Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee is enjoying a late surge in the polls for the Republican nomination, especially in the crucial early caucus state of Iowa. Part of his appeal is a sense of humor, as evidenced by this clever appropriation of the Chuck Norris Facts meme:

Chuck Norris, in addition to his considerable thespian credentials, is a proud creationist who wants the Bible taught in public schools. So it is not surprising to find Mike Huckabee denying the reality of evolution during a televised debate.

But this video, while also quite funny, is pretty scary. Via Cynical-C, it’s a 2004 speech to the Republican Governors’ Association.

A phone call from God! Quite the thigh-slapper. Huckabee artfully includes an assurance that God doesn’t take side during elections — although we all know his preferences, apparently.

I understand that it’s a joke. But there are moments of solemnity during the “phone call,” when Huckabee is being perfectly serious. One of those is at the 2:00 mark, where we are reminded that the President talks to God. And then we receive a list of instructions, including “protecting marriage.” (It needs to be protected from The Gays, for those who don’t have your decoder rings.) George W. Bush himself has occasionally mentioned talking to God, although usually in private meetings where it’s difficult to get objective verification, and admittedly his theology is somewhat unsystematic.

A lot of people who don’t really believe in the old-fashioned supernatural nevertheless think it’s a good idea to appropriate spiritual terminology for their own uses — re-defining “faith” as “any hypothesis that has not yet been proven,” or “God” as “the warm feeling I get when contemplating the universe,” or “religion” as “a nice kind of social club that brings people together to reinforce each other’s goodness.” It’s not a good idea. These are words, and they have meanings when you say them — people think they know what you have in mind. When you say “God,” most people think of the dictionary definition — “the one Supreme Being, the creator and ruler of the universe.” They’re not thinking of “the laws of nature.” And they honestly believe in this dictionary-definition God. And they let that belief affect, or at least justify, how they govern the country. Shouldn’t every non-religious person be deeply alarmed about this state of affairs?

At the Beyond Belief II conference, Stuart Kauffman gave an interesting (although flawed, I thought) talk about complexity and reductionism, and then ruined the whole thing by suggesting at the end that we should re-define “the sacred” as something arising from the radical contingency of the empirical path of biological evolution. Or something like that, it was a bit vague. What an abysmally bad idea. If you want to choose a word that refers to something other than the traditional religious conception of supreme beings and all that, then don’t use religious language. Because there are other people out there — far vaster in number than you — that are using those same words to mean exactly what they straightforwardly denote: a supernatural power with a vested interest in smiting the wicked, especially boys and girls who fall in love with boys and girls, respectively. And they’re running this country at the moment, and their beliefs are enacted into policy.

Of course, arguing with Mike Huckabee and his friends runs the risk that Chuck Norris will come along and kick your ass. That’s just the chance we have to take.

By Seamus Heaney.

Up-end the rain stick and what happens next
Is a music that you never would have known
To listen for. In a cactus stalk

Downpour, sluice-rash, spillage and backwash
Come flowing through. You stand there like a pipe
Being played by water, you shake it again lightly

And diminuendo runs through all its scales
Like a gutter stopping trickling. And now here comes
a sprinkle of drops out of the freshened leaves,

Then subtle little wets off grass and daisies;
Then glitter-drizzle, almost-breaths of air.
Up-end the stick again. What happens next

Is undiminished for having happened once,
Twice, ten, a thousand time before.
Who care if all the music that transpires

Is the fall of grit or dry seeds through a cactus?
You are like a rich man entering heaven
Through the ear of a raindrop. Listen now again.

For those wishing a more literal interpretation, here is what YouTube can teach you about the rain stick.

Two stories, superficially unrelated, neatly tied together by a deep lesson at the end.

The first is the case of Lucia de Berk, a Dutch nurse sentenced to life imprisonment in 2003 for multiple murders of patients under her care. However, there was very little direct evidence tying her specifically to the deaths of the individual cases. Much of the prosecution’s case against her was statistical: it was simply extremely unlikely, they argued, that so many patients would die under the care of a single nurse. Numbers like “one in 342 million chance” were bandied about.

