Blogs / Cosmic Variance

I’m back! Sorry for the long absense, but since I last posted here in early November, I’ve submitted 3 papers, sent out many many job applications, and interviewed for 22 solid days, including giving 13 job talks at 11 institutions and talking one on one to about 200 scientists. I’ve been on something like 30 planes, and haven’t been in one place for more than a week at a time. I hadn’t initially planned to completely disappear from this space for so long, but I did manage to visit all of these states (plus a provence) in my absense:

Luckily you’ve been left in very capable hands at cosmicvariance without me. And, luckily for me, all this cavorting around the country has not been for naught. It’s been completely exhausting, but energizing and actually pretty fun at the same time. I’ve really enjoyed meeting and talking science with so many great people. Especially after spending the past few years in a building populated solely by cosmologists, it’s been fun to get to talk to people doing everything from biophysics to quantum computing to string theory to star formation. It was also very interesting to get a sense of how different departments operate, and to see so many parts of the country, and to have the chance to think hard about what it would be like to work and live in some very different places and enviroments. And so far, things are looking very good. I’ll write more about that after the dust has settled, but it does look like I’ll be a proper professor somewhere next year, and not milking the cows.

By the way, I love this map maker, so just in case you are curious where I’ve been in my life and not just in the last couple of months, here’s the states and countries that I’ve visited. You’ll notice a distinct lack of southern hemisphere here, but I’m hoping to rectify that with my first honest-to-goodness vacation in a long long while sometime before I start my new job. Any suggestions?

You can make you own visited states or visited countries map if you like.

Science & Theology News was looking for some famous and charismatic scientists to respond to an interview with Noam Chomsky on various issues touching on science and religion. They were able to get Lawrence Krauss to agree, but then they ran out of ideas and ended up asking me. So you have some of the deepest questions we face about meaning and the universe, addressed by someone recently voted the world’s top intellectual, with responses by the author of The Physics of Star Trek and an assistant professor with a blog. What a great world!

You will notice that most of my answering comments are short and sweet. You can take this as evidence that I know how to pack a tremendous rhetorical punch into just a handful of words, or that I was in a hurry as the deadline was approaching. But sometimes I do go on a bit when a nerve is struck, such as this discussion on whether science and religion ever overlap in their respective spheres of interest.

ON STEVEN JAY GOULD AND “NON-OVERLAPPING MAGISTERIA”

CHOMSKY: Steve Gould [was] a friend. But I don’t quite agree with him [that science-and-religion are “Non-Overlapping Magisteria”]. Science and religion are just incommensurable. I mean, religion tells you, ‘Here’s what you ought to believe.’ Judaism’s a little different, because it’s not really a religion of belief, it’s a religion of practice. If I’d asked my grandfather, who was an ultra-orthodox Jew from Eastern Europe. ‘Do you believe in God?’ he would have looked at me with a blank stare, wouldn’t know what I’m talking about. And what you do is you carry out the practices. Of course, you say ‘I believe in this and that,’ but that’s not the core of the religion. The core of the religion is just the practices you carry out. And yes, there is a system of belief behind it somewhere, but it’s not intended to be a picture of the world. It’s just a framework in which you carry out practices that are supposed to be appropriate.

KRAUSS: Science and religion are incommensurate, and religion is largely about practice rather than explanation. But religion is different than theology, and as the Catholic Church has learned over the years, any sensible theology must be in accord with the results of science.

CARROLL: Non-overlapping magisteria might be the worst idea Stephen Jay Gould ever had. It’s certainly a surprising claim at first glance: religion has many different aspects to it, but one of them is indisputably a set of statements about how the universe works at a deep level, typically featuring the existence of a powerful supernatural Creator. “How the universe works” is something squarely in the domain of science. There is, therefore, quite a bit of overlap: science is quite capable of making judgments about whether our world follows a rigid set of laws or is occasionally influenced by supernatural forces. Gould’s idea only makes sense because what he really means by “religion” is “moral philosophy.” While that’s an important aspect of religion, it’s not the only one; I would argue that the warrant for religion’s ethical claims are based on its view of the universe, without which we wouldn’t recognize it as religion.

