This week the American Astronomical Society is meeting in San Diego. (No, I’m still here in Chicago, thank goodness.) The AAS meetings are huge, impersonal affairs, very different in character from a smaller conference devoted to a particular specialty. But they serve at least one important purpose — to provide a forum where astronomers can announce newsworthy findings, knowing that there will be a healthy collection of journalists available to tell their stories.

That’s why the second week in January is always filled with fun astronomy stories in the news. Interesting results this week include a claim that the Chandra X-ray satellite observatory has found evidence for thousands of black holes near the center of the Milky Way, and that ripples in the large-scale distribution of galaxies — predicted to result from the same acoustic oscillations that give rise to preferred scales in microwave background temperature anisotropies — have been reliably measured in data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. And many more.

Sometimes, sadly, people get carried away. Here for example is an extremely cool result: evidence for spacetime dragging around a spinning black hole, from X-rays observed with the Rossi satellite. If you did nothing but read the nice story just linked to (by Robert Roy Britt, describing research by Jeroen Homan and Jon Miller), you’d be impressed at how much astronomers are able to learn about black holes. (The picture is an artist’s impression by Dana Berry, not an actual image of the source!) If on the other hand you chased down the press release for this work, you’d be surprised to hear the claim that the result, if confirmed, “would represent a new phenomenon that goes beyond Einstein’s general relativity.” Because it wouldn’t, actually. It’s a nice confirmation of a precise prediction of general relativity, in fact. Happily, the journalist for the above article either didn’t read the press release, or knew better than to write about the fake overthrow of Einstein. Sadly, not every journalist was so fortunate. This article from USA Today would have you believe not only that the black hole is “changing the dimensions of space,” but that the very possibility of a spinning black hole is “something never considered in Einstein’s theory of gravity.” Eeek. (Although I have a nice textbook he should buy.)

I’m usually reluctant to criticize science journalists and press officers, as they have a hard job and get little credit (at least compared to the glamorous life of the research scientist). But it’s important to get it right, and just takes a little extra effort. Lost in the confusion is the crucial point: that observations like these represent the first steps towards what will be a major project over the next couple of decades, mapping out the spacetime in the vicinity of black holes. Plans are in the works for ultra-high resolution X-ray satellites like Constellation X that will directly image the inner edge of accretion disks near black holes, and gravitational-wave observatories like LISA will open an incredibly precise new window on the way in which black holes curve spacetime. At least, if we can somehow find the money — and really good science stories have an important role in making that possible.

Speaking of the dissemination of scientific information, the latest edition of Tangled Bank is now up at Science and Politics. It’s full of scientific information. (Although I understand that the total entropy of the universe was increased in the process of bringing it together).

Besides Steve Hsu, another physicist-blogger I noticed at Crooked Timber is fellow cosmologist Andrew Jaffe. He has a couple of posts up about science publishing on the web. Of course, physicists have historically been in the vanguard of electronic dissemination of information, beginning spectacularly with the invention of the World-Wide-Web at CERN. In the particular case of scientific papers, Paul Ginsparg’s arxiv.org (originally based at Los Alamos, now at Cornell) had a revolutionary impact. Each morning you can read the titles and abstracts of every paper submitted the previous day, and download and print the full text of those that strike your interest. The increase in speed and convenience over ordinary journals seems slight, but the impact is huge. It used to be that researchers that were “in the loop” would receive preprints from their colleagues, giving them a noticeable advantage over more isolated workers who had to wait months for the journals to appear.

Equally important, although rarely mentioned, is the straightforward advantage of one-stop shopping — rather than leafing through a dozen journals, and still possibly missing some interesting papers, every paper worth reading goes to a single site. It is so convenient that plenty of people (myself included) will often go to arxiv.org to print out a copy of their own paper, rather than go through the effort of digging it up in a file. The convenience is enhanced considerably by the citation service of the SPIRES database in high-energy physics (and the similar NASA Astrophysics Data System), which tells you which papers have been cited by which other papers, constructing an instantly searchable network of references. (And, something also convenient but less obviously beneficial, a way to rate one’s worth as a scientist. [Which gives me a nice way to smoothly insert a link to the Hot Paper by Mark Hoffman, Mark Trodden, and me.])

