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Another Reason Scientists Don’t Always Make Great Storytellers

The world is not magic. At least, that is, the actual real world around us. That’s the great insight we’ve achieved over the course of centuries of scientific investigation into the universe. It all follows rules; everything has an explanation (which is not the same as everything having a reason).

So I was struck by this blog post by screenwriter John August. He talks about the movie Groundhog Day, in which Bill Murray’s weatherman character is stuck in a time loop of unspecified duration. For a film that seemed fairly inconsequential at the time, it’s really a great starting point for all sorts of conversations — I use it in my book to talk a bit about time-travel paradoxes. (Did I mention I’m writing a book?)

But August uses it to illustrate the cinematic usefulness of unexplained magic. Even in a fictional universe, you don’t want it to be completely magical — there need to be rules, otherwise it’s impossible to have a coherent drama in which the characters struggle to achieve some goal. In Groundhog Day, the goal is to win the love of Andie MacDowell, although different stories make different choices.

But the central conceit of the movie — Bill Murray is stuck in an endless loop, trying to get out — remains completely unexplained. In an early version of the script, apparently, there was some talk of a voodoo spell that set the time loop in motion. Removing that bit of explanation was an incredibly smart decision. If it had been included, the focus on the story of the protagonist’s journey would necessarily have been diluted by the attention paid to the voodoo spell. The movie worked much better with that little bit of magic remaining unexplained.

You can just imagine if Murray’s character had been a physicist instead of a TV personality. Forget about winning someone’s love; the guy would have spent millions of years trying to figure out the mechanism behind his travel in a time loop. It’s great when scientists talk to Hollywood, but thank goodness they haven’t taken over.

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Inherent Vice

I wasn’t going to mention Thomas Pynchon’s latest book, a noir detective novel set in 1970 LA called Inherent Vice. Not because of any suspected problems with the book — it sounds great, and I’m looking forward to reading it. Only because we previously enthused back on this very blog when Pynchon’s last book, Against the Day, came out — and I still haven’t gotten around to actually reading it. Bad blogger.

But this is too cool not to mention (via Andrew Jaffe) — the good folks at Penguin Books have come out with a “trailer” for Pynchon’s new book.

In case you’re wondering — yes, that’s Pynchon reading the voice-over. The man doesn’t like having his picture taken, which is perfectly understandable, but there’s no reason not to lend some authorial authority (as well as the actual text) to a video attached to one’s work.

I notice that Tom Levenson also did a trailer for Newton & the Counterfeiter. Wave of the future, I suppose.

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The Grid of Disputation

A few days ago the world witnessed a rare and precious event: a dispute on the Internet. In this case, it was brought about by a Bloggingheads episode of Science Saturday featuring historian of science Ronald Numbers and philosopher Paul Nelson. The controversy stemmed from the fact that Nelson is a Young-Earth Creationist — someone who believes that the Earth was created by God a few thousand years ago. You can read opinions about the dialogue from PZ Myers, Jerry Coyne, or for a different point of view Nelson himself.

I was one of the people who found the dialogue extremely inappropriate (especially for “Science Saturday”), and as someone who is a fan of Bloggingheads I sent a few emails back and forth with the powers that be, who are generally very reasonable people. I think they understand why scientists would not be happy with such a dialogue, and I suspect it’s not going to happen again.

But it’s worth laying out the precise source of my own unhappiness — I’ll let other scientists speak for themselves. One potential source of discomfort is the natural reluctance to give credibility to creationists, and I think that’s a legitimate concern. There is a long-running conversation within the scientific community about whether it’s better to publicly debate people who are skeptical about evolution and crush them with superior logic and evidence, or to try to cut off their oxygen by refusing to meet them on neutral ground. I don’t have strong opinions about which is the better strategy, although I suspect the answer depends on the precise circumstances being contemplated.

Rather, my concern was not for the credibility of Paul Nelson, but for the credibility of Bloggingheads TV. I’m fairly sure that no one within the BH.tv hierarchy is a secret creationist, trying to score some public respect for one of their own. The idea, instead, was to engage in a dialogue with someone who held radically non-mainstream views, in order to get a better understanding of how they think.