But statistics can be tricky. Dutch mathematician Richard Gill has gone over the reasoning presented in the case, and found it utterly wrong-headed; he has organized a petition asking Dutch courts to re-open the case. Gill estimates that 1 in 9 nurses would experience a similar concentration of incidents during their shifts. And he notes that there were a total of six deaths in the ward where de Berk worked during the three years she was there, and seven deaths in the same ward during the three years before she arrived. Usually, the arrival of serial killers does not cause the mortality rate to decrease.

But patients had died, some of them young children, and someone had to be responsible. Incidents that had originally been classified as completely natural were re-examined and judged to be suspicious, after the investigation into de Berk’s activities started. The worst kinds of confirmation bias were in evidence. Here is a picture of what de Berk actually looks like, along with a courtroom caricature published in the newspapers.

Also, she read Tarot cards. Clearly, this is a woman who is witch-like and evil, and deserved to be punished.

The other story involves a brilliant piece of psychological insight from Peter Sagal’s The Book of Vice, previously lauded in these pages. It involves the reason why people play slot machines, or gamble more generally. There are many complicated factors that go into such a phenomenon, of course, but it nevertheless remains a deep puzzle why people would find it so compelling to roll the dice when everyone knows the odds are against you.

Peter asks us to consider the following joke:

An old man goes to the synagogue and prays, every day, thusly: “God, let me win the lottery. Please, just one big win. I’ll give money to the poor, and live a righteous life. . . . Please, let me win the lottery!”

For years, he comes to the synagogue, and the same prayer goes up: “Let me win the lottery! Please, Lord, won’t you show your grace, and let me win the lottery!”

Finally, one day, after fifteen years of this, as the man mutters, “The lottery, Lord, let me win the lottery. . . ,” a golden light suffuses the sanctuary, and a chorus of angels singing a major C chord is heard. The man looks up, tears in his blinded eyes, and says, “Lord . . . ?”

And a deep resonant voice rings out, “Please . . . would you please BUY A TICKET already?”

And that’s why we gamble: so God can answer our prayers. Fortune’s wheel, in other words, might occasionally want to favor us, but how can it if we don’t give it a chance? By playing the slots, we make it so much easier for Providence to bestow its bounty upon our deserving heads.

The common thread, of course, is the deep-seated aversion that human beings have to accepting randomness in the universe. We are great pattern-recognizers, even when patterns aren’t really there. Conversely, we are really bad at accepting that unlikely things will occasionally happen, if we wait long enough. When people are asked to write down a “random” sequence of coin flips, the mistake they inevitably make is not to include enough long sequences of the same result.

Human beings don’t want to accept radical contingency. They want things to have explanations, even the laws of physics. They want life to have a purpose, chance events to have meaning, and children’s deaths to have a person to blame. They want life to make sense, and they want to hit the triple jackpot because they’ve been through a lot of suffering and they damn well deserve it.

Of course, sometimes things do happen for a reason. And sometimes they don’t. That’s life here at the edge of chaos, and I for one enjoy the ride.

Paul Davies has published an Op-Ed in the New York Times, about science and faith. Edge has put together a set of responses — by Jerry Coyne, Nathan Myhrvold, Lawrence Krauss, Scott Atran, Jeremy Bernstein, and me, so that’s some pretty lofty company I’m hob-nobbing with. Astonishingly, bloggers have also weighed in: among my regular reads, we find responses from Dr. Free-Ride, PZ, and The Quantum Pontiff. (Bloggers have much more colorful monikers than respectable folk.) Peter Woit blames string theory.

I post about this only with some reluctance, as I fear the resulting conversation is very likely to lower the average wisdom of the human race. Davies manages to hit a number of hot buttons right up front — claiming that both science and religion rely on faith (I don’t think there is any useful definition of the word “faith” in which that is true), and mentioning in passing something vague about the multiverse. All of which obscures what I think is his real point, which only pokes through clearly at the end — a claim to the effect that the laws of nature themselves require an explanation, and that explanation can’t come from the outside.

