It seems that Europe, led by the UK in a surprising display of the items usually kept in a jar on George Bush’s mantlepiece, has decided to stand up against one of the most disgusting and damaging abuses of science by the current administration. As The Guardian reports

Europe, led by the UK, last night signalled a major split with the United States over curbing the Aids pandemic in a statement that tacitly urged African governments not to heed the abstinence-focused agenda of the Bush administration.

The statement with which the article is concerned makes clear that rejection of science is the problem here

We are profoundly concerned about the resurgence of partial or incomplete messages on HIV prevention which are not grounded in evidence and have limited effectiveness,” it says.

The current US stance on tackling AIDS in Africa is hopelessly hamstrung, requiring, among other absurd demands, that no funds be distributed to any organization that even counsels a pregnant woman that abortion is an option, and that two-thirds of funds go to programs that stress abstinence (a third goes to abstinence only programs). If you want to understand how experts in the US see this, see what Planned Parenthood has to say.

A specific example is provided by Uganda, which used to be the poster child for AIDS programs in Africa, and which has suffered a recent setback that is at least partially linked to a decrease in the availability of condoms due to US policies.

The issues here are entirely obvious to anyone who is not blinkered by ideology and/or repression. As the British international Development secretary, Hilary Benn, put it

“Abstinence works if people can abstain, but I don’t think people should die because they have sex. We need to make sure people have all the means [of prevention] at their disposal - condoms and clean needles. It includes education and access to sexual and reproductive health services.”

This is an example of what people mean when they say that the Bush administration is ignoring science in favor of ideology. It is an established scientific fact that abstinence only programs do not work. Yet these are the ones we are using to fight a disease that is ravaging parts of Africa. This shouldn’t be a partisan issue. It is one of common sense, and of common decency. Is there any chance that sensible, reason-based people, Democrats and Republicans, could agree on this?

Well, it was another ridiculously busy day. I’ve a headache and I got up too early to begin the day…. dozed off a touch in Christian Roemelsberger’s (of the Perimeter Institute) excellent seminar just after lunch (triple problem for inducing sleep in seminar: (1) early start after late night, (2) lunch immediately before… (3) sitting in darkened stuffy room with a solo voice talking). Interestingly, I followed everything and only did “power-dozes”, so was able to ask intelligent questions during and after….

Taking a short break. It is after six o’clock on a week day, so I’m allowed some alcohol….this time in the form of a glass of wine. (Picked up this ad-hoc rule from my wife -back before she left- and she from her father, I gather…. it’s a nice tradition to keep up….) The rule gets broken when one is called on to go to receptions of various sorts on campus, of course…… Neccessities of work, you see. Duty calls, and all that. And on the weekends the rules are totally different.

Well, after going to sleep at 1:00am after reading postdoc applications, I got up early -6:00am- to prepare the final exam for that course I was telling you about a while back, and then I gave it at 9:00am. It was not a take-home. Those have their place, but I also like trying to set interesting exams in the classroom, where both the examiner (me) and the examined (them) have a good time. I remember this from my days as a student. I loved interesting exams. You come in the room, the scene of possible triumph or disaster. You’ve prepared, and you’re as ready as you will ever be, and the teacher hands out the papers, and then it is you vs the examiner. Fixed time, and all you have is you, your pen, and your brain. (And your sweat.) You turn over the paper and the battle begins…. Excellent drama!

