Chad Orzel just wants to be a good citizen and read some post-Super-Bowl football commentary. But he can’t, because Gregg Easterbrook can’t resist the temptation to spice up his respectable (or at least unobjectionable) football writing with utterly senseless remarks about science.

Recently some astronomers proposed that the universe is shaped like a gigantic donut. Then a competing group proposed that the universe actually is shaped like a gigantic soccer ball. The cosmic-doughnut group, based at the University of Pennsylvania, took exception to the cosmic-soccer-ball gang, who are mainly French academics. Cosmic-donut supporters asserted if the whole universe is a soccer ball, then individual views of the sky should resemble a sliced bagel.

Both the donut and soccer-ball camps hold that when astronomers scan deep space, the infinity they think they see is an illusion. In some doughnut-shaped or soccer-inspired or bagel-sliced way, the cosmos appears much larger than it is. Cosmologists estimate there are at least 100 billion galaxies; actually, these researchers contend, what we observe is reflections of a much smaller number of galaxies: a traveler moving at super-speed straight out into the universe would eventually end up back at the starting point, not continue forever. The universe is an illusion? Well, this seems easier to swallow than the idea that all material for the entire cosmos popped out of a single point with no content, as Big Bang theory maintains.

And in a comment, Kip Dyer points to Easterbrook’s mindless attack on the entire enterprise of particle physics. Chad puts it best: “Just… stop. You’re hurting America. Take your cue from John Madden, and just disappear until August.”

I wanted to say something about the essay by Robert Laughlin (no relation to this McLaughlin fellow, nor for that matter this one) that was pointed to by 3 quarks daily. Laughlin, of course, is a towering figure in theoretical condensed-matter physics, winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for his work on the fractional quantum Hall effect. He is also a well-known proponent of “emergence” as a crucial concept in modern physics. This notion of emergence is held up in contrast with reductionism — the latter attempts to understand things by breaking them down into their component parts, while the former focuses on collective behaviors that only become apparent at the macroscopic level.

This is an interesting distinction, but for some reason people feel compelled to raise it to the status of some sort of competition, arguing that either emergence or reductionism is somehow more important than the other. I don’t know why they feel that way. An unfortunate side-effect of this attitude is that it causes very smart people to say very silly things. Laughlin, for example, talks about the current view of string theorists — the ultimate reductionists — as represented by Brian Greene’s book The Elegant Universe.

The worldview motivating my uncle’s attitude toward Yosemite, and arguably also Brian Greene’s attitude toward physics, is expressed with great clarity in John Horgan’s The End of Science (Addison-Wesley, 1996), in which he argues that all fundamental things are now known and there is nothing left for us to do but fill in details. This pushes my experimental colleagues beyond their already strained limits of patience, for it is both wrong and completely below the belt. The search for new things always looks like a lost cause until one makes a discovery. If it were obvious what was there, one would not have to look for it.

Now, nobody could possibly have read The Elegant Universe and come away characterizing it as saying “all fundamental things are now known and there is nothing left for us to do but fill in details.” The book goes into great detail about all of the things that we don’t know, even just within the (quite considerable) scope of string theory. It doesn’t talk a lot about condensed-matter physics, but that is hardly the same as arguing that condensed-matter physics isn’t important. And it clearly does emphasize the need for experiments, even though they are very hard to do at this point.

The reason why such a smart person could say something so obviously wrong becomes clear in the next paragraph:

Unfortunately this view is widely held. I once had a conversation with the late David Schramm, the famous cosmologist at the University of Chicago, about galactic jets. These are thin pencils of plasma that beam out of some galactic cores to fabulous distances, sometimes several galactic radii, powered somehow by mechanical rotation of the core. How they can remain thin over such stupendous distances is not understood, and something I find tremendously interesting. But David dismissed the whole effect as “weather.” He was interested only in the early universe and astrophysical observations that could shed light on it, even if only marginally. He categorized the jets as annoying distractions on the grounds that they had nothing in particular to tell him about what was fundamental. I, by contrast, am fascinated by weather and believe that people claiming not to be are fibbing.

Well, sure. There are cosmologists who are not interested in non-cosmological astrophysics. There are particle physicists who are not very interested in superconductivity. Likewise, there are condensed-matter physicists and astrophysicists who are not very interested in relativity or string theory. And there are biologists who are not interested in poetry, and historians who are not interested in number theory. Let’s face it — there are academics of all stripes who are more interested in their own fields of research than in other fields. They’re not fibbing, but neither does their attitude translate into an objective statement about the worthiness of other questions.

