From the LA Times, via The Poor Man:

WASHINGTON — Bush administration lawyers argued in three closely contested states last week that only the Justice Department, and not voters themselves, may sue to enforce the voting rights set out in the Help America Vote Act, which was passed in the aftermath of the disputed 2000 election.

Veteran voting-rights lawyers expressed surprise at the government’s action, saying that closing the courthouse door to aspiring voters would reverse decades of precedent.

Because, of course, the only person with the requisite wisdom and objectivity to protect the American voter would be John Ashcroft.

Another example of DeLong’s Law: The Bush Administration is always worse than one imagines, even when taking into account DeLong’s Law.

No, I’m not talking about politicians — it’s about physicists.

Sometimes, you see a hornet’s nest, and some wise part of you knows that you shouldn’t go poking it with a stick. But if you were smart enough to resist, you wouldn’t have a blog, would you? Peter Woit mentions a recent colloquium at Fermilab by Howard Georgi, in which Georgi discusses the lamentable under-representation of women in physics. Peter says some sensible things about how complicated the problem is, but being a provocateur, he can’t resist getting in a dig at Lubos Motl at the end of it. Lubos, getting into the Halloween spirit, dons his caveman costume and responds with an explanation of the situation, which seems to rely on hormones and the fact that women have fewer neurons than men. (He mentions, generously, that women can be both smart and beautiful; this is only fair, as he frequently mentions how this or that male physicist is kind of dreamy.)

I’ve chatted before about the issue of gender disparity in physics, but there is a separate but related issue worth remarking on: the arrogance, aggressiveness, and competitiveness of many physicists. Of course such a characterization is a careless over-generalization, but there is enough truth to it that it’s worth exploring. The fact is, many physicists can be overbearingly macho about their field. Why is that? Is it also true in other fields, to the same extent? My limited experience seems to indicate that other parts of academia are just as competitive as physics is, but somehow don’t have quite the arrogance that we often do. I know that academics in the social sciences or humanities will find this hard to believe, but I really do think that physicists are even worse, on average.

We could indulge in some cheap psychology here. Most of these physicists, after all, were not exactly quarterbacking the football team in high school. It would not be a stretch to imagine that many of them were — what do we say — kind of nerdy. We may just be dealing with a certain amount of overcompensation. Finding themselves in a relatively isolated community of like-minded folks, where the ability to do integrals is more prized than the ability to do push-ups, it might be natural to deal with some lingering resentment about being picked on as a child by picking on others as a somewhat-developed adult. In other words, the macho posturing of physicists (scoring points by ridiculing the ideas of others, angling to shout the loudest during seminars, looking disdainfully at any sign of weakness or lack of knowledge) may be the same phenomenon that creates schoolyard bullies, played out in a very different arena.

Admittedly, that is some really cheap psychology indeed, and the truth is undoubtedly more complex. For one thing, the field is competitive, whether we like it or not, for the most basic of reasons: too many people chasing too few goods. In the case the goods are positions of various forms — acceptance at the best graduate schools, getting good postdocs and faculty jobs, winning awards. There are many more people who want to be scientists than there are jobs for them, so competition is inevitable. And that creates an unfortunate situation where everyone is constantly evaluating the worthiness of everyone else, estimating in their own minds where they deserve to be in the hierarchy of desirable goods. I don’t see any way to possibly escape that syndrome — even if we lived in a utopia of wealth where everyone received a substantial stipend to pursue their individual passions, there would still be competition to get located in the best places, which are limited by definition.

But there’s a difference between competing for jobs (sad but inevitable) and acting as if doing physics were itself a competition (sad and untrue). Nature is a big complicated thing that is smarter than any of us, and we should all be in this together. Almost everyone will admit under examination that cooperation is a more effective way of doing science than pure competition. And although becoming a professional physicist is by necessity a difficult task, it doesn’t have to be torture, or even unfriendly. Too often in my field we mistake aggressiveness for intelligence, or at least refuse to make the effort to nurture talented people who don’t push themselves forward as shamelessly as some of their colleagues. Perhaps it’s gradually changing for the better, but I have no way of knowing.

