Miscellany

Not much time for posting this week. In addition to taxes and teaching, I’ve been traveling too much; earlier this week in Texas, tomorrow giving a colloquium at Swarthmore. Somewhere in there it would be nice to fit some research, but you can’t have everything.

I know that I earlier denied any interest in politics, but it sure would be nice to have a job with lots of vacation time, like President of the United States. Now that I think about it, that would probably mean I would pay a lower tax rate, too. Maybe my decision was too hasty.

Will Baude, when he isn’t blogging full speed over at Crescat Sententia, fills his free time by writing occasional columns for the Chicago Maroon. (He is also a University of Chicago undergraduate, but apparently that doesn’t take much time out of your week.) His recent column deals with some interesting issues about privacy in an academic setting. But the really interesting question is asked right at the beginning: How much do professors talk about their students?

The inverse question is also interesting: How much do students talk about their professors? My best answer would be, more than they (the professors) suspect, but less than they would like. You would think that professors would know the answer perfectly well, since they were presumably students themselves at one point. But anyone who has ever actually taken a class can attest that professors tend to completely forget what it’s like to be a student.

So what about the professors talking about students? It’s probably the same answer: more than they suspect, less than they would like. Professors talk about students all the time, to be honest. Very often it’s quite abstract: the new incoming class looks pretty good, kids today don’t work as hard as we did, etc. But individuals certainly do get talked about. (Hope I don’t get kicked out of the union for revealing this. If we had a union.) And here’s another secret revealed: some students are more interesting than others, and they get talked about more. The anti-titillating news is that the talk is almost exclusively drily academic: that student is struggling, this one is amazing, the other one really should switch to another field. Except, of course, for the tremendous amount of griping that goes on about students who are somehow difficult (usually because they are complaining about grades). But very little, in my experience, about students’ personal lives, unless some disaster is causing them trouble in school. Most professors have enough trouble managing their own personal lives (low-key though they may be) that there’s little thought of delving into those of the students. Unless I’m just excluded from those conversations.

As an advisor of both graduate and undergraduate students, I suspect that they don’t always appreciate how much their advisors worry about giving them proper guidance. Or, conversely, how much pride they take when the students do well. (I know that my own students read this, but I think I can tell the truth without getting in trouble here.) This pride is largely undeserved; if a really talented student chooses to work with me and I don’t completely screw them up, they will do well just as if they had had some other advisor. But that won’t stop me from feeling somehow responsible for their success.

Much of my mental energy these days is going into trying to buy a condo. Nerve-wracking stuff for anyone who finds financial matters somewhat distasteful, as the average academic tends to do. Now they say we might be in the midst of a housing bubble, analogous to the internet bubble of recent memory. There’s even a website devoted exclusively to the possibility. Bubbles, of course, tend to burst, leaving the chewer all sticky and embarrassed. (Or poor, as the case may be.) But on the other hand there’s a claim this could never happen in Chicago, what with our diversified economy and benevolent dictatorship. Is this a crazy thing to be doing right now?

PZ Myers at Pharyngula is defending scientists against the pernicious charge of “methodological naturalism.” This is an accusation levied by intelligent-design enthusiasts eager to show how closed-minded the scientific community actually is. This idea is just that scientists begin by assuming the existence of a purely naturalistic explanation for the natural world, and are therefore cognitively unable to recognize evidence of design when it is staring them in the face.

It’s an interesting question, actually, one that addresses what it means to be thinking scientifically. We often think of science as searching for a simple set of rules governing the behavior of the world; what if there is no such set of rules that suffices to cover all circumstances? What if some aspects of the world can’t possibly be explained by a mechanistic working-out of simple patterns, but instead arise from the actions of a conscious supernatural being that isn’t subject to any rules at all? Would science be able to recognize this, or would it always assume that there were rules, just that we hadn’t yet figured them out?

As I argued in my paper on cosmology and atheism, I think that the search for immutable laws is not the hallmark of science; rather, it’s the search for a simple, complete, and coherent explanation for all we see. We should distinguish between the methodology of science, which is really what defines it, and the product of science, which is the worldview that methodology leads us to. Naturalism and theism are two competing worldviews — nothing but rules vs. intervention by one or more supernatural beings. But the defining characteristic of science is its method, which involves observing the world, framing and testing hypotheses, and so on. The scientific method stands in contrast to other possible ways of trying to understand the world, including contemplation and revelation. The ID types actually do understand this distinction, which is why they are accusing scientists of “methodological naturalism.” Their criticism could in principle be correct, but in fact doesn’t describe real scientists.