Interestingness is like beauty — it is not located out there in the world, it is a function of the relationship between a person and a phenomenon. Things are not intrinsically interesting, they are found to be interesting by people. (In a truly precise language, it wouldn’t even be grammatically possible to say “X is interesting”; we’d only be able to say “I find X to be interesting,” or “X is found to be interesting by most people.”) I personally am interested in the nature of the dark energy that apparently constitutes seventy percent of the universe. But if someone else is not interested, they aren’t making a mistake, that’s just their honest feeling. If David Schramm wasn’t that interested in jets, we can’t simply extrapolate that one data point to a general conclusion that those arrogant reductionists are unwilling to appreciate the allure of collective behavior — some of us think that weather is fascinating, and are more than happy to admit it, even if it’s not what we want to do research on. (Not to mention the most likely explanation for the recounted conversation, which is that Schramm was simply yanking his chain.)

Unfortunately, we need to act as if these incommensurable levels of interestingness are somehow real, since we live in a world of finite resources and need to decide how they should be allocated. The good news is that there really is enough to go around, at least at the moment — we can simultaneously pursue high-energy physics and cosmology, and also contemplate astrophysics and biophysics and condensed matter. Not everyone feels that way, of course, which is why we get unfortunate incidents like Phil Anderson’s undercutting of the Superconducting Super Collider. Perhaps someday they will notice that, when funds get cut for massive reductionist experiments, they tend not to flow to research into the fascinating world of emergent phenomena, but rather to simply disappear. Can’t we all just get along?

Okay, sometimes things don’t always end so happily.

AMMAN (AFP) – A budding romance between a Jordanian man and woman turned into an ugly public divorce when the couple found out that they were in fact man and wife, state media reported.

Separated for several months, boredom and chance briefly re-united Bakr Melhem and his wife Sanaa in an Internet chat room, the official Petra news agency said.

The folks at 3 quarks daily have been on a roll lately, picking out all sorts of interesting things. I do want to comment about the essay by Robert Laughlin. But for the moment I am lazy, and will just grab a quote from a book review they link to on a completely different topic. The review is by Peter Beinart, and the book is Gilles Kepel’s The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West. Kepel argues that Islamism is not an ascendant ideology, but rather one that has turned to violence only because it is losing support overall. At least, for the most part; here’s an excerpt from the review:

The book’s argument is faint, and submerges during chapter-length digressions. But at its core The War for Muslim Minds tries to explain why al-Qaeda, contrary to the predictions in Jihad, is not fading. Although Kepel concedes that the organization has inherent strengths, he still assumes that if left to its own devices, it would fail to draw a mass following. The problem, he suggests, is that it is not being left to its own devices. Rather, the Bush administration’s war on terror — expressed in disastrous policies toward both the Palestinians and Iraq — is gaining for al-Qaeda an appeal it could never win on its own. In contrast to President Bush, who has responded to 9/11 with an audacious effort to redirect the course of Muslim history, Kepel implicitly calls for something far more modest: prudent management of a threat that — if we let it — can be beaten from within. The war for Muslim minds, Kepel suggests, will be won in Riyadh, Cairo, and the suburbs of Paris. In Washington it can’t be won — only lost.

I tend to agree with Beinart’s review, both in his agreement with the basic thesis about al-Qaeda, and also in where he disagrees with Kepel about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Kepel seems to want to blame American neo-cons for even more terrible things than they are actually responsible for; hard to manage, but not metaphysically impossible.

On the spur of the moment, we went to the Green Mill last night to listen to Patricia Barber. Longtime Preposterous readers already know that she is one of my favorites, but it’s worth saying again.

Barber is a pianist, composer, singer, and lyricist, who is accomplished and innovative in all these areas. You’d most likely classify her as a jazz musician, but she happily combines a pop sensibility (“Norwegian Wood” was one of last night’s highlights) with classically-influenced structures. She recently won a Guggenheim fellowship to develop Mythologies, a cycle of songs based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and we got to hear some of the pieces debut last night. It was startling to see these jazz musicians (Michael Arnopol on bass, Eric Montzka on drums, and guest Zach Brock on violin) suddenly pull out these elaborate pieces of sheet music to play the new songs — they were intricate formal arrangements, enlivened by spaces for improvization within the work.

