Miscellany

Here is a rare chance for me to provide actual information rather than warmed-over opinion. A New York Times story reports that NASA instructed its employees not to comment on “The Day After Tomorrow”, an upcoming movie in which global warming sets off all sorts of disasters. The natural worry is that the Bush administration is concerned about lending credibility to anything that suggests global warming might be something to worry about. This has been commented on by David Harris, John McKay, Charles Perez, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, and Fred at the Dead Parrot Society. (For some discussion of the film itself, have a look at Chris Mooney.)

My inside contacts at NASA (really, I’m not kidding) have forwarded me this more recent email that has been sent around:

Movie Support Clarification

News reports in recent days have suggested that NASA has attempted to “muzzle” researchers from responding to the issues raised in the upcoming movie “The Day After Tomorrow.” To the contrary, NASA expects that as colleagues, we will speak our minds, regardless of whether those views work to the advantage of the agency or not.

Diversity of opinion is a valuable resource and plays an important role as we work to successfully fulfill our mission objectives.

To clarify the specific issue, a number of NASA colleagues assisted with the film’s development. However, we require producers to sign a cooperation agreement before offering any formal advance promotional support. This is a standard agency policy that has successfully worked with other entertainment blockbusters such as “Armageddon” and “Space Cowboys.”

But, the producers of “The Day After Tomorrow” have not signed an agreement. As such, NASA does not plan any specific support of this production.

This direction should not be interpreted as an attempt to keep scientists from speaking out on the issue of climate change. We encourage our researchers to openly answer all appropriate questions regarding the science explored in the movie.

Glenn Mahone

Assistant Administrator for Public Affairs

I don’t know if this is an embarrassed reversal of policy, or if the original intent was simply distorted. But it’s important to understand that “The Day After Tomorrow” lacks the detailed NASA input that made “Armageddon” and “Space Cowboys” such plausible and artistic films.

I’m late as usual to noticing this, but Brian Leiter and Alas, a Blog have picked up on the most recent poll demonstrating how shamefully ill-informed most Americans are, especially those that lean to the right.

A majority of Americans still believes Saddam Hussein was in cahoots with al-Qa’ida and that Iraq either had weapons of mass destruction or a programme for developing them, according to a new opinion poll.

[…]

A staggering 82 per cent of respondents believed most experts supported the notion that Iraq was providing “substantial support” to al-Qa’ida – a contention that President Bush has been forced to disavow. Almost 60 per cent were unaware that world opinion was against the war in Iraq, with 21 per cent saying the world was behind the US-led invasion and 38 per cent saying views were “evenly divided”.

(See also here.) One way to spin this is “liberals are better informed,” but I think that misses the underlying mechanism. I suspect that what’s going on is something like this:

• People are more likely to believe claims that reinforce their political views.
• Our current conservative administration has been spreading lies, or at least intentionally misleading statements, about important issues of the day.
• Therefore, conservatives today are more likely than liberals to believe these untrue statements, and thus come off as uninformed.

But the real question to me is, how could the American public be this wrong? Whose fault is it? Certainly the media must bear a large fraction of the blame. People complain back and forth about the media being biased against their favorite group, but the important problem is the opposite: in an attempt to appear “neutral,” our major media outlets prefer to report statements that can be attributed to someone rather than statements that are true. If Official X claims that 2+2=5, they will try to find some other Official Y to claim that 2+2=4, or perhaps that 2+2=7, then report both and consider their job well done. (Or if time is running short, the first claim will be reported as is.) It goes beyond politics; if a manager at the cable company claims that their new policy will cut rates for customers, and a consumer-rights advocate claims that the rates will effectively go up, you will most commonly just find both claims reported and left at that, rather than the journalist simply plugging in some numbers and telling us what the truth is. This overly-cautious approach to objectivity is why average people on the street might not know that there has been no link found between Saddam and Al-Qaeda; right-wing sources make the suggestion/implication often enough that the contradictions from left-wing sources seem like just so much partisan back-and-forth, rather than straightforward statements of fact.

