The Geostationary Banana Over Texas, that’s what! Longtime readers will recall that we love the GBOT here at Cosmic Variance. What is not to love? Just the existence of the very concept holds out promise for a brighter future. Truly, it’s projects like this that define what it means to be human.

(After all, actual bananas may soon go extinct, leaving us with only their giant inflatable brethren to remember them by.)

Now, however, Backreaction points to terrible news: the GBOT is facing a funding crisis! Artist/visionary Cesar Saez has received about $100,000 from the Canadian government, and needs to raise another $1.5 million to make his dream a reality. So far, efforts have fallen short; only $12,018 has been collected. Hey, it’s a start!

Now, some will say that the GBOT isn’t really a realistic project; that it’s more an excuse to have a cool website, generate a bit of buzz, and play with some drafting software than an honest attempt to float a banana over the Lone Star State.

Some will say that the flight plan looks more like a scribble in Microsoft Paint than a NASA-approved model of the GBOT’s trajectory.

We say, true art doesn’t listen to people like that! True art thinks those people are wankers.

Some day the GBOT will fly — if only in our hearts.

I’ve been glancing over with some enjoyment and much nostalgia a multi-part Science Course that The Guardian ran back in late April and early May. Created in association with Science Museum and split into seven parts, this is an attempt to provide, extremely briefly, a snapshot of human scientific knowledge.

The seven sections are: The universe; Life & genetics; The earth; Humans; Energy; Building blocks; Experiments for kids, and each section is split into a host of different subtopics which span pretty much all the major subjects (although, as with any such endeavor, I’m sure there will be people who feel that something vital is missing).

There are a number of things that struck me about this effort. Perhaps foremost is that it is just wonderful to see a national daily newspaper devoting this much time, effort and space to science. Another notable feature, as far as I could see, is that they have chosen to focus on the science and not on the scientists. While I’m not against reporting that serves to show the public that scientists aren’t the humorless automatons they are often portrayed as, there is something refreshing about getting the egos and the myth of the lone genius out of the picture and focusing on the remarkable truths about the universe that the collective efforts of humankind have revealed. There is a real sense of wonder here.

But I think what grabbed me most, and what stirred those nostalgic feelings in me, was what a kid might take away from this. The vast scope of science presented here; the feelings of awe; the idea that by grasping some portion of this one would actually understand why things are as they are, and not have to rely on the authority of others. These all take me back to reading the newspaper as a child; to watching the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures; to reading science magazines; and to my parents gathering my brother and me up for our weekly trip to the library. These were some of the first experiences that I concretely remember thinking of as revealing the excitement of knowledge. I never got over it.

It doesn’t matter if all the details of what you are reading or watching are perfectly correct, and it doesn’t matter if you know who did what and when. These are details you will sort out later if they become important. What matters as a kid is that you be able to grasp why scientists do what they do, and understand the power of the scientific method. In her introduction to the Experiments for kids section, science writer Gabrielle Walker writes

Real science isn’t about textbooks, it’s about experiments that
are surprising, exciting and — yes, even a bit dangerous.

Doing them means taking risks, getting stuck in, finding out for yourself — using your imagination.

Kids should do scientific experiments too, for the same reason that they should write stories as well as reading them or do sport as well as watching it. Experiments encourage kids to be curious, creative and confident. Jokes make us laugh because the punchline takes us by surprise. The best experiments do the same.

And it’s true. Science is a part of culture, and as a child, while I did my fair share of reading and writing stories, and playing and watching sports, I loved mathematics, but also derived tremendous enjoyment from my little chemistry set, and the toy microscope I received one Christmas. If you could make something go “bang”, change color, or both, it was always a lot of fun. Science is something you do.

There are many influences that can cultivate one’s desire to understand more about the world, whether one becomes a scientist or not. Curious parents who care about education and decent, enthusiastic teachers are most certainly important, and I was so lucky to have those (definitely the former, and mostly the latter). But the ways in which science and scientists appear in our culture have a major influence. Science news shouldn’t be a quirky niche area. If it weren’t, perhaps more people would be able to develop informed opinions about some of the major issues facing society. Wouldn’t it be a step forward to read about, and have people understand, the scientific challenges and issues surrounding nuclear power, biofuels, solar energy, genetically modified foods, evolution, etc.?

