There’s a sprawling blog conversation going on at ScienceBlogs and elsewhere, sparked by an article by Matthew Nisbet and Chris Mooney in Science magazine. Ironically, as I’m not the first to point out, it’s only available to subscribers (although there is a press release). The origin of the irony is that the subject of the article is how scientists should talk to the general public. In particular, Nisbet and Mooney focus on “framing” — putting whatever you want to talk about into a context that strikes an appropriate chord in your audience.

Much back-and-forth — see long posts by coturnix, Orac, and Nisbet to get some of the flavor — without reaching a simple consensus. Shocking, I know. But, despite the noise along the way, these conversations really to help make progress.

My view on these issues is incredibly complex and well-thought-out, but sadly the margin of this blog post is too narrow to contain it. Instead I’ll just highlight something that is probably obvious: a big reason for the disagreements is the attempt to find a set of blanket principles governing a widely diverse and highly idiosyncratic set of circumstances. Talking to the public involves a tremendous array of competing pressures, and how best to balance them will certainly depend on the specifics of the situation. Are scientists bad communicators, when they are talking to the public? Very often, yes. Is it important to be better? Absolutely, both for altruistic and self-interested reasons. Should they compromise telling the truth in order to win people over? No. Does making an effort to engage people on their own level necessarily mean that the truth must be compromised? No. Should they expect the same kind of arguments to work with the public as work with their colleagues? No. Are the standards of acceptable levels of precision and detail different when talking to specialists and non-specialists? Of course. Is connecting to people’s pre-conceived notions, and using them to your advantage as a communicator, somehow unsavory? No. Should we pander to beliefs that we think are false? Certainly not. Etc., etc.; every situation is going to be different.

But, in the absence of any actually helpful suggestions, I will take the opportunity to point to this recent post by Charlie Petit in the (awesome in its own right) Knight Science Journalism Tracker. The punchline: science journalism in the United States is in the midst of a catastrophic downsizing. In the wake of the news that Mike Lafferty of the Columbus Dispatch has accepted a buyout, Petit mentions other periodicals that have recently decimated their science coverage, including Time, Newsday, and the Dallas Morning News (I’ll add the LA Times to that list). Science sections have dropped from 95 less than twenty years ago to around 40 today.

I’m just saying.

Yesterday I took a pilgrimage to two holy sites:

Trinity
This was where the first atomic bomb was detonated, on July 16, 1945. The site is located on the White Sands Missile Range, and is open to the public twice a year. Needless to say, it’s in the middle of nowhere. You drive for miles across desert scrubland, to arrive at a fenced in area the size of a soccer field.

One morning over 60 years ago, the desert floor glowed brighter and hotter than the surface of the Sun. The bomb was detonated at the top of a 100ft steel tower. A small piece of twisted steel, one of the footings of the tower, is all that remains. As you walk the site, you notice little pieces of mottled greenish glass (think tiny shards of a beer bottle). This is trinitite: sand from the desert floor melted into glass by the explosion. After the explosion the entire crater floor was covered with trinitite, forming a green glassy bowl. Since then the trinitite has been bulldozed, though scattered pieces remain. We brought a Geiger counter, which provided the main indication that this patch of Earth is unlike your average backyard. At the epicenter the radiation level is roughly an order of magnitude higher than background levels. It is unnerving to be exploring a nondescript patch of desert while your Geiger counter clicks up a storm.

One becomes contemplative at the site. Holding a piece of trinite, you realize that it was forged at the instant of the birth of the atomic age. That this tiny piece of glass is a physical remnant of humanity’s loss of innocence.

Very Large Array
A couple of hours away from Trinity sits the Very Large Array (VLA), part of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. The VLA is perhaps the single most publicly recognizable scientific installation. It is extraordinarily photogenic; the film Contact moved the observatory into the “A” list of movie stars. It is hard not to be impressed by its sheer scale: 27 radio dishes, each of them 25 meters (82 feet) in diameter and weighing 230 tons. The dishes move along 21 kilometer (13 mile) long train tracks, allowing for various configurations trading off resolution and field-of-view. These tracks are arranged into three arms radiating from a central point, forming a scientific trinity. This trinity has led to great enlightenment.

