Reverse chronology — narrating a story, or parts of one, backwards in time — is a venerable technique in literature, going back at least as far as Virgil’s Aeneid. Much more interesting is a story with incompatible arrows of time: some characters live “backwards” while others experience life normally.

Probably the most famous contemporary example is Martin Amis’s chilling novel, Time’s Arrow.

Eating is unattractive too… Various items get gulped into my mouth, and after skillful massage with tongue and teeth I transfer them to the plate for additional sculpture with knife and fork and spoon. That bit’s quite therapeutic at least, unless you’re having soup or something, which can be a real sentence. Next you face the laborious business of cooling, of reassembly, of storage, before the return of these foodstuffs to the Superette, where, admittedly, I am promptly and generously reimbursed for my pains. Then you tool down the aisles, with trolley or basket, returning each can and packet to its rightful place.

The narrator of Time’s Arrow is a disembodied consciousness who lives inside another person, Odilo Unverdorben. The host lives life in the ordinary sense, forward in time, but the homunculus narrator experiences everything backwards – his first memory is Unverdorben’s death (although, for expository purposes, he comes into existence as a full, speaking intellect). He has no control over Unverdorben’s actions, nor access to his memories, but passively travels through life in reverse order. At first Unverdorben (going under the name of “Tod Friendly”) appears to us as a doctor, which seems like a morbid occupation – patients shuffle into the emergency room, where the doctors suck medicines out of their bodies and rip off their bandages, sending them out into the night bleeding and screaming. But near the end of the book, we learn that Unverdorben was an assistant at Auschwitz, where he created life where none had been before – turning chemicals and electricity and corpses into living persons. Only now, thinks the narrator, does the world finally make sense.

The Truth Laid Bear has an “ecosystem” to rank blogs, using both inbound links and traffic as indicators of popularity. Here’s the top ten as of this afternoon:

Higher Beings

1. Daily Kos: State of the Nation (6587) details
2. Michelle Malkin (4935) details
3. Instapundit.com (4928) details
4. Cosmic Variance (4863) details
5. Tricia’s Musings (4712) details
6. lgf: helping moonbats sleep soundly (3906) details
7. Boing Boing (3762) details
8. Talking Points Memo (3314) details
9. Power Line (3041) details
10. Wanderlust Sha (3027) details

Okay, there seems to be a bug somewhere; we’re not really the fourth-largest blog on the Internets, by any plausible way of counting. Unless they are counting by awesomeness. But then we would have Instapundit and Malkin beat handily.

Today is Grad School Recruitment Day at Caltech, from which I surmise that there must be dozens of readers of this blog who are currently puzzling over where they might want to spend the next years of their lives. And hundreds of readers who went through this puzzling at one point themselves, or will face it in the future. So, since “work” is preventing me from blogging very much, here is a place to share stories and questions; we’ve previously given advice, but you can never get too much. (Professors, did you know that these students are talking about you behind your back on the internet? A brave new world etc.)

My grad school story: I was an astronomy major at Villanova as an undergrad, but knew that I really wanted to do physics. Nobody in my department was really qualified to give advice about grad schools in theoretical high energy physics or cosmology, but there was a big book put out by the AIP that listed programs and the people working in each specialty; not sure if the book still exists, or whether it’s been replaced by a website. So I applied to five different places, all top-notch; got into three, waitlisted at one, and rejected at one. (I had a not-completely-unheard-of profile: small undergrad school, great letters, good but not perfect grades and GRE’s, vague and untutored desire to unify all of theoretical physics.) I wanted to stay on the East Coast for personal reasons (= “girlfriend”). Sadly, the school that rejected me (Princeton) and wait-listed me (Harvard) were the ones on the East Coast that I had applied to. So I visited Harvard myself to plead my case; to no avail, of course (I wouldn’t recommend doing this — it won’t work and can annoy people), but I was told that if I could get an outside fellowship they would accept me. And then I did get an outside fellowship, from the NSF; but Harvard still wouldn’t accept me. Apparently that was a bit of a tactic. So I called up the astronomy department and asked if they would let me in. They were a bit surprised that physics wouldn’t accept me, given that I was free, but happily took me on. Which explains why I have no degrees in physics, even though all of my subsequent employment has been in physics departments.

