Blogs / Cosmic Variance

I want one, I want one! A new, totally tricked-out 17″ MacBook Pro with solid state drive:

2.93GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
8GB 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM - 2X4GB
256GB Solid State Drive
SuperDrive 8x (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
MacBook Pro 17-inch Hi-Resolution Antiglare Widescreen Display
Backlit Keyboard (English) / User’s Guide
Apple Mini DisplayPort to DVI Adapter
iWork ‘09 preinstalled
Aperture preinstalled
AppleCare Protection Plan for MacBook Pro (w/or w/o Display) - Auto-enroll

All for just $5,875.

JobsRated.com has taken a look at their URL, and decided that they should rate the best jobs in the world. (Methodology here; thanks to Diana Brodie for the pointer.) Obviously crazy, of course. I mean, Mathematician? Biologist? Philosopher? Dude, get serious.

1. Mathematician
Applies mathematical theories and formulas to teach or solve problems in a business, educational, or industrial climate.

2. Actuary
Interprets statistics to determine probabilities of accidents, sickness, and death, and loss of property from theft and natural disasters.

3. Statistician
Tabulates, analyzes, and interprets the numeric results of experiments and surveys.

4. Biologist
Studies the relationship of plants and animals to their environment.

5. Software Engineer
Researches, designs, develops and maintains software systems along with hardware development for medical, scientific, and industrial purposes.

6. Computer Systems Analyst
Plans and develops computer systems for businesses and scientific institutions.

7. Historian
Analyzes and records historical information from a specific era or according to a particular area of expertise.

8. Sociologist
Studies human behavior by examining the interaction of social groups and institutions.

9. Industrial Designer
Designs and develops manufactured products.

10. Accountant
Prepares and analyzes financial reports to assist managers in business, industry and government.

11. Economist
Studies and analyzes the effects of resources such as land, labor, and raw materials, on costs and their relation to industry and government.

12. Philosopher
Studies questions concerning the nature of intellectual concepts, and attempts to construct rational theories concerning our understanding of the world around us.

13. Physicist
Researches and develops theories concerning the physical forces of nature.

14. Parole Officer
Monitors, counsels, and reports on the progress of individuals who have been released from correctional institutions to serve parole.

15. Meteorologist
Studies the physical characteristics, motions and processes of the earth’s atmosphere.

16. Medical Laboratory Technician
Conducts routine laboratory tests and analyses used in the detection, diagnosis, and treatment of disease.

17. Paralegal Assistant
Assists attorneys in preparation of legal documents; collection of depositions and affidavits; and investigation, research and analysis of legal issues.

18. Computer Programmer
Organizes and lists the instructions for computers to process data and solve problems in logical order.

19. Motion Picture Editor
Supervises the filming and editing of motion pictures for entertainment, business, and educational purposes.

20. Astronomer
Uses principles of physics and mathematics to understand the workings of the universe.

The real lesson, of course, is that it’s awesome to be a professor. Or a parole officer. Whichever.

And here are the worst jobs, of course:

1. Lumberjack
Fells, cuts, and transports timber to be processed into lumber, paper, and other wood products.

2. Dairy Farmer
Directs and takes part in activities involved in the raising of cattle for milk production.

3. Taxi Driver
Operates a taxi cab over the streets and roads of a municipality, picking up and dropping off passengers by request.

4. Seaman
May perform any number of tasks involved in the operation of ships, boats, barges, or dredges.

5. Emergency Medical Technician
Attends to situations which demand immediate medical attention, such as automobile accidents, heart attacks, and gunshot wounds.

6. Roofer
Installs roofs on new buildings, performs repairs on old roofs, and re-roofs old buildings.

7. Garbage Collector
Collects refuse on a designated municipal route, and transports trash to disposal plants or landfill areas.

8. Welder
Joins or repairs metal surfaces through the application of heat.

9. Roustabout
Performs routine physical labor and maintenance on oil rigs and pipelines, both on and off shore.

10. Ironworker
Raises the steel framework of buildings, bridges, and other structures.

Interestingly, dangerous and low-paying jobs involving a great deal of manual labor seem to come in below the glamorous and largely sedentary lifestyle of a typical academic. Although opinions differ; my brother is an EMT, and he couldn’t be happier with the job.

