An apparent rupture in the spacetime continuum has been noted over at archy and Pandagon. In one of the questions asked to President Bush on his current “bus” tour, the interlocutor referred to an apparent acausal propagation of economic hardship:

In 1998, due to the impending recession, I started living the American nightmare.

John McKay at archy wonders whether there could be a quantum-mechanical explanation for how anyone could be suffering through the effects of a recession that wouldn’t begin for another two years. But I think it is more likely that the explanation requires closed timelike curves. You see, in relativity it is impossible to move faster than the speed of light; physical particles are therefore confined to move along “timelike” trajectories that move inexorably forward in time. But in general relativity spacetime is curved; it is therefore conceivable that a timelike curve can loop back and intersect itself in the past, in a kind of time machine. Bush’s questioner had obviously found such a closed timelike curve, lived through the horrors of the recent recession, gone backwards in time, and cowered in fear as he lived once more through 1998 with the ever-present knowledge that the economy would tumble just about the time Bush was elected. Of course, it is probably necessary to violate some of the laws of physics to actually create closed timelike curves in the real world; this is the content of Hawking’s Chronology Protection Conjecture. But the administration has never let the laws of nature get in the way of their plans.

Or, I suppose, maybe the bus-tour audiences are not completely representative samples of the local population; one might even suspect that they are carefully selected to be sympathetic. But that would make me a wacky conspiracy theorist. Besides, there was one actual question, when Bush was asked about a cut in federal funding to local health services. His priceless response, as reported on NPR:

Well, that’s what happens when you’re trying to cut the deficit in half.

Such an answer cannot be explained simply by closed timelike curves; we need to invoke parallel universes.

One of the most profound experiments in physics is one you may never have heard of. It’s the torsion-balance experiment at the University of Washington (and others like it elsewhere in the world).

This group, led by Eric Adelberger, has recently garnered attention for testing Newton’s inverse-square law of gravity down to a tenth of a millimeter. This experiment is interesting because there are good (or at least plausible) reasons to suspect that Newtonian gravity actually breaks down at around a millimeter. In particular, models with large extra dimensions of space can unify the scales of quantum gravity and particle physics if there are two extra dimensions about a millimeter in size. The Washington group has placed significant constraints on this fascinating idea.

But the profound experiment I’m referring to is the one about “testing the equivalence principle.” The Equivalence Principle is Einstein’s idea that you can’t tell, if you are sitting in a sealed laboratory, whether your lab is on the surface of a gravitating body or accelerating through space at uniform acceleration. So if the EP is right, uncharged bodies should all fall at the same rate in a gravitational field, just as they would in an accelerating rocket.

So far, the UW experiments have not detected any violations of the EP. But if they did, you wouldn’t conclude that Einstein was wrong; instead you would guess that the bodies you were using weren’t really “uncharged.” In other words, you would have discovered a fifth force. The best limits right now on such fifth forces are that they are less than one-trillionth the strength of gravity, if they exist at all; that’s incredibly weak. The fact that there is no noticeable fifth force is one of the most profound facts of physics.

We know of four forces in nature: gravitation, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. The latter two only operate over very short ranges (atomic scales and below), leaving only gravity and E&M as forces relevant to our daily lives. (“Electricity” and “magnetism” are two different manifestations of the same force.) This is the deep and astonishing fact: everything we directly see around us can be accounted for by some simple forms of matter (electrons, atomic nuclei) interacting through just those two forces. Fortunately for us, they can interact in extremely intricate ways.

Scientists like to talk about what they are currently doing research on, which by construction tends to be speculative ideas at the boundaries of our ignorance. What can easily get lost is an appreciation for how much we actually know beyond any reasonable doubt, and how little wriggle room there is. ESP, astrology, and other paranormal phenomena provide excellent examples of ideas that simply can’t work. When scientists criticize these ideas, they often start talking about blind tests and repeatability and so forth. All well and good, but the fact is that these ideas have no chance of being right even before we test them directly. There is no way for the human brain to send out a signal that would read a mind or bend a spoon, nor is there any way for the planet Venus to influence your love life. Any such influence would have to be communicated by one of the forces of nature, and there are only two possibilities: gravitation and electromagnetism. In either case the size of the force would be easily detectable, and we haven’t detected it.