One of the reason why these systems sprung up most easily in high-energy physics and astrophysics is because those subfields have very little commercial application! The stakes are (mostly) intellectual, and millions of dollars are not at risk if someone reads your paper before it is peer-reviewed. Indeed, workers in these fields are becoming increasingly convinced that peer review is kind of a nuisance, since the only people who care about these results are fellow researchers who can judge for themselves whether a paper is interesting or not. That’s why the Bogdanov affair (in which some French demi-celebrities were accused, incorrectly, of “spoofing” physicists by publishing nonsense papers) was more interesting to outsiders than physicists — bad papers get published all the time, we just ignore them. In other fields, it’s more important that non-experts can assume that published work has been vetted by reliable researchers; putting every paper out on a free preprint server is a dicier proposition. Nevertheless, efforts like the Public Library of Science are attempting to make scientific and medical results freely accessible, even if not quite as quickly and conveniently as the arxiv does for physics.

Interestingly, the blog model has found physicists lagging behind the rest of the world; just look how the list of academic blogs at Crooked Timber or Bitch, Ph.D. are dominated by the social sciences and humanities. Jacques Distler is one of the few physicists who actually uses his blog to talk about research-level questions with fellow string theorists, and the String Coffee Table is a way to allow anyone to join in. More recently there have been a couple of couple of other attempts along these lines: Physics Comments gathers papers from the arxiv and provides a space to discuss them, while CosmoCoffee is aimed more narrowly at cosmology, and makes some effort to limit membership to working cosmologists.

We’ll see how these new efforts work. I’m hopeful but somewhat skeptical. At some point, more communication isn’t what the field needs; it needs more results to communicate about, or at least more good results, or at least more quiet time to think about getting some results. I think that the current lines of communication between professional physicists are pretty good; papers are disseminated rapidly, most institutions have frequent seminars, and nobody is complaining that there aren’t enough conferences. Compared to talking to someone in person, chatting about technical results on the Web is necessarily clumsy, even if (as Jacques and others have done) some effort is put into allowing equations to be displayed nicely.

On the other hand, the lines of communication between professional scientists and interested non-scientists could use a great deal of improvement, and there might be a future for blogs in this capacity. If I were a more public-spirited person, I would resist the temptation to clutter this blog with politics and philosophy, and make a real effort to stick to explaining physics and cosmology to non-experts. But it wouldn’t be as much fun.

From DemWatch, Atrios, Volokh, and a million other places, we hear about the uplifting piece of scripture that Tom DeLay chose to read at the Congressional Prayer Service on January 5th:

A reading of the Gospel, in Matthew 7:21 through 27.

Not every one who says to me, “Lord, Lord,” will enter the kingdom of heaven; but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.

Many will say to me on that day, “Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name? Did we not drive out demons in your name? Did we not do mighty deeds in your name?”

Then I will declare to them solemnly, “I never knew you: depart from me, you evil doers.”

Everyone who listens to these words of mine, and acts on them, will be like a wise man, who built his house on a rock:

The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew, and buffeted the house, but it did not collapse; it has been set solidly on rock.

And everyone who listens to these words of mine, but does not act on them, will be like a fool who built his house on sand:

The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew, and buffeted the house, and it collapsed and was completely ruined.

The poor Congressman is taking some grief for his choice of text, due to what some perceive as insensitivity towards the victims of the actual tsunami that knocked down quite a few houses.

The problem seems to be that DeLay is blaming the victims for this terrible catastrophe — if they had listened to Jesus, this never would have happened. I should point out that, well, that’s because it’s true, at least if you believe that God is in charge of the natural world. God (or Jesus, or the Holy Spirit, I can’t always keep track) could easily have prevented this disaster, but chose not to. And for an all-powerful being, it’s hard to distinguish between “chose not to prevent” and “caused.” So it would be equally legitimate (and less dependent on theological fine points) to say that DeLay’s choice of text puts the blame squarely on God’s shoulders, for having such a maliciously petty approach to being omnipotent.