Did it matter that I went to an astronomy department rather than a physics department where my interests would have been a more natural fit? Absolutely — I hung out with people who chatted about redshifts in their spare time, not with people who chatted about Feynman diagrams, and that lack of immersion in a crucial subject has undoubtedly been a handicap. But I was generally in a good situation (you can’t really complain about being at Harvard), and I made the most of it — took many physics classes, spent time talking to professors, wrote papers with other students and mathematicians as well as my advisor, went to MIT and ended up collaborating with people there as well. If you go to someplace that is decent enough to offer opportunities, it will be up to you to take the initiative and make your time there a success.

By Muriel Rukeyser.

Whether it is a speaker, taut on a platform,
who battles a crowd with the hammers of his words,
whether it is the crash of lips on lips
after absence and wanting : we must close
the circuits of ideas, now generate,
that leap in the body’s action or the mind’s repose.

Over us is a striking on the walls of the sky,
here are the dynamos, steel-black, harboring flame,
here is the man night-walking who derives
tomorrow’s manifestoes from this midnight’s meeting ;
here we require the proof in solidarity,
iron on iron, body on body, and the large single beating.

And behind us in time are the men who second us
as we continue. And near us is our love :
no forced contempt, no refusal in dogma, the close
of the circuit in a fierce dazzle of purity.
And over us is night a field of pansies unfolding,
charging with heat its softness in a symbol
to weld and prepare for action our minds’ intensity.

So I was poking around Amazon.com looking at biographies of some of the founding names of thermodynamics and kinetic theory — Boltzmann of course was an interesting character, but there are a lot of good stories out there. The American physicist Josiah Willard Gibbs obviously was a major player — among other things, he introduced the concept of the statistical ensemble, the primary tool by which we nowadays think of thermodynamic systems.

One of the notable biographies of Gibbs, it turns out, is by none other than Muriel Rukeyser. That’s a name that should be familiar to long-time blog readers, as she was the author of the delightful poem The Conjugation of the Paramecium. Any poet who spends her free time writing biographies of the titans of statistical mechanics is my kind of poet.

Turns out that Rukeyser led a pretty interesting life in her own right. She was a political activist, drawing on her own experiences as a feminist Jewish bisexual, but agitating for social justice in a number of different areas. She wrote for the Daily Worker, covered the Scottsboro case, and investigated an outbreak of silicosis among miners in Gauley Bridge, West Virginia. You can have a look at her FBI file, if you have a morbid fascination concerning what the government might do with information about what friends you have and what organizations you belong to.

Happily, these days we have restored the balance of civil liberties, and the government would never spy on anyone except terrorists, leaving the rest of us free to write poetry and follow the evolution of distribution functions on phase space unperturbed by political considerations.

Bit of a kerfuffle over at DramaBlogs ScienceBlogs, in the wake of PZ Myers’s visit to a screening of Ben Stein’s new anti-evolution movie, Expelled. PZ apparently signed up online for tickets to a screening (under his own name), but upon arrival he was recognized by the organizers, and asked to leave. Expelled from Expelled! It’s the 21st century, we all have to re-calibrate our irony meters. Adding to the fun was the fact that the rest of PZ’s party was allowed to continue in to see the movie — and among the friends he had dragged along was Richard Dawkins, who was apparently not recognized. This is too delicious a story to pass up, and it’s already been reported in the New York Times and elsewhere.

But not everyone is amused, even on the pro-science side. Chris Mooney complains that the controversy gives a huge boost, in the form of priceless publicity, to Expelled and its supporters. People who never would have heard of the movie will now be curious to see it; the filmmakers are already gloating about all the attention.