Good news and bad news. First the good: David Appell has restarted his blog, Quark Soup. Good links to all sorts of science stories, with interesting commentary.

Now the bad: in one of David’s recent posts, he brings to our attention a slightly loopy screed about experimental gravitation by Gregg Easterbrook. It’s a tired argument, sloppily made: we shouldn’t spend government money on speculative scientific research without any tangible benefits to society. In particular, he picks on the LIGO experiment to detect gravitational radiation.

But while we’re counting tax-funded abstract science boondoggles, let us not forget the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, a $365 million government project that is all but certain to have no practical result, other than as a jobs program.

He stoops as low as you might fear, suggesting that we should be spending the money on trying to cure AIDS. (I’m sure that, absolutist as he apparently is, Easterbrook donates all of his above-subsistence-level income directly to medical research. Those of us who think that we can try to help sick people and pursue other interests at the same time will presumably lead more complicated lives.)

Now, Easterbrook has long ago forfeited any right to be taken seriously when talking about science, for example in his classic discussion of extra dimensions, in which he can’t see why scientists are happy to talk about spatial dimensions but not spiritual ones. I wasn’t blogging at the time of that travesty, but he was justly ridiculed by Kieran Healy, Atrios, and many others.

But it’s a shame that he makes so little sense, because the question itself is well worth asking. How much money should we, as a society, devote to basic scientific research? It is undoubtedly expensive, and getting more so — the next big step in particle physics (after the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva) will be a twenty-mile long Linear Collider, whose cost will be measured in billions of dollars. The cost will be spread out over multiple countries and many years, but it still represents a substantial chunk of change. (I gave a talk on the connections between a linear collider and cosmology.) In a well-ordered society, it’s worth spending some fraction of our money on projects of this sort; but what should the fraction be? Libertarian fantasies aside, private donations just aren’t going to cut it.

You could talk about technological spinoffs from basic science, but that misses the point. The reason why it’s worth spending people’s money on research into the fundamental workings of the universe is because people want to know the answers. They might not understand the details, and more often than not they’ve been traumatized by science classes from high school, but ordinary people really care about these deep questions. That’s why they buy books and go to lectures by Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, or Brian Greene. The amount that gets spent on this kind of research is small compared to numerous other government projects (bridges in Alaska, anyone?), and the results are an unambiguous good for society. And the unfortunate fact is, some experiments aren’t worth doing at all unless you’re willing to spend the money. For half the cost of the Linear Collider, you won’t get half the science — you’ll get nothing. Maybe that’s the choice that the country wants to make; but that’s not the impression I get from talking with people on airplanes who are fascinated by what I do.

Here is my favorite part of Easterbrook’s latest:

Today’s science community is pressuring Congress and the legislatures of Europe to fund incredibly expensive mega-projects almost certain to benefit no one but the scientists themselves. It’s hard not to conclude that physicists and their universities are using mumbo-jumbo about Einstein and the universe–knowing not one member of Congress has any idea what a “gravity wave” is supposed to be or whether this matters–to hoodwink taxpayers into providing cushy jobs for tenured researchers and their postdocs.

Ah, yes, the cushy jobs. I’m so jaded by now, it’s nice to be reminded about how easy my life is. Just last night (Sunday), when I bumped into one of my students in the office around 10 p.m., and we talked about modifications of the Friedmann equation in the presence of Lorentz-violating vector fields, here I thought we were working hard just because we cared so much about the research we were doing. I had completely forgotten that we were really in it for the extended vacation time, exorbitant salary, and total absence of responsibility that comes with an academic appointment.

Don’t get me wrong; I love my job, wouldn’t trade it for anything. But “cushy” isn’t the word I (or anyone in their right mind) would use to describe it. Almost anyone who grinds through grad school and postdocs to get a faculty job as a scientist could be making more money for less work doing something else. But there are a lot more people trying to get these jobs than there are positions, for the same reason why the public is willing to support basic research — we want to know how our universe works. It’s the only one we have.

