If you’re planning on passing through South Dakota, it might be worthwhile brushing up on the credentials some people think you should require to qualify for an abortion. Even if you’ve been raped, you’ll still need one or two small extra things to get over the bar.

From NARAL News:

State Sen. Bill Napoli (R-Rapid City) gave this shocking description of the circumstances under which he thinks abortion should still be permissible when he told The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer:

“A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated. I mean, that girl could be so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life.”

That’s right: all you loose atheists are asking for it!

This one’s for Caolionn. She was collecting signs like this on her blog at some point, if I recall. I spotted this on a hike in the canyons on my trip off-planet (click on it for detail):

I just love this sign.

-cvj

Passed on by DarkSyde at Daily Kos — Rep. Brad Miller of North Carolina has posted a Daily Kos diary calling for Congressional hearings on the issue of the integrity of scientific research in the Bush Administration. He believes that Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, chair of the House Science Committee, may be amenable to such hearings.

And he’s asking a favor: Rep. Miller is looking for information about “instances of censoring, intimidating, blacklisting or whatever” concerning government scientists. Anyone fitting that description (not just random people with a gripe, but actual government scientists who feel that their integrity has been compromised for political reasons) should email Rep. Miller’s legislative assistant Heather Parsons, at heather.parsons [at] mail.house.gov, or Dan Pearson of the Democratic staff of the Science Committee at dan.pearson [at] mail.house.gov.

This year’s Templeton Prize has been awarded to British cosmologist John Barrow. Barrow is a renowned physicist, who has made important contributions in several areas of cosmology and gravitational physics, most recently to understanding the possibility that the constants of nature are changing with time in a measurable manner.

Barrow’s interests and successes extend to his Directorship of the Millenium Mathematics Project, his authorship of a number of books and a successful physics-based play, his wonderful public lectures and the production of excellent Ph.D. students who have become well-known cosmologists in their own right. In short: he’s an impressive guy.

While I am an admirer of Barrow’s science, I find his acceptance of the Templeton Prize unfortunate. Although I’m not going to make a huge fuss over it, I’m always a little disappointed when something like this happens. The Templeton Foundation isn’t the Discovery Institute (although they were involved in funding some of the same things for a while) and I suspect that they have pure, although in my view misguided, motives. Also, if it is truly one’s position that science and religion are reconcilable world-views, and that one should actively seek to smooth over any perceived points of contention, then I guess it is perfectly fine to accept support or prizes from them. Indeed, as Sean has pointed out, there are some scientists who are religious, and the goals of the Templeton Foundation presumably sit rather well with them.

However, I can’t for the life of me see how it is intellectually tenable to consider religion and science as complementary, and it does dismay me to see people for whom I have great respect falling into the other camp. When one accepts money or prizes from the Templeton Foundation, one’s name becomes inextricably linked - not only logically, but also explicitly, on their web site – with their philosophy, their goals and all their efforts.

For example, here is a quote by Sir John Marks Templeton himself, from their main science and religion page:

“There is here no knockdown argument for design and purpose, but certainly there are strong hints of ultimate realities beyond the cosmos. One of the strongest hints, in our opinion, relates to the new understanding of the creativity of the cosmos, its capacity for so-called self-organization. … From a theological perspective it is indeed tempting to see this remarkable self-organizing tendency as an expression of the intimate nature of the Creator’s activity and identification with our universe.”

It isn’t clear what is meant by “strong hints of ultimate realities beyond our cosmos”, but I imagine it might refer to the discussions of the anthropic principle that have been taking place in a small subset of the physics community in the last few years. I also imagine that “self-organization” refers to the same thing. I think one would have to be deluded or dishonest to think, even if these ideas turned out to be correct, that there is any implication of a supernatural force outside the physical universe. Indeed, you’d be hard-pushed to find a string theorist who would claim that the idea of the landscape compels them to view it as “an expression of the intimate nature of the Creator’s activity and identification with our universe.”

But the problem is that when the odd well-known scientist allows their name to be associated with ideas such as those pursued by the Templeton Foundation, it lends credence to non-scientific ideas, and ultimately does a disservice to science and the scientific method.

