to outsiders than physicists — bad papers get published all the time, we just ignore them. In other fields, it’s more important that non-experts can assume that published work has been vetted by reliable researchers; putting every paper out on a free preprint server is a dicier proposition. Nevertheless, efforts like the Public Library of Science are attempting to make scientific and medical results freely accessible, even if not quite as quickly and conveniently as the arxiv does for physics.

Interestingly, the blog model has found physicists lagging behind the rest of the world; just look how the list of academic blogs at Crooked Timber or Bitch, Ph.D. are dominated by the social sciences and humanities. Jacques Distler is one of the few physicists who actually uses his blog to talk about research-level questions with fellow string theorists, and the String Coffee Table is a way to allow anyone to join in. More recently there have been a couple of couple of other attempts along these lines: Physics Comments gathers papers from the arxiv and provides a space to discuss them, while CosmoCoffee is aimed more narrowly at cosmology, and makes some effort to limit membership to working cosmologists.

We’ll see how these new efforts work. I’m hopeful but somewhat skeptical. At some point, more communication isn’t what the field needs; it needs more results to communicate about, or at least more good results, or at least more quiet time to think about getting some results. I think that the current lines of communication between professional physicists are pretty good; papers are disseminated rapidly, most institutions have frequent seminars, and nobody is complaining that there aren’t enough conferences. Compared to talking to someone in person, chatting about technical results on the Web is necessarily clumsy, even if (as Jacques and others have done) some effort is put into allowing equations to be displayed nicely.

On the other hand, the lines of communication between professional scientists and interested non-scientists could use a great deal of improvement, and there might be a future for blogs in this capacity. If I were a more public-spirited person, I would resist the temptation to clutter this blog with politics and philosophy, and make a real effort to stick to explaining physics and cosmology to non-experts. But it wouldn’t be as much fun.