I was going to say that these guys might be famous, but do they have their own blogs? No! Except, of course, Lawrence was our very first guest-blogger, so that counts for something. And, I remembered, Noam Chomsky actually does have a blog. A funny one that consists of answers to occasional interview questions asked by someone from Z magazine, but I suppose it counts. Man, everybody has a blog these days.

Michael Bérubé, International Professor of Danger, pimps out his upcoming collection Rhetorical Occasions by reproducing one of its essays as a blog post. The topic is well-known to any member of the professoriate: the academic anxiety dream. You show up to a class you are supposed to teach, but for some reason it’s not on the subject you thought it was going to be on, or you have completely neglected to prepare a lecture, or you have been reassigned to a classroom that looks like a castoff from the set of Brazil.

I was going to leave some smug comment to the effect that I never have such dreams, when it occured to me that I really shouldn’t, on the grounds that such a claim would not actually be “true.” Last quarter my travel schedule was even more hectic than usual; for an extended period I was flying out of Chicago at least once per week, sometimes twice. A couple of times I woke up early in a hotel room on the East Coast and zoomed to the airport, landing at O’Hare in time to make it to campus to teach my noon class. A couple of other times I went the other way, taking the red-eye from the West Coast. All in all quite hectic, and upon reflection I do remember one quite vivid anxiety dream during this period. The usual story: in the dream I kept thinking that I really should get around to the important task of actually preparing my lecture, but put it off, and suddenly there I was in front of the class. In fact, in the real world, it wouldn’t be such a big deal; at least once per term it’s a good idea to depart from the prepared text and have a free discussion about something related to the material but not formally part of the planned curriculum. Those are often the best classes.

However, I do have an unfortunate tendency to actually reproduce the conditions of the standard academic anxiety dream in real life. Not so much by being unprepared, but by sleeping right through some important event. (A habit which I take to be a sign of my innocence and inner peace.) It started as an undergraduate, when I woke up one day to find that I had completely slept through my E+M final. Fortunately, my professor was more worried about me than annoyed, and I made it up without incident. Then in grad school one of my apartment mates aroused me at noon one day after an all-nighter of general relativity and quantum field theory, to ask “Weren’t you supposed to be giving a lunchtime talk today?” Indeed I was, and I managed to run all the way to the department, showing up only twenty minutes late for my own seminar. I’m guessing that it was not the best talk I ever gave, but happily I have no actual recollection of what I said.

These days I am much better; I only sleep through events that are important for other people, like their thesis defenses (sorry about that, Tanya). On the other hand, as Michael says, why shouldn’t we be anxious about getting up in front of a bunch of smart people (youthful and inexperienced or otherwise) and attempting to teach them something? My very first assignment at the UofC was a graduate course on particle physics — something I know a bit about, but am certainly not the world’s expert. This was a useful experience, as I hit on a helpful philosophy right from the start: it’s not the professor explaining the material to the students, it’s the professor and the students engaging with the material together. In that case, it was “us against the particles,” and I think we acquitted ourselves just fine. And never once did I show up for class in my pajamas.

So by now you’ve done all your planning, right? Placed all the orders, sent off the invitations, decorated the house, maybe even decorated a space at your workplace. The more devout among you have even managed to get the day off work, for religious reasons. The just plain weirdly fanatical among you will be setting off to the local park, beach, mountaintop, or desert to do those (possibly) naked rituals involving various baked goods.

Several TV channels may well have specials, hosted by world reknown, er…. celebrities, like Keith Devlin, Simon Singh, and, yes - Carol Vorderman.

Others will host retrospectives of all of the fun things people did in the past in celebration of the Big Day.

What am I talking about?
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The next Categorically Not! is Sunday 26th March. You may recall my post on the Categorically Not! series of events held at the Santa Monica Art Studios. They’re fantastic, and I strongly encourage you to come to them.

Here is K.C. Cole’s teaser:

To know without knowing how you know; to have a feeling as clear and sharp as a thought; to sense with uncanny confidence—without any obvious reason or prompt. Intuition is a kind of stealth insight, sneaking up on you when you least expect it, telling you what ingredient to add to a recipe—or a painting; it can sniff out dangers or opportunities, distinguish liars from friends, help scientists uncover deep laws of nature. But what does it really mean to understand something “in your bones” or “in your gut”?