It would be great to find a new long-range force, and there are certainly models that predict them. But even if one were found, it would be so tremendously weak that we need all of our best technology to notice its effects at all; there is no way for such a force to push around human beings (even delicate parts of their brains) in meaningful ways. This isn’t to say that there’s no room left for mysteries; figuring out how electrons and nuclei interact through two simple forces to create all of human culture and the rest of the visible world leaves more than enough unanswered questions for generations to come.

We saw a fantastic concert at the HotHouse on Friday featuring Von Freeman and Fred Anderson, two legendary Chicago tenor saxophone players. Both of them have spent their lives playing in Chicago, rather than moving to New York and doing a lot of recording; consequently, either could reasonably claim the title of “most underappreciated living saxophonist.” The occasion was Fred’s 75th birthday, making him the younger of the two, as Von is going on 82. And they can both play like nobody’s business.

Von I know very well, and it’s a surprise that I’ve gotten this far in the blog without ever mentioning him — I’ll have to rectify that at length sometime soon. But I had never heard Fred Anderson live, and it was quite an experience. Von is the consummate showman, telling stories and flirting with the crowd, and one of the most compelling features of his music is how he mixes beautifully accessible melody and harmony with exciting and challenging free-jazz explorations. Fred, in contrast, is all intensity and concentration. Listening to Von is like driving in a convertible through mountain roads where surprising vistas can suddenly appear around the corner, whereas listening to Fred is like taking the bullet train. Or maybe jumping out of an airplane.

Fred’s band is just a trio — him, bass, and drums. He stands up on stage, short and stooped to begin with, and gradually leans forward as he begins to play. Pretty soon his upper body is nearly horizontal, as he is surrounding the sax and blowing with fierce determination. The notes come quickly and relentlessly, as he spins out impossibly long lines without noticeable pause. I was talking with Michael Raynor, Von’s drummer, who was scoping out the room to see how people were reacting. We agreed that anyone could enjoy Von’s style, but you would appreciate it much more if you were really into the music; but to enjoy Fred you needed to be into it from the start. I am definitely into it, and I’ll have to make sure to drop by Fred’s club, the Velvet Lounge, more often. The only regret was that Von and Fred played separate sets, rather than jamming together; that I would have definitely loved to see.

Fred has a new CD just out; Von has one coming in July. It’s a great pleasure to listen to these two men who give so much to their music, their fellow musicians, and their city.

Brian Leiter reports on an example of absolutely shameful pettiness. He compiles a very well-known list of the best law schools, which is competitive with the famous US News rankings in influence (and noticeably superior in methodology). Now he finds out that his law school alma mater, the University of Michigan, has been “explaining” their decline in his rankings by pointing out that they denied him a faculty job. He convincingly explains why this is just ridiculous (or preposterous, as we say around here).

But it got me thinking about a potential conflict-of-interest issue — if I denigrate some institution or person, could someone assume it was just because they didn’t give me a job? Hopefully I could avoid being so shallow, but full disclosure is probably the best policy. In that spirit, here is a list of universities to which I applied for jobs but was turned down, before being offered my current position:

• UC Berkeley
• Cornell
• Penn State
• University of California-Irvine
• Duke
• Stanford
• Harvard
• Princeton
• University of Chicago
• Rutgers
• University of Kansas
• California Institute of Technology
• Brown
• University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
• Johns Hopkins
• University of California, Davis
• University of Pittsburgh
• University of Minnesota
• Northwestern
• University of Wisconsin, Madison
• Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics
• SLAC
• Williams College
• University of California, Santa Cruz
• University of Victoria
• State University of New York, Stony Brook
• MIT
• Swarthmore
• Yale
• Dartmouth
• University of Toronto
• University of Minnesota
• Institute for Theoretical Physics
• University of British Columbia
• University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
• University of California, Santa Barbara
• Oxford University
• New York University
• University of Michigan (!)
• University of Texas, Austin
• UCLA
• University of Maryland
• Columbia
• University of Pennsylvania

There might be others, I forget. And that’s only including faculty jobs, I didn’t bother to include postdocs. And I only listed places once, even if they rejected me more than once. So, just to be safe, you might want to be skeptical of any disparaging remarks I might make about any of these universities or people affiliated with them.