This is basically Paul Myers’ argument as well — if our methods led us to the conclusion that an intelligent designer offered the best explanation for the world we see, that’s what we would conclude. Physics can offer an example of how scientists are willing to toss out their absolutely most cherished principles if the method demands it: the origin of quantum mechanics. If there has ever been a principle that physicists thought they would never have to give up, it was the clockwork determinism of Newtonian mechanics, in which the outcome of any experiment could be predicted with arbitrary precision. Eventually it became clear that this idea just wasn’t going to work any more, and (after much wailing and gnashing of teeth, to be sure) quantum mechanics was born. Scientists wouldn’t necessarily be very happy if their research began to point them in the direction of intelligent design, but they would certainly accept it if the data forced them to.

Of course, the data force us to exactly the opposite. Long ago David Hume wrote in On Miracles about why there is a fantastic prejudice against claims of supernatural intervention: when the laws of nature work perfectly well over and over again in essentially all of our experience, any claim for miraculous violation of those laws would require absolutely overwhelming and incontrovertibly unambiguous evidence. This is not what we are getting from the ID folks.

Still, I imagine that there are scientists who would claim that naturalism is a necessary component of being a scientist. Don’t believe them. Scientists are constantly speaking rashly about what is and is not science, but the sad fact is that scientists don’t always understand how science works, even if they are very good at doing it. We shouldn’t be too surprised. It’s like Ted Williams said about Ty Cobb: he was the best hitter of all time, but if you followed his advice about how to hit you’d never make contact with the ball.

In the last post I lamented the dearth of women in physics, but there is another group that is even less well represented: conservatives in academia. Not to fear, David Horowitz has come up with a straightforward solution to this glaring inequity: he wants to legislate ideological balance in university departments, under the rubric of “intellectual diversity.”

This is obviously a brilliant idea, although it suffers from one obvious flaw: it takes the influence of academia far too seriously. What we really need to do is to legislate mandatory ideological balance in all areas of human endeavor. Personally I think that large corporations tend to affect our daily lives more than university faculties do, so I’d be happy to see affirmative action for under-represented politics among CEOs. All sorts of institutions could be opened up to greater balance: lawyers, bankers, football coaches, the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I look forward to the day when all sectors of America have attained perfect ideological diversity.

As a side project (how does he find the time?) Horowitz wants to help leftists keep in touch with each other, through a database of leftist people and organizations. The site will eventually be at www.followthenetwork.org, but the pages are currently unavailable while they work some of the kinks out. If you’re impatient, someone has mirrored an early version of the site before it went quiet. I was happy to see the University of Chicago appear, although apparently the Enrico Fermi Institute didn’t make it. Thanks for the help keeping the left-wing conspiracy intact, David.

Our physics colloquium today was a departure; instead of a distinguished visitor telling us about forefront research, we had a talk by our own celebrated cosmologist Michael Turner. But he wasn’t talking about cosmology; for the last six months Michael has been in charge of the Mathematics and Physical Sciences Division at the National Science Foundation, and came back to tell us what life was like at the NSF.

At the end of his talk he left us with assignments: what tasks, in his opinion, were most important for the physics community at this moment. Number one in order of importance was to “broaden who we are,” by which he means to diversify away from domination by white males. To get an idea of the importance he was placing on this, the number two task was “do great science.”

Physics has been dominated by white men throughout its modern history. This fact doesn’t necessarily set it apart from other disciplines; but the depressing reality is that the situation in physics is improving only exceedingly slowly, if at all. Michael showed this picture of the University of Chicago physics faculty in 2000; more than thirty faces, none of them female. (At the time we actually had two women faculty, neither of whom happened to be present for the photo; now we have three, out of more than fifty faculty total.) We are not unrepresentative; less than ten percent of physics professors in the US are women, and it’s much worse at the senior level.

The graph shown on the right plots the percentage of women earning Ph.D.’s in selected fields, between 1980 and 1998. (Click the figure for more details.) It illustrates that the situation seems to be getting a little bit better, but also highlights how far we are from most other fields.

Why is it like that? I really don’t know. Anyone who has actually interacted with bright female physicists and students knows that the best women are just as good as the best men. There are also dramatic differences from country to country in the percentage of women in physics. So whatever the problem is, it’s not inevitable; there is something about our system that dissuades women from going into physics (and math, and engineering, and computer science).

My suspicion is that there is no one focused obstacle, and this is what makes the problem so hard to solve. Certainly there is sexism within the physics community, in all sorts of manifestations. I have seen straightforward examples of outright discrimination, where a male physicist would downgrade the abilities of a student or colleague simply because she was female; more commonly, a kind of unconscious sexism is at work, in which insecure men will simultaneously flirt (awkwardly) with women while not taking them seriously as researchers. This is the hardest to eradicate, since the perpetrators would never possibly accept that they weren’t extremely supportive of women in science. But in addition to direct sexism, there are elements of the scientific environment that are hostile, or even just uninteresting/unattractive, to female students, who subsequently leave the field of their own accord.