Frank Tipler is a crackpot. At one point in his life, he did very good technical work in general relativity; he was the first to prove theorems that closed timelike curves could not be constructed in local regions of spacetime without either violating the weak energy condition or creating a singularity. But alas, since then he has pretty much gone off the deep end, and more recently has become known for arguments for Christianity based on fundamental physics. If you closely at those arguments (h/t wolfgang), you find things like this:

If life is to guide the entire universe, it must be co-extensive with the entire universe. We can say that life must have become OMNIPRESENT in the universe by the end of time. But the very act of guiding the universe to eliminate event horizons - an infinite number of nudges - causes the entropy and hence the complexity of the universe to increase without limit. Therefore, if life is to continue guiding the universe - which it must, if the laws of physics are to remain consistent - then the knowledge of the universe possessed by life must also increase without limit, becoming both perfect and infinite at the final singularity. Life must become OMNISCIENT at the final singularity. The collapse of the universe will have provided available energy, which goes to infinity as the final singularity is approached, and this available energy will have become entirely under life’s control. The rate of use of this available energy - power - will diverge to infinity as the final singularity is approached. In other words, life at the final singularity will have become OMNIPOTENT. The final singularity is not in time but outside of time. On the boundary of space and time, as described in detail by Hawking and Ellis [6]. So we can say that the final singularity - the Omega Point - is TRANSCENDANT to space, time and matter.

All of the signs of classic crackpottery are present; the vague and misplaced appeal to technical terminology, the spelling mistakes and capital letters, the random use of “must” and “therefore” when no actual argument has been given. Two paragraphs later, we get:

Science is not restricted merely to describing only what happens inside the material universe, any more than science is restricted to describing events below the orbit of the Moon, as claimed by the opponents of Galileo. Like Galileo, I am convinced that the only scientific approach is to assume that the laws of terrestrial physics hold everywhere and without exception - unless and until an experiment shows that these laws have a limited range of application.

Compares self with Galileo! 40 points! There is really no indication that the person who wrote this was once writing perfectly sensible scientific papers.

Perhaps you will not be surprised to find that Tipler has now jumped into global-warming denialism. In just a few short paragraphs, we are treated to the following gems of insight (helpfully paraphrased):

People say that anthropogenic global warming is now firmly established, but that’s what they said about Ptolemaic astronomy! Therefore, I am like Copernicus.

A scientific theory is only truly scientific if it makes predictions “that the average person can check for himself.” (Not making this up.)

You know what causes global warming? Sunspots!

Sure, you can see data published that makes it look like the globe actually is warming. But that data is probably just fabricated. It snowed here last week!

If the government stopped funding science entirely, we wouldn’t have these problems.

You know who I remind myself of? Galileo.

Stillman Drake, the world’s leading Galileo scholar, demonstrates in his book “Galileo: A Very Short Introduction” (Oxford University Press, 2001) that it was not theologians, but rather his fellow physicists (then called “natural philosophers”), who manipulated the Inquisition into trying and convicting Galileo. The “out-of-the-mainsteam” Galileo had the gall to prove the consensus view, the Aristotlean theory, wrong by devising simple experiments that anyone could do. Galileo’s fellow scientists first tried to refute him by argument from authority. They failed. Then these “scientists” tried calling Galileo names, but this made no impression on the average person, who could see with his own eyes that Galileo was right. Finally, Galileo’s fellow “scientists” called in the Inquisition to silence him.

One could go on, but what’s the point? Well, perhaps there are two points worth making.

First, Frank Tipler is probably very “intelligent” by any of the standard measures of IQ and so forth. In science, we tend to valorize (to the point of fetishizing) a certain kind of ability to abstractly manipulate symbols and concepts — related to, although not exactly the same as, the cult of genius. (It’s not just being smart that is valorized, but a certain kind of smart.) The truth is, such an ability is great, but tends to be completely uncorrelated with other useful qualities like intellectual honesty and good judgment. People don’t become crackpots because they’re stupid; they become crackpots because they turn their smarts to crazy purposes.

Second, the superficially disconnected forms of crackpottery that lead on the one hand to proving Christianity using general relativity, and on the other to denying global warming, clearly emerge from a common source. The technique is to first decide what one wants to be true, and then come up with arguments that support it. This is a technique that can be used by anybody, for any purpose, and it’s why appeals to authority aren’t to be trusted, no matter how “intelligent” that authority seems to be.

