Miscellany

As advertised, I was on Science Friday this afternoon with Adam Riess and Richard Ellis. (Listen here; registration required.)

We talked mostly about dark energy, the mysterious stuff that is smoothly distributed through space, constant (or nearly so) as a function of time, and makes up 70% of the energy in the universe. It’s mysterious for several reasons. For one thing, the leading candidate for dark energy is vacuum energy, which is just a kind of energy that is perfectly constant throughout space and time; but our estimates of how big the vacuum energy should be are larger than the observed amount of dark energy by one hundred and twenty orders of magnitude (a one followed by 120 zeros). For another, the amount of dark energy is comparable to the amount of matter in the universe (the other 30%), even though they change dramatically with respect to each other as the universe expands.

An issue that arose during the discussion was whether dark energy worked against gravity. It’s important to understand that dark energy is not a new “force,” but a new kind of “stuff,” that creates its own gravitational field. The funny thing is that this gravitational field pushes things apart, rather than pulling them together. But the force communicating the push is just gravity as Einstein figured it out — a manifestation of the curvature of spacetime.

We also talked about crazy new ideas, which are certainly worth considering. (It was during the course of this discussion that I extemporaneously introduced the concept of “peppermint-flavored dark energy,” although I’m not sure that will catch on.) Crazy ideas range from some energy source that changes slowly, but is nevertheless dynamical, all the way to tossing out Einstein’s general relativity and invoking new behaviors for gravity. People have tried all sorts of things, and should definitely keep trying, but so far the vanilla-flavored dark energy remains the model to beat.

It’s good that the press isn’t letting Bush just get away with using images of the World Trade Center in campaign ads. Kerry cannot let Bush be the presumptive anti-terror candidate. Next time Kerry gets asked about those ads in an interview or debate, he should say something like this:

I think it reveals something about the President and his campaign. Personally, I don’t think it’s appropriate to use images of Ground Zero for political gain. Of course we should have a debate about how best to combat terror and preserve our national security, but our memories of the September 11th tragedies should be treated with respect. This president won’t spare more than one hour of his time to talk with the commission investigating what went wrong on 9/11; to me, that says he’s just not willing to do what it takes to make sure a tragedy like this never happens again.

I’m sure the Kerry campaign is overjoyed to get such insightful advice for free over the web. Here at Preposterous, we toil selflessly for the greater good.

Maybe my final exams are too hard, after all. At the University of Georgia, former assistant coach Jim Harrick Jr. (son of head coach Jim Harrick Sr.) taught a course in 2001 on Coaching Principles and Strategies of Basketball. There was only one exam, including questions along the lines of “How many halves are in a college basketball game?” and “In your opinion, who is the best Division I assistant coach in the country?” (Correct answer: C, Jim Harrick Jr.)

The test in its entirety is here. Everyone in the class got an A. Both coaches recently lost their jobs following an NCAA investigation of multiple rule violations.

I’m spending all day Thursday at DePauw University, as a guest of their Science Research Fellows program. It should be fun, although they’re keeping me busy: a lunchtime talk, two seminar class discussions, and a public lecture in the evening. The lunchtime talk will be a reprisal of one I gave at a conference on “God and Physical Cosmology” last year at Notre Dame. The conference consisted primarily of theologians and philosophers, but they invited a couple of cosmologists (Joel Primack and me) along to give some scientific perspective. I didn’t really want to give a standard gee-whiz cosmology talk, so they let me talk about Why (Almost All) Cosmologists are Atheists. As you can read, it’s just the standard argument about why scientific reasoning leads to a firm rejection of a supernatural being as an explanation for what we see in nature; the kind of thing you’ll find in Richard Dawkins or Steven Weinberg.

I went into the conference having no idea what the response would be; this was, after all, the only conference I had ever been to where there was a prayer to open the banquet. But as it turned out they loved my talk. I didn’t change anybody’s mind, nor did I expect to (although one participant did say that I had convinced him once and for all that the argument from design wasn’t one that theists should rely on). But they were very happy to get a completely different perspective, and I think they were pleased to really hear what a cold-blooded scientific materialist actually thinks, rather than just being humored. I certainly give everyone at the conference credit for being good sports (which academic theologians generally are, in my experience).