The receivers are in the 70 Mhz–50 Ghz frequency range, corresponding to wavelengths of 400–0.7 cm. Because these radio wavelengths are long, a much larger dish is needed to produce a resolution on the sky equivalent to optical telescopes. The angular resolution of a telescope can be approximated by: θ = λ/d, where θ is the angular resolution (in radians), λ is the wavelength of the observed radiation, and d is the diameter of the telescope. For reference, the full moon is ~0.5 degrees = 30 arcminutes = 1800 arcsec across, and 1 arcsec ~ 5e-6 radians. The center of the visible (optical) band of light, corresponding to the color green, has λ ~ 500 nm = 5e-5 cm. To image something green on the sky to 1 arcsecond (which optical telescopes routinely do) thus requires a telescope of size at least 10 cm. To make an equivalent image in radio frequencies (which have wavelengths roughly 100,000 times longer) requires a dish 100,000 times bigger: instead of 10cm, we need a dish 10 km across. There are two ways to address this: (1) Make a humongous dish. The Arecibo dish in Puerto Rico is 300 meters across. (2) Make use of interferometry. The VLA combines the data streams from 27 dishes to produce a single image, corresponding to a much larger single observatory. Each individual pair of dishes can be thought of as sampling an interference pattern of a point source, or measuring a Fourier component of the full brightness distribution of an extended source. With sufficient numbers of pairs, a detailed image can be reconstructed. The VLA has 27 dishes, and thus 26+25+24+..+1 = 351 separate pairs. In the A configuration, the dishes are placed at their furthest positions, leading to a maximum pair separation of 36km. This corresponds to the resolution of a single dish 36km across, with a collecting area (and thus sensitivity) of a single dish 130 meters in diameter. In its highest frequency band, and in its widest observing mode, the VLA has an effective resolution of 0.05 arcsec. At present the VLA is in D configuration, which is its most tightly-packed: all the dishes are within 1km of each other. In addition to having great resolving power, the VLA is extraordinarily sensitive. If you were sitting on the Moon trying to make a cellphone call, and the VLA pointed at you, you would completely overwhelm its detectors. Needless to say, all cellphones must be turned off on the VLA grounds. In addition, computers need to be shielded in metallic rooms (Faraday cages). Most importantly, the observatory has to be far from all possible interference. It is in a remote part of New Mexico, surrounded by mountains which act as natural shields. The VLA has been responsible for many spectacular discoveries, on everything from magnetars in our Milky Way to quasars at the far reaches of the observable Universe.

Both the Trinity Test site and the VLA are located in the New Mexican desert. Both are deliberately remote. And both are testaments to human ingenuity. They remind us of the tremendous and the terrible power of science.

All sorts of holidays going on, between Easter, Passover, and most importantly National Poetry Month, as hilzoy keeps reminding us. In celebration, here is an excerpt from the works of the immortal Bard; in particular, “A tedious brief scene of young Pyramus And his love Thisbe; very tragical mirth,” from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Act 5, Scene 1).

USA Today reports on the efforts of “prayer warriors” who have taken to the sky for the spiritual benefit of the people of Ohio.

CINCINNATI — Ten small single-engine airplanes circling over Ohio on Friday afternoon will be on a special mission. They’ll be taking part in PrayerFlight, airplanes filled with people praying for the health and welfare of the state’s 11 million residents. [...]

The prayer warriors, from all religious affiliations, pray silently and aloud while aloft. They ask God to guide leaders, pray for people in schools and hospitals, and ask for salvation. [...]

The second flight had eight planes with 26 people, including six youths from Teens for Christ, a ministry of teenagers from 22 high schools. This time the group prayed over seven Ohio counties.

Samantha Ciminillo, 18, of Lima, a member of Teens for Christ, took one of the December flights. It was her first airplane ride. “You see rows and rows of houses, and you know they are full of people you are praying for,” she said. [...]

For now, Ciminillo is looking forward to Friday. “God works through the power of prayer,” she said. “I’m expecting big things to happen.”