Tipler isn’t completely crazy to want “average people” to be able to check claims for themselves. He’s mostly crazy, as by that standard we wouldn’t have much reason to believe in either general relativity or the Standard Model of particle physics, since the experimental tests relevant to those theories are pretty much out of reach for the average person. But the average person should be acquainted with the broad outlines of the scientific method and empirical reasoning, at least enough so that they try to separate crackpots from respectable scientists. Because nobody ever chooses to describe themselves as a crackpot. If you ask them, they’ll always explain that they are on the side of Galileo; and if you don’t agree, you’re no better than the Inquisition.

As the year breaks, the internets are abuzz with deep thoughts!

What will change everything? is this year’s Edge Annual Question. Many interesting answers, as you might expect. Choose from Massive Technological Failure (David Bodanis), Breaking the Species Barrier (Richard Dawkins), Coordinated and Expanded Computational Power (Lisa Randall), Faster Evolution (Jonathan Haidt), Happiness (Betsy Devine), Synthetic Biology (Dimitar Sasselov), and more. The book of last year’s question is out soon.

The blog posts to be reprinted in the Open Lab 2008 anthology have been announced — only 50 selections from over 500 nominations, I’m glad I wasn’t responsible for making the tough choices. Also glad that they chose one of my posts, The First Quantum Cosmologist. You can also read about The Igneous Petrology of Ice Cream (Green Gabbro), Expect the Unexpected (A canna’ change the laws of physics), How do cave bats know when it is dark outside? (Pondering Pikaia), and perhaps the most courageous blog post of all time: Liveblogging the Vasectomy (Terra Sigillata). Some sort of new journalism” going on there.

Finally, if all those ideas are weighing you down, play with the David Lee Roth ‘Runnin’ With the Devil’ Soundboard (via Cynical-C). Deconstructed from this classic track.

The complete version is here, but it only detracts.

I’m hoping that, for many of our readers, New Year’s Resolutions include getting off their duffs and starting a blog of their own. It’s certainly not hard; at the minimal level of effort, hop over to Blogger and set up your own free blog in a couple of easy steps. Only after you’ve established yourself can you hope to sell out to the Man and thereby cause the Death of the Blogosphere, like us.

But there are obstacles, for example: what to call the blog? We’re here to help. I was leafing through some old emails, and stumbled across the conversations we were having in the days before Cosmic Variance even existed. The heady days of youth, when we were trying to come up with good names for our new venture. Of course there are many types of blogs, from individual rants about the state of one’s personal life and recent dining experiences to focused discussions of the prospects for health care reform at the national level. We (including Clifford) wanted something that reflected our identity as scientists, but would attract and intrigue non-scientists as well, as we have always hoped to cast our discoursive net more widely than our particular disciplines. So we were looking for titles that played off scientific concepts, but didn’t come off as complete gobbeldy-gook to non-experts. Shores of the Dirac Sea is an excellent recent example of the genre — very much a physics in-joke, but one that isn’t completely off-putting to outsiders. If you call your blog “Laplace-Beltrami Operator” or “Gravitino Propagator,” you might amuse yourself, but your audience will be limited. (Apologies if there are any blogs out there with those names.)

Of course we came up with more than one, before settling on our perfect choice. But what was imperfect for us might fit you just fine. So, offered up free of charge, here are some of the names we were bandying around, plus some extras I came up with since.

• Tycho’s Nose
• Higher Dimensional Operators
• Extremize The Action
• Critical Phenomena
• The Residue Theorem
• But No Simpler
• De Revolutionibus
• Smooth Tension
• Ultra Deep Field
• Outside the Light Cone
• Primeval Atom
• Left As An Exercise
• The Error Bar

Personally I’m partial to Tycho’s Nose, but The Error Bar is an awesome name. That blog practically writes itself. So what are you waiting for?

Those who are too lazy and/or timid to start their own blogs are encouraged to suggest additional names in comments.

Don’t let a black hole eat your house!

• Photo by Kevin O’Mara

The start of a new year can bring optimism - a chance to wipe the slate and get a fresh start.  And 2009 is already looking better; if nothing else, the US will get a President that can pronounce the word nuclear.  Personally, I am bidding good riddance to my Annus Horribilis and refuse to set any New Year’s resolutions.  I am unapologetic in my plan to be hedonistic and live life to the fullest (including lots of good science!).

To put us all in the proper year’s end party mood, here is some music.  Ray Charles, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Fats Domino on stage simultaneously, with pianos. Ron Woods and Carl Perkins, amongst others, are on back-up.