One of my favourite interesting exams was when during my final exams as an undergraduate, at Imperial College, London University, 1989. The quality of my BSc. degree depended on a single week of peak performance (this was back in the day when there was little stock placed in spreading the load over the course of the year…..sudden death ruled! I could get anything from a First to a Desmond (or maybe worse), depending upon that week.). Rather late in the day, I discovered how interesting a number of my courses were as a result of studying hard in the weeks leading up to the finals, surveying the course, the careful notes I took (even when I did not understand them - a technique I stress in my students today but they ignore me), etc… I really appreciated the deeper aspects of condensed matter physics and nuclear physics in those weeks. The nuclear physics course had seemed really tedious…..just lots of rather ad-hoc looking models of things, and lots of classifying and bean-counting and no overall theme…it seemed. Things began to make more sense once I had al the course notes in front of me. Then the exam came (the lecturer was T.S. Virdee, I wonder if he is still there?) and I loved it. (I was sure that I was not going to do so well in that course as I did not like it very much, but then I got enthusiasm for it and it just overnight changed my ability to do things in it …. see my comment here on another thread about the importance of enthusiasm…) My favourite question (getting back to the point) started off as a seemingly tedious question about the “liquid drop” model of the nucleus, and you had to estimate the sizes of nuclei using a technique which estimates the force on on nucleon due to the presence of all the others…… You get out the usual numbers. But then the question took an interesting turn, which was not in the lecture course! (You can’t do that these days, you get sued….) He asked what would happen if you took into account Newton’s gravitational force as well. Well, you do the estimate and it is just not important at all…it would seem. It is vanishingly smaller than all the other forces governign the structure of a nuclues. How silly, you think, but you carry on anyway, since you’re getting points for doing what was asked. The question then takes you to the point where you increase the number of nucleons until the gravitational component does become significant. You get a huge number. You carry on anyway. You then estimate the size of this new bound object, you get …after checking the computation again for errors!… about 11 kilometers. The last question on that section is then something like “can you identify this object?”. Then it comes to you in a flash…it’s a neutron star!

That’s one of the reasons I love writing exams that take the student to new places where they learn new stuff in the act of doing it. You’re just not supposed to do that anymore….. bad practice. You’re just supposed to test students with thinly-veiled versions of what you already told them in the lectures. Very thinly. Anything challenging had better be in an open-book exam or a take-home. No arena. No drama. No sweat. Sad.

But I try to do it at graduate level still, since most graduate students in physics are not from the USA and so don’t realize that they can sue me. (Kidding…..slightly….)

It does not always work, but I think that it worked this time.

Continue reading ‘Pause for a Glass of Wine’

Here at Cosmic Variance we occasionally grant the gawking masses a brief glimpse into the glamorous and sexy world of the professional physicist. So, for those of you keeping score at home, I just did a quick count: in the last 24 hours I have sent 35 emails. Sadly, I have received 54 emails, so it looks like I’m still falling behind. (No, this doesn’t include spam — I usually get between 100 and 150 of those per day, but I do have a very good spam filter.)

Update: sorry, in counting messages received I only accounted for those I had either answered or saved, not those I had simply deleted. So, add another 31 messages, for a total of 85 non-spam messages received.

So I’ve spoken here about my frustrations about the myths about Los Angeles, and the fact that so much is missed by many because they’re in their cars. In particular I’ve spoken about public transport (such as the fact that it exists but almost nobody uses it), and I’ve spoken about walking, and cycling. But it must seem all so abstract. So in a fit of frustration at not being able to bring you all along with me and just show you, I decided the day after I did this post that I’d take you with me on one of those mornings when I decide on the way to the bus stop that I’m not going to stop for the bus….. I’m going to go all the way to work on the bike. Yes….the cute little Brompton that everyone living in a city should have to displace their car activity. (I dream, I know.) (See for example here, and here.)

So anyway…I just thought we’d see what I see routinely as I go into work if I cycle all the way. It’s not all guns and violence, it’s not all highways and concrete, it’s not all empty scary sidewalks…etc. It is thriving….wonderful life! Get out of your car and see it too, some time.

We pick up the journey on Hollywood Blvd, where we are passing one of my favourite hole-in-the-wall burrito stands. Dee-licious. (Featured near the end of a journey in an earlier post.) Immediately after is the Barnsdale Sculpture garden, and across the street from that is a nursery of some sort, with wonderful colourful murals on the walls.

After crossing Vermont Ave and carrying on, we pass the excellent Wacko store in Los Feliz (I had to quickly cross the road to get a better shot of the mural) which is just full of wonderful things. More on that later perhaps.

Across the road from that is one of my favourite local food stands. The family in there seem to know me pretty well now, and it is always a pleasure to see them and get a house burrito. Mouth-wateringly delicious. With a cup of horchata, you’ve got an amazing meal for under $6.00…..

Continue reading ‘Commuting, I’

Having spent an extremely relaxing Thanksgiving break with a huge party of my in-laws, I have now returned refreshed and replete and ready to tackle the traditionally crazy couple of weeks at the end of the semester.