I suspect that a large number of people (of any gender) leave the field simply because they look around and think to themselves, “Wow, a substantial number of my colleagues are hyper-competitive jerks, this really isn’t worth it.” And that’s too bad. Fortunately, along with the jerks are a large number of very sweet and supportive individuals who I am happy to call my friends. So if anyone out there is a friendly non-competitive person with a passion and talent for physics — stick with it, we need more like you.

John Holbo points to a post by Jim Henley on why libertarians should vote for Kerry. Part of the argument is kind of obvious — general fears of big-government Democrats aside, why would any libertarian think that George W. Bush would be better? Apart from the general incompetence of the administration at just about everything, they haven’t demonstrated any particular tendency toward small government, aside from cutting taxes. Spending is up, foreign policy is willfully interventionist, the deficit is out of control, civil liberties are under assault as never in the past fifty years, and no special effort has been made to promote free trade. But the particular emphasis of Henley’s piece is the unrealistic attitude of the administration to the war on terror. Which, although I agree with the critique, raises an interesting rhetorical point, and a valid criticism against both Kerry and Bush.

“Terror” is a tactic, not an enemy. You can’t “win” the “war” on it, the notion is absurd. The best you can hope to do is to minimize the danger, so that concerns about terror are reasonably contained, just as we hope to do with countless other dramatic dangers. Everybody in their right minds knows this, certainly both candidates do. But you aren’t allowed to admit it out loud. It is taken as a given that we must pretend that the goal is to crush terrorism out of existence, and that each candidate has a plan for doing so within four years. The problem is, campaigning is hard and people get tired, so both candidates will occasionally slip. They will admit in moments of weakness that the fight against terror is likely to go on forever, and that really the goal is to minimize the danger. Within minutes the other campaign will be all over them, accusing the momentarily honest politician of insufficient manliness to lead our nation through these perilous times.

Only a few more days before the recounts and court challenges begin in earnest.

So I’ve been busy, but with good reason. Long ago I mentioned some research I have been doing with Jennie Chen, a grad student here, on the arrow of time. And finally the paper is done! We have just submitted the manuscript to the online e-print server at http://arxiv.org/archive/hep-th, where it should appear Thursday evening. (Update: here it is!) Some day we’ll even submit it to a journal, although that seems so twentieth-century to me.

As a reward to all our faithful readers at Preposterous Universe, here is the paper itself, revealed a full twenty-four hours before ordinary physicists get to see it! Getting in on the cosmological ground floor, as it were. The paper is available as a postscript file or as a pdf file; unfortunately the pdf version will look crappy on your screen, but it should print okay.

We have a grandiose-sounding goal: to explain the century-old puzzle of why the entropy of the universe was low in the past. The entropy, of course, is a measure of how “disorderly” a system is; more properly, how “generic” or “random” it is. Low-entropy states are suspiciously orderly; the classic example is a box of gas in which all of the gas just happens to be located in one corner. This is a perfectly acceptable configuration, but a statistically very unlikely one; if you let it go, the gas will quickly evolve to fill the room. This is the celebrated Second Law of Thermodynamics — in closed systems, entropy tends to increase (or stay constant). Long ago Boltzmann developed a mathematical understanding of this phenomenon, by showing how entropy measured the number of equivalent ways we could re-arrange the elements of the system to give a state that was macroscopically indistinguishable. For the box of gas, there aren’t that many ways we could re-arrange the molecules to keep them in one corner, but there are many ways we could re-arrange them smoothly throughout the box. It is therefore very natural to evolve from a low-entropy state to a high-entropy state, simply because there are so many more high-entropy states to evolve to.

The fact that entropy increases defines the arrow of time. It is a statistical phenomenon, valid for large systems, and the Second Law looks very different from the “microscopic” laws of physics, which are generally don’t care which direction time is running in. Of course, the only reason we see that entropy increases is because it used to be small in the past. Once the gas fills the box, it essentially stays there forever (apart from rare fluctuations).

So, as cosmologists, we have an issue to address — why was the entropy of our early universe so small? If high-entropy states are “natural,” why don’t we live in one? You might think to appeal to the dreaded anthropic principle, and argue that life couldn’t exist in a state with really high entropy. But that turns out not to be good enough; the entropy of our universe is much much lower than it needs to be to support the existence of life. So we are faced with the “arrow of time problem.”