We’ll only ever get there by making science an integral part of culture, rather than an obscure art. Although I think most scientists will find some flaws with its approach, the Guardian Science Course brought a smile to my face as I remembered the easy access to popular science I had as a kid growing up in England, and the way this access influenced how I viewed science. They should be applauded for trying to play their part in recognizing science as a central part of society.

Q: What do the following Army service decorations have in common?

• Army Distinguished Service Medal
• Legion of Merit with three oak leaf clusters
• Army Staff Identification Badge
• Meritorious Service Medal with six oak leaf clusters
• Army Commendation Medal with two oak leaf clusters
• Army Achievement Medal with one oak leaf cluster

A: They have all been awarded to the author of this statement:

After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.

That would be Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba (ret.), writing the preface to the report Broken Laws, Broken Lives: Medical Evidence of Torture by the US, recently released by Physicians for Human Rights. The “ret.” in General Taguba’s full title is somewhat euphemistic; after 34 years of service, in 2006 he was instructed to retire by the Army’s Vice-Chief of Staff. This might have been related to his authorship of the Taguba Report, the official report of an Army investigation into torture and prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib.

It’s hard to have a reasonable discussion about the possibility of holding senior officials in the U.S. government responsible for war crimes. It’s the kind of accusation that gets thrown around too lightly for political or rhetorical reasons, by ideologues on one side or the other who are far too quick to find inhumanity and evil intent in the actions of their opponents.

But that doesn’t mean that war crimes don’t happen, or that our country doesn’t commit them, or that responsibility can’t ever be traced to the highest reaches of the government. There is no question that the U.S. tortures; people who have been held without any charges against them have been raped, killed, and permanently psychologically damaged. And there is no question that it’s not just a matter of a few bad apples — not when John Yoo, author of the infamous Department of Justice torture memos, gets asked “Could the President order a suspect buried alive?” and doesn’t know what the right answer is.

The question is, should the President and other administration officials be held accountable for these acts? Taguba thinks the answer is yes:

This report tells the largely untold human story of what happened to detainees in our custody when the Commander-in-Chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture. This story is not only written in words: It is scrawled for the rest of these individuals’ lives on their bodies and minds. Our national honor is stained by the indignity and inhumane treatment these men received from their captors… [T]hese men deserve justice as required under the tenets of international law and the United States Constitution. And so do the American people.

It it literally sickening that we’ve come to this. But nobody can be surprised. The Bush Administration has been perfectly consistent in its behavior for the last eight years. It’s going to take some time to deal with the consequences, and it won’t be pleasant for anyone. I can’t imagine the sort of havoc it would wreak on the political landscape if a Democratic administration pursued charges of war crimes against a former Republican administration (for example). It would not be the kind of thing that brings the country together, let’s just say.

On the other hand, should the United States have a policy that its political officials cannot, a priori, be accused of war crimes, because to do so would cause a political firestorm? Perhaps we will end up needing a Truth Commission.

It’s fascinating to read the GLAST blog, written by Steve Ritz and featuring the exploits of everyone’s favorite new gamma-ray observatory. Not that it’s perfectly transparent — it’s full of breathless exclamations along the lines of “Very early this morning the LAT and GBM flight computers were powered on and booted successfully. Later this morning, the process of turning on the LAT detectors will begin!” But you kind of get the idea, even if the acronym-heavy NASA-ese is not a model of accessibility. And so far, things are looking just great — in fact, the LAT (my guess is “Large Aperture Telescope,” and I’m too proud to look it up) just took it’s first science data! Which is indeed an event worthy of exclamation points.

Steve is a friend of mine, and a good choice for a blogger, but I have to admit that I prefer the blogs that are by the experiments themselves, rather than the people working on them. This is a path blazed by NASA’s Opportunity Mars Rover, which had a (now sadly defunct) LiveJournal that made the Red Planet come to life: “The article also talked about my little, ahem, driving accident and implied that I am getting old and creaky — OMG so embarrassing!!! What if he read them!!”

What about the new Phoenix Lander? There was one of those boring human-based blogs for the landing, but the craft itself doesn’t seem to have it’s own blog. That’s because Phoenix is totally ahead of the curve, and eschews the outdated blogging format in favor of a Twitter account! And, of course, a Facebook profile. Good call, Phoenix — very cutting-edge.