Physicists rely on intuition to a surprising extent, and so for our next Categorically Not!, we’re delighted to have physicist Joe Polchinski of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, a new member of the National academy of Sciences. Joe will engage in a conversation with K.C. Cole about how he intuits meaning from math—which was, in essence, how he “discovered” higher dimensional membrane-like objects that may well be the building blocks of the universe. Just how the brain does this is a subject for neuroscience, of course, and so USC neurologist Antonio Damasio (see here and here) will tell us something about what goes on inside our heads when we “intuit” things. Antonio is the author of several wonderful books on the relationship between cognition and emotion, including “The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness” and “Decarte’s Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain”. From an arts perspective, USC filmmaker Jed Dannenbaum will talk about how, in artful movies, the communication between filmmakers behind the camera, actors in front of it, and audiences in the theatre relies primarily on an intuitive sensing of subtle visual and aural cues that we process at the nonconscious level. Jed is the co-author of Creative Filmmaking From the Inside Out, and will teach a new course next fall for non-filmmakers on the creative mind.

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

Bits and bobs accumulated while I was traveling, offered up as I recover from the traumatic trip back to Chicago. (I wasn’t at Don and Crystal’s wedding, but many congratulations to the happy couple!) I had an early flight scheduled Sunday, but I was feeling lazy and unmotivated to arise at dawn to return my rental car, so I called United and asked whether I could go standby on a later flight. They indicated that there should be no problem, as the later flights had plenty of open seats. This turned out to be one of those things they believed even though they couldn’t prove, in fact even though it wasn’t true. After sitting in LAX, watching two flights to Chicago take off full without me, I finally squeezed onto a plane that was scheduled to reach O’Hare at 10:44 p.m. Of course, it took off only after an hour-and-a-half delay, and then landed safely around 12:30 a.m. Sadly, it landed not in Chicago, but in Rockford IL, since it was apparently a bit breezy in Chicago. (Windy city and all that.) After some tense moments when it appeared as if we might all climb aboard busses and drive the rest of the way, the plane did take off again, landed safely in the appropriate airport, and I endured a tense half an hour in which everyone on the flight retrieved their luggage except me. Finally mine came out, allowing me to proceed to the character-building exercise of standing in the rain for another half an hour to get a taxi. Arriving to my chilly lakeside condo at 3:30 a.m., since apparently some bozo left the window open when he left for L.A. For as much as I travel, it’s been a long time since I’ve been subjected to such delays, so I suppose I was due.

And while we were away:

• Peter Woit reports that the second- and third-year WMAP results are soon to be released, which looks to be true. My guess is that there won’t be any universe-shaking surprises, just some careful results about polarization of the CMB, which is a very tiny signal that is hard to measure.
• Grrlscientist points to a bit of culture you can only find here in Illinois: the best hamburger ever. Served, apparently, at the ballpark of minor-league baseball team the Gateway Grizzlies. What is it, you may ask, that separates this particular all-beef patty with two slices of cheddar and two strips of bacon from its artery-clogging competitors? It must be the bun, which consists of two halves of — wait for it — a Krispy Kreme Original Glazed donut. Mmm. It’s only 1000 calories, so you might want to order two.
• Alina Stefanescu , via Marginal Revolution, points to a condensed version of Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom in cartoon form. Originally published in the 1950’s in Look magazine, and distributed by General Motors. Hayek was an economist and political philosopher, popular today among libertarian-leaning types for his warnings against the horrors of collectivism. It’s interesting to me how the process of creeping loss of liberty described in The Road to Serfdom sounds these days like a warning against the excesses of our putatively-conservative administration. (At least, according to that notorious pinko sympathizer Sandra Day O’Connor.)
  
  And now there’s a movie version!
• Occasional CV commenter John Farrell points to a slightly more conventional documentary: The Bag of Knees, about the lives and choices of nurses. You can see a preview, and it’s available for purchase on DVD.
• Continuing on the movie theme, from Orin Kerr at the Volokh Conspiracy comes perhaps the second-cutest thing ever: this somewhat unequal cat fight.
  
  The cutest thing ever was of course already referenced here. Those darn cats.
• My interminable trip home was enlivened by a celebrity presence on the plane, one celebrated for his persistent cheerfulness: that’s right, Richard Simmons. There was a touchy moment when we were on the ground in Rockford and it looked like he was going to lead the plane in singing campfire songs. The previous evening, playing poker at an L.A. cardroom, the table behind me featured a game between Gus Hansen, Phil Ivey, and a couple of their friends. Which of these counts as a more significant celebrity sighting will depend on your personal cultural matrix.