Personally I find this claim either vacuous or incorrect. Does it mean that the laws of physics are somehow inevitable? I don’t think that they are, and if they were I don’t think it would count as much of an “explanation,” but your mileage may vary. More importantly, we just don’t have the right to make deep proclamations about the laws of nature ahead of time — it’s our job to figure out what they are, and then deal with it. Maybe they come along with some self-justifying “explanation,” maybe they don’t. Maybe they’re totally random. We will hopefully discover the answer by doing science, but we won’t make progress by setting down demands ahead of time.

So I don’t know what it could possibly mean, and that’s what I argued in my response. Paul very kindly emailed me after reading my piece, and — not to be too ungenerous about it, I hope — suggested that I would have to read his book.

My piece is below the fold. The Edge discussion is interesting, too. But if you feel your IQ being lowered by long paragraphs on the nature of “faith” that don’t ever quite bother to give precise definitions and stick to them, don’t blame me.

Continue reading ‘Turtles Much of the Way Down’

We’ve previously celebrated Father Georges-Henri Lemaitre on this very blog, for taking seriously the idea of the Big Bang. His name has come up again in the post expressing thanks for Hubble’s Law — several commenters, including John Farrell, who wrote the book and should know — mentioned that it was actually Lemaitre, not Hubble, who first derived the law. That offered me a chance to haughtily dismiss these folks as being unable to distinguish between a theoretical prediction (Lemaitre was one of the first to understand the equations governing relativistic cosmology) and an observational discovery. But it turns out that Lemaitre did actually look at the data! Shows you how much you should listen to me.

I received an email from Albert Bosma that cleared up the issue a bit. Indeed, it was not just a theoretical prediction (as I had wrongly presumed) — Lemaitre definitely used data to estimate Hubble’s constant in a 1927 paper. He obtained a value of about 625 km/sec/Mpc, not too different from Hubble’s ultimate value. Of course, Lemaitre’s paper was in French, so it might as well be in Martian. Arthur Eddington translated the paper for the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, in 1931, but left out the (one-sentence) discussion of the data!

Here is a slide from Albert containing the original paragraphs. Click for a larger version, and you can compare the French to the English. Thanks to Albert for sending it along.

However — Lemaitre didn’t have very good data (and what he did was partly from Hubble, I gather). And for whatever reason, he did not plot velocity vs. distance. Instead, he seems to have taken the average velocity (which was known since the work of Vesto Slipher to be nonzero) and divided by some estimated average distance! If Hubble’s Law — the linear relation between velocity and distance — is true, that will correctly get you Hubble’s constant, but it’s definitely not enough to establish Hubble’s Law. If you have derived the law theoretically from the principles of general relativity applied to an expanding universe, and are convinced you are correct, maybe all you care about is fixing the value of the one free parameter in your model. But I think it’s still correct to say that credit for Hubble’s Law goes to Hubble — although it’s equally correct to remind people of the crucial role that Lemaitre played in the development of modern cosmology.

Further update: Albert has now sent me more snippets from Lemaitre’s original paper (one, two, three), and the English translation. (All jpg images.)

Last year we gave thanks for the Lagrangian of the Standard Model of Particle Physics. This year, we give thanks for Hubble’s Law, the linear relationship between velocity and distance of faraway galaxies:

v = H₀ d.

(We could be sticklers and call it the “effective velocity as inferred from the cosmological redshift,” but it’s a holiday and we’re in an expansive mood.) Here is the original plot, from Hubble 1929:

And here is a modern version, from Riess, Press and Kirshner 1996 (figure from Ned Wright’s cosmology tutorial):

Note that Hubble’s distance scale goes out to about two million parsecs, whereas the modern one goes out to 500 million parsecs. Note also that Hubble mis-labeled the vertical axis, expressing velocity in units of kilometers, but he discovered the expansion of the universe so we can forgive him. And yes, the link above is to Hubble’s original paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Only 146 citations! He’d never get tenure these days. (Over 1000 citations for Freedman et al., the final paper from the Hubble Key Project to measure H₀.)