On Morning Edition this morning, Barbara Bradley Hagerty spoke to representatives from various faiths about the meaning of this disaster in the light of God. I only heard snippets, but the commentators were at least admirably consistent, choosing not to weasel out of the obvious conclusion. The Muslim agreed that, yes, the fact that Allah chose to do this meant that there was some very good reason why those people had to suffer and die; we might not know what it is, but presumably they did something bad. The Protestant was more in the Enlightenment tradition of egocentric individuality, choosing to interpret the tsunami as God’s way of telling him, personally, to shape up. Not a comforting thought to the actual victims, but at least intellectually honest.

Of course, it is also true that DeLay is an insensitive jerk. Just because his God is petulant and vindictive doesn’t mean he has to rub it in our faces.

In case you aren’t listening to NPR or watching C-SPAN (or reading Human Rights First), Pandagon provides a nice paraphrase (N.B.: just a paraphrase, not a transcript!) of Patrick Leahy’s noble attempts to squeeze a straight answer out of future Attorney General Alberto Gonzales:

LEAHY: “Does U.S. law allow for torture, in your opinion?”

GONZALES: “Bush has already said there won’t be any torture.”

LEAHY: “That’s not what I asked. In your opinion, does U.S. law allow for torture?”

GONZALES: “That’s a hypothetical question that I won’t answer.”

LEAHY: “U.S. law. Torture.”

GONZALES: “That involves a lot of complex law that I don’t know.”

Joe Biden also said something sensible (you’re nominated for Attorney General, not the Supreme Court, so you can’t actually weasel out of giving us your opinions), but is such a pompous jerk that he does more harm than good to his own case.

Update: This guy claims not to have a view about whether Senate filibusters are constitutional. And he wants to be Attorney General?

It’s funny to hear the Republicans throw softballs. “Judge, do you think terrorism is bad?” Or course, for most nominees, “Do you think torture is bad?” would qualify as a softball.

Update again: Gonzales slipped for a moment and actually answered a question. Asked if he thought the President had the right to ignore a law that he personally suspected was unconstitutional, he said “Yes.” Nobody asked the obvious follow-up, whether we should consider changing the title “President” to “God-Emperor.”

Last update: I hadn’t realized that the Justice department finally backed off its classification of torture as unacceptable only when the interrogator intentionally inflicted pain on the order of major organ failure or death. A new memo has been issued that takes a wider view of what is unacceptable. Of course, it came out last week, which is more than two years after the original memo. But just in time for the Gonzales hearings!

If you want info on the new FBI reports expressing shock at the torture going on at Guantanamo Bay, see articles at Newsweek and the ACLU.

In the Comments, Kriston very naturally wonders whether I was perhaps exaggerating about the President’s divine right to declare laws unconstitutional. Nope. I haven’t found a transcript, but Gonzales repeated this belief again later, so it wasn’t a slip. Here a quote from the Human Rights First site, which is not the most clear but gives you the gist:

Gonzales – The Executive branch should always look with great care at a law before it decides that law is unconstitutional and should not be followed.

Many of us had thought that was the Judicial branch’s job. But hey, if they look with great care, what more can we ask?

I was happy to notice via Crooked Timber that Steve Hsu, I physicist I know from way back, has begun to blog. He’s in the physics department at the University of Oregon, although many of his posts are about economics and finance.

Steve links with approval to an article entitled Don’t Become a Scientist!, by Jonathan Katz. Professor Katz is pretty straightforward about what he means by this dramatic statement:

Are you thinking of becoming a scientist? Do you want to uncover the mysteries of nature, perform experiments or carry out calculations to learn how the world works? Forget it!

Science is fun and exciting. The thrill of discovery is unique. If you are smart, ambitious and hard working you should major in science as an undergraduate. But that is as far as you should take it. After graduation, you will have to deal with the real world. That means that you should not even consider going to graduate school in science. Do something else instead: medical school, law school, computers or engineering, or something else which appeals to you.

Why am I (a tenured professor of physics) trying to discourage you from following a career path which was successful for me? Because times have changed (I received my Ph.D. in 1973, and tenure in 1976). American science no longer offers a reasonable career path. If you go to graduate school in science it is in the expectation of spending your working life doing scientific research, using your ingenuity and curiosity to solve important and interesting problems. You will almost certainly be disappointed, probably when it is too late to choose another career.

