As a theoretical physicist, you come to cherish those very few moments when a new idea makes everything snap into place. In politics it almost never happens, so we should be even more grateful. One such idea has been hit upon by John McKay’s wife: George W. Bush doesn’t want to be President any more. He’d be just as happy to lose. It all makes sense now. He never really wanted to be President in the first place; he only ran because God told him to. But he was never happy about it; more like a reluctant Orestes being egged on by Apollo to do all those nasty things.

The man has suffered enough for the greater good. He’d be happier on his pickup truck back in Crawford. It’s really the least we can do for him, after all he’s done for us.

p.s. I do have one question. Why is considered humble to think that you’ve been chosen by God? Doesn’t that mean that you think God has chosen you personally, rather than somebody else? It’s a funny approach to humility.

Now would be a good time to brush up on our theology and morality, in preparation for the upcoming debate about the Federal Marriage Amendment. The Senate had a preview this week, as they voted 51-46 to confirm J. Leon Holmes to the Eastern District Court in Arkansas. Holmes was controversial for various reasons, including a 1997 article in which he and his wife Susan argued that it was the duty of a good Catholic wife to subordinate herself to her husband. This angered knee-jerk liberals like Edward Kennedy, who referred to the Holmes’ view as “extreme.” Kennedy was countered by Orrin Hatch, who pointed out that the argument originated in St. Paul, not in the Holmes article, and that “most everyone” in the country would vote for St. Paul over Teddy Kennedy if they were choosing from whom they should take advice about morality.

The relevant Scripture is from Chapter Five of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, verses 22-24:

Wives should be subject to their husbands as to the Lord, since, as Christ is head of the Church and saves the whole body, so is a husband the head of his wife; and as the Church is subject to Christ, so should wives be to their husbands, in everything.

(From the New Jerusalem Bible, probably the most accurate translation.*) In all fairness, Paul attempts to be evenhanded, when in verse 28 he says

In the same way, husbands must love their wives as they love their own bodies, for a man to love his wife is for him to love himself.

Although, to be absolutely fair, we should also draw attention to Chapter Six, verses 5-6:

Slaves, be obedient to those who are, according to human reckoning, your masters, with deep respect and sincere loyalty, as you are obedient to Christ: not only when you are under their eye, as if you had only to please human beings, but as slaves of Christ who whole-heartedly do the will of God.

Most religious liberals these days would probably not go along with the ideas that wives should be subservient to their husbands, nor that slaves should be obedient to their masters. One would rather interpret these as anachronistic relics of an earlier time when our understanding of morality was less well-developed. The question is then, how do we distinguish between the anachronisms and the useful guides to behavior? Think of it this way: are there any circumstances under which your moral instincts might be in direct conflict with religious doctrine, where you would accept the Church’s teaching even though you would have come to a very different conclusion by yourself? And if not, what good exactly is the teaching as a guide to morality?

Update: I should include a footnote about the New Jerusalem Bible, as found at bible-researcher.com: “The idea that a Bible version such as this, which contains introductions and notes that presuppose the acceptance of skeptical views and modernistic theories concerning the authorship and authenticity of the books, would be suitable for all Christians, is very questionable. After fully admitting its good qualities, we must point out that the Jerusalem Bible is not in fact suitable for Christians who are in need of edification in the faith. The theological commentary and critical speculations included in this version, useful as they may be for advanced studies, are likely to have a bad spiritual effect on most readers. This is a Bible suitable only for students who are well established in the faith and capable of using it with discretion.”

Today the quotes will speak for themselves. It’s all rabid political polemic, so those of you looking for our regularly-scheduled insights into the workings of the universe will have to wait until next week.

From Chris C. Mooney, more complaints from high-level scientists about the administration’s unbelievable politicization of the scientific advisory process. From his notes on a Union of Concerned Scientists press conference:

Janet Rowley, cell biologist at the University of Chicago and President’s Council on Bioethics member. Rowley delivered what I consider a startling revelation: That her appointment to the President’s Council in 2001 was politically vetted to an inappropriate extent. In her own words, the White House personnel office asked her the following questions: “Had I voted for president Bush’s election; also, did I support president Bush’s policies.” Rowley said she “remonstrated” that these questions had no bearing on her competence to serve on the council. “The response from the White House was that this was a presidential appointment, they wanted to appoint people who supported the president,” Rowley continued.

