A shameful event in American history

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Everyone knows that the Bush administration moved up the timing of its Supreme Court nomination to push chatter about Karl Rove off the front pages. No reason we should go along with the plan.

Part of the Republican strategy, of course, has been to shift the focus away from Rove and onto Joseph Wilson and his wife, CIA agent Valerie Plame. (The mind absolutely boggles at what these exact same people would be saying if a Democratic political operative had blown the cover of a CIA agent — flogging wouldn’t be good enough for them.) They want to give the impression that Plame wasn’t really undercover, so it was no big deal to give a few reporters her identity in order to settle a political score.

Actual CIA agents disagree, and they’ve written an open letter to Congress to make their stance clear.

We, the undersigned former U.S. intelligence officers are concerned with the tone and substance of the public debate over the ongoing Department of Justice investigation into who leaked the name of Valerie Plame, wife of former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson IV, to syndicated columnist Robert Novak and other members of the media, which exposed her status as an undercover CIA officer. The disclosure of Ms. Plame’s name was a shameful event in American history and, in our professional judgment, may have damaged U.S. national security and poses a threat to the ability of U.S. intelligence gathering using human sources. Any breach of the code of confidentiality and cover weakens the overall fabric of intelligence, and, directly or indirectly, jeopardizes the work and safety of intelligence workers and their sources.

The Republican National Committee has circulated talking points to supporters to use as part of a coordinated strategy to discredit Ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife. As part of this campaign a common theme is the idea that Ambassador Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame was not undercover and deserved no protection. […] These comments reveal an astonishing ignorance of the intelligence community and the role of cover. The fact is that there are thousands of U.S. intelligence officers who “work at a desk” in the Washington, D.C. area every day who are undercover. Some have official cover, and some have non-official cover. Both classes of cover must and should be protected.

Via Dynamics of Cats and AMERICAblog.

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Brad and Angelina

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Seriously, why did Mr. and Mrs. Smith get such mixed reviews? You have two of the prettiest people in the world, exchanging witty banter and steamy looks (and a substantial number of gunshots) with each other, moving through a visual feast of elegant settings while the surrounding chaos leaves their makeup and fashionable clothing largely undisturbed. What is not to like about this movie?

You will be unsurprised to hear that I have a theory. Like many works of genius, Mr. and Mrs. Smith is misunderstood. The movie makes no pretensions to depth or profundity; it is a genre film, pure and simple. But it skirts the edges of the conventions of its genre — action comedy — in interesting ways.

“Action comedy” is a somewhat novel and unstable classification to begin with. Classic action films may feature a witty line here and there, but they would never be mistaken for comedies. In the post-Raiders of the Lost Ark era, however, the hybrid has become more common, as witnessed in the success of franchises from Lethal Weapon to Men in Black.

But still, there are rules. Within the conventions of an action film, there are two standard ways of creating comedy: to play the action straight but include a substantial dose of humorous situations and dialogue (Lethal Weapon), or to move toward parody or satire (Men in Black). In the former case, it is taken for granted that the adventure scenarios must be traditionally realistic and thrilling; in the latter, allowance is made for a greater degree of slapstick silliness, and realism is happily tossed aside.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith falls into neither of these modes. No serious attempt is made to paint a realistic scenario — two professional assassins who have been married to each other for years without knowing what their spouse did for a living would be difficult to make believable. Mrs. Smith works in gleaming high-tech surroundings, where all of her co-workers would appear to be very attractive and fashionable young women; Mr. Smith, in contrast, works in sleazy surroundings that call to mind private investigators in the Sam Spade mold. We are never told what these organizations are, who their clients might be, nor how they fit into a larger picture. We are supposed to simply recognize the accepted tropes of the genre, and enjoy the fun that the characters themselves are so obviously having.

