“Here’s a very nice post at the Volokh Conspiracy consisting almost entirely of a quote from George Will.”

The filibuster is an important defense of minority rights, enabling democratic government to measure and respect not merely numbers but also intensity in public controversies. Filibusters enable intense minorities to slow the governmental juggernaut. Conservatives, who do not think government is sufficiently inhibited, should cherish this blocking mechanism. And someone should puncture Republicans’ current triumphalism by reminding them that someday they will again be in the minority.

In case you might be tempted to give too much credit to Will for his sensible level-headedness, check Brian Leiter on academic diversity.

Finally a good motivation for joining the AAS — Robert Kirshner‘s “President’s Column” in the monthly newsletter. The newsletter is only available to AAS members, since we wouldn’t want all the secret goodies in there leaking out to the unwashed masses. Normally this is no great loss. But since Kirshner has become president, the monthly column has become a highlight.

Here at Preposterous we toil thanklessly for the greater good, so we might just make it a regular feature to excerpt some of Bob’s best quotes. Last month the topic was the process by which NASA decides to make the wrong choices (as revisited in Risa’s last post). This month it’s about the connection between astronomy and physics. Here are the opening few paragraphs:

Everybody has this happen to them — you’re sitting on an airplane, headed for the AAS meeting or an observing run or a windowless room at NASA headquarters when a stranger sits down in the seat next to you. You’re revising a manuscript (changing “affect” to “effect” or the other way around), or writing a referee report (“this paper contains too few references to the pioneering work of the anonymous referee”), or browsing through the AJ (“this paper is pretty good, I wonder if I’m a co-author.”) The person next to you, picking up on these subtle cues, asks, “What do you do?” Here you must make a quick judgment. Do you want to talk to this person?

If your answer is yes, then you say, “I’m an astronomer” and you can be sure your neighbor will pick up that thread — possibly asking for a personal horoscope, possibly asking you for insider information on that satellite that landed so firmly in Utah, and possibly asking if the dark energy is really the cosmological constant. In any case, both time and the airplane will fly.

On the other hand, if the idea of talking to this stranger (“outreach” in NSF-speak) is less appealing than having three hours of root canal work, you just say, “I’m a physicist.” Somehow, that always produces a social retreat, leaving you in your own cocoon of noise-cancellation to compose letters of recommendation that skirt the inside edge of perjury.

Well, the rest is just as good, but I’d hate to have the notorious AAS lawyers come after me. (I’ll have to encourage Bob to start up his own blog, perhaps once this AAS presidency is over.) The point is that there is not a sharp line telling us where astronomy ends and physics takes over, or vice-versa. Some of the most important questions at the heart of each discipline are right there in the heart of the other — biologically difficult to manage, but metaphorically quite manageable.

Of course such a claim sounds so cliched and feel-good as to almost not be worth mentioning on a cutting-edge blog such as this one. However, it remains true that the categories of “astronomy” and “physics” are quite reified in the worlds of funding agencies and university departments, and this can often be a source of trouble. If I were a gossip, I could tell many stories of visiting places on my job searches and being asked, “Sure, we know you dabble in gravity, and astrophysics, and field theory — but what are you really?” One of the nice things about the University of Chicago is that the barriers between the fields are remarkably low, but other places aren’t so lucky. At Harvard, where Bob Kirshner was the department chair when the Astronomy Department grudgingly awarded me a Ph.D. for work on “Cosmological Consequences of Topological and Geometric Phenomena in Field Theories,” there is a fifteen-minute walk through the snow to get from the Physics Department to the Observatory, and it’s not a very beaten path. They’re making an effort, though, so I wish them luck.

Scandinavia seems like such a peaceful place. Maybe they got all the lust for violence out of their system with the whole Viking thing; or maybe it’s still there, just bubbling below the surface, invisible to an outsider like me.

Returning to reality, and taking a quick tour around the news and the blogs, uncovers too many sad stories and reasons for disgust to really keep track of. Here’s a little list, so you can choose to target your outrage according to your geo-political predilections.

• Pakistan
• Burma
  
• Israel
• Sudan
• Iraq
• United States

No claim is made to being exhaustive.

I’m back from Sweden, and twelve hours of sleep later I’m more or less ready to resume the struggle. Thanks to Risa for helping out, and coming close to setting the record for most-commented-on post!

Just before I left my phone rang, and on the other end was a woman with a pleasant English accent. “Hi, I’m calling from the journal Nature.” Hi, what can I do for you. “We’re working on a feature story about young theoretical physicists who are making an impact.” Well, of course I’m always happy to help out such a prestigious publication. “So, do you know any?” Oh. “Um, perhaps I should explain, we are limiting the scope of ‘young’ to include only people who are thirty-five or less. So I believe you are over the cutoff, is that right?” Yes, I suppose that’s right.