I think that Chris is right: this is publicity for the movie that they couldn’t possibly have received any other way, and PZ and Dawkins are basically doing exactly what the filmmakers were hoping for all along.

And they should keep right on doing it.

To understand why, consider the much more intemperate response by Matt Nisbet, Chris’s partner in the Framing Science game. They have been exhorting scientists to communicate more effectively by framing issues in a way that resonate with their audiences. This sounds like very good advice, and in fact kind of obvious and uncontroversial. But when ask to give examples, Chris and Matt often choose Richard Dawkins as their poster boy for what not to do. Personally I think that Dawkins has been very good for the cultural discourse overall, but Matt and Chris fear that his avowed atheism will turn people against science, making things easier for folks who want to fight against evolution in public schools.

In his post, Matt is perfectly blatant: PZ and Dawkins are hurting the cause, and should just shut up. When called up by the media, they should decline to speak, instead suggesting that the reporter contact someone who can give the pro-evolution message in a way that is friendlier to religion.

As you might expect, neither PZ, nor Dawkins, nor any of their ilk (and I count myself among them) are likely to follow this undoubtedly well-intentioned advice, as this pithy rejoinder demonstrates. The heart of the difference in approaches is evident in the analogies that Matt brings up, namely to political campaigns:

If Dawkins and PZ really care about countering the message of The Expelled camp, they need to play the role of Samantha Power, Geraldine Ferraro and so many other political operatives who through misstatements and polarizing rhetoric have ended up being liabilities to the causes and campaigns that they support. Lay low and let others do the talking.

When Chris and Matt talk to the PZ/Dawkins crowd, they do a really bad job of understanding and working within the presuppositions of their audience — exactly what framing is supposed to be all about. To the Framers, what’s going on is an essentially political battle; a public-relations contest, pitting pro-science vs. anti-science, where the goal is to sway more people to your side. And there is no doubt that such a contest is going on. But it’s not all that is going on, and it’s not the only motivation one might have for wading into discussions of science and religion.

There is a more basic motivation: telling the truth.

What Matt and Chris (seemingly) fail to understand is that PZ Myers and Richard Dawkins are not trying to be successful politicians, persuading the largest number of people to come over to their side. They have no interest in being politicians. They are critics, and their goal is to say correct things about the world and argue against incorrect statements. Of course, they would certainly like to see evolution rather than creationism taught in schools, and ultimately they would be very happy if all of humanity were persuaded of the correctness of their views. But their books and blogs about science and religion are not strategic documents designed to bring about some desired outcome; they are attempts to say true things about issues they care about. Telling them “Shut up! You’ll offend the sensibilities of people we are trying to persuade!” is like talking to a brick wall, or at least in an alien language. You will have to frame things much better than that.

Politicians and critics often don’t get along. And the choice to be one or the other usually comes down more to the personality of the individual rather than some careful cost-benefit analysis. (You know that PZ will be regaling youngsters with the story of how he was expelled from Expelled for decades to come.) I’m very much in the mold of a critic; one of my first ever blog posts was why I could never be a politician. It’s easy enough to tell the difference: even if a critic knew for a fact that a certain true statement would harm their cause politically, they would still insist on saying it.

But one stance or the other is not better nor worse; society very much needs both politicians and critics. The job of a critic sounds very lofty — speaking truth to power, heedless of extraordinary social pressures and the hooting condemnation of a benighted populace. But if everyone were a critic, it would be a disaster. We need politicians to actually things done, and (in the rare instances where it is carried out with integrity) the role of a politician should be one of the most honored in society. A gifted politician will understand the contours of what is possible, and work within the constraints posed by the real world to move society in a better direction.

However, we also need critics. If everyone were a politician, it would be equally disastrous. In Bernard Shaw’s famous phrasing, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” The perfect can be the enemy of the good, but if we don’t have a loud and persistent chorus of voices reminding us of how far short we fall of perfection, we won’t work as hard as we can to get there.