So I want the Large Hadron Collider to have a blog. Humans are fine in their own way, of course, but I’d rather hear from the machine itself, or at least one of the experiments — an ATLAS or CMS blog would be fine. There is a Hardware Commissioning webpage, which makes the GLAST blog read like Dr. Seuss. (They’re cooling the thing down, and it seems to be going well.) There is also LHC Countdown, which seems less connected to facts on the ground.

Anyway, we are entering the home stretch, and the LHC should actually be injecting protons in July or maybe August. The beam won’t be at full strength yet, and there is going to be a lot of work to shake down the detectors and get everything in working order. After that, it’s up to Nature, who will decide whether to give us some interesting physics discoveries early, or really make us work for them.

In the meantime, a blog would help keep us up to speed. Now that we know that the LHC won’t destroy the world, it could use a media-friendly makeover. That’s all I’m saying.

The struggle to definitively prove or disprove the existence of atheists has puzzled philosophers for centuries. Some have proposed the cosmological argument — “many cosmologists seem to be atheists” — while others have fallen back on the argument from design — “without atheists, who would believers have to argue against?”

But the Catholic Encyclopedia seems unconvinced by these arguments:

The most trenchant form which atheism could take would be the positive and dogmatic denial existence of any spiritual and extra-mundane First Cause. This is sometimes known as dogmatic, or positive theoretic, atheism; though it may be doubted whether such a system has ever been, or could ever possibly be seriously maintained. Certainly Bacon and Dr. Arnold voice the common judgment of thinking men when they express a doubt as to the existence of an atheist belonging to such a school. Still, there are certain advanced phases of materialistic philosophy that, perhaps, should rightly be included under this head. Materialism, which professes to find in matter its own cause and explanation, may go farther, and positively exclude the existence of any spiritual cause. That such a dogmatic assertion is both unreasonable and illogical needs no demonstration, for it is an inference not warranted by the facts nor justified by the laws of thought.

You have to admire the confidence — the fact that “dogmatic atheism” is “both unreasonable and illogical needs no demonstration,” and let’s leave it at that. It’s a little bit different from the tack they take in another entry:

Formal dogmatic Atheism is self-refuting, and has never de facto won the reasoned assent of any considerable number of men.

The Encyclopedia does not dirty its hands by explaining the nature of this self-refutation, any more than it explained the previously-noted unreasonability and illogic. I like it! It’s kind of like arguing on the internet.

Entertainment Weekly, clearly nostalgic for the orgy of millenarian list-making, has come up with a list of the 100 Greatest Books of the Last 25 Years. (They have the 100 Greatest Movies, too.) Here are the top 20:

1. The Road , Cormac McCarthy (2006)
2. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, J.K. Rowling (2000)
3. Beloved, Toni Morrison (1987)
4. The Liars’ Club, Mary Karr (1995)
5. American Pastoral, Philip Roth (1997)
6. Mystic River, Dennis Lehane (2001)
7. Maus, Art Spiegelman (1986/1991)
8. Selected Stories, Alice Munro (1996)
9. Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier (1997)
10. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami (1997)
11. Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer (1997)
12. Blindness, José Saramago (1998)
13. Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (1986-87)
14. Black Water, Joyce Carol Oates (1992)
15. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers (2000)
16. The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood (1986)
17. Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez (1988)
18. Rabbit at Rest, John Updike (1990)
19. On Beauty, Zadie Smith (2005)
20. Bridget Jones’s Diary, Helen Fielding (1998)

Of these 20, I have read precisely half. And my favorite among those 10 would be Bridget Jones. Draw whatever conclusions you will.

It’s a provocative list, as such lists are intended to be, as the point is more to begin discussion than to conclude it. There are a few non-fiction works that somehow poked their way in there (Stephen King, Barbara Ehrenreich, Malcolm Gladwell) — they would have been better off leaving those out entirely, as there is a lot more worthy non-fiction that could easily have made the final cut, and the apples/oranges comparisons aren’t very illuminating.