Also links to a new report from the UCS.

From Talking Points Memo, a pointer to an article in The New Republic about the administration’s attempts to score a big coup against terror just in time for the election:

This spring, the administration significantly increased its pressure on Pakistan to kill or capture Osama bin Laden, his deputy, Ayman Al Zawahiri, or the Taliban’s Mullah Mohammed Omar, all of whom are believed to be hiding in the lawless tribal areas of Pakistan. A succession of high-level American officials–from outgoing CIA Director George Tenet to Secretary of State Colin Powell to Assistant Secretary of State Christina Rocca to State Department counterterrorism chief Cofer Black to a top CIA South Asia official–have visited Pakistan in recent months to urge General Pervez Musharraf’s government to do more in the war on terrorism. […]

This public pressure would be appropriate, even laudable, had it not been accompanied by an unseemly private insistence that the Pakistanis deliver these high-value targets (HVTs) before Americans go to the polls in November. The Bush administration denies it has geared the war on terrorism to the electoral calendar. […] But The New Republic has learned that Pakistani security officials have been told they must produce HVTs by the election. According to one source in Pakistan’s powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), “The Pakistani government is really desperate and wants to flush out bin Laden and his associates after the latest pressures from the U.S. administration to deliver before the [upcoming] U.S. elections.” […]

But according to this ISI official, a White House aide told ul-Haq last spring that “it would be best if the arrest or killing of [any] HVT were announced on twenty-six, twenty-seven, or twenty-eight July”–the first three days of the Democratic National Convention in Boston.

And from Political Animal (via Brad DeLong), a link to a CNN story explaining (yet!) another reason GWB is the odds-on favorite to be judged Worst President Ever:

President Bush declined an invitation to speak at the NAACP’s annual convention, the group said…. NAACP spokesman John White said Wednesday that Bush has declined invitations in each year of his presidency — becoming the first president since Herbert Hoover not to attend an NAACP convention.

It’s enough to make even a libertarian like Jacob “I’ve never cast a vote for a major-party candidate for President” Levy come out in favor of Kerry. As he says here,

This time, it seems very clear to me that the Bush Administration has failed basic tests of competence in policymaking and execution, and of trusteeship of long-term interests like alliances and trade negotiations and moral credibility. I expect to dislike an awful lot of John Kerry’s policies. But I don’t expect that kind of failure of the basic responsibilities of the office.

Hopefully enough folks in Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania will follow suit (link from Balkinization.)

A recent article by Amanda Schaffer in Slate is causing physicists to sit up and take notice (see comments at Gnostical Turpitude, Quark Soup, Not Even Wrong). The article is nominally about Brian Greene’s standing in the physics community, although it doesn’t really address that question. Brian, of course, is a well-known string theorist at Columbia, but celebrated more widely as the author of The Elegant Universe and The Fabric of the Cosmos, as well as host of a NOVA special on PBS.

The real focus of the Slate article is more about the style of string theory — in the absence of detailed experimental results, are the criteria of beauty and mathematical coherence that string theorists rely on sufficient guides to doing effective physics? Interesting questions, about which I’ve previously promised to blog, but haven’t gotten around to it yet. But what about the nominal question, of someone’s standing as a physicist? It should come as no surprise that physicists, being the hard-nosed quantitative types that they are, have developed an extremely precise (and, often, wildly inaccurate) method for rating the worthiness of their colleagues, and implemented it as a web page to boot. It’s the SPIRES high-energy physics literature database, which keeps track of what articles are citing, and being cited by, other articles in physics (or at least in high-energy physics, and increasingly astrophysics and related areas). Coupled with the availability of the papers themselves (in preprint form at arxiv.org or in published form at various online journals), the ease with which one can search through literature citations has become fantastically greater over the last ten years or so. No self-respecting physicist goes to an actual library any more, much less uses a Xerox machine.

But the real fun of SPIRES is to figure out how many citations your friends have (and thus, how good they are). For example, I have about 40 papers listed, with about 2000 total citations — pretty good for an assistant professor, but by no means near the top of the list. I have no “renowned” papers (more than 500 citations), but I do have seven “famous” papers (more than 100 citations). Even that is a bit of a cheat, since two of those papers are review articles, which are cheap ways to rack up lots of citations. There are numerous caveats to this measure of one’s quality — different specialties have very different rates of citations, certain fields are not covered as well by SPIRES, it’s very hard to appropriate credit in large collaborations, not to mention the obvious fact that having a lot of citations is not the same as being a good paper — but it’s just so easy and quantitative that the citation numbers from SPIRES have become very influential.