But the fun is not slapstick or parodic — it is affectionate. Mr. and Mrs. Smith is not a satire, calling our attention to the foibles of the genre or of society; it is a caricature, exaggerating notable features for purposes of amusement. The relevant distinction is between “making fun of” and “having fun with.” The point is neither realism nor social criticism; it extends to having a good time and no further. And the talents deployed towards this end are considerable: Jolie is obviously an extremely talented actress, while Pitt is underappreciated as a brilliant comic actor. The cinematography is colorful and evocative, and the dialogue zips along with very few sluggish patches.

The critics, by and large, don’t get it. David Denby, just to pick an example, complains about the absence of motivation when Jolie “appears at some sort of club in a strapless, shiny, black patent-leather rig, flogs some guy in a back room, and then breaks his neck.” Would more backstory have really enriched that scene? It’s like watching Bugs Bunny and complaining that we aren’t told how rabbits learned to talk.

Admittedly, the film is very much of its time. Although it is not a satire, I imagine that it wouldn’t be as enjoyable for audiences not immersed in a set of expectations about action films, comedies, and movie stars. It’s not The Maltese Falcon, but that’s no reason not to enjoy it on its own terms.

Perhaps next time we will discuss how Johnny Depp looks in lipstick.

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Synchronized time

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Last week in Paris, I walked along the north-south line connecting the Observatoire de Paris to the Palais du Luxembourg. A line of longitude: in fact, the line of longitude, if the French had had their way a little over a century ago. A politico-scientific battle was being fought in the late nineteenth century over the location of the Prime Meridian. Parisians, thinking only of considerations of nature and philosophy, argued that the line of zero longitude should go through l’Observatoire; the rest of the world, crass materialists that they were, noted that over seventy percent of the world’s shipping was already using Greenwich (nine minutes and twenty-one seconds to the west of Paris) as its standard of longitude. The French lost out to the British, prefiguring a similarly heated tussle over who would host the Olympic Games over a hundred years later.

These issues figure prominently in the book I was reading during my trip, Peter Galison’s Einstein’s Clocks, Poincare’s Maps: Empires of Time. It is a paradigmatic example of a engaging work of intellectual history, as it has a definite theme that is at once simple, interesting, and true. Einstein and Poincare, the obscure German theoretical physicist and the celebrated French mathematician and philosopher, were pivotal figures in the development of the special theory of relativity, whose centenary we are celebrating this year. Relativity has a reputation as an esoteric theory, and Einstein and Poincare are often thought of as abstract thinkers divorced from mundane matters of technology and experimentation. Galison argues convincingly that these thinkers’ practical concerns with the measurement of time — Einstein judging clock designs at his patent office in Bern, Poincare as President of the Bureau of Longitude — were in fact crucial to their recognition of the need for a new understanding of the fundamental nature of time itself.

In a Newtonian universe, time is universal — the amount of time elapsed between two events is precisely and uniquely defined, even if the events are widely separated in space. It may be difficult to actually measure the time between events, and this task was a constant preoccupation of nineteenth-century astronomers, surveyors, politicians, and businessmen. It’s easy enough to use the sun to determine your local time, but the advent of railroads made it necessary (as several unfortunate accidents proved) to sensibly coordinate time among far-flung locales, a program that eventually led to our current system of time zones. In the course of standardizing time across broad expanses of geography, it became clear that synchronization was an operational concept — you had to bounce some signals back and forth between locations, and taking into account the travel time of the signals themselves was of primary importance. Poincare’s work on longitude was intimately connected to precisely this problem, as was Einstein’s experience with novel clock designs. (At one point subterranean Paris featured tubes that would carry pulses of compressed air from a central station to clocks throughout the city, which would use the pulses as reference standards to guarantee as precise a degree of synchronization as possible. Einstein would have seen numerous proposals for electrical versions of such schemes.)