Update: Damn it, more evidence that administration is strangling NASA’s pure science budget, in favor of going to the Moon and Mars. Paul Krugman said it best: “Money-saving suggestion: let’s cut directly to the scene where Mr. Bush dresses up as an astronaut, and skip the rest of his expensive, pointless — but optimistic! — Moon-base program.”

The big news is that, despite previous misgivings, I’ve gone ahead and signed a contract for a condo. Signing the contract is not the final step; that would be closing, later in June. Closing is like getting tenure, while signing the contract is like landing a tenure-track faculty job; it’s not the end of your worries, but it is the single biggest hurdle.

As you can see from the satellite image (found at TerraServer), I am already being spied on. The Man knows that I’m a troublemaker, and wants to keep an eye on me at all times.

In other news, my alma mater has chosen Big Bird to speak at commencement. Not in costume, but the actor who plays the character on Sesame Street. Not all of the students are happy. They shouldn’t complain; the only real dimension along which commencement speeches should be judged is that of brevity. Once students have had four years of education and have typically made plans for jumping into the real world (or into grad school) it must be too late for a few well-crafted words of wisdom to have much impact on their subsequent trajectories.

The irony is thick out there in low-earth orbit these days. Mere days after finally launching Gravity Probe B, equipped with the most precise gyroscopes ever built, NASA has lost one of the gyroscopes on the International Space Station. This leaves them with two functioning gyros (out of four), the minimum number necessary to keep the ISS from tumbling (which wouldn’t be a disaster, but would require the expenditure of fuel to keep it the station in alignment. Yes, I know that the gyros on the ISS are completely different from those on GPB; we can’t blame the failure on conservation of angular momentum.

Bob Park in the What’s New newsletter from the American Physical Society put it this way:

SPACE TURKEY: GYROSCOPES ARE NOT COVERED BY DEALER’S WARRANTY. Two of the four gyroscopes on the International Space Station have now failed. The ISS can maintain orientation with only two gyroscopes, but what if there’s another failure? We called the customer-service desk to ask how long repairs would take. They connected us to Hi Rodomontade, who sets NASA schedules. “You’re in luck,” Hi said, “we have one in stock. We’ll send it up on the next shuttle.” We asked when that would be. “Well, that’s a problem, the shuttle fleet is being fixed. We use the Russian Soyuz to get to the ISS.” But the Soyuz just traveled to the ISS on Wednesday for a crew change, “Did it deliver a new gyro,” we wondered? “Unfortunately, the gyroscope is too large for the Soyuz. You’ll just have to wait for the shuttle.” When will that be? “It’s scheduled for May,” there was a pause, “May 2005.”

This morning I was listening to Eight-Forty Eight, a local magazine show on Chicago public radio. They were talking with two video artists about Video Mundi, a festival currently playing at the Chicago Cultural Center.

Apparently one short video has become quite a sensation on the video-art circuit. Swedish artist Jeroen Offerman practiced for months to learn how to sing Stairway to Heaven backwards. And he learned how to play air guitar backwards, whatever that means. The resulting video shows his performance played backwards — so you hear the words forwards. He includes an instrumental track for Stairway to Heaven playing behind him. You can certainly understand every word he’s saying (at least as well as Robert Plant’s original). But there is something creepy and different about it. I’m not sure I would have been able to decode what was going on if I had heard it without explanation.

One of the artists being interviewed said that work like this gave him hope for society. That is not exactly the conclusion I might have drawn.

Update: Jeroen Offerman is Dutch, not Swedish — my mistake. Thanks to Arjon Dunnewind for the correction (in the Comments).

Is it just possible that the Kerry campaign is being very clever?

If there is one thing we have learned about the Bush administration/campaign, it’s that they fold instantly under political pressure. To prevent stories from festering, they happily reverse direction under the slightest provocation, or at least claim to. Think of military records, only giving one hour to the 9/11 commission, Rice’s public testimony, the appointment of outsourcer Tony Raimondo as assistant secretary of Commerce, etc. And basically, the strategy has worked; what might have been long-lasting criticisms of the administration rapidly drop off the radar screen.