Many older scientists and engineers grew up tinkering. Car engines were pulled, belts on washing machines were replaced, loose wires on toasters were soldered. Such experiences build a basic competence with the physical world, and develop an innate understanding that the devices around us are not powered by magic. For better or worse, however, gadgets have become both more electronic and more disposable, leaving few useful opportunities for fixing things. Moreover, many of us grew up in non-tinkering households, and even if we’d been raised during the glory days of Large Mechanical Devices Made of Steel, we wouldn’t have wound up tinkering ourselves. And finally, much of that tinkering was pretty clearly marked as a Guy Thing.

But, there is a possible cure. I give to you Snap Circuits.

This has to be one of the funnest, most accessible geeky kid’s toys ever. It completely takes away the overhead of electronics assembly, allowing even very little kids to assemble circuits well before you’d trust them with a soldering iron. All the pieces are color-coded in bright primary colors with the standard circuit notation imprinted on top. The projects are largely fun — things like driving a little motor that turns a fan blade, which, if you mount it upside down, eventually generates enough lift that it shoots off and sails up the ceiling. There’s no chance of exploding capacitors or burnt fingers (which I’m sure for some of you makes it completely un-fun, but we’re talking 5 year olds here). Instead, what kids get is fast understanding of how circuits work, at a level that they can understand and really enjoy.

On top of just being extremely cool, for some reason Snap Circuits seems to have way more cross-gender appeal than the old Heathkits. It somehow cracked the code of not seeming like a gender-coded toy. There are no pictures of kids on the package (male, white, or otherwise), and it’s brightly colored without being frilly. There is also no assumption of past apprenticeship, where one was supposed to have learned soldering and breadboard wiring from some older family member. As such, I know as many girls as boys who are enamored with Snap Circuits (and although I probably don’t hang with the most representative sample of kids ever, the Snap Circuits flickr pool seems to bear my impression out).

So, if you have a kid in your life and don’t mind being stigmatized as the adult who gives nerd presents, consider Snap Circuits.

The Boltzmann Brain paradox is an argument against the idea that the universe around us, with its incredibly low-entropy early conditions and consequential arrow of time, is simply a statistical fluctuation within some eternal system that spends most of its time in thermal equilibrium. You can get a universe like ours that way, but you’re overwhelmingly more likely to get just a single galaxy, or a single planet, or even just a single brain — so the statistical-fluctuation idea seems to be ruled out by experiment. (With potentially profound consequences.)

The first invocation of an argument along these lines, as far as I know, came from Sir Arthur Eddington in 1931. But it’s a fairly straightforward argument, once you grant the assumptions (although there remain critics). So I’m sure that any number of people have thought along similar lines, without making a big deal about it.

One of those people, I just noticed, was Richard Feynman. At the end of his chapter on entropy in the Feynman Lectures on Physics, he ponders how to get an arrow of time in a universe governed by time-symmetric underlying laws.

So far as we know, all the fundamental laws of physics, such as Newton’s equations, are reversible. Then were does irreversibility come from? It comes from order going to disorder, but we do not understand this until we know the origin of the order. Why is it that the situations we find ourselves in every day are always out of equilibrium?

Feynman, following the same logic as Boltzmann, contemplates the possibility that we’re all just a statistical fluctuation.

One possible explanation is the following. Look again at our box of mixed white and black molecules. Now it is possible, if we wait long enough, by sheer, grossly improbable, but possible, accident, that the distribution of molecules gets to be mostly white on one side and mostly black on the other. After that, as time goes on and accidents continue, they get more mixed up again.

Thus one possible explanation of the high degree of order in the present-day world is that it is just a question of luck. Perhaps our universe happened to have had a fluctuation of some kind in the past, in which things got somewhat separated, and now they are running back together again. This kind of theory is not unsymmetrical, because we can ask what the separated gas looks like either a little in the future or a little in the past. In either case, we see a grey smear at the interface, because the molecules are mixing again. No matter which way we run time, the gas mixes. So this theory would say the irreversibility is just one of the accidents of life.

But, of course, it doesn’t really suffice as an explanation for the real universe in which we live, for the same reasons that Eddington gave — the Boltzmann Brain argument.