By itself, the need to synchronize time via exchanged signals does not lead you to relativity; it is equally characteristic of Newtonian absolute time. But when combined with the principle of relativity and the invariance of the speed of light, this insight led Einstein to understand that the notion of simultaneity of distant events is not universal, but depends on one’s frame of reference. (In general relativity, in which spacetime is curved, we need to go even further — the notion of simultaneity is not simply frame-dependent, it is completely ill-defined.) Time goes from being an absolute characteristic of the universe to something individual and personal, a measure of the distance traversed by a particular object through spacetime. Poincare (following Hendrik Lorentz) had worked his way to similar conclusions, but it was Einstein who showed how to completely abandon the absolute Newtonian time that other physicists felt still lurked unobserved in the background.

Did someone say that scientists are individual idiosyncratic human beings? Gleaming mathematical edifices like the special theory of relativity can give the impression of having dropped from the sky; it’s nice to be reminded of the messy contingent ways that real people happen to stumble upon them.

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Secret exciting blog news revealed

I try to tease you folks, but it’s hard to keep secrets from such a clever and persistent group of people. No, there aren’t any marriage plans on the horizon — it’s even better than that.

As some of you guessed, I’m happy to announce the launch of a new group blog:

Cosmic Variance

My co-bloggers include notorious Orange Quark proprietor Mark Trodden, former Preposterous guest-blogger Risa Wechsler, and two blogging neophytes, JoAnne Hewett and Clifford Johnson. As you will discover for yourself, they comprise quite the group of charismatic and irreverent raconteurs, and I’m sure the discussions will be both amusing and stimulating. Mark, like me, is a theoretical field theorist and cosmologist; Risa is an expert on the formation of galaxies and cosmological large-scale structure; JoAnne is one of the world’s leading particle phenomenologists; and Clifford works on string theory and M-theory, and (like me) has written a textbook to prove it.

Don’t let the fact that they are all physicists fool you. Although we each have our different voices and concerns, all of us at Cosmic Variance agree that we’ll spend some of our time talking about science, and a good amount of time talking about whatever else strikes our fancy. In particular, my Cosmic posting philosophy will be precisely the same as my Preposterous posting philosophy has been — there will just be some extra value-added from the interactions with new colleagues. (And, by the way, a much nicer blog layout and functionality, as some of these folks actually know what they’re doing.) I’m excited, this is going to be great fun.

As for the plucky old blog you’re reading here, what of its future? For the most part, I won’t be posting here very much — as I said, everything I might have posted will simply go to the new site. I will keep it around, as I will often have reason to refer to posts in the archives, as well as an understandable sentimental attachment. Perhaps I will occasionally post something here that I don’t want to sully my new collaborators with (although frankly I can’t imagine anything).

So, the blog is dead, long live the blog! Thanks to everyone for reading, and enjoy the new blogging ahead.

Update: the new blog already has one distinction to its name — it’s the place to go for news about Brad and Angelina.

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Perspectivalism

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As an undergraduate I took a delightful course in the Philosophy of Religion from a young lecturer named Tony Godzieba. He was a committed anti-foundationalist, and would discourse passionately on the Hermeneutics of Suspicion — along with Augustine and Aquinas we read Nietzsche and Freud and Ricoeur and had a grand old time.

But Tony had one deeply ingrained habit that used to drive me nuts. He took seriously the idea that there was no neutral vantage point from which we could discuss absolute truths; rather, our lively class discussions were to be thought of as interactions between a variety of perspectives. And he knew that my friend Padi Boyd (who was also taking the class) and I were the astronomy majors in the room. So whenever he would call on either of us, he would (with the best of intentions) inevitably say something like “So now let’s get the natural-science perspective on this.”

Man, that drove me crazy. Putting aside for the moment any disputes between foundationalist and perspectivalist theories of truth, granting that anything I say might necessarily be coming from some perspective, there is still a crucially important difference between my perspective (or that of any other individual scientist) and some abstracted notion of a “natural-science perspective.” When I would argue that St. Anselm’s ontological proof for the existence of God was a load of hooey, I may have been informed by my scientific education, but also by innumerable other influences — random and deliberate, obvious and hidden, justified and irrational. Physical sciences propose crisp mathematical structures in order to model the inner workings of the natural world, but the scientists themselves are human, all too human.

