Blogs / Cosmic Variance

John McCain thinks he’s hit on a good strategy for the upcoming Presidential campaign: make fun of scientists.

WEST GLACIER, Mont. — If you’ve heard Sen. John McCain’s stump speech, you’ve surely heard him talk about grizzly bears. The federal government, he declares with horror and astonishment, has spent $3 million to study grizzly bear DNA. “I don’t know if it was a paternity issue or criminal,” he jokes, “but it was a waste of money.”

A McCain campaign commercial also tweaks the bear research: “Three million to study the DNA of bears in Montana. Unbelievable.”

Three million whole dollars! Just think what we could do with so much money.

The Washington Post article goes on to note, what should come as no surprise to anyone reading here, that the grizzly bear study is actually very interesting and worthwhile science. The researchers, led by Katherine Kendall of the U.S. Geological Survey, performed the first accurate survey of grizzlies in the Northern Continental Divide ecosystem. They discovered the happy news that this formerly endangered species had substantially rebounded, thanks in part to three decades of conservation efforts. The kind of thing that you actually have to go out and collect data to discover.

Completely beside the point of course. John McCain doesn’t care about grizzly bears one way or the other, and to him 3 million dollars is chump change. What he cares about his the symbolism — enough to highlight it in his stump speech and TV commercials.

McCain is tapping into a deep strain of anti-intellectualism among American voters. Some of us tend to take for granted that questions about the workings of the natural world should be addressed by scientists using scientific methods, and that attacks on science must be motivated by external forces such as economic or religious interests. What scientists tend to underestimate is the extent to which many people react viscerally against science just because it is science. Or, more generally, because it is seen as part of an effort on the part of elites to force their worldview on folks who are getting along just fine without all these fancy ideas, thank you very much.

In the old-time (1980’s) controversies about teaching creationism in schools, pre-Intelligent-Design, one of the most common arguments was that school boards should have “local control” over the curriculum. Defenders of evolution replied that this was clearly a ruse to disguise a religious anti-science agenda. Which may have been true for some of the national organizations behind the movement; but for many school boards and communities, it really was about local control. They didn’t want to be told what to teach their kids by some group of coastal elitists with Ph.D.s, and creationism was a way to fight back.

Don’t believe me? They are happy to tell you so to your face. Consider the case of John Derbyshire, columnist for the National Review Online. Derbyshire is admittedly a complicated case, on the one hand writing books about the Riemann hypothesis and on the other proudly proclaiming that he reads Blondie and Hagar the Horrible for “insights into the human condition.” And he is also generally pro-science and pro-evolution in particular. But nevertheless — despite the fact that he is smart and educated enough to understand that evolution is “right” in the old-fashioned sense of right and wrong — he will state explicitly (and quote himself later in case you missed it) that

I couldn’t care less whether my president believes in the theory of evolution. In fact, reflecting on some recent experiences, I’m not sure that I wouldn’t prefer a president who didn’t. [Emphasis in original.]

And why is that? I wrote a whole blog post explaining why it is important that the President understand and accept the workings of the natural world, but obviously Derbyshire disagrees. The reason why is that scientific understanding is too often the bailiwick of elite leftist snobs.

Possibly as a result of having grown up in the lower classes of provincial England, I detest snobbery. I mean, I really, viscerally, loathe it. This is one reason I hate the Left so much…

Invited to choose between having my kids educated, my car fixed, or my elderly relatives cared for by (a) people of character, spirit, and dedication who believe in pseudoscience, or (b) unionized, time-serving drudges who believe in real science, which would I choose? Invited to choose between a president who is (a) a patriotic family man of character and ability who believes the universe was created on a Friday afternoon in 4,004 B.C. with all biological species instantly represented, or (b) an amoral hedonist and philanderer who “loathes the military” but who believes in the evolution of species via natural selection across hundreds of millions of years, which would I choose? Are you kidding?

The real point is not who you would choose in such a situation — it’s that Derbyshire sincerely believes that these are the kinds of choices one typically needs to make. One the one hand: character, spirit, dedication, and pseudoscience. On the other: amoral, hedonistic drudges (sic) who believe in real science.

