At least that’s the impression I got from this quite spectacular animation. (Via Shtetl-Optimized.)

Admittedly, real biological molecules would be quite a bit more densely packed. Either that, or there’s an awful lot of spooky-action-at-a-distance going on inside cells.

After you’re done being amazed, you could do worse than check out the lecture notes for Scott Aaronson’s class, Quantum Computing Since Democritus. And when you’re done with those, here are some videos of Feynman lecturing on QED in New Zealand. (Thanks to Ed Copeland for reminding me of these.)

The Senate has voted 65-34 in favor of S. 3930, “A bill to authorize trial by military commission for violations of the law of war, and for other purposes.” Here, “trial by military commission” means that, if you are an unlawful enemy combatant, you have no right to a trial by your peers or any other basic protections of the Bill of Rights. (Who counts as an “enemy combatant”? Whomever the government says. Even U.S. citizens who haven’t even left the country, much less engaged in combat? Yes.) And “other purposes” means torturing people.

I remember when Republicans used to look at government with suspicion. Now the motto of the Republican Party is “Trust us, we’re the government, we know what’s best and we don’t make mistakes.”

I have nothing to add to the discussion that hasn’t been said by more expert people elsewhere. I just wanted it on record, if the internet archives last a thousand years and I’ve been cryogenically preserved for the same length of time, that I was one of the substantial number of people who thought the bill was repulsive and anti-democratic. It will go down in history as one of those sad moments when a basically good nation does something that makes later generations look back and think, “What made them go so crazy?”

I can just quote other people. Jack Balkin:

The current bill, if passed [as it just was], will give the Executive far more dictatorial powers to detain, prosecute, judge and punish than it ever enjoyed before. Over the last 48 hours, it has been modified in a hundred different ways to increase executive power at the expense of judicial review, due process, and oversight. And what is more, the bill’s most outrageous provisions on torture, definition of enemy combatants, secret procedures, and habeas stripping, are completely unnecessary to keep Americans safe. Rather, they are the work of an Executive branch that has proven itself as untrustworthy as it is greedy: always pushing the legal and constitutional envelope, always seeking more power and less accountability.

Almost all the Republican Senators, of course, voted for the bill, Lincoln Chafee being the lone honorable exception. As Glenn Greenwald notes,

During the debate on his amendment, Arlen Specter said that the bill sends us back 900 years because it denies habeas corpus rights and allows the President to detain people indefinitely. He also said the bill violates core Constitutional protections. Then he voted for it.

Most Democrats were against (although not all, sadly). Hillary Clinton:

The rule of law cannot be compromised. We must stand for the rule of law before the world, especially when we are under stress and under threat. We must show that we uphold our most profound values…

The bill before us allows the admission into evidence of statements derived through cruel, inhuman and degrading interrogation. That sets a dangerous precedent that will endanger our own men and women in uniform overseas. Will our enemies be less likely to surrender? Will informants be less likely to come forward? Will our soldiers be more likely to face torture if captured? Will the information we obtain be less reliable? These are the questions we should be asking. And based on what we know about warfare from listening to those who have fought for our country, the answers do not support this bill. As Lieutenant John F. Kimmons, the Army’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence said, “No good intelligence is going to come from abusive interrogation practices.”…

This bill undermines the Geneva Conventions by allowing the President to issue Executive Orders to redefine what permissible interrogation techniques happen to be. Have we fallen so low as to debate how much torture we are willing to stomach? By allowing this Administration to further stretch the definition of what is and is not torture, we lower our moral standards to those whom we despise, undermine the values of our flag wherever it flies, put our troops in danger, and jeopardize our moral strength in a conflict that cannot be won simply with military might.

Russ Feingold:

Habeas corpus is a fundamental recognition that in America, the government does not have the power to detain people indefinitely and arbitrarily. And that in America, the courts must have the power to review the legality of executive detention decisions.

Habeas corpus is a longstanding vital part of our American tradition, and is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.

As a group of retired judges wrote to Congress, habeas corpus “safeguards the most hallowed judicial role in our constitutional democracy – ensuring that no man is imprisoned unlawfully.”

Mr. President, this bill would fundamentally alter that historical equation. Faced with an executive branch that has detained hundreds of people without trial for years now, it would eliminate the right of habeas corpus.

But words are cheap, and nobody stepped up to filibuster the bill. Democrats, as usual, put their fingers to the wind and decide to be spineless. The calculation seems to be that they won’t look sufficiently tough if they come out strongly against torture. They don’t get it. “Tough” means that you stand up for what you believe in, and that you’re willing to fight for it if necessary. How are you supposed to keep the country safe when you’re afraid to stand up to demagoguing Republicans? People know this, which is why it’s been so easy to paint Democrats as weak.

The “tough” stance of the Bush administration has taken Iraq, a country that formerly opposed al-Qaeda, and turned one-third of it over to al-Qaeda, in the process fueling Islamic radicalism and making the threat of terrorism significantly worse. If that’s what you get from “tough,” I’ll stick with “smart” and “principled” any day.

