Miscellany

An article in the Duluth News Tribune recreates the atmosphere at the Arrows of Time meeting I went to recently. One of the things it doesn’t mention is the dinner-table reminiscences of the late Sidney Morgenbesser. I had never heard of Morgenbesser, but two of the participants knew him well — Steve Savitt was his Ph.D. student, and David Albert was a close friend of his at Columbia.

Morgenbesser was a philosopher who was known for making a profound impression on his students and colleagues; you can read some personal remarks at 3quarksdaily (also here and here). There are clearly a good number of favorite anecdotes about his dry Jewish humor, as several of the stories told around dinner in Minnesota are reproduced in the New York Times. He is less well-known to those who didn’t meet him personally, as he was notorious for publishing very little. He managed to have an important impact through his interactions with others, rather than by systematically expounding a particular system of thought.

Of course, there are figures throughout history who managed to make a splash without having an impressive publication record; Socrates and Jesus come to mind. But they were fortunate enough to have Plato and St. Paul put their words (or some possibly-distorted reflection thereof) onto paper; who knows how history might have been different if they didn’t have such prolific acolytes. Even in the recent history of physics, there are good examples of people who wrote very little and then managed to come up with big ideas when it counted; Ken Wilson’s ideas about the renormalization group and Alan Guth’s inflationary universe are good examples.

It’s hard to compare across generations, but I suspect that brilliant-but-reticent geniuses have a harder time getting hired as professors today than they did a few decades ago. It just seems that the competition for jobs is a little more fierce, and among the candidates for any one position there will always be someone who looks brilliant and also publishes a lot. You can hardly blame departments for being short-sighted if they tend to hire people who write papers, for the simple reason that most people are not quiet geniuses. For every Morgenbesser, there are a dozen others who show promise but will end up just taking up office space for the next thirty years as a tenured faculty member. It’s a shame, of course, as there are people who are great to have as colleagues and mentors in a department, even if they don’t publish very much. But, short of doubling all of the budgets so that we can hire more people, I don’t know of any better way than the system we have.

Update: Steve Savitt informs me that Morgenbesser was his undergraduate advisor, not his Ph.D. advisor. His Ph.D. advisor was Jean van Heijenoort, who was Leon Trotsky’s private secretary before going into academia. Another colorful life.

A few years old, but worth sharing: NASA interviews Santa.

In just a few hours the Jolly Old Elf will brush the fireplace ash out of his beard, don his famous red suit, and begin the serious work of delivering presents all over the world. It’s a job he’s done in the same way for a long, long time, but times may be changing. As humans and space probes travel to other worlds, the possibility of Christmas on other planets can no longer be ignored, and the prospect of delivering presents throughout the solar system is, well, turning Santa’s hair white.

Read on to get the big news: Santa is made of tachyons!

So I’m poking around the internet, looking for reviews of my book. (Still time to order it for Christmas!) And I come across this page, with the following enthusiastic collection of quotes:

“I can only recommend Spacetime and Geometry: An Introduction _ to General Relativity. Special thanks to Addison Wesley which produced it. Recently I have got Spacetime and Geometry: An Introduction _ to General Relativity, it is very cool. I can only recommend this item. This way I imagined Spacetime and Geometry: An Introduction _ to General Relativity. Spacetime and Geometry: An Introduction _ to General Relativity is very cool, it is worth all the money Addison Wesley wants for this product. Spacetime and Geometry: An Introduction _ to General Relativity was a very nice present when I got it on 20 June, 2003. I was surprised that Spacetime and Geometry: An Introduction _ to General Relativity was so nice, Addison Wesley really knows how to please customers.”

Impressive indeed, except … who thanks the publisher for the appearance of a book? And on closer inspection, it’s especially interesting that they were pleased to receive their copy in June 2003, since I remember quite clearly that I was feverishly writing Chapter Nine during that time. The actual book didn’t appear until October.

It’s perfectly clear that these people just make stuff up! They’re like Bill O’Reilly talking about Christmas!

Speaking of which, I’m off for the week, so don’t expect any blogging. Merry Christmas to everyone, especially you ornery atheists out there.