Although there isn’t a consensus view of the solution to this problem, most cosmologists would guess that it has something to do with inflation. The idea of inflation states that the very early universe went through a period of incredible acceleration, which smoothed out the bumps and wiggles and gave us the big smooth universe we observe today. If it works, inflation tends to wipe out any pre-existing features and leave us with a universe similar to what we observe today.

But there’s a problem — even though cosmologists think that it’s quite natural for inflation to start and leave us with the universe we see, very few would think it was quite natural for a collapsing universe to smooth itself out and anti-inflate; that is, to undergo a process that is the time-reversed version of inflation. So secretly, the very idea of inflation has some time-asymmetry built into it; it makes sense forward but not backward. Therefore it doesn’t really count as a solution to the arrow of time problem. We need to explain how the conditions for inflation to start in the first place could naturally arise.

Jennie and I do the following thought experiment — if it weren’t for inflation, what would be a “natural” state for the universe to be in? Different people have addressed this question, with different answers; Roger Penrose, for example, has suggested that it would be a lumpy universe full of black holes. Our answer is almost exactly the opposite — the only natural state is empty space. This is basically because gravity makes everything unstable, and the entropy of any given configuration can always be increased by just expanding the universe by a huge factor. Sure, black holes will form, but they will ultimately evaporate away. If you let the universe evolve forever, it will ultimately get emptier and emptier (generically).

But we now know that even empty space has energy — vacuum energy. (Or at least some sort of dark energy.) So when we evolve to “empty space,” there is still some energy pushing the universe around; the resulting spacetime is called “de Sitter space.” Along with this energy comes a small nonzero temperature, which keeps all the fields in the universe gently fluctuating. Gentle or not, however, if we wait long enough we will find a really big fluctuation — one that is large enough to make inflation spontaneously begin. In other words, we are suggesting (although it’s not original with us) that de Sitter space is unstable; it doesn’t last forever, but eventually starts inflating here and there. These little inflationary patches will ultimately convert into ordinary matter and radiation, leaving behind universes just like our own.

And here is the fun part: this story can be told either forward or backward in time. In other words, you give me some state of the universe, chosen however you like. (Maybe you calculated the wavefunction of the universe, who knows.) I evolve it using the laws of physics. If Jennie and I are correct, it first empties out into a cold de Sitter space, dominated by a tiny shred of dark energy. But eventually we get lucky, and a small patch of inflating universe is born within this de Sitter background. This will happen at different places and times, give rise to a fractal distribution of spacetime geometry in the far future. And I can do the same thing going backwards in time from the initial state you gave me; the generic evolution is the same. It will empty out, and eventually begin to spontaneously inflate. So in the super-far past of our universe, before our “Big Bang” (which is nothing special in this picture), we will find other Big Bangs for which the arrow of time is running in the opposite direction. On the very largest scales, the entire universe is symmetric with respect to time.

Is this scenario correct? Interesting? Important? We’re not sure yet. This is certainly not one of those brilliant flashes of insight, like the original discovery of inflation was. Rather, it’s a concatenation of several intriguing ideas, most of which had already been suggested by someone or another. And there are a million questions remaining to be answered, especially about the onset of inflation in an empty background spacetime. But I like how the whole picture hangs together, and wouldn’t be surprised if something like it eventually came to be accepted as a reasonable picture of the universe on the very largest scales.

Honestly, I think it’s a dead heat — a statistical tie, too close to call, too uncertain to prognosticate. And wishful thinking is a powerful drug. But I’m not too proud to take heart in this graph, from Andrea Moro at the University of Minnesota.

Here’s a homework assignment for you folks out there in internet-land. As my own assignment as a member of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics here at Chicago, I’ve written a Cosmology Primer meant to explain the basic features of the universe to people on the street. It’s very much in rough draft form at present, but has nevertheless gone live. I’d be very interested in what people think — not about stylistic questions, since the look and feel will undoubtedly evolve, but whether the level is appropriate, and if the important questions are addressed, and if so if the answers make sense. Let me know.