So there you have it — objective proof that I have left the ranks of the youthful and nimble and joined those of the stodgy middle-aged. I’m trying to figure out some way to turn this to my advantage. Perhaps a crisis is in order. I’m thinking a nice cherry-red sports car might just ease the pain.

I’m still at the Philosophy of Science Association meeting in Austin, where I have thus far been foiled in my attempts to buy a PSA T-shirt. The other disappointment was that I arrived too late to hear a plenary talk by Steven Weinberg. But otherwise it’s been going well. We had a fun little session yesterday on the dimensionality of space. Craig Callender from UCSD gave an overview of various attempts to “prove” that space must be three-dimensional. Apparently it was Immanuel Kant who first tried to use Gauss’s Law to show that space must be three-dimensional. That seems a little backwards to us today, since you have to assume that gravity has a 1/r² force law to do it; it seems more sensible to derive the force law from the dimensionality rather than the other way around. (I also learned that Newton calculated how elliptical orbits would precess if the force law wasn’t precisely 1/r², a fact that later gained significance as a proof of general relativity.) Then there are crazier proofs based on the anthropic principle. An example (which Craig didn’t use) that I originally heard from Mark Wise is the “tying your shoes argument” — in more than three spatial dimensions, there’s no such thing as a knot, so it wouldn’t be possible to keep your shoes from falling off, which makes civilization very difficult. I pointed out to Mark that this also ruled out fewer than three dimensions, so it’s a pretty powerful argument. Perhaps you could use 2-branes to keep your shoes on, though. I’ll have some of my grad students look into it.

Another talk was by Nick Huggett and David Hilbert (no, not that Hilbert) of the University of Illinois at Chicago on perceptions of three dimensions. This talk started with some abstract ideas from Poincare, and slid into an empirical psychological study of how three-dimensionality is ingrained into our brains. Not hard-wired, though; Linda Henderson in the audience mentioned an experiment in which subjects were trained to think in four-dimensional intuition. I personally wouldn’t classify these issues as philosophy, but as psychology, since they involve empirical investigations of how the mind actually works. Of course there is a good question about whether philosophy is really a science; to me the answer is clearly “no.” Science is about constructing models and trying to fit them to the world, using empirical data to decide which models are better than others. (Glossing over some details here.) Philosophy includes the stuff that is non-empirical, although there is obviously a great deal of connection. Moral philosophy and logic are fine examples of disciplines that are just not science at all. Indeed, philosophy of science is not a science (although sociology of science is). It’s okay not to be a science! Some of my best friends are non-scientists.

My own talk was on the good reasons we have for suspecting that there may be more than three dimensions of space. I didn’t say anything new; the argument was basically that we need to quantize gravity, string theory is our best current hope for a quantum theory of gravity, and string theory predicts the existence of extra dimensions. Of course, all of these statements are controversial, even if not “new.” If Peter were there, I suspect he would have disagreed with the statement that string theory is our best hope for quantizing gravity. To me, it clearly is, and I’ve been hoping for a while to sit down and type out a clear exposition of why I think so. But I would first want to talk more generally about quantum gravity and stuff, and right now I have to go to Sweden! Happy Thanksgiving; you’ll be in Risa‘s competent hands while I’m gone.

After a long search, the new director of Fermilab will be Pier Oddone, currently deputy director of Lawrence Berkely Labs. Oddone is an experimentalist, and the originator of the idea of asymmetric B-factories to study CP violation; two such facilities have since been built at SLAC in California and at KEK in Japan.

According to the news reports, Oddone seems to be in favor of an aggressive push to keep Fermilab moving forward in particle physics:

Oddone, 60, takes the helm of the laboratory at a critical time in energy research. Although Fermi remains the top high-energy physics lab in the world, it is expected to be surpassed by a European facility in three years.

To ensure the lab’s survival and staffing levels, Oddone said Fermi will need to market itself to either run the next big energy facility or create a niche market for new research using the lab’s current neutrino experiments. Neutrinos are one of the least understood components of the universe. They are similar to electrons but lack an electric charge.

Even with current changes at the U.S. Department of Energy, Fermi will continue to get backing to move forward on either project, said Robin Staffin, director of the office of high energy physics and office of science at the DOE.

“Fermilab plays a major, very important role in the department’s high-energy physics,” he said. “We certainly expect that to continue.”

That’s good news, it’s just what the field and Fermilab need.

I’m in sunny Orlando with my friends from Project Exploration, who had previously fed me and brought me along on dinosaur expeditions. (It’s good to pick the right friends.) Why are we here, you ask? PE has already established a great track record at working with kids and getting them interested in science, but they have grand ambitions to grow far beyond their current presence. In particular, they are planning to build an exploration center that would serve as some sort of hybrid between a science museum, action park, and research facility. (Still working on what to actually call it.) Part of the philosophy is to go beyond just showing people the wonders of science, and to engage them interactively with the process by which science is actually done. They want to demystify science and help children appreciate that this is an adventure they can all be part of.