Why didn’t I think of this first? If you want to teach about intelligent design, you will have to decide which of the designers you should highlight. And, despite what you might read in comic books, there are a lot more designer-based theories of creation than science-based ones. Apostropher points to a helpful list of the Top Ten Intelligent Designs:

• Norse mythology
• Zorastrianism
• Babylon’s Enuma Elish
• Egyptian mythology
• The Aztec Earth Mother
• China’s Cosmic Egg
• Japan’s incestuous siblings
• Hinduism’s Rig Veda
• Hesiod’s Theogony
• The Judeo-Christian-Islamic Garden of Eden

Find the whole article, complete with pictures, at LiveScience.com. Looks like a good site.

Here’s something a few people have mentioned to me: the Pirelli Relativity Challenge. The tire company is sponsoring a prize of 25,000 Euros to “the best multimedia work that explains special relativity theory to the layperson.” By “multimedia” they apparently mean a web-based animation, using Flash or some such thing. My total lack of animation skillz prevents me from entering, I’m afraid. If anyone is interested, the deadline is March 31, 2005.

There will probably be a bunch of similar stunts, associated with the World Year of Physics in 2005. (Another site here — I think the latter is more US-based.) It’s the anniversary of Einstein’s “Miraculous Year,” in which he had no fewer than three amazing breakthroughs: an understanding of Brownian motion in terms of atomic theory, an understanding of the photoelectric effect in terms of light quanta, and the ultimate formulation of special relativity. Of course, his best breakthrough was ten years later, when he came up with the ultimate formulation of general relativity. Plenty of room for more celebrations then.

Reporting now from a rustic lodge deep in the forests of Minnesota, where a motley collection of physicists and philosophers have gathered to talk about the Arrows of Time. My job is of course to let people know that we have an explanation for the apparently low entropy of our observable universe. Once you have that, there are still a number of interesting questions, but I think that the cosmo-thermodynamic arrow is the origin of all the rest.

Actually the collection is not so motley; there are some very smart people here in the woods, including one Nobel laureate, Tony Leggett. The other night we shared the lodge with the holiday party of a local real estate firm, and let me tell you something: women swoon for Nobel prizewinners. Even (especially?) ones as gentle and soft-spoken as Tony. Trust me on this.

Physicists have a lot to learn from philosophers (and vice-versa). I learned something (or think I did) about the psychological arrow of time from David Albert. As you know (since even those who haven’t been reading the blog from the start have gone back and combed through all the archives), I have previously mentioned the idea that the thermodynamic arrow of time — the fact entropy is very small in the past, and tends to grow on purely statistical grounds — is responsible for the fact that we can remember the past but not the future. But why is that exactly?

It’s a tricky argument, and I’m still not sure I understand it correctly. But the basic idea hinges on the consistency of different hypotheses about what was going on in the far past. In particular, imagine a situation where we have three things: 1) a memory of receiving a new sweater for Christmas last year, 2) detailed knowledge of the laws of physics, and 3) complete ignorance about the initial conditions of the universe, i.e. a hypothesis that all conditions consistent with our current macroscopic state are equally likely. (Our macroscopic state is really everything we think we know about the present universe, including positions and properties of the macroscopic objects in it; but this knowledge is compatible with a huge number of microstates, which would correspond to a specification of the properties of each and every elementary particle comprising these objects.) Can we conclude, from these three pieces of information, that we probably did receive a sweater? No; in fact, it turns out to be incredibly unlikely. That’s because, of all the ways we could have a memory of receiving the sweater, most involve very high-entropy conditions in the past, out of which we and our memory have appeared very recently as a random fluctuation. Random fluctuations of order from disorder are very rare; however, there are many many more ways to be disordered than to be ordered, so the number of ways to achieve order is dominated by trajectories that come from disorder, not trajectories that come from greater order. So if we really believe that all possible past configurations are equally likely, our “memories” are utterly unreliable.

What saves us from such a psychologically devastating situation is that this set of beliefs is cognitively unstable. That’s because we used our knowledge of the laws of physics (not to mention the rules of logic, probability, and so forth) to reach this conclusion. But the reason why we believe these laws is that we have memories of experiments that count as evidence for them — but these memories are completely unreliable! So we have no reason to think that we actually understand the laws of physics. Thus, this set of beliefs is self-undermining; if we hold it, we conclude that we have no reason to hold it.