That’s why the Kerry campaign should not make too big a deal out of Bush and Cheney appearing before the 9/11 commission together — at least not yet. Let them actually do it, first. It’s such a ridiculous situation, easily made fun of in debates (or on late-night talk shows), and speaks so directly to one of Bush’s weaknesses, it would be a shame to lose it. Let them wound themselves, and take advantage later.

I was reminded of this when the cry went up from Republicans for Kerry to release his military records. I hadn’t realized that they weren’t already public, and certainly there’s always the possibility of some lurking embarrassment. But now they’ve been released, and what do you know — they make Kerry look great. And all of the articles about it will obviously offer a comparison to Bush’s sad record, which brings that story back into the news. (Explicit comparison made over at Daily Kos here and here.)

Could it actually be that the Kerry people had purposefully not released the records, hoping that at some point the Republicans would notice, and provide an opportunity for some free publicity for how wonderful Kerry is? I’m reluctant to give them that much credit, but it’s a possibility.

Now that I have blog stats to check, I have lost valuable time that could be spent checking the amazon.com sales rank for my book. Thank goodness, because the book is tanking, to be perfectly honest. I am currently about 70,000th on the bestseller list, which is sobering. I started out somewhere below two million, and peaked around 3,000. I don’t really think these rankings are a very good indication of sales for textbooks, since most people buy them at their college bookstore, but a higher ranking is nevertheless to be preferred over a lower one.

For those of you who haven’t heard, the book is a graduate-level introduction to general relativity. There are many good books on the subject already, but I thought there was a niche for a modern book that focused on providing a clear, pedagogical introduction to the subject, rather than being overly ambitious and including too much advanced material.

The book came about in an interesting way. I first taught GR when I was a postdoc, and at the time I was young and foolish enough to think it would be fun to type up very detailed lecture notes and hand them out to each class. (Now that I am old and wise, the very thought makes my head spin.) Word got around that the notes were useful, and I began to receive requests for copies, so I just went ahead and put the whole collection online. They’ve been quite popular; the counter on the web page for the notes has passed 100,000, and that doesn’t include the many folks who download them directly from arxiv.org. Of course not nearly that many people have read them, or even printed them out, but it’s nice to be noticed.

The actual book is an expanded version of the lecture notes; what’s in the notes comprises perhaps half of the finished book. And of course the exposition is cleaned up and improved throughout in the book version. Still, it has been questioned whether anyone would pay for a book if much of the material was available online for free; indeed, certain publishers insisted that I would have to take it off of the internet (as if that were possible) if they were to publish it. But the nice folks at Addison-Wesley loved the idea of keeping the notes online, as basically free advertising for the book. They did a great job at the actual book production (spiffy cover etc.), although the price is somewhat high ($80). So this is something of an experiment in the relation between free online content and expensive tangible content.

By the way, I did not review my own book for amazon.com, like some people do. Even though my reviews have been good, I would have gone into much more loving detail.

One of the great things about the internet (one of the things, anyway; great or not is up for dispute) is that I can surround myself by only those voices that I want to hear. For example, I tend not to spend much time lingering at The Corner at National Review Online; I’ll trust others to point to anything interesting that goes on over there.

Impearls has just pointed to one such thing: a short dialogue between Peter Robinson and John Derbyshire on the imminent launch of Gravity Probe B, a satellite designed to test general relativity. This satellite has a long and checkered history; scientists started working on the idea in the late Sixties, and it has since grown over-budget and out of control, but has been kept afloat by the persistence of its supporters in lobbying Congress. It is infamous for suffering delays in being launched, and we are in the midst of one such delay as I type this; the current plan is to launch on the morning of April 20th.

The Robinson/Derbyshire discussion was more interesting than I would have thought. (I’ve honestly never read anything by these guys before, although their names are familiar from rants by people I do read.) Derbyshire clearly knows something about the science, and gives an essentially-correct account of the usefulness of testing general relativity. (Okay, a quick lookup on the web: Derbyshire is the author of a popular-level book on the Riemann hypothesis, and also a self-described racist and homophobe. Takes all kinds, I guess.)