Nobody with any pretensions to originality would quote Fafblog. It’s just too cheap and easy. But downright irresistible.

Some other candidates say they are steady but are they really? Or are they just suspiciously french an ketchupy? “Sacre bleu, vive le France,” say some other candidates. “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.”

Indeed.

By Heather McHugh. I’ve had this one linked to my home page for a while, but I’m not above recycling.

We were supposed to do a job in Italy

and, full of our feeling for

ourselves (our sense of being

Poets from America) we went

from Rome to Fano, met

the mayor, mulled

a couple matters over (what’s

a cheap date, they asked us; what’s

flat drink). Among Italian literati

we could recognize our counterparts:

the academic, the apologist,

the arrogant, the amorous,

the brazen and the glib — and there was one

administrator (the conservative), in suit

of regulation gray, who like a good tour guide

with measured pace and uninflected tone narrated

sights and histories the hired van hauled us past.

Of all, he was most politic and least poetic,

so it seemed. Our last few days in Rome

(when all but three of the New World Bards had flown)

I found a book of poems this

unprepossessing one had written: it was there

in the pensione room (a room he’d recommended)

where it must have been abandoned by

the German visitor (was there a bus of them?)

to whom he had inscribed and dated it a month before.

I couldn’t read Italian, either, so I put the book

back into the wardrobe’s dark. We last Americans

were due to leave tomorrow. For our parting evening then

our host chose something in a family restaurant, and there

we sat and chatted, sat and chewed,

till, sensible it was our last

big chance to be poetic, make

our mark, one of us asked

                     “What’s poetry?

Is it the fruits and vegetables and

marketplace of Campo dei Fiori, or

the statue there?” Because I was

the glib one, I identified the answer

instantly, I didn’t have to think — “The truth

is both, it’s both,” I blurted out. But that

was easy. That was easiest to say. What followed

taught me something about difficulty,

for our underestimated host spoke out,

all of a sudden, with a rising passion, and he said:

The statue represents Giordano Bruno,

brought to be burned in the public square

because of his offense against

authority, which is to say

the Church. His crime was his belief

the universe does not revolve around

the human being: God is no

fixed point or central government, but rather is

poured in waves through all things. All things

move. “If God is not the soul itself, He is

the soul of the soul of the world.” Such was

his heresy. The day they brought him

forth to die, they feared he might

incite the crowd (the man was famous

for his eloquence). And so his captors

placed upon his face

an iron mask, in which

he could not speak. That’s

how they burned him. That is how

he died: without a word, in front

of everyone.

               And poetry —

                              (we’d all

put down our forks by now, to listen to

the man in gray; he went on

softly) —

               poetry is what

he thought, but did not say.

Normally I pride myself on being more of an idea person than a man of action. Action can be exhausting, after all. But sometimes circumstances force you to move against your natural inclinations. So, recently Chris Lackner and I combined two of our favorite activities — poker and Bush-bashing — into a small but rewarding fundraising event for the Kerry campaign. We held a No-Limit Texas Hold’Em tournament, with proceeds going to the campaigns in Midwest battleground states.

Physicists constituted a minority of the participants — only four of the sixteen — but dominated in the late stages, including three of the top four finishers. Must be that special combination of mathematical wizardry and deep psychological insight that makes people successful in both science and poker. In a tense showdown stretching into the late hours of the evening, string theorist Jeff Harvey defeated cosmologist Risa Wechsler to take first place. (And they say that string theorists are disconnected from the real world.)

How often do you get to see a picture of internationally renowned theoretical physicists staring each other down over a flop? The role of the button (indicating the dealer) was played by a small Albert Einstein action figure. Note also the abundance of alcoholic beverages — well-known to increase one’s poker skills.

So we raised a little money and had a lot of fun. These events are also good because they give people a feeling of being involved in the process; empirically, anyone who goes to a fundraiser is more likely to actually vote on Election Day. (Hopefully, even if they didn’t do well in the tournament.)

The 14th edition of Tangled Bank (just as fascinating as the 13th, if not officially as lucky) is now up at Prashant Mullick’s weblog. It involves a bacterium named Wigglesworthia, so you know it will be good.