Don’t miss** BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time program on Negative Numbers. You listen at the website to this proramme until Thursday morning, when they replace it with the next one.

Here’s the blurb for the programme, which I stole from their website (I hope they don’t mind):

In 1759 the British mathematician Francis Maseres wrote that negative numbers “darken the very whole doctrines of the equations and make dark of the things which are in their nature excessively obvious and simple”. Because of their dark and mysterious nature, Maseres concluded that negative numbers did not exist, as did his contemporary, William Friend. However, other mathematicians were braver. They took a leap into the unknown and decided that negative numbers could be used during calculations, as long as they had disappeared upon reaching the solution.

The history of negative numbers is one of stops and starts. The trailblazers were the Chinese who by 100 BC were able to solve simultaneous equations involving negative numbers. The Ancient Greeks rejected negative numbers as absurd, by 600 AD, the Indians had written the rules for the multiplication of negative numbers and 400 years later, Arabic mathematicians realised the importance of negative debt. But it wasn’t until the Renaissance that European mathematicians finally began to accept and use these perplexing numbers.

Why were negative numbers considered with such suspicion? Why were they such an abstract concept? And how did they finally get accepted?

The contributors on the programme are: Ian Stewart (Professor of Mathematics at the University of Warwick), Colva Roney-Dougal (Lecturer in Pure Mathematics at the University of St Andrews), and Raymond Flood (Lecturer in Computing Studies and Mathematics at Kellogg College, Oxford).

I’ve not heard it yet, but I’ve been reliably informed that it was pretty good…. They even chat a bit about imaginary numbers too. Enjoy!

-cvj

**Thanks Ed Copeland!

Ok, here’s Cosmic Variance’s first Society Wedding coverage - but several Celebrity Physicists (at least in my field) replace the usual Hollywood set, or British Royals. (I managed to get in, depite being in none of the above groupings, by virtue of being a friend of the groom.)

Well of course I still managed to leave Los Angeles much later than I’d planned, in order to make it in time for the 3:00pm wedding ceremony in Santa Barbara. (I’m really really going off linen suits, ok? You waste tons of time ironing them, and they still make you look like you’re wearing an old potato sack, after ten minutes of wearing them…. sigh.) So it was less of a slow, relaxed drive and more of a focused, determined, fun -but careful- sprint! This resulted in me setting a new personal daytime record for getting up there (successfully road-testing some ealier modifications I’d made to the car).

There were a number of microbursts of torrential rain along the way and so I was concerned that the outdoor ceremony would be moved (as part of the hosts’ backup plan) but they went ahead with it, and so I turned up at the park in good time. The setting was quite lovely, actually. There was a huge amount of rain in the region, but somehow it stopped 15 minutes before the ceremony, the clouds all went away and a perfect blue sky appeared (with a lovely rainbow over downtown Santa Barbara in the distance). (Not long after the ceremony, new clouds appeared and the rain started up again, but we were by then indoors at the reception venue. Impressive timing.)

Here’s the blushing physicist pairing: the bride (UCSB Astrophysicist Crystal Martin) and the groom (UCSB Relativist Don Marolf):

That is Princeton astrophysicist Alice Shapley, doing crucial things with flowers and the train of the wedding dress. Don’s brother David is on the left. The ceremony was very nicely done. It was presided over by Syracuse University condensed matter physicist Eric Schiff, his first ceremony since qualifying to do them (he’s just behind Don).

The group of guests was rather rich with representatives of the great and the good of theoretical physics. Well, there was Cosmic Variance’s very own Mark Trodden (of Syracuse), sitting here with his wife Sara, and just in front of me was UCSB’s Jim Hartle:

And in my row was Perimeter Institute’s Rob Myers (front) and UCSB’s Gary Horowitz, sitting either side of Gary’s wife Corrine:

After the wedding ceremony, people stood around chatting for a while before heading off to the reception. Here’s another well-known pair, Gary Horowitz and Joe Polchinski (KITP-UCSB):

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Hmmm, so it seems that I keep running into my colleague KC Cole this week. While settling down to drink my morning coffee after a couple of hours of battling dust around the house and leaves outside the house, I found myself looking at the LA Times’ Book Review section, and saw that KC wrote a review of the book entitled “What We Believe but Cannot Prove”, edited by John Brockman. The subtitle of the book is “Today’s leading thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty”.