And we should hardly be surprised that bloggers and polemicists tend to be critics rather than politicians. We should have people out there selling evolution to skeptical listeners who might be committed to religion and suspicious of science. But that doesn’t mean that sincere voices who believe that thinking scientifically sends you down the path to atheism should be told to shut up. Without stubborn critics who refuse to compromise on their vision of the truth, our discourse would be an enormously poorer place.

It’s about the time of year when prospective graduate students are making one of the most important decisions of their lives: where to go to grad school. So we really should give some advice about that, but happily we already have! And it still seems pretty relevant. Meanwhile, today I’m at the KITP in Santa Barbara, speaking on a panel on The Perils and Pitfalls of Speaking to the Press. (One in a series organized by the KITP’s Journalist in Residence.) So I have to give a short talk about that, and thought I could take advantage of the opportunity by turning it into a blog post.

Sadly, I eventually realized that I do not have a Grand Unified Theory of interactions between scientists and journalists. It is a complicated relationship, in which there is much overlap in objectives on both sides, but also undeniably some tensions here and there. Consider the following two anecdotes:

• My first direct interaction with the science press was as a grad student, when I was working with Edward Farhi and Alan Guth on whether it was possible to build a time machine out of cosmic strings (as proposed by Richard Gott). Our work was written up in Science News, and they did an extremely careful job — Ron Cowen interviewed us in depth, asked good questions, and the magazine even sent us a draft copy of the article to check for accuracy before it was printed. (That almost never happens, don’t expect it.) But when we saw it in print, an editor had helpfully inserted just one new sentence to make things more clear — explaining that open universes were ones that would expand forever. Except that we were working in the slightly unusual context of 3 spacetime dimensions, not the usual 4, and in that case open universes don’t really “expand” at all. Good intentions gone awry.
• I was once in the audience for a panel featuring David Kestenbaum, a science reporter for NPR. He played us a tape of a radio journalist talking to a scientist about the fear of avian flu spreading from the Bronx Zoo. The scientist babbled on at length about open systems and complex environment and disease vectors in a rapid-fire stream of utter incomprehensibility. The journalist stopped him for a second, and basically said “Look, cutting to the chase, does the zoo pose a danger?” The scientist said “No, absolutely not.” “Okay, could you say that directly?” “Sure, no problem.” And then the journalist asks the question again, to which the scientist — well, you can guess. A rapid-fire stream of dense jargon, in which the word “No” never appeared. Completely useless for the radio.

As far as the Very Big Picture is concerned, scientists and journalists are on the same side. We all want to tell interesting and true stories to a wide audience. But when it comes to specifics, aims and competencies often diverge. Understanding what each others’ goals and constraints are can definitely help to make for a better final product.

So here are some things that I, as a scientist, have figured out about what journalists want. At least I think I have figured them out; actual journalists are welcome to jump in and explain what they really want in their own words.

Continue reading ‘Unsolicited Advice, Part Six: Talking to the Media’

Barack Obama gave a major speech on race in Philadelphia today. Inflammatory statements by his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, have been receiving a lot of media attention — they feed into fears that many Americans have about a black guy with a funny-sounding name. Obama has strongly condemned the statements, but refused to dissociate himself from his pastor.

Instead, as evidenced in this excerpt from his speech (which he wrote himself), Obama is choosing to respond with a nuanced and honest assessment of race-based resentment in America. It’s a novel strategy; we’ll have to see if the collective attention span of the media and public is up to the task of absorbing something like this.

… This is the reality in which Reverend Wright and other African-Americans of his generation grew up. They came of age in the late fifties and early sixties, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted. What’s remarkable is not how many failed in the face of discrimination, but rather how many men and women overcame the odds; how many were able to make a way out of no way for those like me who would come after them.