Derbyshire is not alone. Conservative commentator Tom Bethell has published a Politically Incorrect Guide to Science in which he takes down such Leftist conspiracies as evolution, global warming, AIDS research, and (um) relativity. At Tech Central Station, Lee Harris pens a passionate defense of being stupid more generally:

Today, no self-respecting conservative wants to be thought stupid, not even by the lunatics on the far left. Yet there are far worse things than looking stupid to others—and one of them is being conned by those who are far cleverer than we are. Indeed, in certain cases, the desire to appear intelligent at all costs can be downright suicidal…

In a world that absurdly overrates the advantage of sheer brain power, no one wants to be seen as a member in good standing of the stupid party. Yet stupidity has been and will always remain the best defense mechanism against the ordinary conman and the intellectual dreamer, just as Odysseus found that stuffing cotton in his ears was his best defense against beguiling but fatal song of the sirens.

Again: most sensible conservative commentators are quick to say “of course, all things being equal, it’s better to be correct/intelligent/scientific than otherwise.” But they truly don’t believe that all things are equal. The real fight isn’t against science, it’s a much broader culture war. Science is being used as a stand-in for a constellation of things against which many Americans react viscerally — elitism, paternalism, snobbery. Presenting better science and more transparent evidence isn’t going to change this attitude all by itself. We need to address the underlying cause: the relic anti-intellectual attitude that still animates so many people in this country.

The grizzly bears will thank you.

External review letters for tenure cases, like recommendation letters more generally, aren’t usually public, so who knows what juicy bits are in there that will never see the light of day? Here is a line from a letter which I promise is genuine:

[Prof. X] is too bold for [his/her] rank, and uses the first person pronoun too freely for a junior scholar.

Not a physicist, not anyone at Caltech or anywhere else I have been affiliated with, so don’t even try to guess. But I’d be tickled to get such a line. (The candidate received otherwise uniformly positive reviews, and was unanimously approved.)

We’ve been remiss at updating the blogroll, which I hope to do shortly. Here are some fun new physics-leaning blogs for you to watch out for.

• Imaginary Potential is a group blog by five young (postdoc/grad student level) physicists in a variety of fields. This should be awesome, would love to see more like it.
• The Inverse Square Blog is by Thomas Levenson, a science writer, film maker, and faculty member at MIT’s Graduate Program on Science Writing. He obviously needed blogging to fill all that spare time.
• From the Bench is a new blog by Michael Banks. He is an editor at PhysicsWorld, which for you Americans is sort of like Physics Today, although perhaps a little less boring.
• Resonaances has been around for a while, and I’m sure I’ve linked there before. But not enough; Jester does a great job in relating particle theory talks and happenings with a spirited style.

Not to mention all the great non-physics blogs that keep popping up, of course. Feel free to promote (yourself or others) in the comments.

Update: Chad Orzel and Michael Nielsen join in the fun, suggesting blogs and asking for pointers to ones they haven’t noticed. So go there too and make some noise.

Physicist Bill Foster has been running against dairy magnate and perpetual candidate Jim Oberweis in a special election in Illinois to replace retiring Republican representative Dennis Hastert, former Speaker of the House. The election was today, and with 96% of precincts reporting, it’s been called for Foster, 52% to 48%. This is great news for scientists and for Democrats, and awesome news for those of us who are both. Oberweis’s signature issue is anti-immigrant xenophobia, and a Democratic victory in this reliably Republican district bodes very well for the national picture this fall.

We’ve mentioned Bill’s campaign here before, and think he will be a great Representative. He is not just any old particle physicist, but quite an accomplished one, having been a co-inventor of Fermilab’s antiproton Recycler Ring. Once you’ve mastered antiprotons, the Washington political process should be child’s play. Congratulations!

The bad news is: because this was a special election to replace Hastert, they will have to do the whole thing over again in November. Here’s hoping that Foster can repeat his great showing.

Over at Steinn’s place, we’re all a twitter anticipating the number of Hubble Space Telescope proposals submitted this Cycle. Fancy new instruments and shiny bad-ass spectrographs coming to the telescope, so interest should be high. Based on comments, here’s proposal number versus time until deadline. I’ll add any late breaking data to the plot — post submission times (PST, preferrably, because math iz hard) in comments here or at Steinn’s, and I’ll add them as I can.

Apparently this is a nice exponential, so my prediction is that we’ll have an infinite number of proposals this round.

Update: No! Flattening off! We may not even break 1000, which is a shock! Highest number so far is 928 at 10 minutes until the deadline. Extrapolated fit uses the most recent decade in time. Any procrastinators out there have something higher?