Meanwhile, on the drive down from Chicago, I found an evangelical radio program explaining in quite a bit of detail why “old-earth” theories of evolution had been convincingly disproved, and correct scientific analysis had demonstrated that most geological features originated in an hydraulic catastrophe (the Flood) four thousand years ago. (Ed Brayton has an interesting discussion of just this issue.) So the discussion continues, needless to say, on multiple levels.

Here is synergy for you. This Friday I’ll be a guest on NPR’s Science Friday, in the second hour (3:00-4:00 Eastern time). One of the things we’ll be talking about is dark energy, including some new data bearing on whether the universe will be torn apart in a Big Rip. (The Big Rip is a little overhyped, actually; hopefully I’ll say more about that later.)

But one of the reasons I was invited was that the producer, Annette Heist, noticed that I had a blog, and in particular that I had mentioned NPR. And now I can tell you about it using the blog. Dizzying.

Congratulations to Howard Dean for winning his first primary.

So Kerry is the nominee. From Fark.com (somewhat indirectly, since they mangled the link) comes the news that he wants to be our second black president:

Speaking to the American Urban Radio Network, Kerry said Monday that he hoped to emulate former President Clinton in the eyes of blacks, the party’s most loyal constituency and a solid source of support during his stretch of primary wins.

“President Clinton was often known as the first black president,” Kerry said. “I wouldn’t be upset if I could earn the right to be the second.”

Now we can look forward to a stream of articles speculating about the veep slot, followed by a compensating stream telling us it doesn’t matter because the vice-presidential candidate can rarely even help win their home state. (Of course, Gore couldn’t win his home state in 2000, so maybe the presidential candidate doesn’t matter either.)

Nobody’s really excited about Kerry, are they? He seems like Gore with a different accent. Aloof, drifting, only predictable in his willingness to back down on questions of principle when an opportunity to pander presents itself. But we should give him a chance, and see how he does under the spotlight of the general-election campaign.

So it looks like there used to be a lot of water on Mars.

This is a great discovery. There’s so much we don’t know about the origin and evolution of planets and their chemistry, any little bit of information helps. The evidence seems to be somewhat indirect (sulfate concentrations, shapes of rocks), but I’m willing to believe that it paints a compelling picture.

Still, I have profoundly mixed feelings about this. Of course, the result is immediately spun as evidence for the possibility of life, with some intentional ambiguity about how strong the possibility is, when the life might have died out, or what form it took. More than one of the scientists comes right out and says that this part of Mars would have been an hospitable environment for life to exist. Really? Just because there was water? Wouldn’t we need to know a little more than that to make such a sweeping statement?

Discovering solid evidence for life native to Mars (as opposed to some organic material that was splashed there from Earth, as we now know can happen after comets or meteors impact us) would be a truly wonderful event. But it’s not very likely. For one thing, it’s just hard; I can imagine a long series of experiments reaching inconclusive results. For another, the a priori chances that life evolved separately on Mars seem incredibly small. There seem to be a lot of planets in our galaxy (one hundred billion, maybe?), but yet the galaxy is not teeming with the electromagnetic buzz of numerous advanced civilizations (the Fermi paradox). Either civilizations destroy themselves with extremely high probability, or life comes into existence with extremely low probability. Choose for yourself which seems more reasonable.

But still, it would be well worth chasing after this remote possibility if it didn’t cost anything. (Warning: curmudgeonly realism ahead.) But this finding will certainly be used as justification for funneling yet more money away from other NASA science programs and into the Mars program, especially into the manned mission which Bush recently proposed. Which is just silly.

The space shuttle and the space station were part of a NASA strategy to make travel to Earth orbit cheap and routine, which is certainly a laudable and achievable goal. The problem is, it’s been an abject failure. Shuttle missions are infrequent, unsafe, and fantastically expensive; the space station is even worse on all counts. So the new strategy is to build a base on the Moon and then visit Mars? This is like a kid who can’t quite get the hang of riding a bike without any training wheels, who decides that everything would improve if he enters the Tour de France. Not that it’s not a worthwhile goal (either the Moon or the Tour de France), but it’s not necessarily right under any circumstances. And we’re just not there yet.

Meanwhile, the rest of NASA’s science budget is being strangled. I gave a colloquium at the Space Telescope Science Institute on January 14th this year; the starting time had to be delayed so that everyone could listen to the President’s announcement of the new initiative, which had been (coincidentally, one assumes) scheduled for the same time. The sense of dread in the room was palpable; here were dozens of dedicated scientists, who were devoted to using this fantastic instrument to discover new things about the universe, who could see it being undermined before their eyes. And indeed, soon thereafter the planned servicing mission (to install $200 million of new equipment, which has already been built) was canceled. Safety was certainly a major concern in the decision, but money was a crucial factor.