Hubble was helped along in his investigations by Milton Humason; together they wrote a longer follow-up paper. (Some habits don’t change.) Here is a sobering sentence from an article about Humason: “During the period from 1930 until his retirement in 1957, he measured the velocities of 620 galaxies.” These days projects measure millions of velocities. So let’s give thanks for better telescopes, CCD cameras, and software, while we’re at it.

Hubble’s Law is an empirical fact about photons we receive in our telescopes, but it’s implications are profound: the universe is expanding. This discovery marks a seismic shift in how we think about the cosmos, as profound as the Copernican displacement away from the center. It was so important, Einstein felt the need to visit Hubble on Mt. Wilson and check that he wasn’t making any mistakes.

Chad has a spectacular takedown of the latest Easterbrook nonsense. It is impossible to do much better. Plus, you get to read snark like:

His most recent effort is just a masterpiece of dumb, though. This is a desperately stupid bit of work, even by the standards of desperately stupid science interludes in Gregg Easterbrook columns. He packs more dumb into these nine paragraphs than I would’ve thought possible in a major media outlet.

Go give it a read, and enjoy.

Through the magic of Google Trends, we now must face the brutal truth. No one cares. Or at least, about half as many people care now the fraction of people who care is now half as many as four years ago:

Now, it turns out that this isn’t quite as big deal as one might think. It turns out that people just care less about everything, at least in terms of metrics that Google can track. Pretty much every generic search term I could think of showed similar declines, which leaves me wondering what people are doing now instead of googling for information. Heading straight to Wikipedia or blogs?

Seems so! More interesting to me were the seasonal variations in science-y searches:

It seems that no one cares about science during the Christmas season, what with all the shopping and downing of eggnog. However, when you notice the drop during summers, it’s clear that a fair fraction of the “science” googling is school related. Amusing also is the end-of-semester desperation that sets in among our budding young plagarists:

Finally, a big shout out to all my homies on the pacific rim (in so much as a middle-aged white lady geek with kids can have “homies”). Apparently, while astronomy is just not that interesting any more, at least it’s big locally:

Very sad to report that Sidney Coleman passed away yesterday. Sidney, a professor at Harvard, was one of the greatest theoretical physicists of recent times. He doesn’t share the name recognition among the general public that some of his contemporaries have — he was always more interested in the deep underlying principles of quantum field theory than in any particular model of the universe — but no student of high-energy physics could help but be deeply influenced by his thinking, both through his research and his famous Erice lectures. He was an invaluable resource when I was a grad student at Harvard, both through his quantum field theory course and through many hours spent in his office pestering him with specific questions. At my wedding just a couple of months ago, some of the happy-memory-sharing involved trading our favorite Sidney quotes; “Modesty forbids me but honesty compels me” was my personal choice.

Sidney’s papers were not like anyone else’s. One of his classic quotes, from a paper with de Luccia on “Gravitational Effects on and of Vacuum Decay“:

The possibility that we are living in a false vacuum has never been a cheering one to contemplate. Vacuum decay is the ultimate ecological catastrophe; in the new vacuum there are new constants of nature; after vacuum decay, not only is life as we know it impossible, so is chemistry as we know it. However, one could always draw stoic comfort from the possibility that perhaps in the course of time the new vacuum would sustain, if not life as we know it, at least some structures capable of knowing joy. This possibility has now been eliminated.

Plenty of people aspire to be profound and playful at the same time; Sidney could pull it off, and had the technical chops to back it up.

Sidney had been sick for the last few years. In 2005 there was a conference in his honor, which arguably featured the greatest concentration of physics talent in recent memory; I wasn’t there, but Jacques Distler blogged a bit about it.

Physics will be a little bit duller without him.

PhD Comics has a nice one page presentation about what life is like for a typical PhD student in observational astronomy:

The faculty version involves writing proposals pretty much all the time. It’s not nearly as funny. Trust me.

(hat tip: the Astrodyke)