Post-Mortem: While cracking some beers with my group at 5:05 PST, we talked with a student who had submitted a STIS proposal. Apparently the spectroscopic ETC (exposure time calculator) was all kinds of crazy, so I’m betting that cut down on the number of proposals one could just whip out for COS or STIS. The imaging ETC worked just great (or at least, it lied convincingly). I also agree with Steinn that a lot of people decided to sit this one out, since there were of course going to be 2000 proposals (the same way that the number of proposals went up after the ACS failure, since of course no one was going to be asking for time on WFPC2 and NICMOS). Apparently you’d make a killing placing short sales on HST proposal betting.

Apparently heretics are, on the aggregate, lazier than I suspected. I had the unusual pleasure of reading a blog post for completely independent reasons and coming across my own name — Ethan Zuckerman was reporting on a talk given by gerontologist Aubrey de Grey at the recent BIL Conference, in which he quotes my line from the Edge World Question Center that “Being a heretic is hard work.” (His other quote was from Gandhi.) It hadn’t occurred to me that such a sentiment was sufficiently unique to deserve being quoted, but as far as Google knows nobody else has pointed this out before. (While we’re at it, did nobody appreciate my previous Google joke?)

So I re-read my own World Question Center entry, and (to nobody’s surprise) I thought it was great. I’m my own most sympathetic audience. But in my post here about the WQC, I linked to the entry but didn’t reprint it in its entirely. Which I will hereby do now, because I’m a busy guy and you are busy blog readers who don’t always have the time to click on a link. Being a blogger is hard work.

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Growing up as a young proto-scientist, I was always strongly anti-establishmentarian, looking forward to overthrowing the System as our generation’s new Galileo. Now I spend a substantial fraction of my time explaining and defending the status quo to outsiders. It’s very depressing.

As an undergraduate astronomy major I was involved in a novel and exciting test of Einstein’s general relativity — measuring the precession of orbits, just like Mercury in the Solar System, but using massive eclipsing binary stars. What made it truly exciting was that the data disagreed with the theory! (Which they still do, by the way.) How thrilling is it to have the chance to overthrow Einstein himself? Of course there are more mundane explanations — the stars are tilted, or there is an invisible companion star perturbing their orbits, and these hypotheses were duly considered. But I wasn’t very patient with such boring possibilities — it was obvious to me that we had dealt a crushing blow to a cornerstone of modern physics, and the Establishment was just too hidebound to admit it.

Now I know better. Physicists who are experts in the field tend to be skeptical of experimental claims that contradict general relativity, not because they are hopelessly encumbered by tradition, but because Einstein’s theory has passed a startlingly diverse array of experimental tests. Indeed, it turns out to be almost impossible to change general relativity in a way that would be important for those binary stars, but which would not have already shown up in the Solar System. Experiments and theories don’t exist in isolation — they form a tightly connected web, in which changes to any one piece tend to reverberate through various others.

So now I find myself cast as a defender of scientific orthodoxy — from classics like relativity and natural selection, to modern wrinkles like dark matter and dark energy. In science, no orthodoxy is sacred, or above question — there should always be a healthy exploration of alternatives, and I have always enjoyed inventing new theories of gravity or cosmology, keeping in mind the variety of evidence in favor of the standard picture. But there is also an unhealthy brand of skepticism, proceeding from ignorance rather than expertise, which insists that any consensus must flow from a reluctance to face up to the truth, rather than an appreciation of the evidence. It’s that kind of skepticism that keeps showing up in my email. Unsolicited.

Heresy is more romantic than orthodoxy. Nobody roots for Goliath, as Wilt Chamberlain was fond of saying. But in science, ideas tend to grow into orthodoxy for good reasons. They fit the data better than the alternatives. Many casual heretics can’t be bothered with all the detailed theoretical arguments and experimental tests that support the models they hope to overthrow — they have a feeling about how the universe should work, and are convinced that history will eventually vindicate them, just as it did Galileo.

What they fail to appreciate is that, scientifically speaking, Galileo overthrew the system from within. He understood the reigning orthodoxy of his time better than anyone, so he was better able to see beyond it. Our present theories are not complete, and nobody believes they are the final word on how Nature works. But finding the precise way to make progress, to pinpoint the subtle shift of perspective that will illuminate a new way of looking at the world, will require an intimate familiarity with our current ideas, and a respectful appreciation of the evidence supporting them.

Being a heretic can be fun; but being a successful heretic is mostly hard work.