The way out is to change our initial set of assumptions. We simply replace the assumption that any past configuration is equally likely with the “past hypothesis” — the idea that the early universe is in a very special state (or one of a small number of special states) with very low entropy. This simple hypothesis removes from consideration all of the thermodynamically unlikely (but very numerous) possible histories in which we and our memories of Christmas past are just fluctuations from the surrounding chaos. Given that we have a memory of receiving a sweater, and that the universe began in a highly ordered state, it is quite likely that we actually did receive a sweater.

The lesson that we are supposed to learn from this is that the past hypothesis is a crucial part of our understanding of how the world works — it has the status of a law of nature. In the picture that Jennie Chen and I have suggested of a universe in which our observed patch is just a small part of a bigger ensemble, this hypothesis is local and contingent, but still reasonable. There are other parts of the bigger universe which are close to thermal equilibrium, where the past hypothesis wouldn’t be appropriate. But in regions of thermal equilibrium you won’t have living beings, much less reliable memories.

David Albert is also known for being perhaps the sole respectable person to appear in the movie What the #$*! Do We Know?, a docu-drama about quantum mechanics and consciousness. (I haven’t actually seen the movie, but Peter Woit has. FYI, “#$*!” is usually pronounced as “bleep”, but more colorful renderings are allowed.) The movie was made by crackpots, who want to argue that consciousness and quantum mechanics are inextricably intertwined, to the extent that we can literally change reality by appropriately focusing our mental states. David was asked by the producers to sit for an extended interview about the mysteries of quantum mechanics, and he innocently agreed. After five hours of filming, in which he patiently explained to them that their views were completely crazy, they chopped up the footage into short sounds bites of quotes like “Yes, that’s an important question,” and interspersed them throughout the film. David is on record as saying that his views were dramatically misrepresented by the movie. Another lesson learned: if anyone wants to get you on film, you have to establish that you trust them not to twist your words against themselves.

All of Bob Park’s What’s New is good this week. I’m on the road again, so I’ll just cheat by reproducing this (you’re welcome to subscribe yourself).

WHAT’S NEW Robert L. Park Friday, 17 Dec 04 Washington, DC

1. MISSILE DEFENSE: EXPLAIN TO ME AGAIN WHY THEY WERE TESTING IT? The Missile Defense Agency said this week’s flop would not affect the decision to declare the system operational. In the previous test, two years ago, the kill vehicle failed to separate from the booster. That was unfortunate, but MDA said it didn’t affect the “success rate” because the interceptor never reached the “endgame” http://www.aps.org/WN/WN02/wn121302.cfm. This week, the Missile Defense Agency tried again. This time the interceptor failed to make it out of the silo. In April, a GAO report said the tests were not realistic. The MDA director, General Kadish, director explained, “you can’t operationally test the system until you put it in place” http://www.aps.org/WN/WN04/wn043004.cfm. So what’s the problem? There are now 6 interceptors in place in Ft. Greely, AK, just hanging out waiting to be tested operationally.

2. NASA: THE SEARCH IS ON FOR SOMEONE TO REPLACE SEAN O’KEEFE. General Kadish is said to be high on the list. Under O’Keefe, top NASA positions were often filled by military men, but competition is stiff. Although several former astronauts are rumored to on the list, the front runner is thought to be Bob Walker, a former Member of Congress who was chair of the House Science Committee. He predicted the space station would produce a Nobel Prize, backed cold fusion, and introduced his Hydrogen Futures Act, which in the initial version violated the First Law of Thermodynamics. He is now the Chairman of Wexler & Walker, a Washington lobbying firm tied to science and space interests. A member of the President’s Moon-Mars commission, Walker has no science background, but then neither does O’Keefe, who has just accepted the job of Chancellor of Louisiana State University. He says he took it for the money.

3. THE HUBBLE FACTOR: O’KEEFE SHOULD BE GIVEN A MEDAL OF FREEDOM. O’Keefe bore none of the blame for the Columbia accident, but it led to the Hubble problem. The Columbia review called for using the ISS as safe haven in case of a shuttle problem, but that’s not practical for a shuttle flight to the Hubble orbit. While O’Keefe pushed hard for the President’s Moon-Mars plan, he decided Hubble should go. O’Keefe is going instead. It’s time to start over. Put the shuttles in museums, and drop the ISS in the Philippine Trench, but take care of Hubble till it can be replaced. In the meantime, if Tenet is awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom after telling the President that weapons of mass destruction in Iraq are a “slam-dunk,” why not give one to O’Keefe?