This year things are particularly hectic, as the next few days see two very exciting physics events. First, on Friday, my condensed matter colleagues are holding the inaugural New York Complex Matter Workshop. If I have time I may try to attend some of the talks, which cover a broad range of topics, mostly in soft condensed matter, which involves physical situations in which the dynamics is driven predominantly by the entropy term in the free energy, as opposed to the energy term.

Second, and most importantly for me, Monday sees the fifth installment of the Syracuse-Cornell Joint Theory Meeting. This time, we also have people attending from SUNY Buffalo and from Case Western Reserve University. We’ll be discussing cosmology, particle physics phenomenology, string theory, modifications to gravity, and all manner of other topics and, if our previous meetings are any guide, it should be a great success.

These types of meeting are tremendous for so many reasons. It is great for one’s own research program to see such a wide spread of interests and approaches; they provide a valuable opportunity for graduate students in particular to speak in front of a friendly audience; and they are wonderfully collegial events.

If readers of this blog could be flies on the wall during these meetings (let me know if you’d like to drop by), I think they would be struck by the stunning breadth of research interests in today’s physics departments. Take a look at the talk titles on the web pages I mentioned above, ranging from all types of biophysics topics, through nanophysics to cosmology and string theory. And our experimental particle physicists, astrophysicists and gravitational physicists won’t even be at the Monday meeting.

I’ll report again after the Monday meeting and let you know how it went.

The other thing that’s nice about the Categorically Not! gatherings is the fact that you can wander in the other parts of the space (a giant aircraft hangar) and find interesting displays of art, and run into interesting people. One time, I ran into Julie Weiss! You’ve no idea who that is, right? Thought not. Well, you probbaly know her work. She is a designer in the film industry, and she’s helped set the overall look of several films, including American Beauty, Frida, The Ring (oh yes!), Twelve Monkeys, etc. Wonderful work that is understated and unsung….the overall look of a film is so important to how you see it, but we forget this and just credit everything to the director…… She’s just busily designing in the room next door while we’re doing our Categorically Not! stuff. Who knows what film I’ll be looking at sometime soon and seeing work that I could hear being done in the studio next door….we shall see!

Last time, I was introduced to an artist, Gurpran Rau, who had some pieces up. (You can see some snaps I took in this post, above and below. Click on her name to go to a site with better reproductions….)

Continue reading ‘In the Other Room’

There’s an old physics joke about the stages of the reception of a new idea: first it’s considered to be wrong, then it’s considered to be trivial, before finally people are claiming that it was their idea first. Some of our more colorful colleagues have even mastered the art of claiming all three at once!

The question of whether or not we should expeditiously withdraw from Iraq seems to be working through the stages of this joke. Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings points to an especially amusing example. Joe Biden (who, I think people on all sides can agree, is a craven opportunist if ever there was one) writes an editorial calling for a timetable for withdrawal. Right-wing hacks in the blogosphere and elsewhere jump all over the poor Senator, questioning his manhood and patriotism. Meanwhile, the White House congratulates Biden for coming up with a plan that was remarkably similar to their own. A slight communication problem for the ordinarily tightly-run noise machine.

The obvious next step: a joint Nobel Peace Prize for George W. Bush, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and Saddam Hussein.

Busy day of meetings related to business of three separate committees. (The day started well, at about 6:00am, with writing and then giving a two hour class on string theory techniques….) But it’s all tiring and time-consuming. Sigh….

….But then the day ended wonderfully. We had Tilman Sauer of the Einstein papers Project give the final colloquium of the semeser, and it was entitled “Einstein’s Discovery of General Relativity, 1905-1915″. It was conceived as an event in celebration of the World Year of Physics or Einstein Year. The abstract:

Ninety years ago, on 25 November 1915, Einstein published the gravitational field equations of general relativity, the so-called Einstein equations. This event marks one of Einstein’s most significant achievements, even in comparison to his three most famous papers of his miracle year 1905. It also presents the end of a long and winding path that began soon after Einstein published his theory of special relativity as an unknown patent expert in 1905. At the end of this path he had risen through the ranks of academic hierarchy to being a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin. The experimental confirmation of his theory by a British eclipse expedition in 1919 then irreversibly catapulted Einstein to world fame, making him the first celebrity in the history of science. In the talk I will give an account of Einstein’s search for a theory of gravitation and a generalized theory of relativity in those years. I will show how an analysis of some of Einstein’s research notes helps us understand his heuristics, and will also comment on his competition with the mathematician David Hilbert in the final days of the discovery of general relativity.