I’m not trying to give John Barrow a particularly hard time here - as I mentioned above, accepting the Templeton Prize is presumably commensurate with his philosophical views, and I expect he and I would just plain disagree over the validity of those views. But I do think it is worth pointing out the consequences of association with the Templeton Foundation, and to hope that, at the very least, scientists who do not subscribe to Templeton’s views of science and religion won’t allow their names to be used in support of them.

As many of you know, the Mac OS X platform is just a gift for those who want cross-platform adaptability, good and clever design, elegance, fun, and serious tools all combined. Forgive my enthusiasm, but it’s just perfect for the kind of job I do and I can’t get over how well stuff works even after a number of years of using it…..Ok, better stop there, since I’m bound to annoy someone.

Anyway, I just learned of another excellent tool. Many of you may know of it already, but those of you who don’t might find it a major boost to communications. I use Instant Messaging a lot to communicate a lot with collaborators, students, and friends and family. I use iChat for IM, adding iSight for video sometimes.

Well, my undergraduate student Jeff Pennington IM-ed me last night to tell me about Adium X. It is a new (at least to me) IM program for Mac OS X, and if you have Equation Service installed (don’t tell me you don’t have Equation Service installed!!!), when you type an equation in LaTeX (enclose it inside double dollar signs, e.g., $$\LaTeX$$), it shows up fully processed in the IM window!

Here’s a screen shot of a chat I did with…er…. myself, which explains the repetition in the dialogue (well, nobody else seemed to be awake when I wanted to generate the test chat….sigh):

This is just so great for those more technical collaborative conversations…..cuts down on faxing equations, or trying to point your camera at your notebook (especially if you don’t have it with you on your travels, etc….) And of course you can save the whole conversation. I’ll bet there are a lot of other features I don’t know about…but the instant LaTeX-ability just makes it click for me. Now if only they’d allow me to connect my iSight camera into it as well….

(Oh, yes, I’d be very happy if someone wrote in and told me that LaTeX works just as well for iChat too…. if so, how do you switch it on?)

You can get Adium X (and read more about it) here.

Enjoy!

-cvj

Melissa Fletcher Stoeltje takes an unflinching look at a small, quiet community that seems to be gaining in numbers in the unsuspecting coffee shops of San Antonio — atheists!

She wears stylish glasses, and her thick black hair is swept up in a ponytail; the only hint of a slightly rebellious streak is the tattoo that peeks from under her shirtsleeve. He is a slight, soft-spoken man with a laid-back demeanor and a full beard.

Melissa and Chanse are young atheists. They don’t believe in God. As such, they’re part of a small but substantial minority that swims against the overtly religious mainstream of America, a spiritual tenor that has grown more strident in recent times as issues of faith increasingly become entangled with politics and public policy.

Of course they are stylish! And only slightly rebellious, at least on the surface. In fact it’s a very nice article, the point of which is that atheists and agnostics, despite being a tiny minority (about 3 percent), constitute the fastest-growing category of religious “belief” in the United States.

This cheerful demographic fact ties into a discussion between Chris Mooney, PZ Myers and others a little while back, on how we should speak about science and evolution and religion in the public sphere. Chris suggested that, since we live in a very religious culture, it’s to our own benefit to emphasize the compatibility of religious belief with a scientific worldview. PZ replied that there is no reason to dilute our message just to win some temporary battles. And the truth is that, while there are some staunchly religious scientists who also believe in evolution, and there’s no reason not to have such people be fighting for the cause of science, most scientists are somewhat agnostic if not downright atheist, and there’s no reason to hide that fact. Chris’s response correctly identified the underlying disagreement, which is completely about tactics. (Be sure to read Chris at Mixing Memory on the use of “framing” in this context, and John Rennie at Scientific American on the Dover trial.)

If I may put words into their mouths, Chris is a strategist, looking for the most politically effective ways of fighting the battle currently before us, which is defending evolution in schools. PZ is playing the role of the intellectual, for whom strategy and tactics will always take a back seat to telling the truth. If it makes a few people uncomfortable, that’s their problem. This is why Richard Dawkins generates such emotional responses among people who are clearly on his side when it comes to the truth of evolution; intellectuals admire his fierce determination to call it as he sees it, while strategists cringe at his blatantly anti-religious rhetoric.

