Scientists who work on fundamental physics, especially in the U.S., are feeling a kind of urgency these days — we have to hurry up and get as much research done as we can before the government puts us completely out of business. Belle Waring complains about the shutdown of the Voyager mission, which is indeed a shame, if mostly for sentimental reasons. A much harder hit is NASA’s cancellation of the Astrophysics Data Analysis and Long Term Space Astrophysics programs. These programs were a main way to support young scientists (grad students, postdocs, junior faculty) working on theory and data analysis with broad application to NASA’s satellite observatories. In other words, in the midst of a golden age of new theories and experiments, we are strangling the field at the point where new blood is entering.

For those of you with more Earth-based concerns, you should know that the U.S. is also basically abandoning experimental particle physics (pdf version if that one is inaccessible). The Tevatron at Fermilab will run through the end of the decade, after which there is basically nothing left in the budget for high-energy physics in the U.S. By that time the focus will move to the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva, and the traditional brain-drain of bright physicists from Europe to the U.S. will reverse its direction. My real interest is in the health of the field, not in maintaining U.S. dominance, but it will be hard for the field to stay very healthy if the U.S. isn’t a major player. Our best hope for a turnaround is if the U.S. makes a serious bid to host the International Linear Collider; but that’s a long way off, and the tea leaves don’t look so promising. (Update: Just noticed that Peter wrote about the same thing.)

But okay, I don’t want to be gloomy all the time, so here’s some good news: the LIGO gravitational-wave observatory continues to make progress toward their design goals. LIGO, the Laser Interferometric Gravitational-wave Observatory, consists of two facilities — one in Hanford, Washington, and the other in Livingston, Louisiana. Each facility shoots lasers down two four-kilometer evacuated tubes, where they bounce off suspended mirrors and come back. By comparing the phases of the light from each tube, you can look for tiny changes in their length, which would signal a passing gravitational wave.

Of course, you’re looking for really tiny changes in length; about one part in 10²¹ or so. Which, over four kilometers, adds up to significantly less than the size of a single atomic nucleus. So you have to be pretty sensitive. LIGO has been operational for a few years now, and they are steadily beating down the noise curve — the amount of irreducible jiggle in the detector that you can’t get rid of. The idea is that anything you observe on top of the noise is an actual signal, such as a pair of inspiraling neutron stars giving off gravitational waves. According an update by David Shoemaker in the most recent Matters of Gravity, the LIGO folks are making significant progress in eliminating various noise sources, such as trucks rolling by.

Here’s the graph of noise versus frequency, showing both the goal (solid line at bottom) and what levels they have achieved over time. (Click for larger size.) As you see, they are getting there, and have already decreased the noise by something like three orders of magnitude over the last couple of years. LIGO may or may not see anything in its current configuration; a planned upgrade to “Advanced LIGO” is much more likely to actually detect a gravitational wave. Once they do, it will open a completely new window onto the universe.

Paul Krugman states the obvious: one reason why academics tend to be liberals is that modern conservatism has become increasingly anti-reason and anti-intellectual.

Scientific American may think that evolution is supported by mountains of evidence, but President Bush declares that “the jury is still out.” Senator James Inhofe dismisses the vast body of research supporting the scientific consensus on climate change as a “gigantic hoax.” And conservative pundits like George Will write approvingly about Michael Crichton’s anti-environmentalist fantasies.

Think of the message this sends: today’s Republican Party – increasingly dominated by people who believe truth should be determined by revelation, not research – doesn’t respect science, or scholarship in general. It shouldn’t be surprising that scholars have returned the favor by losing respect for the Republican Party.

But honestly, this reasoning is a little self-congratulatory and superficial (even if it contains a lot of truth). The tendency of academics to be liberal runs much deeper than a reaction against the current wave of know-nothingism in the Republican party.

If we try to put in terms that are as value-neutral as possible, I think that it comes down to idealism and universalism. Conservatives tend to take pride in their tough-mindedness, a realistic and hard-nosed approach to the dog-eat-dog world we find ourselves in. Looking out for number one is not only a life strategy, but a moral good. Academics, meanwhile, tend to have a different set of values; not only do they value learning for its own sake (above more straightforward values of material success), but they develop an ability to understand and sympathize with people in different groups and circumstances. In the truest sense of the word, to be “conservative” is to cherish certain established verities, while a good academic is always questioning accepted ideas, and approaching alternatives in a spirit of open-mindedness. That’s why you’ll always find universities to be mostly liberal, even in the hard sciences (where even the most paranoid conservatives don’t think that faculty are hired on the basis of their political views). None of the legislation that David Horowitz tries to get passed will ever change that.

