Blogs / Cosmic Variance

A tribute* to Rosa Parks by Jim Leftwich:

-cvj

(*spotted on Boing Boing.)

I walked to the bus today rather than cycled, as I’m going to a concert later tonight and don’t want to have to try to leave the bike with the coat-check people at the concert. This means that I have a bit more time on my journey, and decided to see what was on my ipod, which has been continuing to faithfully download podcasts of things even though I have not listened to any for quite a while. As I have not taken the time to figure out how to organize the podcasts in a useful way on the pod, I can end up flicking through them at random now that I have so many un-listened-to ones. In this way, I found that on the BBC’s Radio 4 (the greatest speech radio station ever?), the series called “In Our Time” is back for a new season, and they did a rather nice show on Magnetism last month (29/09). I recommend it.

Beware of In Our Time, as it is a bit like the spoken word equivalent of KCRW’s 9:00am music programme entitled “Morning Becomes Eclectic”, which I sometimes prefer to call “Morning Becomes Pretentious”: It can get a bit puffed-up and full of itself and otherwise carried away with its worthy business of being beyond category, and can end up being a bit off-putting to the casual listener (ahem, there’s a lesson in there somewhere for us all)…. but there’s excellent stuff in there (which ultimately makes them worth-while, in my opnion). Witness the opening words of presenter Melvin Bragg (still amusingly regarded by many in the UK as the model living Renaissance Man), which he actually reads out to introduce the programme:

Pliny the Elder, in his Historia Naturalis, tells a story of a legendary Greek shepherd called Magnes who, while guiding his flock on Mount Ida, suddenly found it hard to move his feet. The nails of his sandals held fast to the rock beneath them, and the iron tip of his crook was strangely attracted to the boulders all around. Magnes had stumbled across the lodestone, or ‘Magnetite’, and discovered the phenomenon of magnetism. Plato was baffled by this strange force, as were Aristotle and Galen, and despite being used in navigation, supposedly suspended over the body of Mohammed and deployed in the pursuit of medical cures - apart from some 13th century scholastic studies - it was not until the late 16th century that any serious scientific attempt was made to explain the mystifying powers of the magnet.

…but before you just run away, or at least leave your skateboard firmly outside the stuffy Cambridge Senior Common Room he’s clearly going to simulate for an hour or so (at 9:00am on a Monday morning -I love the BBC!), do have a listen. It is actually a nice discusson. He has three excellent guests, Stephen Pumfrey, Senior Lecturer in the History of Science at the University of Lancaster, John Heilbron, Emeritus Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley, and Lisa Jardine, Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary, University of London.

He asks further in his introduction:

Who pioneered the study of magnetism? What theories did they construct from its curious abilities and how was the power of the magnet brought out of the realm of magic and into the service of science?

This is the basis for a fun discussion, which - if you need further motivation - has history, geography, physics, cartography, polictics, religion, art and sex in several places. (Particularly funny when the sex comes up, because everybody gets uncomfortable at the mere metion of the word, and one person is a bit too close to the microphone and keep’s making a loud “hmmm” noise in one or two places which are borderline juvenile.)

My only criticism of the programme is slight, and is my usual one about the bias of the broadcast establishment in the UK about things they consider “intellectual”. It is still very much from the Art and Humanities perspective and less an actual Science one. So notice that all the guests are Historians of a very very bygone age (but yes, an interesting one) and so by the end of the programme they get to “modern times” by mentioning Faraday once or twice! This is usually the case with these sorts of programmes. One could get the impression that no actual physics has happened since 1926 or so….. In this case, they don’t even make it out of the 19th Century.

Nevertheless, it is classified on the BBC website as a History programme, so I should be grateful when they do any science in this primetime slot at all. For what it is, it is a very accessible and pleasant exploration of the early and middle history of the concepts upon which Magnetism impinge….. As you may know, much of the puzzling over magnetism was during the development of many central ideas in science such as action at a distance, the overthrow of the earth-centric view of the world, etc.