I was recently asked to recommend a good popular-level book on quantum mechanics. I don’t think I know of any, at least not first hand. We had a whole thread on the Greatest Popular Science Book, filled with good suggestions, but none specifically about quantum mechanics. A quick glance through amazon.com reveals plenty of books on particle physics, or even specific notions like quantum computing, but not one book that I could recommend in good conscience to someone who just wants to know what quantum mechanics is all about. It is the greatest intellectual achievement of the twentieth century, after all.

There are some books that either come close, or might very well be perfect but I’m not familiar with them. In the latter category we have The Quantum World by Ken Ford, and David Lindley’s Where Does the Weirdness Go? These might be great, I just haven’t read them. I’m sure that the Mr. Tompkins books by George Gamow are good, since I love One, Two, Three… Infinity (and Gamow was a genius), but I haven’t actually read them. Feynman’s QED is another classic, but focuses more on quantum electrodynamics (duh) than on QM more generally. David Deutsch’s The Fabric of Reality is a fantastic book, especially if you are curious about the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics; but I’m not sure if it’s the best first introduction (I haven’t looked at it closely in years). And David Albert’s Quantum Mechanics and Experience is great for a careful philosophical account of what QM is all about, but again maybe not the best first exposure.

Any suggestions? Not for a good book that is related to quantum mechanics or perhaps mentions it in a chapter or two, but for something whose major goal is to provide a clear account of QM. Surely there is something?

The Large Hadron Collider project, under construction at CERN in Geneva Switzerland, is the largest project in High Energy Physics to date, if not one of the largest scientific projects undertaken by humankind. The two main high energy detectors are ATLAS and CMS. Here are a few interesting facts about the numerology:

• The well-known “circular” collider is actually not a circle. It consists of 8 straight sections and of 8 arcs.
• The rate of proton-proton interactions at design luminosity is 10⁹ events per second.
• The weight of the CMS experiment is roughly 13000 tons (which is 30% more than the Tour Eiffel) .
• The ATLAS experiment is reputed to be able to float in water.
• The amount of cables used in ATLAS is roughly 3000 km.
• The data volume recorded at the front-end in CMS is 1 TeraByte/second which corresponds to 10,000 sets of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Per second.
• The data recorded during the 10-20 years of the LHC lifespan will be equivalent to all the words spoken by humankind since its appearance on earth.
• The kinetic energy the beam is equivalent to 1 small aircraft carrier weighing 10⁴ tons traveling at 20 miles/ hour.
• The machine temperature is 1.9 Kelvin (which will be the largest cryogenic system in the world).
• The total cost of machine + experiments is roughly 5000 MCHF (or 8 billion US dollars, using US accounting techniques).
• The total number of physicists involved is roughly 5000, a large fraction of which are from the US.

I’ve been looking for this for years online — Monty Python’s classic International Philosophy football match, Greeks vs. the Germans.

“This is Nietzsche’s third booking in four games.”

Actually, string theorist John Schwarz now occupies Richard Feynman’s old office at Caltech.

But…

Continue reading ‘Who Got Feynman’s Office?’

This is a quick reminder about the “Apocalypse” Categorically Not! event this Sunday (see here or here), featuring Marc Kamionkowski, Jonathan Kirsch, and Carolyn See.

I’d also like to let you know about the next Southern California Strings Seminar, next week Friday and Saturday at USC. A number of topics in string theory will be discussed, from applications to topics in Mathematics (the Langlands program), through black hole physics, and all the way to applications to the physics of experiments involving collisions of heavy nuclei. More about this regional meeting over on Asymptotia.

-cvj

Declan Butler, a reporter at Nature, is calling for scientists to follow the lead of Lawyers Without Borders in speaking out against the sham trial of the “Tripoli Six.” There is also an urgent editorial in Nature calling for action.

Five Bulgarian nurses (Valya Chervenyashka, Snezhana Dimitrova, Nasya Nenova, Valentina Siropulo, and Kristiyana Valtcheva) and one Palestinian doctor (Ashraf al-Hajuj) had been sentenced to death by firing squad for infecting more than 400 children with HIV at the al-Fateh Hospital in Benghazi in 1998. The Libyan Supreme Court ordered a retrial after international outrage at the unfairness of the original proceeding. During that trial, Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute in Paris and Vittorio Colizzi of Rome’s Tor Vergata University analyzed the viruses from the children, concluding that they had mostly been infected before the health care workers ever arrived in Libya. This testimony was thrown out in favor of a study by Libyan doctors. It seems likely that the cause of the infections was poor hospital hygiene, which doesn’t reflect well on the Libyan government.