Perhaps any such list that ignores Mason & Dixon but somehow finds room for The Da Vinci Code should just be dismissed out of hand. But looking over the list, or for that matter just thinking about a lot of contemporary literature, I can’t help but succumbing to the bloggy temptation to pronounce a grand theory on the basis of two minutes of thought and a teaspoonful of anecdotal evidence. To wit: if the literary spirit of our age would be summed up by a single word, it would be “passivity.”

Not all of the 100 books fit my theory, of course, not by a long shot. But when I think about today’s serious fiction and compare it to yesterday’s, there seem to be a lot more books featuring relatively helpless protagonists, swept along by the currents of fate/society/circumstance rather than heroically altering them. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the novels are more inward-focused, concentrating on the personal struggle of the protagonist with their own attitudes more than on their attempts to change the external situation.

Either way, I get the feeling that the Zeitgeist views individual people as very small and the world as very big. It doesn’t seem to be much of a time for heroes, Harry Potter notwithstanding. (Or maybe I’m just reading the wrong books.)

George Carlin passed away Sunday afternoon.

There’s a place for respectful, good-faith argumentation between people who respectfully disagree — but some good old-fashioned mockery is occasionally called for, as well.

He told it like he saw it, that’s for sure.

Science, that is. No, this is not what I have in mind. Rather, this provocative statement — the discoveries of science should be disturbing, they shouldn’t simply provide gentle reassurance about our place in the universe — is the conclusion reached by my latest Bloggingheads dialogue, with David Albert.

.

David is a philosopher of science at Columbia, author of Time and Chance as well as Quantum Mechanics and Experience. We talked about what philosophers of science do, the awful What the Bleep Do We Know? movie, string theory and falsifiability, and touched on time before running out thereof. Future episodes are clearly called for.

We’ve written on a number of occasions here (and elsewhere) about the importance of good, reliable science journalism. Now, writing in his Bad Science column in The Guardian, Ben Goldacre points to an extremely concrete reason, with important ramifications for society, to encourage quality science writing.

There are all kinds of reasons to be concerned about and interested in science journalism. Are important issues getting the right amount of coverage? Is there a reasonable balance to the stories? Do journalists rely too much on the opinions of a few friendly experts, or do they seek out diverse expert views? Do university press releases drive coverage rather than inform it? Do funding agencies pay to much attention to research and authors who receive press coverage? I could go on and on. Some of these issues are mostly of interest to academics, but to some extent they all directly affect not only the public’s understanding of current scientific progress, but also their ability to make an informed decision to support (or not support) future scientific endeavors.

But there is another, more direct reason to hope for strong coverage of science. Goldacre reports on several studies showing that when it comes to health issues, the public pays a remarkable amount of attention to press coverage of a given question. Among other things, he notes that

A 2005 study in the Medical Journal of Australia looked at the impact of Kylie Minogue’s breasts on mammogram bookings. They rose by 40% during the two-week publicity peak, and six weeks later they were still up by a third. The increase among previously unscreened women in the 40-69 year age group was 101%. These surges were unprecedented.

…A systematic review from the Cochrane Collaboration found five studies looking at the use of specific health interventions before and after media coverage of specific stories, and each found that favourable publicity was associated with greater use, and unfavourable with lower.

One might think that this is an extremely positive thing, since to a large extent the public seems to trust scientific results, and holds science is high regard. However, the main point of Goldacre’s column is to discuss a recent analysis, by former journalist Gary Schwitzer, of 500 mainstream media health articles from the US.

The results were dismal. Only 35% of stories were rated satisfactory for whether the journalist had “discussed the study methodology and the quality of the evidence”: because in the media, as you will have noticed, science is about absolute truth statements from arbitrary authority figures in white coats, rather than clear descriptions of studies and the reasons why people draw conclusions from them.

Only 28% adequately covered benefits, and only 33% adequately covered harms. Articles routinely failed to give any useful quantitative information in absolute terms, preferring unhelpful eye-catchers like “50% higher” instead.

So it turns out that what the public really trusts is whatever journalists tell them about science. This is why it is so important to do everything we can to support good science journalism, and to resist the temptation to contribute to poor efforts by overly sensationalizing our own work when speaking to journalists about it.

But it isn’t easy, given the juicy data the article also contains about how New York Times coverage skews citations!