It doesn’t seem like all that long ago that we were enthusing about the results from the first three years of data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe satellite. Now the team has put out an impressive series of papers discussing the results of the first five years of data. Here is what the CMB looks like, with galaxy and foregrounds and monopole and dipole subtracted, from Ned Wright’s Cosmology Tutorial:

And here is one version of the angular power spectrum, taken from the Dunkley et al. paper. I like this one because it shows the individual points that get binned to create the spectrum you usually see. (Click for larger version.)

The headline two years ago was “Cosmology Makes Sense.” (That was my headline, anyway — others were not quite as accurate.) This continues to be true — the biggest piece of news isn’t that the results have overturned any foundations, but that the concordance model with dark matter, dark energy, and ordinary matter continues to work. The WMAP folks have produced an elaborate cosmological parameters table that runs the numbers for different sets of assumptions (with and without spatial curvature, running spectral index, etc), and for different sets of data (not just WMAP but also supernovae, lensing, etc). Everything is basically consistent with a flat universe comprised of 72% vacuum energy, 23% dark matter, and 5% ordinary matter. The perturbations are close to scale-free, but still seem to be a little larger on long wavelengths than shorter ones (0.014 < 1-n_s < 0.067 at 95% confidence). Probably the most fun result is that there is, for the first time, evidence from the CMB that neutrinos exist! Good to know.

My personal favorite was the constraint in the Komatsu et al. paper on parity-violating birefringence that would rotate CMB polarization. I was in on the ground floor where birefringence is concerned, so I’m sentimentally attached to it. But it’s also a signature of some very natural quintessence models, so this helps constrain the physics of dark energy as well.

Congratulations to the WMAP team, who have done a great job in establishing some of the pillars of contemporary cosmology — it’s historic stuff.

And he will inform you of this desire … in song!

Via Cynical-C.

Never let it be said that we ignore the Republicans! Seeking to further highlight distinctions between the parties, presumptive nominee John McCain has been on something of an anti-science tear lately. First, he dined and spoke with the Discovery Institute in Seattle — not a huge red flag by itself (there were many co-presenters, and one can’t always choose one’s lunch companions), but telling in light of his many flip-flops on teaching intelligent design in schools. (Like any good postmodern conservative, he has staked out firm positions on both sides of a wide variety of issues.)

But the latest news is much worse, as McCain panders to crackpots who believe that vaccination causes autism.

At a town hall meeting Friday in Texas, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., declared that “there’s strong evidence” that thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative that was once in many childhood vaccines, is responsible for the increased diagnoses of autism in the U.S. — a position in stark contrast with the view of the medical establishment.

The main problem with such a claim is not that just it’s untrue — it’s complete rubbish, of course, but politicians say untrue things all the time. The problem is that, unlike unfortunate choices about NASA spending priorities, in this case the stupidity can cause people to die. Hilzoy quotes the CDC on measles, which these vaccinations protect against:

Measles itself is unpleasant, but the complications are dangerous. Six to 20 percent of the people who get the disease will get an ear infection, diarrhea, or even pneumonia. One out of 1000 people with measles will develop inflammation of the brain, and about one out of 1000 will die.

Of course, McCain himself will be perfectly safe. He is arguably the most superstitious Presidential candidate of recent times, relying on a defense-in-depth strategy when it comes to lucky charms.

“I’m wearing my lucky shoes from today till Sunday,” McCain says from his bus on Wednesday. At the moment, his pockets contain the compass, feather (from a tribal leader) and penny (flattened, in his wallet). When McCain once misplaced his feather, there was momentary panic in the campaign, until his wife found it in one of his suits. When the compass went missing once, McCain assigned his political director to hunt it down. Weaver found it, and it remains safe, knock wood.

Primary day requires additional rituals. By the time you read this, Steve Dart, McCain’s lucky friend, should have arrived in South Carolina from California. He has been present with McCain for every Election Day since McCain first won a seat in Congress. McCain must sleep on a certain side of the bed, particularly before an election (and he never puts a hat on a bed–bad luck). Rain is good for Election Day, as are motion pictures. McCain requires himself to view a movie before the vote is counted. He fell asleep in his hotel room in New Hampshire before he watched a movie on primary day, but his staff didn’t panic. “We have superstition fire walls,” says Todd Harris, a spokesman.

I presume that one of his first initiatives as President will be to provide lucky compasses, feathers, and pennies to young children throughout this great land, which will keep them safe from those nasty viruses. Ready to lead on day one.

Researchers at University of Arizona’s Lunar & Planetary Laboratory have just released images of major rockslides on Mars in progress.

That’s just plain cool. Phil at Bad Astronomy has more, as expected!