In other news, the BBC has finally made it into the late 20th Century by allowing you to download/stream programme episodes older than a week past broadcast, and so you can find the link to the programme here.

Enjoy, and come back and tell us what you think.

-cvj

People who care about science are not sitting quietly as the Kansas board of education eviscerates the state science curriculum. First the American Association for the Advancement of Science and other organizations refused to participate in the sham hearings that had a foregone conclusion. This is a potentially risky strategy, aiming to deny an aura of respectability to the forces of superstition, but running the risk of giving them free rein to spout their nonsense unchecked. It seemed to work in this case, though, as many commentators were forced to take the initiative to point out how non-scientific the testimony was. (Here are more resources from AAAS.)

Now the National Academy of Sciences and the National Science Teachers Association are refusing to let Kansas use their materials in courses.

Two leading science organizations have denied the Kansas Board of Education permission to use their copyrighted materials as part of the state’s proposed new science standards because of the standards’ critical approach to evolution.

The rebuke from the two groups, the National Academy of Sciences and the National Science Teachers Association, comes less than two weeks before the board’s expected adoption of the controversial new standards, which will serve as a template for statewide tests and thus have great influence on what is taught.

Kansas is one of a number of states and school districts where the teaching of evolution has lately come under assault. If adopted, its change in standards will be among the most aggressive challenges in the nation to biology’s bedrock theory.

The copyright denial could delay adoption as the standards are rewritten but is unlikely to derail the board’s conservative majority in its mission to require that challenges to Darwin’s theories be taught in the state’s classrooms.

Again, a risky strategy, but potentially a very effective one. These materials are heavily used throughout the standards, so it will create a major headache for the board to remove them. It’s about time that pro-science groups stood up and started using the weapons at their disposal — the other guys don’t fight fair, we need to put everything we can into this battle.

Update: PZ Myers and Josh Rosenau are upset about the sloppy writing in the article. Fair enough.

Here’s some news I’ve been bursting to tell you for a while, but had to wait until it was official. It is going to be announced tomorrow, so we’re ahead of the pack here. You may recall the science writer/journalist K.C. Cole, who I’ve mentioned before in connection with the programme Categorically Not! about which I’ve posted here, here and here, and whose comments also featured in a recent post by Sean. Well, she’s left the LA Times, and has moved to… USC!

I’m excited about this because of my interests in the communication of science to the public, and how this might be done more effectively (and in larger quantities), toward my ultimate goal of increased science awareness in society at large, which I’ve shared with you here. One of the key things that has to be tackled in this area is of course the better training of journalists in this specific area of science coverage.

So I’m really excited because she’ll be joining USC’s excellent Annenberg School of Communication faculty (in the Journalism subdivision), and she will be specifically charged with the creation of a new gradaute degree programme focussing on science and technology. This is really great, since she’ll be involved in drawing on the whole campus worth of science and technology expertise and the huge interdisciplinary spirit that USC has.

I also expect that now she’s on campus full time, I’ll be able to tempt her into collaborating on some exicting projects which will bring the Physics and Astronomy department (and perhaps other science departments) into closer contact with the Annenberg School, in parallel with some of the other collaborative efforts I’m trying out with my friends and colleagues in the School of Theatre and the Cinema-Television School. (I hope to tell you more about some of that some time soon.)

Anyway, I forsee more exciting times ahead with this new development!

(Never let it be said that I don’t bring you breaking news from time to time….)

-cvj

[Update: The Annenberg School now has a press release.]

Hey, wasn’t there some sort of baseball game last night? Shouldn’t we be talking about that? National pastime, &c.

Apparently the White House has a beef with The Onion, a news parody previously mentioned on this blog. Seems they are not happy when The Onion uses the Presidential seal in its satirical spoofs. They claim it is a violation of regulations. Looks like lawyers are getting invovled.

Excuse me, but doesn’t The White House have more important things to think about?