But for all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn’t make it – those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination. That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations – those young men and increasingly young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hope or prospects for the future. Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race, and racism, continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways. For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician’s own failings.

And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright’s sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning. That anger is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change. But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.

In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience – as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.

Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren’t always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.

Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze – a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many. And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns – this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.

A bit more below the fold.
Continue reading ‘A More Perfect Union’

In honor of the holiday, I offer you a Muppet-ized version of “Danny Boy”:

Today’s Bloggingheads dialogue features me and writer John Horgan — I will spare you a screen capture of our faces, but here is a good old-fashioned link.

John is the author of The End of Science, in which he argues that much of modern physics has entered an era of “ironic science,” where speculation about unobservable things (inflation, other universes, extra dimensions) has replaced the hard-nosed empiricism of an earlier era. Most of our discussion went over that same territory, focusing primarily on inflation but touching on other examples as well.

You can judge for yourself whether I was persuasive or not, but the case I tried to make was that attitudes along the lines of “that stuff you’re talking about can never be observed, so you’re not doing science, it’s just theology” are woefully simplistic, and simply don’t reflect the way that science works in the real world. Other branches of the wavefunction, or the state of the universe before the Big Bang, may by themselves be unobservable, but they are part of a larger picture that remains tied to what we see around us. (Inflation is a particularly inappropriate example to pick on; while it has by no means been established, and it is undeniably difficult to distinguish definitively between models, it keeps making predictions that are tested and come out correct — spatial flatness of the universe, density fluctuations larger than the Hubble radius, correlations between perturbations in matter and radiation, fluctuation amplitudes on different scales that are almost equal but not quite…)

If you are firmly convinced that talking about the multiverse and other unobservable things is deeply unscientific and a leading indicator of the Decline of the West, nothing I say will change your mind. In particular, you may judge that the question which inflation tries to answer — “Why was the early universe like that?” — is a priori unscientific, and we should just accept the universe as it is. That’s an intellectually consistent position that you are welcome to take. The good news is that the overwhelming majority of interesting science being done today remains closely connected to tangible phenomena just as it (usually!) has been through the history of modern science. But if you instead ask in good faith why sensible people would be led to hypothesize all of this unobservable superstructure, there are perfectly good answers to be had.

The most important point is that the underlying goal of science is not simply making predictions — it’s developing an understanding of the mechanisms underlying the operation of the natural world. This point is made very eloquently by David Deutsch in his book The Fabric of Reality. As I mention in the dialogue, Deutsch chooses this quote by Steven Weinberg as an exemplar of hard-boiled instrumentalism:

The important thing is to be able to make predictions about images on the astronomers’ photographic plates, frequencies of spectral lines, and so on, and it simply doesn’t matter whether we ascribe these predictions to the physical effects of gravitational fields on the motion of planets and photons or to a curvature of space and time.

That’s crazy, of course — the dynamics through which we derive those predictions matters enormously. (I suspect that Weinberg was trying to emphasize that there may be formulations of the same underlying theory that look different but are actually equivalent; then the distinction truly wouldn’t matter, but saying “the important thing is to make predictions” is going a bit too far.) Deutsch asks us to imagine an “oracle,” a black box which will correctly answer any well-posed empirical question we ask of it. So in principle the oracle can help us make any prediction we like — would that count as the ultimate end-all scientific theory? Of course not, as it would provide no understanding whatsoever. As Deutsch notes, it would be able to predict that a certain rocket-ship design would blow up on take-off, but offer no clue as to how we could fix it. The oracle would serve as a replacement for experiments, but not for theories. No scientist, armed with an infinite array of answers to specific questions but zero understanding of how they were obtained, would declare their work completed.