It’s humbling to look at the citation records of the really influential people in high-energy physics. Big names in string theory do especially well in the citation game; string theorists just write a lot of papers. Cumrun Vafa at Harvard has five renowned papers and 58 famous ones; David Gross at KITP in Santa Barbara (who was an extremely successful field theorist long before he became an influential string theorist) has twelve renowned papers and 41 famous ones. In cosmology, Andrei Linde has three renowned papers and 39 famous ones; in particle phenomenology, Howard Georgi has eight renowned papers and 47 famous ones. These are just representative names; I haven’t done any systematic searches for who has the most citations. Besides, everyone knows the answer: Ed Witten has an amazing 36 renowned papers and 99 famous ones. Both prolific (over 200 papers) and profound (over 200 citations per paper). Everyone else is just playing for second place.

I wanted to link to this cartoon, but PZ Myers beat me to it.

Kerry should have just shifted the topic to string theory. Aren’t politicians trained to answer the question they wanted to be asked, rather than what was actually asked?

Kerry’s penchant for hedging is obviously going to be a major GOP talking point in the upcoming election, in stark contrast with a President who doesn’t know the meaning of the phrase “on the other hand.” Of course, to any reasonable person Bush’s single-mindedness and complete lack of doubt is a bad thing; in a complicated world, sometimes a little nuance is called for. Nevertheless, Kerry truly does have a problem with trying to have everything both ways, and deploying lawyerly caveats to make sure he keeps everybody happy. Of course, Clinton had a similar problem, and now he’s a bestselling author, so maybe it’s not an absolute barrier to success.

The press has already fallen for the stereotype of Kerry as being unable to construct a simple declarative sentence. Slate has a feature called “Kerryisms,” in which they strip a quote of its “caveats and curliques.” Eugene Volokh (not a typical Kerry voter, I would imagine) has shown how ridiculous the Kerryisms are (here, here, here); the caveats are very often simple and necessary parts of the meaning of the original statement. Saletan has a completely lame apologia for what he is trying to do. (The real reason for the feature is that Slate has an equally silly “Bushisms” feature, where they make fun of the President for his malapropisms, and as you know it’s important to be balanced.)

The message to future candidates for public office is clear. Speak in cliches, preferably ones with universal appeal. Stick to nouns and verbs, perhaps with an occasional adjective or adverb; anything at the level of a prepositional phrase is sufficient grounds to suspect insincerity or worse. Avoid complicated issues of public policy; the people need to have their hearts lifted by statements of steely resolve, and there’s little time for wonky hair-splitting.

Bush/Cheney ’04: Classical leadership in times of quantum uncertainty.

Way back in the early history of Preposterous Universe (the second post ever, in fact) we mentioned the lovely animated film Les Triplettes de Belleville, in the context of it being robbed by Finding Nemo for the best-animated-film Oscar. Something I had forgotten about, lost in all the excitement, was the appearance of Einstein’s equation in the opening sequence. Nobody is quite sure why. (Einstein’s equation relates the curvature of spacetime to the amount of energy and momentum. For details, see my short introduction to general relativity [pdf].)

The good folks at the American Physical Society have noticed this, and have even initiated a contest to help ferret out the reason for the equation’s appearance.

If nothing else, the filmmakers should be congratulated on choosing a much more profound equation of Einstein’s than the hackneyed old standby E=mc².

By the way, a serious plot flaw in Finding Nemo was pointed out at Rhosgobel:

Clownfish, of Finding Nemo fame, are a good example of a protandrous hermaphrodite: the largest individual fish in a group is female, the next smallest is the reproductive male, and the rest are typically non-reproductive. When the largest female is removed from the population the male becomes female, and a non-breeder becomes male. Thus, in Nemo’s case Marlin (Nemo’s father) should have turned into Marla once Coral (Nemo’s mother) disappeared.

Now that’s a Disney movie that might have been worthy of an Oscar.