That must be depressing to read for a young person who is considering embarking on the long and difficult road to becoming a professional scientist. A brief perusal of his web page reveals that Professor Katz is something of a nutcake, with other essays like In Defense of Homophobia and Diversity is the Last Refuge of a Scoundrel. Nevertheless, is there anything to his career advice?

The facts of the case are not in dispute: there are many more people who would like to become scientists, even among those who have made it as far as graduate school, than there are jobs for them as professional scientists. (Really here we are thinking of jobs as professors at universities, not working for industry, and the problem is equal or worse in other areas of academia.) The numbers will depend sensitively on how you define the problem, but I’ve heard that perhaps one in four people who get a Ph.D. will eventually become a professor, and that seems plausible.

Why would anyone go through years of extremely hard work (four years of undergrad, perhaps five of grad school, about four or five of postdoc on average, not to mention another six before you come up for tenure) just to have such a small chance of winning what appears to be a somewhat modest prize? It’s like aiming to become a professional athlete, except without the lavish riches, celebrity status, or the esteem of the opposite sex. One must conclude that people only embark on this path because they care deeply about doing science. Should we really be telling those people that they should hang it up, their efforts are a waste of time?

No. Of course we should tell them the truth — there aren’t many positions available, even for people with doctorates from prestigious graduate schools. But in my experience that is hardly a secret — the lesson is driven home again and again, in conversations with other students as well as with faculty. Maybe I’m wrong, but I haven’t heard any professors spinning tales of how easy it is to get a faculty job. There is some tension, of course, because we do try to recruit students to come to our own schools, or to join our groups rather than some other one. But as far as I can tell, such a student would have to live in an especially well-sealed cave to achieve a Ph.D. without having heard about how bad the job market is. And if they do understand how difficult it is, and want to try anyway, then more power to them.

In the face of an unfortunate situation, it’s nice to be able to blame somebody. Who can we blame for the fact that there are fewer jobs than people who get Ph.D.’s? Perhaps there should be more jobs. That would be great, but runs into the fairly prosaic problem of how to pay for it. Double college tuitions? The number of faculty positions is slowly growing, but I don’t see any way to make it grow so fast that it outstrips the number of people who would like to have one.

Maybe we can blame graduate schools, for accepting all of these students even though there aren’t guaranteed jobs waiting for them? I’ve actually heard people express this view in all seriousness. But let’s think about it. What is actually being suggested is to simply accept far fewer applicants to grad school, i.e. to reject half or more of the students we currently take. And this is supposed to benefit these students? “Yes, we understand that you wanted to go to graduate school, but for your own good we’ve decided not to let you get a Ph.D. It’s true, you might have been one of the fortunate ones to get a job, or you might have led a fulfilling life outside of academia, but in our judgment the odds are against you. Someday you’ll thank us.”

It’s hard to get a job as a science professor, or just about any other kind of professor. And it’s heartbreaking to go through years of effort and not achieve that goal. But not letting people try is not the answer. Nor is discouraging anyone who might want to pursue the dream of being a scientist. We should be relentlessly honest — it’s a hard road, and many will ultimately not succeed. But in my experience, this fact is pretty obvious, not at all hidden. And if someone understands this and wants to try anyway, they should be encouraged as much as possible. I have the best job in the world, and it wouldn’t be right to tell someone else they shouldn’t pursue the same path if that’s where their passion leads them.

Okay, so you have some really important, super-secret data you want to store. This stuff is so good (maybe illegally good) that you worry about it being compromised by the snoopy government or voracious competitors. Where can you keep your data where it will be completely safe? I suggest the principality of Sealand. (Photo copyright Kim Gilmour.)

During WWII, Britain constructed “sea forts” as a way of protecting the coast line against German air attacks. After the war they were abandoned, and eventually torn down, except for one — Fort Roughs Tower. It was (and is) basically a platform situated on two huge pillars, that sat there slowly rusting. At least, until 1967, when radio pirate Paddy Roy Bates and his friends occupied the structure as a base from which to broadcast to the UK. Never one to think small, Bates declared the fort an independent country, dubbed it Sealand, and named himself Prince. (See history at Wikipedia and an article at Wired.)