The Volokh Conspiracy is ruminating over why so many academics are hostile to some religions rather than others. Todd Zywicki cites data:

According to a study by the Institute of Jewish and Community Research, 53% of professors have an unfavorable view of Evangelical Christians but only 3% have an unfavorable view of Jews. A summary of the study is here. 33% have unfavorable views of Mormons. Muslims, Atheists, and Catholics all score in double-digits.

He goes on to express his astonishment…

It is almost impossible to imagine any identifiable group of Americans today who would hold such a reflexively negative view of other groups of Americans. I can’t imagine that any degree of racial bigotry by any group toward any other group would even approximate this degree of bigotry and prejudice.

Until, of course, his commenters point out an inconvenient fact: this “prejudice” pales next to that against atheists.

Co-blogger Ilya Somin then chimes in with a theory — it’s all just bias against conservatives.

Overall, I think the data confirm my theory that most academics are not hostile to religion as such, but merely to those religious groups that they perceive (for the most part correctly) as politically conservative.

The study Todd cites shows that 53% of academics have an “unfavorable” view of Evangelical Christians and 33% say the same of Mormons. By contrast, only 13% have an unfavorable view of Catholics and 3% towards Jews. As Todd points out, Evangelical Christians and and Mormons are generally seen as politically conservative, while Jews tend to be liberal, and Catholics somewhere in between. Todd may well be right that academics’ views of Evangelicals and Mormons are based on stereotypes rather than personal experience. However, the stereotype that these groups tend to be politically conservative is actually correct.

I have a different theory. What if academics had an unfavorable view of evangelicals and Mormons, and a generally favorable view of Catholics and Jews, because of how those groups view academia? Crazy, I know, but bear with me here. Catholicism and Judaism, whatever their other faults, have long traditions of valuing learning and scholarship, while Mormonism and evangelical Christianity … not so much. (Those are wild generalizations, of course, but the trends are clear.) Perhaps these unfavorable views are not actually prejudices at all, but informed opinions based on empirically verifiable realities?

Just a theory.

Modesty forbids me, but honesty compels me: my 15-month-old predictions for the 2008 Presidential elections have thus far been so spot-on, it’s spooky. I know that many of you have clamored for us to drop the science stuff from our blog entirely, and just talk about politics and/or our personal lives, topics that are severely under-served in the blogosphere. My own preference would be to focus exclusively on physics, to the exclusion of any other topic of any possible interest, but who am I, anyway? This is a blog, after all, and I think we can all agree that the loudest commenters should have final say on what we post about.

Therefore, I feel compelled to offer up another round of predictions, now that we’ve narrowed the field to two major candidates. By why not make it more fun and have a prediction contest? Anyone can join in, just by leaving your prediction the comments. Entries that appear before the end of June will officially count.

But to make things somewhat science-y, let’s use equations to judge who will win. Each prediction consists of two numbers: the fraction f of the total popular vote cast for the two major candidates that goes to Barack Obama, but also the standard deviation σ of your prediction for that percentage. We are thus ignoring the electoral college entirely, and dealing with the annoyance of third-party candidates by concentrating exclusively on McCain vs. Obama. And we are assuming for purposes of misleadingly-precise quantification that each prediction follows a normal (Gaussian) distribution:

And here is the rub: the winner is not the one whose fraction f is closest to the final answer, but the one whose value of P(x) is the highest, when x is equal to the fraction of votes Obama actually does win. The smaller your standard deviation is, the higher your P(x) will be for x very close to your predicted value f , but the faster it will die off as you get further away. So if you are extremely confident, you can ensure victory by choosing an appropriately tiny standard deviation on your prediction. Contrariwise, if you choose a large standard deviation, you might get lucky if none of the confident folks comes close to the actual result. Cool, eh?

So here we go: I predict that Obama will win 55.5% of the popular vote fraction, with 1.5% standard deviation. That’s right — a blowout. Might be crazily optimistic of me, but right now the portents are good. In Obama’s favor, the current electoral map is extremely favorable (not that it matters for our contest), he is an energetic and charismatic campaigner, his organization is impressively seasoned and effective, he will have twice as much money to spend, Democratic identification among voters is soaring, the incumbent President is world-historically unpopular, various economic crises are putting the squeeze on middle-class voters, the war in Iraq is hugely unpopular, and McCain is a bumbling and unconvincing candidate with a tattered organization, little support among the party faithful, a disturbing penchant for changing his mind and misunderstanding his own policies, and little interest in anything other than foreign policy. In McCain’s favor, Obama is black and his middle name is Hussein; also, McCain has a great rapport with the press, who respect his maverick image. Overall, I think the scales are pretty heavily tilted on this one, and I will not be surprised if McCain replaces Bob Dole as the Presidential candidate that Republicans would most like to pretend never happened.