Now, as a connoisseur of sophisticated theology, I am well aware that the vast majority of religious believers share a philosophically nuanced image of the divine, such as one might read about in the London Review of Books. God is viewed as a manifestation of immanent transcendence (some tension there, to be deliciously savored!), a precondition of the universe’s existence, standing outside our ordinary categories of substance and imagination. Happy times they are, as these typically devout folks chat away over dinner about the progress of our understanding from Tertullian to Levinas, relaxing over dessert with anecdotes about Ricoeur’s hermeneutic speculations.

But, in the interests of complete honesty, we must admit that there are still a few folks out there — one or two, scattered about the landscape — who indulge in a somewhat more literal vision of the traditional religious stories. People who believe that God is some kind of person, sitting up there in the sky, looking down on us and passing judgment. A being quite frightfully anthropomorphic, whose omniscience and omnipotence correspond roughly to those associated with the beard of Gandalf and the strength of Superman, respectively.

It’s a funny kind of philosophy, and I do wonder how carefully people examine their own beliefs. If a human being were to manifest the kind of need for constant worship and gratitude that this God exhibits, we would call them pathological (or perhaps “Mr. President,” but that’s another topic). It’s a scary idea, that God has the power to exert great influence over what happens in our daily lives, but chooses to do so or not on the basis of a handful of people flying around in airplanes, praying their hearts out. (”Sorry, Kentucky; I’d love to help out, but the flightplan didn’t quite take the prayer team over your airspace.”) Subtle interventions to be sure; maybe this person’s cold won’t evolve into pneumonia, that one will get cancer but it won’t be very painful. And if it weren’t for the praying, those unsuspecting folks below would be out of luck; one imagines God doing a weary shrug, in a “Don’t look at me, I’m just enforcing the Cosmic Rules, which, yeah, I’m sort of responsible for in the first place, but still, rules are rules, you know?” kind of way.

And then there are people who believe that things don’t happen for a reason, nor are events influenced by anyone looking at us from on high. The creation of good and evil, justice and mercy, beauty and terror, are all in our hands, as complicated conglomerations of particles obeying the laws of Nature. I kind of like it that way.

I spent yesterday at The Ohio State University, in Columbus, delivering the High Energy Physics/Astrophysics seminar in the physics department. It was a good time and, as well as the talk itself, it was great to see a couple of friends - John Beacom and Stuart Raby - and spend some time talking physics with several other people I know, most notably Samir Mathur and David Weinberg.

I spent some of the morning talking with Samir about his Fuzzball resolution of the information loss problem in a class of string-theoretic black holes, and the possible implications for cosmology. In the afternoon I sat down with Stuart and Akin Wingerter and they told me about their work on realistic compactifications of string theory. John and I chatted briefly about neutrinos and dark matter, but mostly gossiped, and David was nice enough to spend time chatting with me about the content of my talk - gravitational approaches to cosmic acceleration - since a scheduling conflict meant he hadn’t been able to attend.

This is a pretty typical day when one travels to give a seminar - the talk itself takes up an hour of your time, but more important reasons to travel (and to have people visit you at your own institution) are the physics conversations you spend the rest of the day having.

However, the visit to OSU did have one unusual, and extremely enjoyable, difference. The astronomy department has a rather well-known daily journal club called Astro Coffee. Journal clubs exist at many institutions (we have one here), but they are notoriously difficult to do well. They do provide a useful way to keep up with the most interesting papers on the archive, and they are a good way of encouraging students to keep up with the literature. However, it can be difficult to maintain momentum, and the travel schedules of faculty members (I am particularly at fault here) often make journal clubs poorly attended and/or sporadically held.

AstroCoffee is different. Every day (that’s right, I said day, not week!) somewhere between fifteen and thirty people gather, from 10:30am - 11:00am, to discuss recent astro-ph papers. I’ve certainly heard of this, but haven’t attended on any of my previous visits to OSU. This time John invited me and I could see that these guys have clearly got it right. Students, postdocs and a bunch of faculty were there, had skimmed the papers in advance, and had interesting and detailed things to say. This isn’t typical at a weekly club, never mind a daily one. People were feisty too, meaning that you probably might not want to be there when they discuss one of your papers, although you’d undoubtedly learn things that would improve it.