Sealand has had a colorful history, including an attempted coup and a small war. But the radio piracy business isn’t what it used to be, and the primary venture on Sealand is now HavenCo, a manager of “secure servers.” Basically, the Sealand government makes very few awkward demands on the HavenCo management, as they are essentially identical.

The entrepreneurs claim that they don’t want to get involved with truly outlandish illegal activities, child pornography and the like. But if you’d like to manage a few anonymous transactions, HavenCo might be the way to go. I’ll be sure to look into it once I get Preposterous Universe to turn a profit.

To answer a question I had some time back (although probably not just because of that), the text of David Politzer’s Nobel Lecture is now up on his web page. The provocative title is “The Dilemma of Attribution,” but the lecture itself isn’t by any means outrageous. It’s a look at the history of the ideas of QCD and asymptotic freedom from Politzer’s personal perspective, with a strong emphasis on giving credit to absolutely everyone. It’s an important task, as the actual history is inevitably messy, and there is an irresistible temptation to clean them up in the retelling.

As teachers of the next generation of scientists, we always seek to compress and simplify all the developments that have come before. We want to bring our students as quickly as possible to the frontier of current understanding. From this perspective, the actual history, which involves many variants and many missteps, is only a hindrance. And the neat, linear progress, as outlined by the sequence of gleaming gems recognized by Nobel prizes, is a useful fiction. But a fiction it is. The truth is often far more complicated. Of course, there are the oft-told priority disputes, bickering over who is responsible for some particular idea. But those questions are not only often unresolvable, they are often rather meaningless. Genuinely independent discovery is not only possible, it occurs all the time. Sometimes a yet harder problem in the prize selection process is to identify what is the essential or most important idea in some particular, broader context. So it’s not just a question of who did it, i.e., who is responsible for the work, but what “it” is. I.e., what is the significant “it” that should stand as a symbol for a particularly important advance.

Politzer explains vividly the diverse contributions that went into the discovery of asymptotic freedom. But he also believes, I think correctly, that the final result from him and Gross and Wilczek really was the event that deserved the Prize, even if it was “just getting a minus sign right” (the strong force grows weaker at short distances rather than stronger), and indeed a sign that some other people already had calculated. Putting it into the right context, and appreciating its fundamental significance, created the moment in which people finally understood that QCD was the correct theory of the strong interactions.

Update: Another line worth quoting —

I must say that I do regard theoretical physics as a fundamentally parasitic profession, living off the labors of the real physicists.

Happy New Year!

I grew up outside Philly, so naturally I watched a lot of Fat Albert, which has now been made into a movie. (An awful one, apparently, but that’s to be expected.) The cartoon kids from the TV series are swept through a rip in spacetime connected through little Doris’ TV set, to re-appear as live characters in the real world. (I guess they figured out how to violate the null energy condition.)

Roger Ebert, reviewing the movie, raises a question:

And I was wondering, as I always do with plot devices like this, why the human characters deal so calmly with the appearance of toons. Yes, Doris is surprised when the Fat Albert gang pops through her TV set, but isn’t that event more than just … surprising? Isn’t it incredibly amazing? When the laws of the physical universe as we know them are fundamentally violated, shouldn’t it be for more earthshaking purposes than to cheer up Doris?

Okay, I know this one. Yes, it is incredibly surprising. It’s surprising (“it” meaning the appearance of cartoon characters in the real world) because it would never happen. Trust me on that, I’m a scientist. So, it’s hard to reliably answer the question “How would someone react if they saw cartoon characters come to life?” because the hypothesis is contrary to possibility. If we’re going to make movies in which Fat Albert squeezes through the TV and into our bedroom, it’s okay to pass through a brief period of modest surprise before we move onto the wacky hijinks, because the only possible realistic response would involve an hour and a half of stunned disbelief, possibly enlivened by a descent into stark raving madness. Which would be, at minimum, quite a different movie, not really Cosby material at all.

And on that note, let’s wish everyone a happy 2005. It can’t help but be an improvement over its predecessor.