Some of these places, like the University of Chicago, eventually saw the error of their ways and made me an offer on some later occasion. But still, a long list. Perhaps this will be heartening to some younger people on the job market today — keep plugging, for a while anyway.

Somehow I suspect this will not become a popular meme.

Here is a rare chance for me to provide actual information rather than warmed-over opinion. A New York Times story reports that NASA instructed its employees not to comment on “The Day After Tomorrow”, an upcoming movie in which global warming sets off all sorts of disasters. The natural worry is that the Bush administration is concerned about lending credibility to anything that suggests global warming might be something to worry about. This has been commented on by David Harris, John McKay, Charles Perez, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, and Fred at the Dead Parrot Society. (For some discussion of the film itself, have a look at Chris Mooney.)

My inside contacts at NASA (really, I’m not kidding) have forwarded me this more recent email that has been sent around:

Movie Support Clarification

News reports in recent days have suggested that NASA has attempted to “muzzle” researchers from responding to the issues raised in the upcoming movie “The Day After Tomorrow.” To the contrary, NASA expects that as colleagues, we will speak our minds, regardless of whether those views work to the advantage of the agency or not.

Diversity of opinion is a valuable resource and plays an important role as we work to successfully fulfill our mission objectives.

To clarify the specific issue, a number of NASA colleagues assisted with the film’s development. However, we require producers to sign a cooperation agreement before offering any formal advance promotional support. This is a standard agency policy that has successfully worked with other entertainment blockbusters such as “Armageddon” and “Space Cowboys.”

But, the producers of “The Day After Tomorrow” have not signed an agreement. As such, NASA does not plan any specific support of this production.

This direction should not be interpreted as an attempt to keep scientists from speaking out on the issue of climate change. We encourage our researchers to openly answer all appropriate questions regarding the science explored in the movie.

Glenn Mahone

Assistant Administrator for Public Affairs

I don’t know if this is an embarrassed reversal of policy, or if the original intent was simply distorted. But it’s important to understand that “The Day After Tomorrow” lacks the detailed NASA input that made “Armageddon” and “Space Cowboys” such plausible and artistic films.

I’m late as usual to noticing this, but Brian Leiter and Alas, a Blog have picked up on the most recent poll demonstrating how shamefully ill-informed most Americans are, especially those that lean to the right.

A majority of Americans still believes Saddam Hussein was in cahoots with al-Qa’ida and that Iraq either had weapons of mass destruction or a programme for developing them, according to a new opinion poll.

[…]

A staggering 82 per cent of respondents believed most experts supported the notion that Iraq was providing “substantial support” to al-Qa’ida – a contention that President Bush has been forced to disavow. Almost 60 per cent were unaware that world opinion was against the war in Iraq, with 21 per cent saying the world was behind the US-led invasion and 38 per cent saying views were “evenly divided”.

(See also here.) One way to spin this is “liberals are better informed,” but I think that misses the underlying mechanism. I suspect that what’s going on is something like this:

• People are more likely to believe claims that reinforce their political views.
• Our current conservative administration has been spreading lies, or at least intentionally misleading statements, about important issues of the day.
• Therefore, conservatives today are more likely than liberals to believe these untrue statements, and thus come off as uninformed.