Unfortunately, the situation won’t be fixed by well-intentioned university departments aggressively pursuing the best women students or faculty (although they should). The problem begins back when children are very young, and girls are gently but persistently diverted away from science by a million subtle pressures. It might be that the only way to achieve gender equality in science is to completely overhaul the society, which strikes me as a big project (although worth undertaking).

Of course women are not the whole story when it comes to diversity; African-Americans, for example, are equally badly under-represented. But in that case the problem seems less subtle to me; it just doesn’t seem very surprising, since the economic conditions in which African-Americans grow up are often much worse than for whites, and the educations are correspondingly poorer. Physics, or academia more generally, is not a common career choice in families where it’s a struggle just to get a decent education. So to increase the representation of African-Americans in physics, all we have to do is to end economic inequality between the races in America. Easier diagnosed than accomplished, I suppose.

We all know what a mess the Administration got itself into by refusing to let Condoleeza Rice testify in public and under oath before the 9/11 commission, eventually being forced to give in. One of the main reasons their position was so silly is that Rice was constantly giving interviews to news shows at the very time she was refusing to testify in public and under oath; the obvious implication being that it was okay to talk, so long as you weren’t sworn to tell the truth, or if you were, so long as nobody would know what you said.

Now they are refusing to release the draft of the speech that Rice was scheduled to give precisely on September 11, 2001 — a major address outlining the administrations foreign-policy strategies. We all know why they wouldn’t want it made public; the painful truth that the administration was focused on state-based threats and swooning over missile defense systems, when they should have been concentrating on asymmetric threats from terrorist organizations, would be glaringly obvious. (See Josh Marshall’s post from last week, based on excerpts from the speech.) But do they really not see how dumb this looks? How secret can it be? It was a speech she was going to deliver! One presumes there would have been people in the room, listening to it and stuff.

Update: Tbogg says much the same thing. Not that I thought this point was so subtle you had to be an overeducated theoretical physicist to figure it out or anything.

And now I’m on the road again (giving a colloquium in Rochester), so still no time for a substantive post. But I did find out that the pie chart that serves as the unofficial logo of this blog will appear on the nametags and program for this conference next week. Not because of the blog (I presume), but because it represents our inventory of the universe: ordinary matter, dark matter, dark energy. Representing the inventory as a pie chart is almost too obvious, but people sometimes ruin the idea by making it too complicated. The universe is actually a simple place, although a subtle one.

There really should be a way to make money off of this blogging thing. Perhaps Preposterous Universe coffee mugs with the pie-chart logo? Is it possible to finance a new car this way?

I would love to write my promised post on quantum gravity, but duty interferes, and I need instead to write a lecture on special relativity for class. Instead, here are two interesting facts about Hendrick Antoon Lorentz, one of the founding fathers of relativity.

First, although he was the inventor of Lorentz transformations, he went to his grave (1928) not believing in Lorentz invariance! He thought his transformations were just a trick for transforming between inertial frames and the one true ether frame. Einstein figured out in 1905 that the ether frame was unnecessary, and that’s when special relativity really got off the ground. For more info, look at the bottom of this page for Michel Janssen’s dissertation.

Second, he did not invent the Lorenz gauge of electromagnetism (note the spelling). That would be Ludwig Lorenz, a Danish physicist. Poor Ludwig’s reputation was lost in the glow of someone with awfully similar name and interests.

The most recent issue of The New Republic has an article about the Pledge of Allegiance affair by Leon Wieseltier. It’s an insightful piece — Wieseltier, who seems to be religious himself, puts the issue in better perspective than I ever could have. His main point is simply that the defenders of keeping “Under God” in the Pledge are actually undermining religion, since their main tactic is to claim that the phrase doesn’t really refer to anything specific, just a warm and fuzzy feeling we all have as Americans. Wieseltier correctly points out that it is the atheists who, by not buying into such a meaningless notion of God and religion, are the ones who take God seriously.

For this reason, American unbelief can perform a great quickening service to American belief. It can shake American religion loose from its cheerful indifference to the inquiry about truth. It can remind it that religion is not only a way of life but also a worldview. It can provoke it into remembering its reasons. For the argument that a reference to God is not a reference to God is a sign that American religion is forgetting its reasons. The need of so many American believers to have government endorse their belief is thoroughly abject. How strong, and how wise, is a faith that needs to see God’s name wherever it looks?

I think he’s exactly right — religion only makes sense if it pleads guilty to making claims about how the world works. I also believe that those claims fall far short, but I have more respect for believers who stand by the manifest consequences of their belief.