I am on the uncompromising-intellectual side of this debate (big surprise there), but I think that the truth-telling attitude has its strategic benefits as well. The fight over teaching evolution in public schools is a tiny skirmish in a much broader cultural conversation. (See? We don’t have to call it a “war.”) We do live in a religious society, remarkably so when we are compared to similar countries elsewhere in the world, and there are complicated reasons for that. But increasingly, a lot of folks are wondering whether their supernatural beliefs are really warranted by the evidence, or whether they’re not just going along because that’s what everyone does. To young people wondering about the meaning of it all, it can be extremely powerful to hear someone say that it’s okay not to believe in God. Everyone always says that you will never talk someone out of their religious beliefs by lecturing about the scientific method; that’s certainly true for a wide range of people who are very confident in their positions, but there are also a huge number of people who are legitimately questioning what to believe. In the long run, the way to squelch the political effectiveness of the intelligent-design movement, the anti-abortion movement, the anti-gay-marriage movement, and so on, is to relegate them to insignificant minority positions within the populace, and one good way to do that is to undermine their supernatural foundations. It’s an extremely long-term project, to say the least, but one worth keeping in mind.

The only time I think the Stoeltje article stumbles is at the very end:

But what, exactly, do atheists believe in, if not in God?

In a nutshell, atheists believe in reason alone, in those things that can be arrived at through intellect and the scientific method. Concrete evidence for God, they argue, simply doesn’t exist. They don’t cotton to leaps of faith or anything that involves a supernatural being reaching into human lives. They believe you can live a happy, respectable life based on human ethics that were derived not from God handing down a tablet but from a code of rules that emerged naturally through an evolutionary process in which humans learned how to live together successfully.

The idea that atheists replace “religion” with “science” is an unfortunately common misunderstanding. Religion plays many roles — it tells a story about the workings of the universe, it suggest moral and ethical guidelines, and it provides social and cultural institutions and practices. Science does not play all those roles, nor should it pretend to; it talks about how the universe works, but is of no help with morality or culture. However, the moral and cultural roles of religion do not stand independently of its beliefs about the universe (existence of a caring supernatural being or what have you) — if that part of the story isn’t true, the other teachings of the religion (homosexuality is a sin, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven) aren’t necessarily any better or worse than any other set of non-religious cultural practices, and should be evaluated on that basis. Science can’t tell us how we should treat other human beings. What it can do is to free us from the mistaken idea that the correct way to treat other human beings can be found in scripture or in church teachings or in the contemplation of God’s will; we human beings have to solve this hard problem all by ourselves.

I return you to regular physics programming here on CV with a brief summary for our non-experts of some of the [screaming and shouting] passionate, informed debate that usually takes place whenever I do a post on string theory…..

String theory (or whatever it will be called when we figure out what it actually is) is a work in progress. It is an attempt to formulate the physics which will help us understand Nature at a level well beyond that at which we understand it now. Among the things we hope that such a theory will tell us about are:

• The quantum physics of spacetime. Nature is at its heart quantum mechanical, yet we don’t yet know what happens when we combine quantum physics with the physics of spacetime (phenomena such as black holes, vacuum energy, the nature of the very early universe, (and possibly more things we just have not realized yet!) depend on us understanding this);
• The connections between gravity and the other forces of Nature (lots to say here too…..much overlap with the other bullet points’s parenthetical remarks);
• The physical origin of several unexplained patterns and mysteries in our current models of particle physics (the matter/anti-matter imbalance, the origin of mass, the weakness of gravity, why three similar families of matter particles?, Why are “force” particles and “matter” particles so different from each other anyway?);
• The structure and evolution of our universe (Dark Energy and Dark Matter, which make up a whole 96% (or so) of our entire universe!…..what the Dickens are they? See several posts here on CV on these constituents of our universe.)….