But the real question to me is, how could the American public be this wrong? Whose fault is it? Certainly the media must bear a large fraction of the blame. People complain back and forth about the media being biased against their favorite group, but the important problem is the opposite: in an attempt to appear “neutral,” our major media outlets prefer to report statements that can be attributed to someone rather than statements that are true. If Official X claims that 2+2=5, they will try to find some other Official Y to claim that 2+2=4, or perhaps that 2+2=7, then report both and consider their job well done. (Or if time is running short, the first claim will be reported as is.) It goes beyond politics; if a manager at the cable company claims that their new policy will cut rates for customers, and a consumer-rights advocate claims that the rates will effectively go up, you will most commonly just find both claims reported and left at that, rather than the journalist simply plugging in some numbers and telling us what the truth is. This overly-cautious approach to objectivity is why average people on the street might not know that there has been no link found between Saddam and Al-Qaeda; right-wing sources make the suggestion/implication often enough that the contradictions from left-wing sources seem like just so much partisan back-and-forth, rather than straightforward statements of fact.

Good news and bad news. First the good: David Appell has restarted his blog, Quark Soup. Good links to all sorts of science stories, with interesting commentary.

Now the bad: in one of David’s recent posts, he brings to our attention a slightly loopy screed about experimental gravitation by Gregg Easterbrook. It’s a tired argument, sloppily made: we shouldn’t spend government money on speculative scientific research without any tangible benefits to society. In particular, he picks on the LIGO experiment to detect gravitational radiation.

But while we’re counting tax-funded abstract science boondoggles, let us not forget the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, a $365 million government project that is all but certain to have no practical result, other than as a jobs program.

He stoops as low as you might fear, suggesting that we should be spending the money on trying to cure AIDS. (I’m sure that, absolutist as he apparently is, Easterbrook donates all of his above-subsistence-level income directly to medical research. Those of us who think that we can try to help sick people and pursue other interests at the same time will presumably lead more complicated lives.)

Now, Easterbrook has long ago forfeited any right to be taken seriously when talking about science, for example in his classic discussion of extra dimensions, in which he can’t see why scientists are happy to talk about spatial dimensions but not spiritual ones. I wasn’t blogging at the time of that travesty, but he was justly ridiculed by Kieran Healy, Atrios, and many others.

But it’s a shame that he makes so little sense, because the question itself is well worth asking. How much money should we, as a society, devote to basic scientific research? It is undoubtedly expensive, and getting more so — the next big step in particle physics (after the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva) will be a twenty-mile long Linear Collider, whose cost will be measured in billions of dollars. The cost will be spread out over multiple countries and many years, but it still represents a substantial chunk of change. (I gave a talk on the connections between a linear collider and cosmology.) In a well-ordered society, it’s worth spending some fraction of our money on projects of this sort; but what should the fraction be? Libertarian fantasies aside, private donations just aren’t going to cut it.

You could talk about technological spinoffs from basic science, but that misses the point. The reason why it’s worth spending people’s money on research into the fundamental workings of the universe is because people want to know the answers. They might not understand the details, and more often than not they’ve been traumatized by science classes from high school, but ordinary people really care about these deep questions. That’s why they buy books and go to lectures by Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, or Brian Greene. The amount that gets spent on this kind of research is small compared to numerous other government projects (bridges in Alaska, anyone?), and the results are an unambiguous good for society. And the unfortunate fact is, some experiments aren’t worth doing at all unless you’re willing to spend the money. For half the cost of the Linear Collider, you won’t get half the science — you’ll get nothing. Maybe that’s the choice that the country wants to make; but that’s not the impression I get from talking with people on airplanes who are fascinated by what I do.

Here is my favorite part of Easterbrook’s latest:

Today’s science community is pressuring Congress and the legislatures of Europe to fund incredibly expensive mega-projects almost certain to benefit no one but the scientists themselves. It’s hard not to conclude that physicists and their universities are using mumbo-jumbo about Einstein and the universe–knowing not one member of Congress has any idea what a “gravity wave” is supposed to be or whether this matters–to hoodwink taxpayers into providing cushy jobs for tenured researchers and their postdocs.

Ah, yes, the cushy jobs. I’m so jaded by now, it’s nice to be reminded about how easy my life is. Just last night (Sunday), when I bumped into one of my students in the office around 10 p.m., and we talked about modifications of the Friedmann equation in the presence of Lorentz-violating vector fields, here I thought we were working hard just because we cared so much about the research we were doing. I had completely forgotten that we were really in it for the extended vacation time, exorbitant salary, and total absence of responsibility that comes with an academic appointment.