PZ Myers, presumably exhausted from smacking down the same tired arguments from creationists (I know I would be), has tossed one to me. It’s against Einstein instead of Darwin, so it’s my bailiwick, I have to admit. But this little piece of foolishness — a brief piece against special relativity on a website grammatically entitled Intelligent Design the Future — is so thoroughly clueless that’s it’s not even mildly diverting. If these people weren’t taking over the country, they wouldn’t even rise to the level of being amusing.

So, instead of going through the nonsense point-by-point, I thought it would be more useful for me to offer a little set of guidelines to the discerning reader: Signs That You Might Not Be Reading A Sensible Critique of Relativity.

1. Critic seems to get understanding of Einstein from an article in the New Yorker, rather than from Einstein (or a stylish textbook).
2. Critic suggests that Einstein “did away with change,” without explaining what that means.
3. Critic defends notion of simultaneity by repeated reference to stuff going on “right now.”
4. Critic claims that special relativity did away with Newtonian absolute time, but that it reappeared in general relativity.
5. That “right now” thing — okay, I just can’t get over that.
6. Critic wouldn’t recognize the Riemann tensor if it bit him on the nose. (Not explicitly stated in the article, but the signs are clear.)

Each sign, as you may guess, is displayed prominently over at ID the F. Sadly, the list is far from exhaustive; there are numerous ways to demonstrate cluelessness about modern physics that weren’t on display in this particular article. Perhaps we could keep a running tally?

Here’s the truth: Einstein proposed that the amount of time elapsed between two spacetime events depends (in a very definite way) on the path taken between those events. It is not simply a universal constant, as it would be in Newtonian physics. So the notion of “simultaneity” for distant events is just a useful approximation, valid when everyone is traveling slowly compared to the speed of light. And you know what? Einstein was right. It’s been verified over and over again, from the lifetimes of rapidly-moving subatomic particles to the time kept by atomic clocks moving in airplanes. Deal with it.

And here’s a little request for anyone else who wants to point out flaws in Einstein. Whatever else you might think, Einstein was a smart cookie. Nothing he said was sacred (my first published paper proposed a theory that violated some of Einstein’s ideas, as have several of my subsequent papers), but you should at least understand what he said before you claim to improve on it. So take a gander at the problem sets for my course in general relativity, and have a go. If you get an average of over 50% on all the sets (as all of the students in my class did), I’ll give your ideas a respectful hearing. Otherwise, you should go back and hit the books if you expect anyone to take you seriously.

So it will be North Carolina against Illinois for all the marbles tonight. As Michael Bérubé notes, the Illini victory against Louisville was probably abetted by the fact that they left Chief Illiniwek at home.

Here’s a short essay about the Chief by Philip Phillips, a physicist at UIUC. Philip was one of the Illinois faculty who won a legal case against the University administration after the latter tried to forbid them from contacting athletes the University was trying to recruit. It was a brilliant idea, really: just call up all the high school basketball and football players that were targeted by UIUC, and explain to them the travesty of the Chief. Stuff that would normally go under the protection of “free speech,” but the University claimed that it would be in violation of NCAA regulations. Usually those regulations are trying to limit the ability of different schools to attract athletes, not keep them away, but it was a convenient excuse.

My favorite historical Pope is Celestine V, one of the Bad Popes described so entertainingly in E.R. Chamberlin’s book of the same name.

In 1294 the Papacy wielded a great deal more power than it does today, and the great families of Rome were constantly jockeying to put their own upon St. Peter’s throne. Deliberations by the College of Cardinals would often drag on interminably, and this time was especially bad, having reached eighteen months as a deadlock between the Colonna and Orsini families seemed unbreakable. In frustration, one of the Cardinals nominated Pietro di Morrone, a holy hermit who preferred to live in small, dirty mountain caves, even as he grew in renown among the most devout. In even greater frustration, the rest of the College agreed, and Pietro was dragged out of his cave to become Celestine V.

But not dragged back to Rome; he refused to go, and (encouraged by King Charles of Naples) set up court at Castello Nuovo in the South. He had a small wooden cell constructed, resembling a cave, where he could hide himself. His followers rejoiced that the dominance of sin and corruption was at an end, to be replaced by a reign of love guided by the Holy Spirit. But Celestine was an awful pope; he issued contradictory orders, granted any request he received, and allowed the papal bureaucracy to crumble into disarray.