K.C. Cole, moving force behind the Categorically Not! meetings that Clifford has blogged about, has left an interesting comment on Clifford’s post from September on Point of View. It’s provocative (and I largely agree with it), so I thought I would reproduce it here on the front page.

Now that it’s time for our October Categorically Not!, I finally have a moment to respond to objections some people raised about my September blurb on the subject of Objectivity, or Point of View.

As a journalist who writes about science, I thought my colleagues could learn a thing or two about the nature of “objective truth” from physics. Objectivity is a word that journalists use a lot—but in my experience, scientists don’t, because it’s not a very useful term. Journalists believe that it’s possible (and desirable) to have zero point of view—that is, to look at the world from some privileged frame through which they see the unvarnished “truth.” What makes science strong, in my opinion, is that it doesn’t fall into that trap. What scientists say is: I made this measurement, and I got this result. Or, I solved an equation, and I got this solution. To say you have a “result” or “solution” without saying how you got it is meaningless. Even when I say the sky is blue, it’s understood that I am a human being whose retina is detecting certain wavelengths of light which are then being interpreted by my human brain in very specific ways. The sky is not “blue” to a snake or a dog or a bee (or if I look through a red filter).

Similarly, if I say the universe was created in a Big Bang (never mind the details) 13 billion or so years ago, there’s no reason anyone should believe me unless I point out that this particular “objective reality” is based on evidence from several very different points of view (cosmic microwave background, expansion, nucleosynthesis….). Journalists often fail to explain this—which is one reason I believe the whole ID issue has been so badly handled in the press. It’s not enough to say “most scientists think evolution is correct….” That leaves the reader in the position of choosing who to believe—the NAS, or the president, for example. It’s not so difficult, I think, to explain that evolution is an answer to specific questions about the fossil record, morphology, DNA, embryology, etc. But it’s rarely done.

What really seemed to get people’s goat (goats?) was my statement that how you look at something determines what you see. I fail to understand the problem. If I look at light with a certain kind of apparatus, it’s a wave; if I look with another, it’s a particle. Reality is always reality, but how we choose to ask the question does determine the answer. So the only way to get an “objective” answer to is say how you asked the question! (And if I’m viewing the world through the eyes of an educated middle aged white woman living in LA—which I am—then I’d better take that into account as well.)

An astronomer friend told me he was upset because my wording played into the hands of the “relativists” (not that kind); that it was understood as “code” to mean “there’s no reality,” or some such. But I’m really tired of other people telling me what my words mean—whether the subject is objectivity, “family values,” “culture of life,” “liberal,” “feminist,” or any of the rest.

So, yes. Objectivity—meaning looking at a situation from a supposedly privileged frame from which you can see the unbiased “truth” —is, as I said, “not only unattainable, but intrinsically fraudulent and ultimately counterproductive.” Science understands this; it’s journalism that has the problem.

Breaking news, very serious, hot off the email. A technician was killed in the ATLAS pit at CERN today. Apparently a crane dropped a load on him. It happened at 17:30 local time. All underground areas were closed immediately. There will be an investigation.

ATLAS (technical home page, public home page) is one of the two very large high energy physics detectors being built for the Large Hadron Collider. It is being built in a large cavernous collider hall far underground where collisions at the LHC will take place. This hall is located just outside of the main gate at CERN.

This is a tragedy for everyone involved. My deepest sympathies for the technician’s family.

Where were we? Ah yes, spontaneous symmetry breaking. When some field takes on a nonzero value even in empty space, and that field is affected by some symmetry transformation, the resulting symmetry is said to be “spontaneously broken,” and becomes hard for us to see directly. The classic example is the electroweak symmetry of the Standard Model, which is purportedly broken by a Higgs field that we have yet to directly detect.

The fields that get expectation values and spontaneously break symmetries are generally taken to be “scalar” fields — that is, they are single functions of spacetime, not something more complicated like a vector field. If a vector field did get a nonzero expectation value, it would have to point somewhere, thereby picking out a preferred direction in spacetime. That means that Lorentz invariance — the physical symmetry corresponding to rotations and changes of velocity — would be broken. Lorentz invariance is a cornerstone of relativity (and thus of all of modern physics), so breaking it is often thought to be bad.