And Hubble is not the only thing to go. I was recently on a NASA “roadmap team” to sketch out a future plan of missions in cosmology and astrophysics. We came up with the Beyond Einstein program, an ambitious but practical set of missions to learn about black holes, dark matter, dark energy, and the early universe. In the President’s new budget, all of the new missions were pushed back several years; of course they can continually be pushed back until they never happen. I have a vested interest in this kind of science, it’s true; but by any objective measure the most successful science missions that NASA has done have been unmanned satellites, not sending people around the solar system. Our scientific decisions are being increasingly driven by spectacle and political calculation, which is a shame when there are such exciting results potentially within reach.

It’s terrible that I can’t simply enjoy a wonderful scientific result for what it is, but automatically start fretting about the wider political consequences. Must be a grownup or something.

On NPR this morning, a teaser for The World mentioned a story this afternoon about a new program in Mexico: they are going to hand out free books to people riding the subway. (Here’s a version of the story from Newsday.) Apparently Mexico has the highest literacy rate in Latin America (about 90%), but people don’t really spend that much time actually reading, so the program make it easy for people to read in a context where they can’t do much else. Hopefully the reading will catch on, maybe even cut down on crime in the subways.

Now, as an idealistic liberal, this sounds like pure genius to me. But realistically there are a couple of questions. First, is this really going to work, or is it just a fantasy cooked up by Mexican liberals who are as starry-eyed and idealistic as I am? Second, who chooses the books? From the story it appears that they are publishing special books of short stories for the occasion, but someone has to decide who gets included. Can you imagine the political (or even literary) wranglings over that one?

So far only about 64 percent of the books have been returned. That doesn’t sound so bad, actually, and I can imagine that people will quit swiping them if they are consistently available for free on the subways. Besides, it’s kind of encouraging that people would want to steal books at all.

The first time I’ve ever seen a paper with my name in the title, and they manage to get the spelling wrong. Now I know how Zbigniew Brzezinski must have felt all the time.

Meanwhile, I seem to have attracted almost a hundred visitors on my first blogday. This internet thing, as others have already noticed, just might catch on. But I don’t know how to tell where people come from, or which pages are linking to me; I think blogspot won’t reveal this information unless I pay them money.

[Update: Now I know how to find who’s linking where. It’s all at Technorati.com, but you probably knew that. Thanks to Henry Farrell of Crooked Timber for the tip. (I still think it takes cash to figure out which visitors came from where.)]

This quarter Shadi Bartsch and I are teaching Moments in Atheism, an undergraduate course in the Big Problems curriculum here at the University of Chicago. I’m not sure what is more surprising, the idea of a course on the history of atheism, or the fact that I could get a humanities course to count as a regular teaching credit.

Teaching the course has been a fantastic experience; it brings me back to my own days as an undergraduate, exploring great ideas in philosophy and history. Indeed, one of the interesting things we have realized along the way is how much the history of atheism parallels all of the major twists and turns in the intellectual history of Western civilization generally. This has to be one of the few courses ever taught with Thomas Aquinas, Karl Marx, and Stephen Hawking on the same syllabus.

We were concerned at first about the touchy nature of the material; we wanted everyone to feel comfortable, no matter what their personal beliefs about religion were. So far it seems to be a success; there is a range of views represented in the class, and nobody has yet complained (out loud, anyway) about being marginalized.

One interesting discovery is the paucity of scholarly work on the actual history of atheism. It’s easy enough to find polemical books on either side of the issue, or careful philosophical works for and against the existence of God, but there’s not so much done on how the ideas have actually developed through time. Maybe because it’s a touchy subject? Also fascinating how reluctant people were to declare themselves atheists (until the 19th century), no matter how obviously the implications of their work were pushing them in that direction. Up at least through Hume, the pressure was so great that nobody could admit to disbelieving in God, even if they thought He was completely powerless in the world, or equal to the world.

Unfortunately we didn’t have time to do much about the present day. It’s still a touchy subject, of course; probably as much now as two hundred years ago. The elder George Bush famously said that he didn’t think that atheists should be considered as citizens. I’m not sure why the US and Europe seem to have diverged so dramatically on this.