That sounds like a noble goal, but I think that in this case it’s misguided. Engaging with radically different views is, all else being equal, a good thing. But sometimes all else isn’t equal. In particular, I think it’s important to distinguish between different views that are somehow respectable, and different views that are simply crazy. My problem with the BH.tv dialogue was not that they were lending their credibility to someone who didn’t deserve it; it was that they were damaging their own credibility by featuring a discussant who nobody should be taking seriously. There is plenty of room for debate between basically sensible people who can argue in good faith, yet hold extremely different views on contentious subjects. There is no need to pollute the waters by engaging with people who simply shouldn’t be taken seriously at all. Paul Nelson may be a very nice person, but his views about evolution and cosmology are simply crackpot, and don’t belong in any Science Saturday discussion.

This thought has led me to introduce what I hope is a helpful graphical device, which I call the Grid of Disputation. It’s just a reminder that, when it comes to other people’s views on controversial issues, they should be classified within a two-dimensional parameter space, not just on a single line of “agree/disagree.” The other dimension is the all-important “sensible/crazy” axis.

The Grid of Disputation

There’s no question that there is a place for mockery in the world of discourse; sometimes we want to engage with crackpots just to make fun of them, or to boggle at their wrongness. But for me, that should be a small component of one’s overall rhetorical portfolio. If you want to play a constructive role in an ongoing cultural conversation, the sizable majority of your disputational effort should be spent engaging with the best people out there with whom you disagree — confronting the strongest possible arguments against your own view, and doing so with a respectful and sincere attitude.

This strategy is not universally accepted. One of the least pleasant aspects of the atheist/skeptical community is the widespread delight in picking out the very stupidest examples of what they disagree with, holding them up for sustained ridicule, and then patting themselves on the back for how rational they all are. It’s not the only thing that happens, but it happens an awful lot, and the joy that people get out of it can become a bit tiresome.

So I disagree a bit with Richard Dawkins, when he makes this suggestion:

I have from time to time expressed sympathy for the accommodationist tendency so ably criticized here by Jerry Coyne. I have occasionally worried that – just maybe – Eugenie Scott and the appeasers might have a point, a purely political point but one, nevertheless, that we should carefully consider. I have lately found myself moving away from that sympathy.

I suspect that most of our regular readers here would agree that ridicule, of a humorous nature, is likely to be more effective than the sort of snuggling-up and head-patting that Jerry is attacking. I lately started to think that we need to go further: go beyond humorous ridicule, sharpen our barbs to a point where they really hurt.

Michael Shermer, Michael Ruse, Eugenie Scott and others are probably right that contemptuous ridicule is not an expedient way to change the minds of those who are deeply religious. But I think we should probably abandon the irremediably religious precisely because that is what they are – irremediable. I am more interested in the fence-sitters who haven’t really considered the question very long or very carefully. And I think that they are likely to be swayed by a display of naked contempt. Nobody likes to be laughed at. Nobody wants to be the butt of contempt…

I emphatically don’t mean we should use foul-mouthed rants. Nor should we raise our voices and shout at them: let’s have no D’Souzereignty here. Instead, what we need is sarcastic, cutting wit. A good model might be Peter Medawar, who would never dream of shouting, but instead quietly wielded the rapier. …

Maybe I’m wrong. I’m only thinking aloud, among friends. Is it gloves off time? Or should we continue to go along with the appeasers and be all nice and cuddly, like Eugenie and the National Academy?

Let me first note how … reasonable Dawkins is being here. He’s saying “well, I’ve been thinking about it, and maybe we should do X rather than Y — what do you folks think?” Not quite consistent with the militant fire-breathing one might expect from hearing other people talk about Dawkins, rather than listening to Dawkins himself.

Nevertheless, I don’t agree with the suggestion. There is an empirical question, of course: if the goal is actually to change people’s minds, is that accomplished more effectively by sweetly reasoning with them, or by ridiculing their incorrect beliefs? I don’t think the answer is especially clear, but very few people actually offer empirical evidence one way or the other. Instead, they loudly proclaim that the mode to which they are personally temperamentally suited — calm discussion vs. derisive mockery — is the one that is clearly the best. So I will just go along with that fine tradition.

My own goal is not really changing people’s minds; it’s understanding the world, getting things right, and having productive conversations. My real concern in the engagement/mockery debate is that people who should be academic/scholarly/intellectual are letting themselves be seduced by the cheap thrills of making fun of people. Sure, there is a place for well-placed barbs and lampooning of fatuousness — but there are also people who are good at that. I’d rather leave the majority of that work to George Carlin and Ricky Gervais and Penn & Teller, and have the people with Ph.D.’s concentrate on honest debate with the very best that the other side has to offer. I want to be disagreeing with Ken Miller or Garry Wills and St. Augustine, not with Paul Nelson and Ann Coulter and Hugh Ross.