4. TARGETED PRAYER: “PRAYER WARRIORS” ARE LINKED BY THE INTERNET. On ABC World News Tonight with Peter Jennings there was a report about Christian prayer teams organized over the internet from the World Prayer Center in Colorado Springs. By praying in unison for specific targets they say the effect is multiplied. They could pray for Missile Defense. It will have as much effect as a test.

By James Weldon Johnson.

And God stepped out on space,

And He looked around and said,

“I’m lonely —

I’ll make me a world.”

And far as the eye of God could see

Darkness covered everything,

Blacker than a hundred midnights

Down in a cypress swamp.

Then God smiled,

And the light broke,

And the darkness rolled up on one side,

And the light stood shining on the other,

And God said, “That’s good!”

Then God reached out and took the light in His hands,

And God rolled the light around in His hands

Until He made the sun;

And He set that sun a-blazing in the heavens.

And the light that was left from making the sun

God gathered it up in a shining ball

And flung it against the darkness,

Spangling the night with the moon and stars.

Then down between

The darkness and the light

He hurled the world;

And God said, “That’s good!”

Then God himself stepped down —

And the sun was on His right hand,

And the moon was on His left;

The stars were clustered about His head,

And the earth was under His feet.

And God walked, and where He trod

His footsteps hollowed the valleys out

And bulged the mountains up.

Then He stopped and looked and saw

That the earth was hot and barren.

So God stepped over to the edge of the world

And He spat out the seven seas;

He batted His eyes, and the lightnings flashed;

He clapped His hands, and the thunders rolled;

And the waters above the earth came down,

The cooling waters came down.

Then the green grass sprouted,

And the little red flowers blossomed,

The pine tree pointed his finger to the sky,

And the oak spread out his arms,

The lakes cuddled down in the hollows of the ground,

And the rivers ran down to the sea;

And God smiled again,

And the rainbow appeared,

And curled itself around His shoulder.

Then God raised His arm and He waved His hand

Over the sea and over the land,

And He said, “Bring forth! Bring forth!”

And quicker than God could drop His hand.

Fishes and fowls

And beasts and birds

Swam the rivers and the seas,

Roamed the forests and the woods,

And split the air with their wings.

And God said, “That’s good!”

Then God walked around,

And God looked around

On all that He had made.

He looked at His sun,

And He looked at His moon,

And He looked at His little stars;

He looked on His world

With all its living things,

And God said, “I’m lonely still.”

Then God sat down

On the side of a hill where He could think;

By a deep, wide river He sat down;

With His head in His hands,

God thought and thought,

Till He thought, “I’ll make me a man!”

Up from the bed of the river

God scooped the clay;

And by the bank of the river

He kneeled Him down;

And there the great God Almighty

Who lit the sun and fixed it in the sky,

Who flung the stars to the most far corner of the night,

Who rounded the earth in the middle of His hand;

This Great God,

Like a mammy bending over her baby,

Kneeled down in the dust

Toiling over a lump of clay

Till He shaped it in His own image;

Then into it He blew the breath of life,

And man became a living soul.

Amen. Amen.

One of the things you hear all the time about the Bible, even from non-believers, is what a great work of literature it is. When people say things like that, exactly what book have they been reading? Parts of the Bible are well-written and/or interesting, but it’s mostly boring, stilted, repetitive, and contradictory — exactly as you would expect from an edited collection assembled by committees working under powerful political pressures. Wouldn’t the Genesis story be much better if it had been written, for example, in the cadences of an African-American folk preacher, as above?

James Weldon Johnson was a remarkable person. Among other achievements, he was the first leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People who was an actual colored person. Could you imagine any contemporary national political organization being led by a poet?

And the punchline is: Johnson was an agnostic. Amen to that, brother.