(We can argue about whether he really was the first celebrity in the history of science -Galileo springs to mind- but I agree that the scale and scope was truly and unprecedentedly global in Einstein’s case, given modern communications, etc…. but we can discuss this maybe some other time…..)

Most of the focus of events for this year has been on Einstein’s “Miracle Year” of 1905, in which he wrote a series of five fantastic papers. But it so happens that November the 25th marks the 90th anniversary of his presentation of the field equations of General Relativity. So today, the 28th, was a good day to celebrate that event.

Let me point out the website for the Einstein papers project, and the associated online archive which is a collaboration with the Albert Einstein archives at the Hebrew University, which is here. It is a wonderful resource, and I should also mention the Einstein papers project’s books that the project releases containing the writings of Einstein, with historical commentary.

I thought it was an excellent colloquium, and the perfect end to the semester’s events. A good sign of how well-received it was by the audience (it was a full house again) is the fact that I had several hands up for questions -from students!- before the applause died down and before I could ask “are there any questions?”. Normally I have to beg, cry publicly, promise favours, or threaten violence (ok, I exaggerate…a bit), to get a student to ask a colloquium question, so that was just great.

One of the most valuable aspects of the talk for all to see and contemplate was the very process of theoretical physics research. The picture is of Einstein struggling along over the decade to try to construct the theory, trying what Sauer describes as a “physical approach” sometimes, and a “mathematical approach” at other times. It is excellent to see how he wrestled with the ideas, and how he made mistakes, wrong turns, missteps. How he turned away from the right answer in the wrong direction (he actually had the correct linearized field equations right there on his notebook pages in 1913…..two years earlier, and then turned away!), and how he learned from those around him, incorporating into his ideas what seemed good to him from wherever he could.

It was a good reminder of the truth of how this kind of process goes. We are often told (in our own recent struggles to construct a radical new theory of Nature), that we are wandering around blindly, and that we are not guided by a shining light along some elegant path to the answer like Einstein was. Well, it was not so elegant at times. He struggles along as best he could, and sometimes very inelegantly….he made guesses, and invented ad hoc “reasons” for his guesses that sometimes were just plain nonsense (in retrospect). He published paper after paper, (sometimes with collaborators) with half-baked and sometimes wrong-headed stabs at the answer. (For example, in an attempt to justify one guess (developed with Grossman in 1913), he spent a good couple of years on a quest to support the idea, in which he was willing to give up general covariance (that which we now believe to be at the core of gravitation) as simply incompatible with physics.)

Continue reading ‘Einstein’s Discovery of General Relativity, 1905-1915′

For reasons having nothing to do with the obscure films post, I recently had the opportunity to see Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (for perhaps the fifth or sixth time). It’s a close call between that and Casablanca for my all-time favorite movie — how can you go wrong combining Kafka and Orwell with Monty Python and Tom Stoppard? (Brazil, I mean, not Casablanca.)

Of course there is a wonderful backstory to the making of the movie, in which Universal studios chopped up the movie to make a “love conquers all” version with a happy ending, which Gilliam refused to have his name associated with. Fortunately that version never got released, as Gilliam resorted (intentionally or not) to a fiendishly clever strategy: he surreptitiously showed his version to groups of film critics, and the LA film critics society awarded its “best picture of the year” award to a movie that hadn’t even been released. The awards, which Universal would much have preferred go to its other movie Out of Africa, embarassed the studio into letting Gilliam’s version be distributed, albeit without any support.