One of the first steps in the process of making this real (besides negotiating with the city of Chicago to snag a great location, which is also ongoing) is to brainstorm about what such a place might be and what it might contain. So here we are at Design Island, where we’re having a Charette to develop ideas for the project. “Charette,” as I have learned, is jargon for a brainstorming session. (The term evolved from 19th-century students at the Ecole Des Beaux-Arts, rushing their projects around in a cart called a charette.) We have certain parameters in terms of space, and a far-reaching agenda about what we want to do with it — exhibits that are interactive and educational, opportunities for visitors to interact with working scientists, space for lectures and announcements of exciting results, research laboratories, an open science library, and all the usual extras. So we’re bouncing around ideas about nature walks and virtual reality and animatronic dinosaurs. We want the experience to be different than you get at a typical museum — less about the shiny and impressive final products, and more about the messy reality. In the meantime I’m having a great time experiencing a very different messy reality; in the next five years or so we’ll get to see how it all turns out.

In case anyone was wondering what kind of barbaric inhumanity is operating under the rubric of Islamic fundamentalism, we have the murder of Margaret Hassan.

Hassan, Irish by birth, married an Iraqi man more than three decades ago, and had devoted her life to providing aid and comfort to the people of her adopted country — first during the tribulations of Saddam’s regime, and then through the difficulties of the recent war. One month ago she was kidnapped by an unknown group on her way to work at Care International. A hue and cry was raised by her many supporters throughout Baghdad, where billboards with pictures of Hassan were posted throughout the city, asking for information about her whereabouts. But Al-Jazeera has now aired a video of a hooded man shooting a blindfolded woman in the head; authorities claim that the woman is Hassan. Just one in a long line of innocent dead people.

And, again just to be clear: no, incidents like this do not justify the war in Iraq. Precisely the opposite; the war has stimulated incidents like this, not prevented them. The obvious culpability of Hassan’s killers doesn’t excuse the obvious stupidity of the war she found herself in the middle of. Instead of fighting terrorism and fundamentalism, we fought a misguided campaign against an ugly but contained secular state, and thereby gave the terrorists a new theater in which to operate and endless new material for their recruiting brochures. Young angry Arabs aren’t seeing the video of Margaret Hassan’s execution, they’re seeing a scared Marine killing a defenseless Iraqi cowering in a corner. (The Marine’s actions were in flagrant violations of the laws of war, but to be honest I can’t judge him; who knows how I would act if I were being ambushed and shot at in a hostile country.) We’re going to be dealing with the horrific fallout of this monumental screw-up for generations to come. What a stupid useless disgusting mess.

The SETI@home people were first, but the idea is catching on: harness the computing power of the world’s home computers for some greater good. The latest example is the World Community Grid, which proposes to use all that excess computing power to study drug research, protein folding, and other complex problems. From a story on Yahoo:

NEW YORK (Reuters) – IBM and top scientific research organizations are joining forces in a humanitarian effort to tap the unused power of millions of computers and help solve complex social problems.

The World Community Grid will seek to tap the vast underutilized power of computers belonging to individuals and businesses worldwide and channel it into selected medical and environmental research programs.

Volunteers will be asked to download a program to their computers that runs when the machine is idle and reaches out to request data to contribute to research projects.

Organizers say the Grid can help unlock genetic codes that underlie diseases like AIDS (news – web sites) and HIV (news – web sites), Alzheimer’s or cancer, improve forecasting of natural disasters and aid studies to protect the world’s food and water supply.

Soon enough, donating your spare CPU cycles will be a deep decision that everyone will have to make, just like donating to charity. Don’t forget Einstein@Home!

I’m about to embark on one of these insane travel jaunts again. Wednesday and Thursday in Orlando, Florida, home of Disney World. Which is where I’ll be, but for semi-work-related reasons. Then to Austin, Texas, a tiny patch of blue in a giant field of red. I won’t be visiting UT, though; I’ll be going to the annual meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association. We have a little session on Friday afternoon on “The Dimensions of Space.” I’ll be arguing that there are more than three, we just don’t know it yet. Then next week it’s to Sweden, to give a couple of colloquia and maybe check out an aurora or two. (It’s a good life, I admit it.)

One presumes that they have internet access even in Bush-controlled states like Florida and Texas, so blogging will hopefully continue unimpeded. But who knows what it’s like in a sclerotic European economy such as Sweden. So next week we’ll have another guest-blogger for you, Chicago’s own Risa Wechsler. Regular Preposterous readers will recognize Risa as the silver medalist in our poker tournament for Kerry. But her day job is as a cosmologist at the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, and she has strong political commitments. In other words, ideally qualified to carry on this little blog’s usual preoccupations.