The sheer size of the department is definitely one thing that helps this to work. But the unusual commitment of a significant number of faculty (and therefore their students and postdocs) is a big deal. Although the papers they focused on yesterday weren’t particularly close to my expertise, I’d be there every day if I was at OSU, because I’d clearly learn a huge amount and one couldn’t help but have new ideas in this environment. I’ve got to work on our journal club!

I finished up the day with a very nice dinner, got an early night at my hotel, and arrived back in Syracuse in time for lunch and to teach this afternoon. Unfortunately, because of my travel to OSU, I missed this week’s cosmology journal club here.

Steinn has a great report up from his recent visit to a Beyond Einstein Town Hall meeting.

The Beyond Einstein program is a comprehensive NASA vision to explore gravitation, cosmology, and fudamental physics over the next couple of decades. I was a member of the original roadmap team, and we worked hard to craft a complementary set of missions that was both amibitious yet affordable; a lot of groups took one for the team, recognizing that their favorite proposals would weigh down the final document and make it look like a wish list rather than a realistic program. Congress and OMB liked what we put together, and made it a part of NASA’s long-term budget.

We highlighted five missions. Two had well-defined mission concepts: LISA to search for gravitational waves and Constellation-X to look at X-rays. Three probes were in development and would be competed to choose a final version: a dark-energy probe (which morphed into the joint NASA/DOE dark energy mission), a black-hole finder to map the X-ray sky, and a search for polarization induced by gravitational waves in the CMB. For future possibilities we highlighted two vision missions: a Big Bang Observer to directly detect the gravity-wave background from inflation, and a Black Hole Imager to resolve X-rays from right next to the event horizons of black holes.

Subsequently, of course, NASA has decided that it has other priorities; primarily, visiting the Moon and Mars. That is too expensive to undertake while we’re squandering money on actual “science,” so some tough choices are going to be made. The current plan is to pick one of the above five missions (not including the vision concepts), and give it a budget slice. Maybe one of the others will get done, someday.

So a high-powered National Academy committee is examining everything closely, deciding what to keep and what to kill. I’m sure that’s not a fun job. Steinn’s report gives a nice informal review of what the committee is hearing, and to a lesser extent what they’re thinking. Gripping reading, in a somewhat morbid way.

Want to enter a lottery where you are bound to win? Here is your chance (no pun intended): A physics student in the UK, Jaspal Kaur Jutla, for her third year project, has devised a quantum lottery in which you pick your numbers on line, and then on May 2, the winner will be determined based on the number of decay counts of cesium 137 in an apparatus she has put together.

Now, as Ms. Jutla points out, you are bound to win. Or at least one of your future world-paths will… In the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, all outcomes of any experiment are realized. Rather than the wave function, a superposition of all possible outcomes, “collapsing” to a single outcome, in the many-worlds interpretation the universe itself branches into all the possible outcomes. This interpretation was proposed in 1957 by Hugh Everett III at Princeton. The physics world thought this inerpretation came along with a bit too much metaphysical baggage to be taken completely seriously. Nevertheless the mathematics are certainly self-consistent, I think. His thesis has been on my shelf since I was a graduate student, and I have always been fascinated by these ideas. Could they not form the basis for a theory with another time dimension, one in which, if you travel, the things that happen (or have happened, or will happen) change? Hmm. Could be useful, no?

Personally I have little metaphysical difficulty with the idea of many worlds. We all live in many worlds, all the time, no? If I have no direct knowledge of what’s happening outside my direct experience, then I must regard that part of the universe as being in a superposition of many, many possible states. Another nice feature of the many-worlds viewpoint is that it removes the special status of the observer; in this view she or he is a quantum state like any other.

Anyway, interestingly, Everett went on to become a defense analyst, later founding a computer consulting firm. He died, far too young, at age 51. (At least, in my world he did.) If he was right, then perhaps he will experience quantum immortality. And so will you…