Dawkins and friends have done the world an enormous service — they’ve made atheism part of the accepted cultural landscape, as a reasonable perspective whose supporters must be acknowledged. Now it’s time to take a step beyond “We’re here, we’re godless, get used to it” and start making the positive case for atheists as sensible, friendly, happy people. And that case isn’t made most effectively by zooming in on the lower left corner of the Grid of Disputation; it’s made by engaging with the lower right corner, and having the better arguments.

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Romantic Science

The Romantic period (roughly 1770-1830) was better represented by poetry than by science. On the poetic side, you had Keats, Shelley, Byron, Coleridge, Blake, Wordsworth, Goethe, Schiller, Pushkin, and more. On the science side, you had Michael Faraday, William Herschel, Humphry Davy, Erasmus Darwin; no slouches, to be sure, but you wouldn’t pick out this period as one of the golden ages of science.

But the interesting thing about this era, according to Richard Holmes’s new book The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, is that the scientists and the poets were deeply interested in each others’ work. That’s what I gather, anyway — not having read the book yet myself — from Freeman Dyson’s review in the New York Review of Books. It’s a provocative look into the cultural mindset of another time, when the power of science to discover new things about the world wasn’t yet quite taken for granted. Dyson quotes a stanza from Byron’s Don Juan:

This is the patent age of new inventions
      For killing bodies, and for saving souls,
All propagated with the best intentions;
      Sir Humphry Davy’s lantern, by which coals
Are safely mined for in the mode he mentions,
      Tombuctoo travels, voyages to the Poles,
Are ways to benefit mankind, as true,
Perhaps, as shooting them at Waterloo.

Scientists and poets don’t talk to each other as much any more (although there are exceptions). I tend to lament the fact that science doesn’t mingle more comfortably with other kinds of cultural currents of our time. Maybe it’s just not possible — we’ve become too specialized, leaving no room for a writer like Coleridge to proclaim “I shall attack Chemistry like a Shark.” But the more we scientists take seriously to share our ideas with the wider world, the more those ideas will take root.

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Quote of the Day

Children of light and children of darkness is the vision of physics that emerges from this chapter, as from other branches of physics. The children of light are the differential equations that predict the future from the present. The children of darkness are the factors that fix these initial conditions.

— Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler, Gravitation (1973), p. 555.

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Social Mediation

People writing books, I have to imagine, are much like people with babies. This newborn thing has been the center of their life, and will continue to be, for some time; and one naturally presumes that the rest of the world shares one’s fascination with it. This presumption, alas, may not always be true.

You may have heard that I have a book coming out — pushed back to January, unfortunately. I haven’t shown any hesitation in blogging about substantive questions related to the topic of the book, nor do I see any reason to. And once it comes out I do want to do some sort of book club so that people can ask questions and have a conversation about what’s in the various chapters. So there will be no shortage of book-related stuff here on the blog.

But there is a whole ‘nother level of bookish miscellany — admiring the illustrations, having blurbs come in for the back cover, setting up public talks, and all that. Now we’re pretty much into baby-picture territory; it might not be completely safe to assume that everyone else is as fascinated by all this as I am. But you don’t want to deprive those who are, right? So I’m sending all that stuff here:

That will shield you from the worst of my enthusiasms. A bit, anyway.

Not that I’m at all sure that this is the right thing to do. Back in my day, we didn’t have all these fancy social networks to play around in; you had your blog, and that was it. Now there’s been a bit of proliferation, and there’s no question that it’s changing the landscape. It can obviously be annoying to try to follow too many things at once, but on the other hand it’s nice to have more appropriate tools for distinct tasks. In the old days, I wouldn’t think much of writing a blog post with an amusing link and little else. Now I will just put that on my Twitter feed. So there are fewer blog posts overall, but the average amount of substance per post is higher. Is this an improvement? Not really sure.