Of course, I could be wrong. So let’s hear your predictions! The winner will receive a lifetime subscription to Cosmic Variance. Or maybe a T-shirt, if we get caught in a generous mood.

September 29, 2007 was the happiest day of my life.

But now my happiness is being undermined. Not by my lovely wife, but by all of these Californians who, starting today, are getting legally gay-married. How can we maintain our marital bliss when all around us other people are feeling blissful with partners of the same gender? It’s degrading, the Pope says, and who can argue?

Okay, it’s hard to be snarky about this issue, I’m too sentimental. Discrimination against gays, lesbians, bisexuals and other sexual identities is one of the last remaining officially-sanctioned forms of inequity in our culture, and it’s incredibly moving to see the joy on the faces of so many newly-married couples as the barriers come (belatedly, tentatively) tumbling down.

Today is a big day. If anyone is in need of some good last-minute wedding vows, you are welcome to borrow ours. The algorithm was simple: take the Form of the Solemnization of Matrimony from the Book of Common Prayer, remove all the references to God (there are a lot of them), and sprinkle with some quotes that express your own feelings. Also, substitute appropriate names for the numbers.

OFFICIANT: Dearly Beloved — We are gathered together here today to witness the joining of [1] and [2] in Matrimony.

Marriage is an honorable estate: and therefore is not by any to be entered into unadvisedly or lightly; but reverently, discreetly, advisedly, and soberly.

Upon completion of the ceremony, we understand that one is not obliged to remain utterly sober, nor for that matter perfectly discreet.

The estate of matrimony attempts the impossible: to formalize the love between two people. In the words of W.H. Auden:

      Rejoice, dear love, in Love’s peremptory word;
      All chance, all love, all logic, you and I,
      Exist by grace of the Absurd,
      And without conscious artifice we die:

      So, lest we manufacture in our flesh
      The lie of our divinity afresh,
      Describe round our chaotic malice now,
      The arbitrary circle of a vow.

By our presence here tonight, we elevate conscious artifice to a heartfelt celebration of the uniting of two lives.

Then shall the Minster say unto [1],

O: 1, will you have 2 to be your partner in life? Will you love her, comfort her, honor, and keep her in sickness and in health; and, forsaking all others, keeping only to her, so long as you both shall live?

1: I will.

Then shall the Minster say unto [2],

O: 2, will you have 1 to be your partner in life? Will you love him, comfort him, honor, and keep him in sickness and in health; and, forsaking all others, keeping only to him, so long as you both shall live?

2: I will.

O, to 1: 1, will you take 2’s hand and repeat after me.

      I, 1, take you, 2, to be my partner in life,
      to have and to hold from this day forward,
      for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health,
      to love and to cherish, till death us do part;
      and thereto I plight my troth.

O, to 2: 2, will you take 1 hand and repeat after me.

      I, 2, take you, 1, to be my partner in life,
      to have and to hold from this day forward,
      for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health,
      to love and to cherish, till death us do part;
      and thereto I plight my troth.

Then shall they again loose their hands; and 1 shall give unto 2 a Ring in this wise: the Officiant taking the ring shall deliver it unto 1, speaking their name out loud, to put it upon the fourth finger of 2’s left hand. And 1 holding the Ring there, and taught by the Officiant, shall say,

1: I give you this ring as a symbol of my enduring love.

Then 2 shall give unto 1 a Ring in this wise: the Officiant taking the ring shall deliver it unto 2, speaking their name out loud, to put it upon the fourth finger of 1’s left hand. And 2 holding the Ring there, shall say,

2: I give you this ring as a symbol of my enduring love.

O: Together we have gathered to share our blessings with 2 and 1 as they begin their lives together. As Rainier Maria Rilke once advised a young poet:

“We must trust in what is difficult. It is good to be solitary,
for solitude is difficult. It is also good to love, because love is difficult.
For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps
the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task,
the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is mere preparation….
Love consists in this: that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.”