It’s such a pleasure to hear music that is simultaneously gorgeous and challenging, that can be immediately appreciated while repaying close attention. Who says that we can’t be passionate and intellectual at the same time? The highlight of last night’s show was a rocking rendition of The Moon, from Verse, which starts with some avant-garde squeals and then gets funky.

should i leave Erebus
to his own device?
what Chaos when the curtain rises
and the houselights dim

with whitecake
on my face
the actress backstage
contemplates
laying a Universal egg

still a broken heart
is a broken heart
and Illumination
is in fact
Performance

in the dark
in the cold
in the sky
i can fly

i am old
but i can see
for miles
and miles

i am silver
i am gold
i am white
i am blue

i am rock
i am chaste
i am time
i am truth

when twilight falls
among the stars
i sit and tinker
with your moods
i hear your thoughts
i move the tides
i am your God
i am your Muse
i can be fire
i can be war
i am the daughter
of Zeus
but tonight
there won’t be light
cause I can’t shine
without you

but tonight
there won’t be light
cause I can’t shine
without you

You have to hear it, especially the insistent bass line, to get the full effect.

And tonight I will go hear Vonski. Have I mentioned that Chicago is the greatest city in the world?

So, the master plan is coming along nicely. First cut taxes down to the bone, turning a budget surplus into a truly alarming deficit. Then use that deficit as an excuse to slash goverment programs not directly tied to invading new countries. Science will not be spared. David Appell reports on the situation in high-energy physics:

Bush’s budget is shaping up to be a real disaster. A friend writes that outlays for high-energy physics are due to be cut from $736M (2005 est.) to $714M (2006 est.), a 3% cut in before inflation terms and therefore about a 5% cut in inflation-adjusted terms. What ever happened to the rich (who’ve received the bulk of the tax cuts under this administration) subsidizing good science? Or, failing that, simply American’s committment to cutting-edge and important research? Must all our money go to militaristic aims and tax cuts for the wealthy? How much more anti-science do we tolerate from this administration?

Meanwhile, in my email this morning I found an informational message from the American Astronomical Society about the House Science Committee Hearing on the Hubble Space Telescope.

Ranking member Bart Gordon echoed chairman Boehlert’s remarks and at the end of the hearing stated, “It was clear from the testimony of the witnesses at today’s hearing that there is consensus on the high scientific importance of Hubble. One had to come away impressed by the unambiguous consensus findings of a National Academies committee that included such noted space authorities from such diverse viewpoints. Hence, the burden of proof when it comes to saving Hubble must be placed on anyone who markedly disagrees with the National Academies’ conclusions.” […]

The President’s budget will be released on Monday and is rumored to contain no funding for any kind of Hubble servicing mission. As warranted, the AAS will release Informational Emails and Action Alerts on budgetary and policy issues of importance to our members.

I wonder if this is what it felt like in the final days of the Roman Empire. Bread and circuses, anyone?

This humble blog offers congratulations to the New England Patriots, who were simply the better team today than the heroic Philadelphia Eagles. Same time next year, guys?

This humble blog also counts its blessings that it is no longer based in Boston, whose sports fans can be insufferable even when they are suffering through decades-long losing streaks. The mind reels at how they must be dealing with success.

Everyone knows what it’s like to experience the hallucinations that accompany certain kinds of drug use (among other mind-altering contexts) — if not from direct experience, at least from depictions in movies and literature. We’ve seen the colorful, swirling patterns, or the illusory tunnels stretching before us. It turns out that hallucinations are by no means random; there are certain recurrent patterns reported by people who experience them. These patterns were studied by Heinrich Kluever in the 1920’s and 30’s, and classified into four different structures: spirals, spokes, honeycombs, and cobwebs. Subsequent work has suggested more complicated hybrid forms, such as that portrayed here, but the basic types seem to be robust.

Here’s the good part: the appearance of these particular hallucinations can be explained by physics! I know this because I’m sitting on the thesis committees for two students, Tanya Baker and Michael Buice, working with Jack Cowan of the math department. Cowan is a pioneer in mathematical neurophysics, developing sophisticated physical models of the behavior of neurons in the brain. He is a co-originator of the Wilson-Cowan equations to model neural behavior, and his students and collaborators have been thinking recently about hallucinations and other emergent properties of the brain.