A lot of bloggers have Twitter feeds where they link to every one of their blog posts, which seems backwards to me. (So I usually don’t subscribe to those folks — nothing personal.) I once asked (on Twitter) whether people thought that was a useful service, and I received strong opinions on either side — but then I noticed that everyone who was in favor of linking to every blog post on Twitter was a blogger who linked to every one of their blog posts on Twitter. So I resist. But then again, I synchronize my Twitter feed to my Facebook status updates, which is considered unforgivably gauche in some circles. So who am I to complain?

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Newton, P.I.

When I was studying for my Ph.D., a fellow grad student and I asked our advisor if he could think of one single characteristic that was common to all of the best scientists he knew. Without too much hesitation, he answered: “Hard work.” That certainly wasn’t the answer we wanted to hear — you mean there isn’t some secret recipe to being brilliant? And of course hard work is not nearly enough to elevate you to the ranks of the world’s great scientists. But now that I have marinated for some time in the juices of experience myself, I see the truth of what he was getting at; there are a lot of smart people out there, so it makes sense that what elevates a few of them above their peers is an extraordinary focus on their work and a great amount of simple effort.

So it should come as no surprise that Isaac Newton, the greatest physicist of all time, was a relentless worker. In his days at Cambridge, when he focused on the workings of the natural world, he would spend as little time as possible on anything that drew him away from the researches in his rooms. Over the couple of years he was writing the Principia Mathematica, he took things to extremes, going for extended periods without food or sleep. (He also, apparently, died a virgin. Extremes come in many guises.)

Most contemporary physicists have heard that Newton eventually left Cambridge and more or less turned his back on scientific research, to take up activities in later life that we associate with varying degrees of disreputability: alchemy, religious studies, taking a bureaucratic position at the Royal Mint, using the Royal Society to attack his scientific rivals. Lots of us shrug and agree that many older scientists do all sorts of crazy things, and don’t wonder too much about the details.

levenson-newtoncounter-us-cover1.jpgHappily, Tom Levenson (of The Inverse Square, and one of our honored guest bloggers) has provided us with a fascinating peek into a telling episode in Newton’s later life — his career as a criminal investigator. Not really “P.I.”, as Newton was acting in his capacity as a government official, the Warden of the Mint. The story is closer to something from Law and Order or CSI — remarkably close, in fact. In Newton and the Counterfeiter, Levenson tells the tale of how Newton took up what should have been a cushy sinecure, and ended up devoting his extraordinary Newtonian powers to the pursuit and prosecution of one William Chaloner, the counterfeiter of the title. Poor Chaloner, suffice it to say, never knew what hit him.

I should say right up front that this is not a book about physics. Some time back Tom asked me to read some pages from his draft, to make sure the physics was coming out right, but he assured me that physics played a very minor role in the book. That baffled me a bit, because — well, it is Isaac Newton, right? But this is a work of biography and intellectual history, and offers a fascinating “street-level view” of the dawn of the Age of Reason. I can recommend it without hesitation to anyone who likes good stories, which I presume is just about anyone.

The book does begin with some stage-setting about Newton’s scientific work in Cambridge — it is Isaac Newton, right? But it picks up when our protagonist finally wrangles a position in London as Warden of the Mint. Not supposed to be a taxing job; one of the attractions for Newton was that he was going to have plenty of time available for his research. Mostly, at that time, on alchemy and religion — one of the enlightening chapters looks at how Newton actually went about his alchemical work, which is both engrossing and baffling to the modern reader.

History did not cooperate. The 1690’s was a transformative time for the English currency system, including the introduction of paper money, trade imbalances with the Continent, massive debts run up by William III’s wars in France, and an epidemic of counterfeiting and “coin-clipping,” by which people would shave off the edges of silver coins and melt them down to make new ones. In response, the Mint eventually gave in and undertook a comprehensive re-coinage — a program that was on track to become a complete fiasco until Newton stepped in. Remember that he was not simply an abstract theorist (although he was that); Newton was an extraordinarily careful experimenter, and he turned his practical side to the problem of re-coinage, with spectacular results.

But the real fun comes in when Newton takes on Chaloner, one of the most notorious counterfeiters of the day. I don’t want to give away too much, because you really should buy the book. Suffice it to say that where Newton was gifted with an extraordinary intellect and a relentless work ethic, Chaloner was gifted with what we would today call “balls.” No scheme was too audacious to be undertaken, no lie was too grandiose to be told, no collection of co-conspirators was too extensive to be betrayed or turned against each other. Chaloner was a colorful character, whose story would have made entertaining reading no matter what era he was born into. But he made one unforgivable mistake: he attracted the particular ire of Isaac Newton, who turned the full force of his powers to tracking this miscreant down and bringing him to justice. Chaloner’s own gifts notwithstanding, it was not a fair fight.