Don’t get me wrong; I love my job, wouldn’t trade it for anything. But “cushy” isn’t the word I (or anyone in their right mind) would use to describe it. Almost anyone who grinds through grad school and postdocs to get a faculty job as a scientist could be making more money for less work doing something else. But there are a lot more people trying to get these jobs than there are positions, for the same reason why the public is willing to support basic research — we want to know how our universe works. It’s the only one we have.

Update: Damn it, more evidence that administration is strangling NASA’s pure science budget, in favor of going to the Moon and Mars. Paul Krugman said it best: “Money-saving suggestion: let’s cut directly to the scene where Mr. Bush dresses up as an astronaut, and skip the rest of his expensive, pointless — but optimistic! — Moon-base program.”

The big news is that, despite previous misgivings, I’ve gone ahead and signed a contract for a condo. Signing the contract is not the final step; that would be closing, later in June. Closing is like getting tenure, while signing the contract is like landing a tenure-track faculty job; it’s not the end of your worries, but it is the single biggest hurdle.

As you can see from the satellite image (found at TerraServer), I am already being spied on. The Man knows that I’m a troublemaker, and wants to keep an eye on me at all times.

In other news, my alma mater has chosen Big Bird to speak at commencement. Not in costume, but the actor who plays the character on Sesame Street. Not all of the students are happy. They shouldn’t complain; the only real dimension along which commencement speeches should be judged is that of brevity. Once students have had four years of education and have typically made plans for jumping into the real world (or into grad school) it must be too late for a few well-crafted words of wisdom to have much impact on their subsequent trajectories.

The irony is thick out there in low-earth orbit these days. Mere days after finally launching Gravity Probe B, equipped with the most precise gyroscopes ever built, NASA has lost one of the gyroscopes on the International Space Station. This leaves them with two functioning gyros (out of four), the minimum number necessary to keep the ISS from tumbling (which wouldn’t be a disaster, but would require the expenditure of fuel to keep it the station in alignment. Yes, I know that the gyros on the ISS are completely different from those on GPB; we can’t blame the failure on conservation of angular momentum.

Bob Park in the What’s New newsletter from the American Physical Society put it this way:

SPACE TURKEY: GYROSCOPES ARE NOT COVERED BY DEALER’S WARRANTY. Two of the four gyroscopes on the International Space Station have now failed. The ISS can maintain orientation with only two gyroscopes, but what if there’s another failure? We called the customer-service desk to ask how long repairs would take. They connected us to Hi Rodomontade, who sets NASA schedules. “You’re in luck,” Hi said, “we have one in stock. We’ll send it up on the next shuttle.” We asked when that would be. “Well, that’s a problem, the shuttle fleet is being fixed. We use the Russian Soyuz to get to the ISS.” But the Soyuz just traveled to the ISS on Wednesday for a crew change, “Did it deliver a new gyro,” we wondered? “Unfortunately, the gyroscope is too large for the Soyuz. You’ll just have to wait for the shuttle.” When will that be? “It’s scheduled for May,” there was a pause, “May 2005.”

This morning I was listening to Eight-Forty Eight, a local magazine show on Chicago public radio. They were talking with two video artists about Video Mundi, a festival currently playing at the Chicago Cultural Center.

Apparently one short video has become quite a sensation on the video-art circuit. Swedish artist Jeroen Offerman practiced for months to learn how to sing Stairway to Heaven backwards. And he learned how to play air guitar backwards, whatever that means. The resulting video shows his performance played backwards — so you hear the words forwards. He includes an instrumental track for Stairway to Heaven playing behind him. You can certainly understand every word he’s saying (at least as well as Robert Plant’s original). But there is something creepy and different about it. I’m not sure I would have been able to decode what was going on if I had heard it without explanation.

One of the artists being interviewed said that work like this gave him hope for society. That is not exactly the conclusion I might have drawn.

Update: Jeroen Offerman is Dutch, not Swedish — my mistake. Thanks to Arjon Dunnewind for the correction (in the Comments).