We would like to argue that this is not the case. Suppose we do not look at the whole box at once, but only at a piece of the box. Then, at a certain moment, suppose we discover a certain amount of order. In this little piece, white and black are separate. What should we deduce about the condition in places where we have not yet looked? If we really believe that the order arose from complete disorder by a fluctuation, we must surely take the most likely fluctuation which could produce it, and the most likely condition is not that the rest of it has also become disentangled! Therefore, from the hypothesis that the world is a fluctuation, all of the predictions are that if we look at a part of the world we have never seen before, we will find it mixed up, and not like the piece we just looked at. If our order were due to a fluctuation, we would not expect order anywhere but where we have just noticed it.

After pointing out that we do, in fact, see order (low entropy) in new places all the time, he goes on to emphasize the cosmological origin of the Second Law and the arrow of time:

We therefore conclude that the universe is not a fluctuation, and that the order is a memory of conditions when things started. This is not to say that we understand the logic of it. For some reason, the universe at one time had a very low entropy for its energy content, and since then the entropy has increased. So that is the way toward the future. That is the origin of all irreversibility, that is what makes the processes of growth and decay, that makes us remember the past and not the future, remember the things which are closer to that moment in history of the universe when the order was higher than now, and why we are not able to remember things where the disorder is higher than now, which we call the future.

And he closes by noting that our understanding of the early universe will have to improve before we can answer these questions.

This one-wayness is interrelated with the fact that the ratchet [a model irreversible system discussed earlier in the chapter] is part of the universe. It is part of the universe not only in the sense that it obeys the physical laws of the universe, but its one-way behavior is tied to the one-way behavior of the entire universe. It cannot be completely understood until the mystery of the beginnings of the history of the universe are reduced still further from speculation to scientific understanding.

We’re still working on that.

We’re not talking kids in their basement ripping DVDs. We’re not talking Johnny Depp wearing too much make-up. We’re talking honest-to-god, high-seas ambush, gun-toting pirates. Here we are in the 21st Century, and yet international waters are in some ways just as lawless and perilous as they were 300 years ago.

The pirates lairs are in the craggy coast of Somalia. They are perfectly poised to capture ships heading through the Gulf of Aden (gateway to the Red Sea), one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world. The first boats they boarded were minor vessels, and nobody really took notice. They would hold the crew hostage, threaten to sink the vessel, and demand a ransom payment. It was easy and cheap and relatively risk-free to just pay them off, and that’s what happened. Again and again. Each time there was a payoff, however, the pirates were enriched and emboldened. It proved that piracy was easy money. And they amassed the resources to outfit themselves, improve their weapons, and swell their numbers. After a few years, piracy has become a full-fledged economic juggernaut; Somali pirates have made over $150 million in the past year.

At this point the pirates have developed an extremely sophisticated enterprise. They have “mother ships” which can bring them out into the high seas, far from the coast. The mother ships carry many smaller zodiac-type boats, full of men with guns and rocket launchers. The smaller boats swarm their prey, eventually boarding by force, and taking control of the ships and their crew. Delicate ransom negotiations ensue. Eventually there is a big payday, the crew and ship are released, and everyone goes their merry way.

Of course, if the first ships had refused to pay the ransom, then this whole business would never have gotten off the ground. But after a few years of payments, the pirates have sophisticated communications gear, fast boats, and top-of-the-line weapons. Recently the pirates have become amazingly brazen. Last month they captured a Saudi supertanker. The ship, fully loaded with oil, is worth over a quarter billion dollars. Not a bad haul. The ships in general have very little protection, at best just non-lethal water and sonic canons; if you’re sitting on a supertanker full of oil, you’re not really interested in a full-fledged exchange of live ammunition. The pirates are still holding the supertanker. In a unfortunate turn-of-events for the pirates, one of their recent captures was a Ukrainian vessel which turned out to be loaded with tanks and machine guns, ostensibly bound for Kenya, but probably ultimately headed to Sudan (breaching the UN arms embargo). Immediately the pirates were on everyone’s radar. Instead of just giving up the vessel and slinking away, they’ve remained steadfast. They’re surrounded by international military, with both American and Russian destroyers keeping a watchful eye. Nonetheless, they won’t give up the ship until they receive $20 million (special holiday price, down from an original demand of $35 million). In the end, someone will almost certainly pay them off, and this money will feed yet further piracy.

It is absolutely astounding that, in this day and age, a small group of ragtag Somali pirates can confront the entire world, and win. The next time you’re paying to fill up your vehicle at the gas pump, don’t forget that some of that money is going to pirates in Somalia. Isn’t the global economy amazing?