You can read all sorts of fun trivia in the Brazil FAQ. My favorite is this: Sidney Scheinberg, president of Universal and the man in charge of the happy-ending version, decided he didn’t like the title, and solicited suggestions from his staff. (To be fair, the title would have made less for his version; in Gilliam’s version there is an elaborate soundtrack by Michael Kamen that is constructed primarily out of variations of the song “Brazil,” all of which was replaced in Scheinberg’s version by rock music, to attract teenagers.) Here are the suggested replacement titles:

• If Osmosis, Who Are You?
• Some Day Soon
• Vortex
• Day Dreams and Night Tripper
• What a Future!
• Litterbugs
• The Works
• Skylight City
• You Show Me Your Dream…
• Access
• Arresting Developments
• Nude Descending Bathroom Scale
• Lords of the Files
• Dreamscape
• The Staplegunners
• Progress
• Forever More
• The Right to Bear Arms
• Explanada Fortunata Is Not My Real Name
• All Too Soon
• Chaos
• Where Were We?
• Disconnected Parties
• Blank/Blank
• Erotic
• Shadow Time
• Maelstrom
• Forces of Darkness
• The Man in the Custom Tailored T-shirt
• Fold, Spindle, Mutilate
• Can’t Anybody Here Play the Cymbals?
• Sign on High
• The Ball Bearing Electro Memory Circuit Buster
• This Escalator Doesn’t Stop At Your Station
• Gnu Yak, Gnu Yak, and Other Bestial Places

I can’t for the life of me understand what they were thinking for most of these. (Okay, I kind of like “Litterbugs.”) I suspect they had a thought process along the lines of “Well, the movie’s kind of weird, so let’s make the title … weird!” I’ve had my own battles with Physical Review over titles of my papers, but nothing like this.

Brian Leiter points to a short essay by John Perry about his colleagues in philosophy, and excerpts this scene:

[A] thought about this wonderful and interesting group of people, my philosophical colleagues. I have a very distinct memory of arriving at the Eastern Meetings of the American Philosophical Association some years back, when they were held at a hotel in Baltimore. The meetings began just after a National Football League playoff game had been played in that city, and the previous occupants of the hotel seemed to be mainly people connected with this game. Since I was flying from the west coast, and had to attend some meeting or other in the early afternoon of the first day, I arrived the night before most of the other participants. I was able to watch the amazing transformation that took place as the football crowd checked out and the philosophy crowd checked in. The NFL people were large, some very large, most quite good-looking, confident, well-dressed, big-tipping, successful-looking folk; the epitome of what Americans should be, I suppose, according to the dominant ethos. We philosophers were mostly average-sized, mostly clearly identifiable as shabby pedagogues, clutching our luggage to avoid falling into unnecessary tipping situations. We included many bearded men— some elegant, some scruffy— all sorts of interesting intellectual looking women; none of the philosophers, not even the big ones and the beautiful ones, were likely to be mistaken for the football players, cheerleaders, sportscasters and others who were checking out. The looks from the hotel staff members, who clearly sensed that they were in for a few days of less expansive tipping and more modest bar-tabs, were a mixture of curiosity and apprehension. The talk, as philosophers recognized each other and struck up conversations, was unlike anything that ever had been or would be heard in that hotel lobby: whether there are alternative concrete possible worlds; whether there is anything in Heidegger not better said already by Husserl; whether animals should be eaten; not to mention topics that aroused truly deep passions, mostly related to proper names.

What a wonderful group of people, I thought, and how wonderful, and lucky, that the world has managed to find a niche for us. Even if philosophy had no real intellectual content at all — was as silly as astrology or numerology certainly are, or as I suspect, in dark moments, that certain other parts of the university are— it would still be wonderful that it existed, simply to keep these people occupied. Especially me. What would I be doing without this wonderful institution? Helping people in some small town in Nebraska with their taxes and small legal problems, I suppose, and probably not doing it very well.

It would take very little to apply this to physicists (or scientists, or academics more generally) as well as philosophers. We tend not to bring up Heidegger, but we do argue about alternative possible worlds all the time.

More importantly, it’s the second paragraph that hits home. How fortunate we are to live in a time and place where society is sufficiently robust and diverse as to put aside a bit of its resources in order to foster a tiny group of people whose professional duty it is to think deeply about the secrets of the universe. I am reminded of the dedication page in the most poetic general relativity textbook ever written, Gravitation by Misner, Thorne and Wheeler:

We dedicate this book
To our fellow citizens
Who, for love of truth,
Take from their own wants
By taxes and gifts,
And now and then send forth
One of themselves
As dedicated servant,
To forward the search
Into the mysteries and marvelous simplicities
Of this strange and beautiful Universe,
Our home.