We tend to look at successful people and imagine that they are defined by their sphere of success. It’s hard for us today to think of Isaac Newton as anything other than a scientist. But he was good at what he did, whether it was piecing together the mysteries of classical mechanics or paying informers to spy on suspected criminals. Gil Grissom would approve — maybe not of all his methods, but certainly of his results.

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Kindling

So I broke down and bought a Kindle. As usual, I tend to be open to trying new technologies, but don’t like being at the bleeding edge (where people get hurt). There’s no doubt that electronic reading devices have a long way to go, but there’s also little doubt that they’re the wave of the future, or at least a sizable part of it. And the technology seems to have reached a point where Kindle editions of books are a non-trivial part of the market. My own decision to get one was definitely influenced by the number of queries I received about whether my own book would have a Kindle edition. (Answer: yes.)

And now it’s arrived! So the question is: what’s the first book I should buy? An obvious choice would be Infinite Jest, as the Infinite Summer project is underway and (as I have learned) toting a thousand-page book around on a cross-country flight is less than perfectly convenient. But, of course, I already own that book. And, as Matthew Yglesias points out, you don’t want to buy Kindle versions of impressive books that you can prominently display to buff up your credentials as a person of culture. And the worst would be to display a giant, impressive book on your shelves, but one that was clearly unread and in pristine condition, even though you really did read it, only you read it on your Kindle. Worst of all possible worlds.

The idea, then, is to find a good book that I haven’t yet read, but not one that is too good — not good enough that I’d rather have the dead-tree edition. Any suggestions?

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Putting the Internet to Infinitely Good Use

Finally someone has discovered a useful purpose for all of those wires connecting all of our computers. Infinite Summer is basically an online book club, devoted to David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. (Via Ezra Klein, who commandeered the only obvious blog post title.) Anyone who would like to join along should plan on reading 75 pages a week (not at all burdensome), and can then come join the conversation.

I once read through Gravity’s Rainbow with a real-world reading group, and it added a lot to the experience. And I would like to do a blog-based book club when my own book comes out, so this should be a learning experience. I’m going to give it a shot, anyway.

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Seems a Bit More Real Now

There’s a major event in the life of every young book that marks its progression from mere draft on someone’s computer to a public figure in its own right. No, I’m not thinking about when the book gets published, or even when the final manuscript is sent to the publisher. I’m thinking of when a book gets its own page on amazon.com. (The right analogy is probably to “getting your drivers license” or something along those lines. Feel free to concoct your own details.)

From Eternity to Here cover
So it’s with a certain parental joy that I can announce From Eternity to Here now has its own amazon page. My baby is all grown up! And, as a gesture of independence, has already chosen a different subtitle: “The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time.” The previous version, “The Origin of the Universe and the Arrow of Time,” was judged a bit too dry, and was apparently making the marketing people at Dutton scrunch up their faces in disapproval. I am told that “quests” are very hot right now.

All of which means, of course: you can buy it! For quite a handsome discount, I may add.

It also means: I really should finish writing it. Pretty darn close; the last chapters are finished, and I’m just touching up a couple of the previous ones that were abandoned in my rush to tell the end of the story. The manuscript is coming in at noticeably more words than I had anticipated — I suspect the “320 pages” listed on amazon is an underestimate.

And, yes, there is another book with almost the same title and an eerily similar cover, which just appeared. But very different content inside! Frank Viola’s subtitle is “Rediscovering the Ageless Purpose of God,” which should be a clue to the sharp-eyed shopper that the two works are not the same.

Writing a book is a big undertaking, in case no one before me had never noticed that before. I’m very grateful to my scientific collaborators for putting up with my extended disappearances along the way. It’s also very nerve-wracking to imagine sending it out there into the world all by itself. With blog posts there is immediate feedback in terms of comments and trackbacks; you can get a feel for what the reactions are, and revise and respond accordingly. But the book really has a life of its own. People will read and review it for goodness knows how long, and I won’t always be there to protect it.

Frankly, I’m not sure this “book” technology will ever catch on.

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