Then shall the Officiant speak unto the company.

O: Inasmuch as 1 and 2 have pledged their troth, I now pronounce them together for life. You may celebrate as you wish.

Congratulations to everyone getting married today! Go plight those troths!

When it comes to art (considered broadly, so as to include literature and various kinds of performance, not to mention a good bottle of wine) I am a radical subjectivist. If you like it, great; if you don’t, that’s your prerogative. There is no such thing as being “right” or “wrong” in one’s opinion about a work of art; what’s important is the relationship between the work and the person experiencing it.

Nevertheless, there’s no question that one’s attitude toward a work of art can be radically changed by outside information or experiences. You might come to understand it better, or conversely you might be overexposed to it and just get bored.

Scientists, in particular, love it when they discover that some boring old art thing that they had previously perceived as undifferentiated and uninteresting actually possesses some hidden structure. If you were ever caught in the unfortunate situation of teaching an art- or film-appreciation class to scientists, the right strategy would be to reveal, insofar as possible, the underlying theories by which the work in question is constructed. And if you think there are no such theories, you’re just not looking hard enough.

Recent examples, which I would blog about in extraordinary depth and breathtaking insight (with a dash of self-deprecating humor) if I were a professional blogger rather than a scientist with a blogging hobby:

• Patrick House in Slate reveals the algorithm for winning the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest. Involves concepts such as the “theory of mind” joke. (Via 3QD.) As far as I know, there is not yet an algorithm for winning the New Yorker Cartoon Anti-Caption Contest.
• The Science of Scriptwriting! This one actually appeared on the arxiv, under the more formal title “The Structure of Narrative: the Case of Film Scripts.” (Via Swans on Tea and the physics arxiv blog.)
• Relatedly, back in March Jennifer was serving as the Journalist in Residence at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at UC Santa Barbara, and ran a series of Friday workshops. One of them was Inside the Writer’s Room: Where Physics and Hollywood Collide, featuring guest speakers David Saltzberg and David Grae. David #1 is a physicist at UCLA and also the science consultant for the CBS sitcom The Big Bang Theory, which I will write about someday, I promise. David #2 is a TV scriptwriter, who was there to tell the physicists how to write for TV. About which maybe also more, someday, but right now I just wanted to highlight one phenomenon: when David was talking about possible plot lines and characters, the physicists played along and seemed mildly interested. But when he revealed that an hour-long TV drama is inevitably broken up into specific acts, each of which generally (in the case of each show) has a particular function within the larger narrative, the room lit up. There was a theory of TV dramas! More than one person said they would never be able to watch prime-time television in quite the same way again.

Also, of course, the assembled physicists all had a similar question: “Why don’t they make a TV show about me, or someone like me? Those people are all nerds!” I have a theory about that.

Here at Cosmic Variance we’ve been having a bit of an internal review of our comments policy and have decided to implement a few new guidelines. These are intended to improve the quality of the discussion, minimize any insulting or inappropriate behavior, and generally make the comments section a more interesting and hospitable place.

Our existing comments policy reads

“We love comments and aim to cultivate a lively and enjoyable space for discussion. To this end, we will not hesitate to delete comments or ban commenters who are excessively impolite or who otherwise derail the discussions. Disagreement with anything we may say is welcome, so long as it is civil and constructive. We’re all about light, not heat.”

We’d like to clarify and supplement this with

1. Since our comments section is not intended for protracted discussions of individuals’ pet theories or personal hobby-horses, we will be deleting comments that attempt to reorient the discussion towards such directions. When we are talking about science, questions from non-experts are especially welcome. However, this blog is not the proper venue for non-experts to present their revolutionary new theories of the Universe, and attempts to start such discussions will generally be deleted without warning. The blogosphere is a big space, and people are always free to start their own blogs to discuss such theories. In fact, many have already.
2. Frank and challenging discussions are a good thing. Indeed, disagreement with the substance of posts or comments is acceptable and even encouraged, as long as it is constructive and polite. A review of most comment threads provides ample evidence that many different viewpoints are allowed. Nevertheless, “criticize” and “disagree” are not the same as “insult”, and we do not think it is appropriate to use the comments section to truly insult others. We will be deleting comments that do that.
3. We will do what we can to ban commenters who repeatedly violate these, or any of our other guidelines. Blogging is our hobby, not our job, and we have little desire to enter into detailed discussions about why this or that comment is inappropriate. Better to be safe than sorry.