So what we have here is a group blog constructed by some idiosyncratic human beings who also happen to be physicists. Sometimes we’ll talk about science, other times it will be food or literature or whatever moves us — I know I have some incisive things to say about Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, for one thing. We’re not a representative collection of scientists, just some engaged individuals curious about our world.

Welcome!

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The missing philosopher

The philosophical blogosphere is abuzz about a silly BBC poll to name the ten greatest philosophers of all time. (See Crooked Timber, 3quarksdaily, applecidercheesefudge, and links therein.) Now you know why history’s greatest thinkers, like the nation’s college football champions, should not be chosen by popular vote: Karl Marx came in first, while Aristotle couldn’t muster better than ninth.

I just wanted to point out that, in a world where disciplinary boundaries were drawn more rationally, the runaway winner would have been Sir Isaac Newton.

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Slouching towards the Middle Ages

Some time back I suggested that Pope Benedict, the erstwhile Josef Ratzinger, may not have been the best choice to help Christianity broaden its appeal in secular Western societies. Condemning gay marriage and casting doubt on evolution, for starters, wouldn’t seem to be effective strategies. Now it appears he might be going for the trifecta: coming down against Harry Potter (via The American Sector).

I can just imagine the throngs of affluent secular Europeans, fed up with privacy rights and modern science and imaginative children’s literature, returning to the arms of the Church in droves. Another strategic setback for the atheist agenda.

Update: Okay, now it makes more sense.

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GWOT

In the wake of a tragedy like the London bombings, it almost seems unseemly to note that it may have been preventable. Unseemly, but necessary.

Supporters of the Bush administration like to paint its critics as unwilling to take the steps necessary to combat terrorism. The truth is, we just want to combat it effectively. Invading countries unnecessarily, taking countless steps to flame anti-American sentiment around the world, and using terror alerts to political advantage are all part of a dishonest and woefully misguided mindset, one that puts many motivations higher than effective steps against the danger of terrorism.

Update: More discussion from Juan Cole, Metafilter, and Daily Kos.

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The Cosmologist vs. The Cardinal

If you want something done, why not go to the top? That seems to be Lawrence Krauss’s strategy — he’s collaborated with two biologists to write a letter to the Pope asking him to clarify the Church’s stance on evolution.

This of course is in response to a New York Times editorial by Cardinal Christof Schönborn, in which he attempts to set straight anyone who might have thought that the Catholic Church was perfectly comfortable with evolution as understood by scientists. He doesn’t mince words, making it clear that Catholics should believe in what is now called “intelligent design”:

Ever since 1996, when Pope John Paul II said that evolution (a term he did not define) was “more than just a hypothesis,” defenders of neo-Darwinian dogma have often invoked the supposed acceptance – or at least acquiescence – of the Roman Catholic Church when they defend their theory as somehow compatible with Christian faith.

But this is not true. The Catholic Church, while leaving to science many details about the history of life on earth, proclaims that by the light of reason the human intellect can readily and clearly discern purpose and design in the natural world, including the world of living things.

Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense – an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection – is not. Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science.

I especially like that last sentence. We certainly wouldn’t want any sneaky ideology to get in the way of our purely scientific understanding of nature, would we?

As PZ says (and even the Times seems to have noticed), the Cardinal is simply repeating the party line of the Discovery Institute. Lawrence and his friends (Francisco J. Ayala and Kenneth R. Miller) are asking the Pope to reaffirm what most people thought was the case, that the Church had fully accepted the scientific theory of the development of life.

It’s hardly surprising that the Church might favor design over natural selection. The idea that God had something to do with the origin and nature of humanity is one that it would be difficult to give up on from a religious perspective. The letter from the scientsts to the Pope stresses “that in these difficult and contentious times the Catholic Church not build a new divide, long ago eradicated, between the scientific method and religious belief.” I wish Lawrence and his friends well, but I don’t think they’ll ultimately succeed; the fact is that there is such a divide, and all the Papal edicts in the world won’t make it go away.

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