Reflecting about the last post reinforces something I’ve noticed for a while: that blogging makes you, if not actually smarter, then at least more careful and better-informed. In the past I might have noticed the story about science education and responded with a practiced sigh. But in blogging about it, I went and took the three minutes necessary to find some actual evidence of how much money teachers made compared to other professions. If my opinions don’t actually change, at least the quality of evidence I can adduce for them improves a great deal.

By the way, I should have recognized that some people wouldn’t take the time to click the link to the study of salaries for different professions of Penn alumni. So, to save valuable time, here are the basic figures in convenient table format:

	Industry	Average Salary
	Communications	$163,414
	Consulting	$147,450
	Elementary/Secondary Education	$47,482
	Financial Services	$471,462
	Government	$82,677
	Higher Education	$58,623
	Law/Judiciary	$186,663
	Manufacturing	$120,324
	Medicine	$197,492
	Non-profit	$68,173
	Other Medical/Health	$100,711
	Other Services	$169,403

I wonder what precisely is included in “Financial Services.” Organized crime? Iraqi reconstruction contracts?

Everyone knows, or should know, that science education in American elementary and secondary schools is a travesty. This long-lamented fact reappeared in the news this weekend, after a group interview with science educators at the National Education Association’s annual meeting. People on the street might wonder whether this is a bit alarmist — is it really worse in the U.S. than elsewhere, or is science education really worse than education in other fields? I don’t know about other fields, but anyone on a college science faculty will tell the same story about comparing the U.S. to Europe and elsewhere: our undergraduate experiences are comparable, graduate education here is the best in the world, but secondary education is an embarrassing failure. All those stories you hear about students graduating from high school not knowing how to use a calculator or that the Earth moves around the Sun? Absolutely true.

Often the lamentations surrounding this state of affairs focus on the idea that we need to be training a new generation of scientists to maintain American supremacy or some such thing. I don’t care all that much about maintaining our supremacy, and I’m not even worried about a new generation of scientists; there are many more people who want to become scientists than we have jobs for them, and the individuals who are really interested in science will get a good education for themselves even if their schools are failing them. But I strongly feel that it’s important for every person to have a basic grounding in science, especially in the basic techniques and methodologies by which science actually works. Everyone should know the basic facts of physics, biology, and chemistry, but they should know how to formulate and test an hypothesis, and the basic notions of understanding data and uncertainties. It’s not that hard, really.

What to do? I’m a big believer that some situations really are solved by throwing money at the problem, or at least they won’t be solved without throwing money. But you have to throw the money in the right direction. New lab equipment and computers are nice, but aren’t in the top three priorities we should be focusing on. To me, these include: 1) Sensible curricula, including realistic studies of methodology, a firm grounding in the basics of each field, and a smattering of exciting modern topics to encourage interest; 2) Vastly improved standards for the training of science teachers, including greater flexibility to allow people with more expertise in science than in education to get involved, and 3) Making elementary/secondary teaching an attractive career option.

It’s only the last of these that requires serious money, but can anyone argue that it isn’t worth it? Look at this study of salaries of liberal arts alumni of the University of Pennsylvania about fifteen years after graduation. It’s a nice sample, since presumably everyone starts with relatively comparable education and employability. And what you find is that elementary/secondary educators are easily the lowest-paid profession (followed closely by college/university teachers!). You can do better working for a non-profit. (You can also generally do better by being male, but you knew that already.) The average teacher’s salary is about $47,000, compared to the average salary for the whole sample of $164,000. You do the math. Why would a talented young person choose this field?

If we had any sense, we would embark on a crash program to double teachers’ salaries across the board over the next ten years. One necessary step would be to shift the income stream for local schools from property taxes to statewide (or, even better, national) income taxes, so that the burden is distributed more equally. It’s not likely to happen, but until it does we’re just slapping new coats of paint on a desperately leaking boat.

Jon Stewart, being interviewed by Larry King, chatting about Bill Clinton.

KING: So you get angry?

STEWART: You get angry because it’s, you are so — so needing of that inspiration and that leadership and that mind and that intelligence and so angry that it would be wasted on such a trifle thing.

KING: Monica Lewinsky…

STEWART: Not to suggest Monica Lewinsky is a trifle. I certainly don’t want to hurt her.

(CROSSTALK)

KING: In an interview with British TV today, she said that Clinton’s description of their affairs an insult to anyone who reads it. Also says that Clinton destroyed her once the liaison became known.