If making predictions were all that mattered, we would have stopped doing particle physics some time around the early 1980’s. The problem with the Standard Model of particle physics, remember, is that (until we learned more about neutrino physics and dark matter) it kept making predictions that fit all of our experiments! We’ve been working very hard, and spending a lot of money, just to do experiments for which the Standard Model would be unable to make an accurate prediction. And we do so because we’re not satisfied with predicting the outcome of experiments; we want to understand the underlying mechanism, and the Standard Model (especially the breaking of electroweak symmetry) falls short on that score.

The next thing to understand is that all of these crazy speculations about multiverses and extra dimensions originate in the attempt to understand phenomena that we observe right here in the nearby world. Gravity and quantum mechanics both exist — very few people doubt that. And therefore, we want a theory that can encompass both of them. By a very explicit chain of reasoning — trying to understand perturbation theory, getting anomalies to cancel, etc. — we are led to superstrings in ten dimensions. And then we try to bring that theory back into contact with the observed world around us, compactifying those extra dimensions and trying to match onto particle physics and cosmology. The program may or may not work — it’s certainly hard, and we may ultimately decide that it’s just too hard, or find an idea that works just as well without all the extra-dimensional superstructure. Theories of what happened before the Big Bang are the same way; we’re not tossing out scenarios because we think it’s amusing, but because we are trying to understand features of the world we actually do observe, and that attempt drives us to these hypotheses.

Ultimately, of course, we do need to make contact with observation and experiment. But the final point to emphasize is that not every prediction of every theory needs to be testable; what needs to be testable is the framework as a whole. If we do manage to construct a theory that makes a set of specific and unambiguous testable predictions, and those predictions are tested and the theory comes through with flying colors, and that theory also predicts unambiguously that inflation happened or there are multiple universes or extra dimensions, I will be very happy to believe in the reality of those ideas. That happy situation does not seem to be around the corner — right now the data are offering us a few clues, on the basis of which invent new hypotheses, and we have a long way to go before some of those hypotheses grow into frameworks which can be tested against data. If anyone is skeptical that this is likely to happen, that is certainly their prerogative, and they should feel fortunate that the overwhelming majority of contemporary science is not forced to work that way. Others, meanwhile, will remain interested in questions that do seem to call for this kind of bold speculation, and are willing to push the program forward for a while to see what happens. Keeping in mind, of course, that when Boltzmann was grounding the laws of thermodynamics using kinetic theory, most physicists scoffed at the notion of these “atoms” and rolled their eyes at the invocation of unobservable entities to explain everyday phenomena.

There is also a less rosy possibility, which may very well come to pass: that we develop more than one theory that fits all of the experimental data we know how to collect, such that they differ in specific predictions that are beyond our technological reach. That would, indeed, be too bad. But at the moment, we seem to be in little danger of this embarrassment of theoretical riches. We don’t even have one theory that reconciles gravity and quantum mechanics while matching cleanly onto our low-energy world, or a comprehensive model of the early universe that explains our initial conditions. If we actually do develop more than one, science will be faced with an interesting kind of existential dilemma that doesn’t have a lot of precedent in history. (Can anyone think of an example?) But I’m not losing sleep over this possibility; and in the meantime, I’ll keep trying to develop at least one such idea.

Choose your favorite frame of reference, collapse your wavefunction, and estimate your error bars — we have a highly nontrivial day ahead of us. After years of contemplation, Talk Like a Physicist Day is finally here, as predicted. (Falsifiably!)

Even the biologists are celebrating (intentionally or not), learning the joys of frictionless surfaces. And some handy reference guides have been provided.

There is also a Facebook group, which I mention so that I can quote the comment left there by Phillip Fernandez:

Wow, this is like being in the ground state of a harmonic oscillator potential. It just doesn’t get any lower than this.

That’s the spirit! On ordinary days, you would goof off by playing video games; but today, you can goof off by simulating special relativity. (Inspired by this post, I am reliably informed.)

And today, instead of getting stuck in traffic, just tell your boss you were captured in a compression wave!

I’m sure you don’t need much more inspiration than that. But just to be sure…