Robinson, on the other hand, is pretty much in the dark, but in a very revealing way. In the very first post in the exchange, he expresses surprise that there would be any such thing as experimental relativity:

Test Einstein? When I first learned about all this a few days ago, the idea shocked me. Einstein, I’d always assumed, must already have been proven correct. But apparently not, or at least not completely. In any event, full marks to the old man for providing us with a theory that meets Karl Popper’s test of falsifiability, which is a lot more than Freud or, as best I can make it out, Darwin ever did.

Whew, where to begin? Robinson seems to have deep-seated misconceptions about how science works, ones that are very revealing in the context of debates about evolution. It is interesting to see Popper’s criterion of falsifiability brandished with such confidence, when he clearly misses the most fundamental point of Popper’s philosophy: the reason why “falsifiability” is a necessary quality is because it is impossible to “prove” any scientific theory correct. You can do all the experiments you like, and have them be perfectly consistent with your theory, but then someone tomorrow does a new experiment which isn’t.

Not only can we not prove Einstein’s theory correct, nobody believes that it actually is perfectly correct. It’s not consistent with quantum mechanics (see long-promised post that hasn’t yet been written), at the very least. But it could easily break down much sooner than we might expect from considerations of quantum gravity, which is why we need new tests in every regime. General relativity isn’t sacrosanct, it’s something people try to modify all the time. I’ve done it myself. (Another great thing about the internet — the effortlessness of shameless plugs.)

It was also amusing to see Freud and Darwin mixed together. Of course Darwin’s theory is eminently falsifiable, in a million possible ways. There could simply be no evidence whatsoever for alteration in the fossil record through time, or species could never appear or disappear, or we could demonstrably pass on developed characteristics to our offspring, or the necessary timescales for evolution could be much larger than the age of the Earth or the universe. None of these is true, though. Here we see one of the big reasons why it is so frustrating to argue with anti-evolutionists. Real scientists know perfectly well that all of our theories are approximations, and that every theory should be tested, and that no theory is perfect; but they are comfortable with the existence of different levels of approximate truth, and understand that evolution and the Big Bang and general relativity can be “true” in a way that doesn’t mean they can’t be improved upon. Anti-evolutionists cling to a more Manichean view of scientific knowledge, in which evolution isn’t all that great because it’s “just a theory.” Like what isn’t?

Meanwhile, hopefully Gravity Probe B will be successfully launched by the time you read this. They have constructed the world’s most precise gyroscopes, to look for a subtle effect known as “frame-dragging.” To be honest, the experiment will only yield modest improvements over existing limits on deviations from general relativity; that’s why an anonymous physicist was opining that the only possible outcomes are agreement with GR, or nobody believing the experiment. Maybe; we’ll have to see. This particular satellite cost a lot of money, much of which was appropriated outside the conventional peer-review process. If anything, the lesson worth emphasizing is that prioritization of scientific projects is a task best left to scientists, not to politicians. Once a satellite is on the launch pad, however, we can all cross our fingers and hope for some impressive new results.

Update: It’s been launched! First science results are expected late in 2005, if all goes well.

I’m back from my brief visit to Swarthmore. Renowned as a liberal-arts college, Swarthmore (like many similar schools) has been placing increased emphasis on having science faculty that do research, with impressive success. We talked a little about the pros and cons of being a science major at a small school vs. a big school. At a big research university you definitely get the feeling of being at the center of a lot of action, with great work being done all around you. More pragmatically, you can take advanced courses in special topics that won’t generally be offered at a smaller place, and there will (or should) be grad students and postdocs lurking around to ask for advice. But your contact with professors will be nothing like it is at a liberal-arts school, and your place in the totem pole is correspondingly lower. I think the happy truth is that there’s no right answer; different students will respond differently to the different environments. (This is part of a larger secret that we don’t like to tell prospective students when we are recruiting them: namely, that the success of their education depends much more on them than it does on what school they go to.)

Update: Victoria Swisher of the Swarthmore student newspaper wrote a nice article about the talk I gave.