….and several other questions that I don’t want to go into here, otherwise it stops being of benefit to non-experts…. (I also won’t go into all of the excellent things string theory has been useful for in our potental understanding other things about Nature, such as the nature of the Strong Nuclear force, why you never see a quark all on its own (”confinement”), etc…..)

Ok. So where are we?

Well, string theory is very complicated. It may well be that all we’ve worked out about it so far, over quite a few years, is just a tiny fraction of the whole story.

Maybe when we have the story worked out, we’ll have a big party in celebration of all that we learn about Nature from it. Or, we’ll see that it’s just the wrong story. Nobody knows whether or not this is the case. We need to work it out in order to know. Another perfectly fine possibility is that string theory tells us about *some* of the list of physics issues above, but not all of it.

In an effort to understand if the theory makes contact (or even has a chance to make contact) with Nature, many have attempted to extract physical scenarios, corresponding to our world, from the theory. Many of these scenarios are difficult to extract. They are often called “solutions” of the theory, in a (partial) analogy to finding solutions to a set of equations in an exercise in high school algebra. (Caveat: The analogy is only partial, because it is not clear if we really have all of the equations yet. This bit is important to remember!)

Workers in the field have found that (keep the above caveat in mind) there are apparently very very many solutions, making up a whole “landscape” of possibilities. (See my earlier, more technical post on this.)

So somewhere in that apparently vast landscape of (possible) string theory solutions, one of them might just correspond to Nature.

The big questions (in this context) for our field right now are:

• Is there a dynamical (or other physical) principle we’re missing that will help us find the One Solution? (In other words, maybe all those solutions aren’t solutions.)
• Must we appeal to other means of selecting the correct solution? (This is where arguments about things like the “Anthropic Principle” begin. See that earlier post and its discussion thread, and several others.)
• Will we just end up choosing a “solution” by hand and see if there’s still interesting science to be done, post-pick? (In other words, use observation/experiment to guide you in determining some parts of the solution (”fitting some parameters to the data”) , and then the theory makes predictions about the rest of the physics.) A perfectly sensible possibility that seems to get forgotten in these discussions, despite the fact that it happens all over the rest of science!)
• Or is it totally random, there’s nothing further to be understood, and string theorists are not doing science any more?

All good questions. Nobody knows the answers, but several people have strong opinions in various directions. Meanwhile, research continues. Excellent.

While we wait for the answers, here’s some hope:

Ok. I’ll come clean now:

Continue reading ‘There’s Gold in the Landscape’

Well, I’m back. I was off-planet since Tuesday, which explains the silence. Needed peace, quiet, seclusion and a new routine in order to get some thinking and writing done. Spring break allowed this to happen.

Where did I go? Somewhere where there are no web connections, and no mobile phone signal. Importantly, it takes me only a bit over three and a half hours in my little spaceship to get to this excellent place. Wonderful!

“So where was he?”, the three of you reading this are wondering.

Was he on the surface of the moon?

Continue reading ‘Off-Planet’

I’ll follow Mark’s suggestion and fill in a bit about the new WMAP results. The WMAP satellite has been measuring temperature anisotropies and polarization signals from the cosmic microwave background, and has finally finished analyzing the data collected in their second and third years of running. (For a brief explanation of what the microwave background is, see the cosmology primer.) I just got back from a nice discussion led by Hiranya Peiris, who is a member of the WMAP team, and I can quickly summarize the major points as I see them.