The medics have now spent five years in jail, during which two of the nurses were raped. Muammar Gaddafi’s government has demanded $5.5 billion in compensation if the prisoners are freed. As the Nature editorial says, scientists should be speaking out against this travesty of justice:

The scientific community has also been relatively silent on the case, perhaps in the hope that it would be sorted out by diplomacy. But the latter has not proved to be the case, and scientific leaders need to use all their influence urgently, as the fate of the medics will be sealed in the coming weeks. It is time not only to save the doctor and nurses, but also to defend a common vision of science and law in establishing the truth, above all other imperatives. Meanwhile, Gaddafi has the opportunity to put this affair behind him by giving the six an immediate pardon.

International pressure was crucial in forcing the original retrial of the six health-care workers; Bill Hooker has information about places to contact with expressions of concern. Anyone with a blog or other platform can help by spreading the word.

Thanks to Janet for the pointer.

I bet you all are not aware, but there is a new test of nationality being performed when one enters the US. I arrived in the San Francisco airport on Monday night, passed passport control, picked up my luggage, and went to hand in my customs form, which is the last step in the arrivals process. The customs agent stopped me dead in my tracks. He first asked, “Are you an American.” Obviously I answered “yes” straight-away. Then he asked, “OK, then, what is the square root of 98?”

Now, this is a question that me of all people (given what I do for a living) can answer, instantaneously. But, at the time all I could do was turn towards the guy and utter “HUH?” There were three things on my mind:

I had already passed passport control. This guy was a CUSTOMS agent. Why was he checking my nationality?

I had been traveling for 23 hours. I left my hotel room in Venice at 5:10 AM, took a boat to the train station, took a train to the mainland, took a train back to Trieste (I won’t mention the trauma associated with catching that train or knowing that it was the correct train…), took a bus from the train station to the airport in Trieste (I won’t mention the trauma wondering if the bus was going to make it on time to the airport so I could catch my flight), took a flight to Munich, sat in the Munich airport for 4 hours, then finally took the 11 hour flight back home to California….I understandably was a bit dazed after all that!

I was smuggling suspicious cheese in my backpack. The last thing I needed was a customs agent with funny questions! I was in Europe, meaning I went to a cheese shop, selected some cheese, and they carved out some hunks from the large rounds of cheese and wrapped it in wax paper. There is no packaging and no information on the pasteurization process…

So, after I gave my intelligent answer of “HUH,” the guy burst out laughing and said, “Yes, of course you’re an American. You don’t know anything!”

I wonder what would have happened if I had been awake. My normal, instantaneous response would have been “7 times the square root of 2”. I wonder if I would have been arrested if I said that….

I was hoping to actually say something substantive about this, but time is precious these days (and it’s been all over the blogosphere anyway). The National Academy of Sciences has released a report, Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering. They seem to think that the relative paucity of women in science is not due to differences of innate aptitude, or even to an aversion to hard work and competitive environments, but to systematic biases within academia. Hmm, fancy that. Cornelia Dean in the NYT writes:

Women in science and engineering are hindered not by lack of ability but by bias and “outmoded institutional structures” in academia, an expert panel reported yesterday…

The panel dismissed the idea, notably advanced last year by Lawrence H. Summers, then the president of Harvard, that the relative dearth of women in the upper ranks of science might be the result of “innate” intellectual deficiencies, particularly in mathematics.

If there are cognitive differences, the report says, they are small and irrelevant. In any event, the much-studied gender gap in math performance has all but disappeared as more girls enroll in demanding classes. Even among very high achievers, the gap is narrowing, the panelists said…

The report also dismisses other commonly held beliefs — that women are uncompetitive or less productive, that they take too much time off for their families. Instead, it says, extensive previous research showed a pattern of unconscious but pervasive bias, “arbitrary and subjective” evaluation processes and a work environment in which “anyone lacking the work and family support traditionally provided by a `wife’ is at a serious disadvantage.”

As Bitch Ph.D. says, “I, personally, am expecting the apologies from Larry Summers’ apologists to start pouring in any day now.”

So I have a question. The reason why most of us were upset by Larry Summers is that he was wrong, in a spectacular and potentially damaging kind of way, and the new NAS study supports this (yet again). But, almost without exception, Summers’ supporters pretended that what got people upset was the very idea of raising the possibility of gender-based cognitive differences, and that these people were anti-free-inquiry and afraid of the truth. Steven Pinker was the most dogged straw-man-constructor, but there were plenty of others. (See also Lawyers, Guns & Money.)

My question is: was there anyone who was actually upset at Summers for this reason? That is, was there any respectable academic who really came out against even asking whether there were gender-based cognitive differences? To make things precise, I’m looking for (1) actual professors or other academics, not crazy blog commenters and so on; (2) people who explicitly were against even asking the question or doing the research, not people who (quite reasonably) argue that bias and discrimination are much more important factors in explaining the current gender disparity; and (3) did so in response to Summers, not some time back in the 1970’s or whatever. I sincerely want to know, did anyone take that position? I’m sure it wasn’t the position of most of us, strawmen notwithstanding, but given the speed and efficiency with which the fairy tale was promulgated among Summers’ supporters, I can’t help but think that at least one person did say it. There are alot of crazy academics out there who say all sorts of nonsensical things, it shouldn’t be too hard to find someone.