Brian Leiter has a quote from the blog of Lawrence Velvel, who is the Dean of the Massachusetts School of Law:

[W]hile I have always been in favor of diversity of viewpoints on a faculty, and our own faculty ranges from very liberal to quite conservative — although we see no need to hire the right wing kooks who seem to be taking over the world — I have lately begun to wonder about the intellectual diversity argument. The right wing has taken over the government, radio, part of television, a significant part of the newspaper world, and certain religiously based universities. Having taken over much of the world, is it really necessary that they be given a major voice in universities too? They’ve done pretty well without a major foothold at lots of universities. Why give these nuts still more power?

That’s an astonishingly stupid comment, especially from the Dean of a law school. (Leiter characterizes the quote as “memorable.”) The problem is the gentle glide from “conservative” to “right wing” to “nuts.” I would hope that, even in these times when liberals are incredibly frustrated at the damage that the nuts in power are doing to our country, we are able to acknowledge that being conservative doesn’t automatically make you nuts (even if the examples are depressingly numerous). We honestly do need intellectual diversity in universities, and there is no question that such diversity should include conservative viewpoints. I don’t have to agree with people who believe in a strict constructionist interpretation of the Constitution, or were in favor of the war in Iraq, or think that an unfettered free market would ultimately benefit people in poverty — but I certainly want people who believe those things to be present at my university, just as I think cosmologists should explore both inflation and the ekpyrotic universe. We’re supposed to be in favor of the free interplay of ideas, remember?

Don’t get me wrong — there is a line to be drawn, and it’s not always obvious where to draw it. Physics departments should consider people who work on both string theory and loop quantum gravity, but needn’t bother with astrologers. Biology departments don’t need to hire creationists, and no departments need to hire racists, fascists, misogynists, anti-Semites, and so on. But you can sincerely believe that affirmative action is harmful to minorities without being racist. There can be policy disagreements about extremely difficult questions among legitimate scholars working in good faith. We don’t need to go out of our way to hire more conservatives as professors — we should hire people who are smart and make real contributions, and some of them will end up being conservative. As a liberal, I am idealistic enough to think that (at least in the context of universities) our ideas will win out through the simple force of reason, not because we give in to the right wing’s paranoid fantasies and start explicitly excluding competing views.

Found this a while ago on Arts & Letters Daily, but it’s still worth mentioning. An interview with Timothy Garton Ash on the relationship between the Bush administration and Europe.

IDEAS: You met with President Bush at the White House in May 2001. How did that come about?

GARTON ASH: It was the most extraordinary thing. I was sitting in my office in Oxford, and I get a telephone call, and someone says, “It’s the White House here, could you come and tell President Bush about Europe, uh, next Thursday at 1:45?” So, I said, “Well, I do have a lunch, but if I can move it. . ..”

IDEAS: What was the meeting like?

GARTON ASH: We were a group of specialists on Europe — three Americans, two Brits, no French, no Germans — and the president was clearly feeling his way, very much sure of himself on some issues like missile defense and the environment — “Kyoto is mush,” he said — and not on others. . .. But I’ll never forget one thing he said, very emphatically, “Do we want the European Union to succeed?” And my British colleague and I said that we certainly did, and we thought the United States should, too. And then he sort of stepped back and said, “That was just a provocation.” But actually, I thought that probably not a single president since 1945 would have asked the question in that form.

IDEAS: You write that when you see how foreign policy decisions are made, “you are left with a sense of mild incredulity that this is how the world is run.”

GARTON ASH: It’s an almighty mess. . .. It’s amazing on what little knowledge, and what prejudices, our leaders make their decisions. . .. The diplomacy of the Iraq crisis was a case study of how not to run a world, with terrible mistakes made on all sides, in Washington, Paris and London, Berlin, Beijing.

IDEAS: Would a different generation of leaders have done better?

GARTON ASH: Yes, I actually do think that. An earlier generation — Churchill, Roosevelt, Truman, Adenauer, De Gaulle — had gone through certain very formative experiences. Our leaders, who are 40-something to early 50s, are professional politicians who haven’t done much else in their lives and often don’t have much international experience. And it shows.

I’m always skeptical about comparing different generations, as nobody has an unbiased view. But from Roosevelt and Churchill to Bush and Blair one does detect a certain diminution of sophistication.

By the way, I can strongly recommend The Magic Lantern, a compelling and highly personal account of the overthrow of Communism in Eastern Europe. Garton Ash was friends with leaders of the revolutions in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany, and spent 1989 traveling from capital to capital and reporting back on the historic events as they occurred.