STEWART: She is going to come out now with a line of grief handbags. Hopefully she can knit her way to health. I don’t know the woman. I’m sure she’s very nice, but quite frankly, I find that if I’m embroiled in a scandal I tend to not go on British television if I don’t have to. If I want to heal and be left alone, I tend to perhaps go off and try and find my way inconspicuously in the world as opposed to say going to parties where they might describe me as a portly pepper pot?

KING: Would you book her on “The Daily Show?”

STEWART: I would not.

KING: Would not?

STEWART: I would not.

KING: Have no interest, not curiosity about it?

STEWART: I have no interest. Curiosity in what sense?

KING: About her life. About what she got herself into, the events that occurred around her.

STEWART: I am very familiar with what she got herself into. I have gotten myself into that with people that I know.

KING: Elaborate.

STEWART: Sex, isn’t it? You never? How many times — you’ve been married like 28 times. You never had — come on, you’ve got kids!

KING: Okay, yes.

STEWART: Am I going to have to draw this for you?

KING: No. OK.

STEWART: But do you know what I’m saying? Why is anyone interested in what she does?

KING: Because she’s a victim and a participant and she’s a footnote in history.

STEWART: Footnote in history is the perfect way to describe her and that should close the book. Footnote in history. Thank you. Finally we have some perspective.

Originally linked to at Crooked Timber (pointing to a different quote). Read the whole thing.

Imagine that your home is broken into by a group of physicists with mischief on their minds. They grab your collection of books and CD’s, but instead of just making off with them, they crunch them together to make a black hole. (Applied physicists, obviously.) In the old days, you might have been quite despondent, thinking that all of the information in your collection of music and literature had been lost forever. However, as we all know by now, almost thirty years ago Hawking showed that black holes don’t just sit there, they emit radiation, and in the process of emission they lose energy and eventually evaporate away completely (if you don’t keep putting extra energy in). So now you might think that you could be very clever, and recover the information that you thought was lost: just observe absolutely every particle emitted in the Hawking radiation, and use your knowledge of what came out of the black hole to reconstruct what went in. In practice this would be a bit far-fetched, but in principle this is exactly what you could do if, for example, the pranksters had just set your collection on fire instead of collapsing it to a black hole. Physicists tend to believe that information is never really lost in physical processes, even if it gets re-arranged into less useful forms.

But black holes are different, sadly. To the best of our knowledge, there is no correlation between what went into making the black hole and what kind of radiation comes out. Indeed, there are reasonable-sounding arguments that there can’t be any such correlation. In that case, the information originally present in your books and CD’s has truly been lost.

Of course, we haven’t seen any black holes up close and evaporating, so these are all thought experiments thus far. But it bugs people to no end to think that evaporating black holes violate such a cherished notion of physics; this conundrum is known as the black hole information loss paradox. For a long time we didn’t even know whether the information could somehow be stored in a black hole, much less retrieved; more recently, however, string theorists have shown that (in many cases) that the amount of information in the black hole really is the same as contained in the stuff that went into making it. And there have been a couple of very clever proposals recently, one of which might turn out to be on the right track: Horowitz and Maldacena have suggested that the Hawking radiation that falls into the black hole is carefully arranged to cancel out the information of the infalling matter, effectively transferring it to the outgoing radiation; while Mathur has suggested that we need to dramatically change our ideas about what the interior of the black hole is like, enough so that the information is actually sitting close to the surface where perhaps it can escape more easily.

I bring this up because I have secret inside information which I now feel empowered to reveal, since the rumors seem to be public anyway. Stephen Hawking has asked to give a plenary talk at a big upcoming conference, where he says he will announce a solution to the information loss problem. As a member of the scientific organizing committee of GR17, I got the email request from our chief organizer; was there any chance we would say “no”? But actually I doubt very much that Hawking will simply announce a solution that everyone will agree with. Theoretical physics just doesn’t work that way. Even if he has a clever idea, people will have to wrestle with it themselves before it would catch on. Also, Hawking isn’t always right; for a long time he has been insisting that information really is lost, which is certainly a minority viewpoint. Unfortunately I won’t be at the conference, which is July 18-23 in Dublin. But I’m sure we’ll be seeing news reports about Hawking’s talk; the media love him, for good reason.