• Here is the power spectrum: amount of anisotropy as a function of angular scale (really multipole moment l), with large scales on the left and smaller scales on the right. The major difference between this and the first-year release is that several points that used to not really fit the theoretical curve are now, with more data and better analysis, in excellent agreement with the predictions of the conventional LambdaCDM model. That’s a universe that is spatially flat and made of baryons, cold dark matter, and dark energy.
• In particular, the octupole moment (l=3) is now in much better agreement than it used to be. The quadrupole moment (l=2), which is the largest scale on which you can make an observation (since a dipole anisotropy is inextricably mixed up with the Doppler effect from our motion through space), is still anomalously low.
• The best-fit universe has approximately 4% baryons, 22% dark matter, and 74% dark energy, once you combine WMAP with data from other sources. The matter density is a tiny bit low, although including other data from weak lensing surveys brings it up closer to 30% total. All in all, nice consistency with what we already thought.
• Perhaps the most intriguing result is that the scalar spectral index n is 0.95 +- 0.02. This tells you the amplitude of fluctuations as a function of scale; if n=1, the amplitude is the same on all scales. Slightly less than one means that there is slightly less power on smaller scales. The reason why this is intriguing is that, according to inflation, it’s quite likely that n is not exactly 1. Although we don’t have any strong competitors to inflation as a theory of initial conditions, the successful predictions of inflation have to date been somewhat “vanilla” — a flat universe, a flat perturbation spectrum. This expected deviation from perfect scale-free behavior is exactly what you would expect if inflation were true. The statistical significance isn’t what it could be quite yet, but it’s an encouraging sign.
• A bonus, as explained to me by Risa: lower power on small scales (as implied by n<1) helps explain some of the problems with galaxies on small scales. If the primordial power is less, you expect fewer satellites and lower concentrations, which is what we actually observe.
• You need some dark energy to fit the data, unless you think that the Hubble constant is 30 km/sec/Mpc (it’s really 72 +- 4) and the matter density parameter is 1.3 (it’s really 0.3). Yet more proof that dark energy is really there.
• The dark energy equation-of-state parameter w is a tiny bit greater than -1 with WMAP alone, but almost exactly -1 when other data are included. Still, the error bars are something like 0.1 at one sigma, so there is room for improvement there.
• One interesting result from the 1st-year data is that reionization — in which hydrogen becomes ionized when the first stars in the universe light up — was early, and the corresponding optical depth was large. It looks like this effect has lessened in the new data, but I’m not really an expert.
• A lot of work went into understanding the polarization signals, which are dominated by stuff in our galaxy. WMAP detects polarization from the CMB itself, but so far it’s the kind you would expect to see being induced by the perturbations in density. There is another kind of polarization (”B-mode” rather than “E-mode”) which would be induced by gravitational waves produced by inflation. This signal is not yet seen, but it’s not really a suprise; the B-mode polarization is expected to be very small, and a lot of effort is going into designing clever new experiments that may someday detect it. In the meantime, WMAP puts some limits on how big the B-modes can possibly be, which do provide some constraints on inflationary models.

Overall — our picture of the universe is hanging together. In 1998, when supernova studies first found evidence for the dark energy and the LambdaCDM model became the concordance cosmology, Science magazine declared it the “Breakthrough of the Year.” In 2003, when the first-year WMAP results verified that this model was on the right track, it was declared the breakthrough of the year again! Just because we hadn’t made a mistake the first time. I doubt that the third-year results will get this honor yet another time. But it’s nice to know that the overall paradigm is a comfortable fit to the universe we observe.

The reason why verifying a successful model is such a big deal is that the model itself — LambdaCDM with inflationary perturbations — is such an incredible extrapolation from everyday experience into the far reaches of space and time. When we’re talking about inflation, we’re dealing with the first 10^-35 seconds in the history of the universe. When we speak about dark matter and dark energy, we’re dealing with substances that are completely outside the very successful Standard Model of particle physics. These are dramatic ideas that need to be tested over and over again, and we’re going to keep looking for chinks in their armor until we’re satisfied beyond any reasonable doubt that we’re on the right track.

The next steps will involve both observations and better theories. Is n really less than 1? Is there any variation of n as a function of scale? Are there non-Gaussian features in the CMB? Is the dark energy varying? Are there tensor perturbations from gravitational waves produced during inflation? What caused inflation, and what are the dark matter and dark energy?

Stay tuned!

More discussion by Steinn Sigurðsson (and here), Phil Plait, Jacques Distler, CosmoCoffee. In the New York Times, Dennis Overbye invokes the name of my previous blog. More pithy quotes at Nature online and Sky & Telescope.

The three-year release of data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) took place earlier today. I’m sure one of us will provide a summary some time over the next week. For now, you can take a look at the third year papers.

I expect the one to read first (most of us won’t be reading all of them) is

Three-Year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) Observations: Implications for Cosmology
D.N. Spergel, et.al.