(Note to self: Figure out when this “Age of Certainty” thing took place and find out why I did not get the memo.)

It seems that the book is supposed to be a collection of essays about things scientists believe but cannot prove…. KC deconstructs this notion a bit, and I’ll let you go and read the article (which can be found here) yourself, since instead of blogging I’m actually supposed to be running around buying a wedding present and then getting ready to head north to Santa Barbara to attend the actual wedding later today…..

She obviously does not think that this book is as good as it could be, largely because of the brevity of several of the contributions, which “either state the obvious or cut off just as things get interesting, random bursts of intellectualizing designed for compulsive channel surfers”. She likens this to blogging, by the way. (Ahem!) She also says:

Fans (and I count myself among them) of such contributors as Jared Diamond, Steven Pinker, Sir Martin Rees, Freeman Dyson, Daniel Dennett and Howard Gardner would be better off sticking to their wonderful books.

She has a number of positive observations, such as:

The essays worth reading take pains to put beliefs in context: Psychologist Irene Pepperberg studies how gray parrots talk and think (compared with apes, marine mammals and children). She believes birds are the best model for understanding human language. But before making her argument, she offers a highly informative backgrounder on bird song. So, by the time she proposes that the “missing link” between learned and unlearned vocalizing may be found in a recently discovered flycatcher that learns its songs, you’re ready to go along.

There’s also this:

Theoretical physicist Leonard Susskind uses a parable to explain that all proof is ultimately based on probability. He can’t prove that a coin flipped a million times won’t come up consistently heads. But he’d bet his life, soul (and even his salary) on it. Mathematician Devlin admits that he believes Andrew Wiles’ 1994 proof of Fermat’s last theorem only because “experts in that branch of mathematics tell me they do.”

(Hmmm. *All* proof? I’m not sure I would go as far as Lenny in that statement, but maybe I’m being a bit picky. I like the rest of the paragraph quite a lot.)

There are a number of other interesting things about the book, and about the review, but why not go have a look at the site and have a read? Fulfilling KC’s observation about blogging, I’ll cut off my thoughts on this at this point….. because I have to dash out to the shops!

-cvj

I had a sinful lunch of coffee and delicate french pastries with the science writer KC Cole yesterday, at Michelle Myers’ excellent French patisserie “Boule”, over in West Hollywood. (The food is divine, but sometimes the counter service leaves a lot to be desired. They need to work on that. Oh well….)

I was on my way to go and see the penultimate day of the MOCA part of the exhibition “Masters of American Comics”, and she was taking a break from writing new material her commentaries on science. Actually, a new one aired last week on KPCC. It was about string theory, in fact, and you can find it here, along with earlier ones.

In the commentary, she tries to counter the accusations made that string theory is all nonsense because it is just “mathematical navel-gazing” with no connection to reality. She does this by pointing out -quite correctly, I think- that it should not be forgotten that there’s quite a history of marvellous scientific discovery coming straight from consquences of puzzling over mathematical structures. She gives the example, among others, of Dirac’s discovery of anti-matter, which essentially came from wondering what was the meaning “the other sign choice” after taking a square root. (At this juncture, I’ll also point you to a post I did last November about Einstein’s decade of struggle to formulate General Relativity. Note: Anti- and Pro-string crowd: Let’s try to go and read that discussion thoroughly before endlessly repeating old arguments all over again on this thread, ok?)

She quite responsibly acknowledges -as I often do here when these types of discussion come up- that string theory is as yet an unfinished project, with lots of work to be done in order to understand if it has anything to do with Nature. But she wants to caution against dismissing something just because it’s “just math”, since mathematics plays such an important role in scientific discovery.

She ends her piece by reminding us that mathematics -which is all about the science of patterns- plays a key role in understanding the universe (physical law is all about patterns, of course), and, following from a conversation with a mathematician friend of hers, she likens it to poetry…. both mathematics and poetry “take a universe of complexity and distill it to essential truth”.

-cvj