But really, how bad is it? When Einstein put together special relativity on the basis of Lorentz invariance, he was arguing that there was no absolute space nor absolute time in the sense of Sir Isaac Newton. If two physicists traveling freely through empty space passed by each other at a high relative velocity, we couldn’t tell in any universal sense which one was stationary and which was moving — it’s all relative, if you like. If we violated Lorentz invariance by having a vector field get a nonzero value in the vacuum, we could tell who was stationary and who was moving — the vector would define a preferred rest frame.

But that’s not quite the same as going all the way back to Newtonian spacetime. The underlying theory is still Lorentz invariant — if we can’t easily detect this vector field (and we obviously haven’t thus far), Lorentz invariance could be spontaneously violated while remaining in complete accord with all experimental tests.

I was in on the ground floor for this idea — it was the first project I worked on in graduate school (with George Field and Roman Jackiw), and was sufficiently non-mainstream that I worried for my career prospects. Alas, those were more freewheeling times, and you could get a good postdoc without necessarily jumping on a major bandwagon. Subsequently, I was surprised to see Lorentz violation actually become it’s own (relatively tiny) bandwagon! A group of researchers, led by Alan Kostelecky at Indiana, have really pushed the idea of writing down ways to spontaneously violate Lorentz invariance, and have spawned an active experimental program to test these ideas using precision data from astophysics, particle physics, and atomic physics. (Alan has a FAQ on the whole idea of violating Lorentz symmetries.)

So I occasionally return to the idea, as in work with my former graduate student Eugene Lim on the gravitational effects of Lorentz-violating vectors. And now I’ve returned to it again, this time with current student Jing Shu, as we try to understand a fundamental question in physics: why is there more matter than antimatter?

(more…)

This is a reminder to mark your calendars for October 30th. Recall my post on the Categorically Not! series of events held at the Santa Monica Art Studios. The first one of the new season was a tremendous success, and I described it here.

Well, the next one of the new season is on Sunday. Here is K.C. Cole’s teaser:

Normally we think of space as an empty canvas—bland, passive and static. But Einstein taught us that space is elastic; it can wiggle and warp; bend light; cause objects to fall to the ground. Modern day physicists envision universes with up to 10 dimensions of space folded into complex shapes like so much Origami. Actors, athletes and dancers also explore space, using their bodies to make space palpable, filling it with structure, tension and emotion. Most basically, spaces are the places we inhabit; they can bring us together or keep us apart. The space we’re in determines, to a large extent, both our perspectives and our possibilities.

For our October Categorically Not! Case Western Reserve University physicist Lawrence Krauss—author of the popular books The Physics of Star Trek, Atom, and most recently Hiding in the Mirror—will explore our longstanding love-affair with the idea that there is more out there—literally—than meets the eye, perhaps tucked away in extra spatial dimensions. From a more down to earth perspective, USC geographer Michael Dear, who has just completed a 4,000-mile exploration of the US-Mexico border, will talk about the way we create ‘place’ out of ’space’ in our personal lives, communities and our world. Without geography, he wisely says, there would be no society. Bringing in the artistic dimension, we have Margo K. Apostolos, [picture top left, USC news] Director of Dance at the University of Southern California and former NASA Faculty Fellow at JPL; Margo works not only with human dancers and athletes, but also (dancing?) robots. She will discuss dance as an art of space, time and motion.

As usual, it is held at the Santa Monica Art Studios, come at 6:00pm for drinks, cookies and a look around the space, and there’s a 6:30 start. For more information, visit the Categorically Not! website.

Hope to see some of you there!

-cvj

P.S. In view of last time, please send pointed critical remarks about the above quoted blurb to KC Cole, and not to me, thanks. However, discussion and exploration of the ideas within it are welcome in the comment section, as usual.