The cerebral cortex of the human brain is basically a thin crumpled sheet, about three millimeters thick and one square meter in area. Naturally, physicists are going to think of it as a two-dimensional problem. The visual field, as observed by our eyes, maps smoothly (but with distortion) onto an area called V1, the primary visual cortex. (I’m glossing over details, including the fact that we have two eyes and our brain has two hemispheres. This is because I don’t really know what I’m talking about, and will try to limit what I say to stuff in which I am confident.) So if we see two parallel lines, it activates a set of neurons that describe two non-intersecting curves in the physical layout of our visual cortex. How do we know the map from the visual field to the cortex? Well, it involves monkeys, or sometimes cats, and electrodes, and noble sacrifices in the name of science. We won’t dwell on the details.

The brain is complicated, so we begin by making approximations. There are enough neurons that we don’t worry so much about the discreteness of cells, but model the cortex as a smooth plane. At each point is a neuron, which can be either be activated or deactivated, or any value in between. The complication comes in when we consider the stimuli to which the neurons respond. These include not just the color and brightness of the point in the visual field to which it corresponds, but also interactions with other neurons, near and far.

These interactions allow the neurons to be sensitive to nonlocal features of the image, such as spatial or temporal frequencies in the brightness pattern, or the presence of correlated orientations within the image. This last capability makes us sensitive to the existence of straight lines — so much so that our brains fill them in when they aren’t even there, such as in the triangle illusion illustrated at right. The space of features of visual stimuli to which neurons are sensitive is not only high-dimensional, it can even be topologically nontrivial.

So as physicists (or applied mathematicians) we want to come up with a mathematical model describing the state of the neurons as a function of the input stimuli and the state of all the other neurons. We end up with an equation of the schematic form

da(x,φ,t)/dt = -a(x,φ,t) + I(x,φ,t) + ∫ dx’ dφ’ f(x-x’,φ-φ’)a(x’,φ’,t)

Here, a(x,φ,t) represents the state of the neuron — either activated, deactivated, or in between. The variable x is the position on the cortex, t is the time, and φ represents all of the things to which the neurons can be sensitive — brightness, spatial frequencies, color, orientation, and so forth. On the right-hand side, the first term -a(x,φ,t) is just minus the current state of the neuron, which makes an unstimulated neuron decay back to the deactivated state. I(x,φ,t) represents the direct stimuli received from the optic nerve, whatever they may be. The interesting part is the final term, an integral representing the interaction with other neurons in the visual cortex. The function f(x,φ) tells us how sensitive the neuron is to the states of other neurons a certain distance away, which can be different for different features of the visual field (frequencies, orientations, etc.). This function typically has a “Mexican Hat” form — it is positive for short distances, negative for intermediate scales, and goes to zero far away.

Okay, the previous paragraph may or may not have made any sense to you. But here is the punchline: patterns of hallucinations reflect normal modes of the neurons in the visual cortex. By “normal modes” we mean the characteristic patterns of vibration, just as for a violin string or the head of a drum. The idea is that a drug such as LSD can alter the ground state of the visual cortex, so that it becomes excited even in the absence of stimuli. In particular, certain oscillating patterns can appear spontaneously. Generally these would take the form of different configurations of straight lines in the cortex itself; however, due to the distortion in the map from our visual field to the brain, these appear to us as spirals, tunnels, and so on. Indeed, Cowan and collaborators have shown that these normal modes can successfully account for all of the basic forms of hallucination classified by Kluever decades ago.

So, the next time you have a near-death experience, and see a tunnel stretching before you leading to a beckoning light, it’s not Jesus calling you into the afterlife. It’s just some characteristic jiggling of the neurons in your weakened brain. Which, to my mind, is much more interesting.

Remember when I gave a bad review to Fahrenheit 9/11, criticizing Michael Moore for cheap theatricality, such as scoring political points by squeezing tears from a woman whose son was killed in action in Iraq?

So, just to be clear, it’s not any better when the President does it.

Sir Paul McCartney is an Eagles fan.

I understand that this is not nearly as cool as, say, having John Lennon be an Eagles fan. Or George Clinton, even better. But we’ll take what we can get.