Finally, listening to the urgings of Cardinal Benedict Gaetani, Celestine took the unprecedented step of resigning as Pope, after a reign of just fifteen weeks. The College met again, and within twenty-four hours Gaetani was elected Pope, taking the name Boniface VIII. The ambitious lawyer was faced with a problem, however; Celestine, even though abdicated and desiring nothing other than to return to obscurity, could serve as a rallying point for the new Pope’s enemies. So Boniface had him transported back to Rome, but Celestine and some of his supporters arranged an escape along the way. Eventually, in the course of an attempted crossing of the Adriatic to Greece, he was caught and dragged back to the Holy City, where he was imprisoned in the isolated fortress of Fumone. He died less than a year later, but not before offering a prophesy to Boniface: “You have entered like a fox, you will reign like a lion — and you will die like a dog.” Boniface ruled for nine years, putting down numerous rebellions by competing families, eventually locking himself in the Lateran palace, where he died in despair, planning insane revenges against his enemies.

Celestine was canonized in 1313. There has been no Celestine VI. Maybe the next Pope will choose to rehabilitate the name.

April is National Poetry Month, as diligent readers of the Preposterous blogroll have already been told by Lauren, Roxanne, and Amanda (at the least — I’m not the most diligent reader myself). Since we already have occasional poetry around here, let’s celebrate by dipping into the classics. How about Shakespeare’s 18th Sonnet?

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st,
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Perhaps you’ve heard this one before, but it holds up. It’s on my mind due to a scene from Tom Stoppard’s Travesties, currently playing at the Court Theatre at UofC. In the play, Dadaist poet Tristan Tzara creates a new work by cutting the sonnet into fragments and pulling them randomly out of a hat.

Darling–
shake thou thy gold buds
the untrimmed but short fair shade
shines–
see, this lovely hot possession growest
so long
by nature’s course–
so … long — heaven!
And declines,
summer changing, more temperate complexion …

Quite a compelling result — but something tells me the version presented in the play wasn’t really produced quite so randomly.

What will they think of next? Google ride finder. See where taxis are throughout Chicago, in real time. (Probably they have other cities as well.)

No time for substantive blogging, as today is the Open House for prospective grad students in both Physics and Astronomy and Astrophysics here at UofC. My duty is to convince everyone that this is the best place in the world, which fortunately isn’t such a hard sell.

I do find myself explaining that my own trajectory is not a good role model. I’m one of the few physics professors you’ll find without any degrees in physics (I was in Astronomy departments for both undergrad and grad school). In my day (late 80’s, early 90’s), it wasn’t clear where to specialize if you were interested in particle physics and/or cosmology — there weren’t any specialties that were especially lively. Now there are too many — inflation and its connections to the CMB and large-scale structure, dark matter theory and experiment, dark energy theory and experiment, ultra-high-energy cosmic rays, galaxy clusters and the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect, accelerator-based particle physics, numerical relativity and field theory, particle phenomenology, string theory and cosmology, pure string theory, gravitational-wave astrophysics, and a couple dozen areas outside the realm of field theory and cosmology. All of these areas are more exciting than they were fifteen years ago. Kids today don’t know how good they have it.

The good news is: Brad DeLong was right. Madeleine Peyroux does an amazing cover of “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go.” Sufficiently good that I went out and got the whole CD, which is a treat. Peyroux sounds like a young Billie Holliday (sometimes too much so, but okay, you could pick worse role models), with just the hint of a French accent. Simply but jazzy arrangements of clever songs, sung with a sly inflection. “Don’t Wait Too Long” and “Weary Blues from Waitin'” are other highlights.

The bad news is: After getting the CD and congratulating myself for finding new music in such an esoteric fashion (I mean, what’s hipper than reading blogs by economists?), I go to grab a coffee and find that Peyroux is in heavy rotation at my local Starbucks. And there’s the CD for sale, prominently displayed at the checkout counter. Just another commodity being pushed by the corporate machine.

I will never be cool.

(On the other hand, part of this post was written while connected via wireless in the waiting room of my local auto shop, where I am getting a flat tire fixed. So that’s pretty cool. Not the flat, but having wireless in the auto shop.)

Okay, I suppose there is no official “conservative platform” that people get together and vote on. But it’s clear that mainstream conservatism is increasingly comfortable with the idea of attacking science and supporting creationism. The latest indication is this notice for an upcoming Heritage Foundation event (from Pharyngula and Political Animal):

A growing number of scientists around the world no longer believe that natural selection or chemistry, alone, can explain the origins of life. Instead, they think that the microscopic world of the cell provides evidence of purpose and design in nature — a theory based upon compelling biochemical evidence. Join us as Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, a key design theorist and philosopher of science, explains this powerful and controversial concept on the mysteries of life.

What a blatant pack of lies. And not lies about contestable political opinions, either. (You will not be surprised to learn that Dr. Meyer has no degrees in biology.)

The Heritage Foundation isn’t a fringe group devoted to promulgating superstition — it’s one of the most influential conservative think tanks. I know there are plenty of people who are educated and intellectually honest and think of themselves as conservative — at what point do their heads begin to explode?