To be frank, we feel that a number of personal disputes, off-topic comments and people using our comments section to conduct public discussion of their own pet theories and issues is lowering the quality of the discourse, and we would like to avoid this as much as possible in the future. We won’t be perfect at this, so bear with us, and hopefully this policy will serve its purpose.

An important event of the early summer was the graduation of my most senior graduate student - Alessandra Silvestri - who successfully defended her thesis on May 15th, and who is leaving the nest at the end of the summer to take up a postdoc in the Physics Department and the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research at MIT. Congratulations to Alessandra!

Alessandra’s thesis - Modified Gravity: Cosmic Acceleration and the Large Scale Structure of the Universe - contains, among other things, results obtained in a series of papers in which she, with collaborators, studied how one might search for an observational signature of modified gravity as the origin of cosmic acceleration, as compared to dark energy, or a cosmological constant.

While it is relatively easy to obtain the correct expansion history of the universe - how its size changes over the course of time - from all kinds of cosmic acceleration models, differences typically manifest themselves in the details of how structure grows, and how that structure influences the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB). There are a number of different important effects, but one that is particularly interesting, and unusually easy to explain, is the Integrated Sachs-Wolfe (ISW) effect.

Here’s how it works. In the early universe, expansion ultimately stretches the wavelengths of photons enough that their energies are too low to ionize hydrogen atoms. This is called decoupling, and after this point the universe is electrically neutral, light essentially ceases to interact with matter, and the leftover photons stream through the universe. Today they form the CMB.

During the photons’ journey across the universe (ultimately to our detectors) they pass through overdense regions of matter that are in the process of becoming more dense, due to the attractive nature of gravity. In passing through such a growing overdensity, the photons gain energy as they fall into the associated potential well, and lose energy as they climb out of it (this is general relativity after all, and gravity affects light just as it would affect massive particles). For a static potential well, these effects would, of course, cancel, just as a ball rolling from one side of a symmetrical bowl to the other will reach precisely the same height that it started at. However, in reality two competing effects occur - the well is growing due to gravitational attraction, and is becoming shallower due to the expanding background. Thus, there is the possibility of an overall change in the photon energy, depending on how the universe is expanding.

The collapse of an overdensity can be thought of as the evolution of a small matter dominated portion of the universe. If the background evolution is matter dominated, this is cancelled by the expansion rate and the overall effect is zero, as for a static potential. However, if the background evolution differs from matter domination then there is a net effect. This adds up as the photon traverses multiple wells, and is known as the ISW effect.

Since we now know that the late time evolution of the universe is not matter dominated, but rather is accelerating, the ISW effect provides one possible insight into the nature of this phenomenon. And since cosmic acceleration is occurring in the most recent epoch (and to distinguish the effect from a related one occurring at early times, during radiation domination), we refer to this incarnation of the effect as the late-time ISW effect (or Rees-Sciama effect). Because acceleration is so dominant, the net effect is that the potential decays while the photon traverses the well, meaning that the photon emerges with a slight net blueshift, compared to how it entered.

Now, because the details of how structure forms depend not only on the background evolution, but also on how the different energy components of the universe cluster, and on the equations obeyed by the overdensities themselves, the size and sign of the late-time ISW effect depends on the origin of cosmic acceleration. For example, modified gravity theories typically introduce a scale-dependence into the growth function that may be used to distinguish such models from dark energy or the cosmological constant model. Thus, in principle, the late-time ISW effect is a powerful tool.

In practice this is very difficult to carry out, since the dominant effect is on large scales in the universe, where cosmic variance (the statistical effect, not us) gets in the way of interpreting any possible signal. Nevertheless, by cross-correlating the microwave background measurements with data from large scale structure surveys, one can make progress.

Cosmic acceleration is a huge mystery, but modern cosmology also provides us with a remarkable set of tools with which to probe it, and to constrain our theoretical approaches. The late-time ISW effect is one of these tools, and is a nice example of how the CMB - an amazing discovery in its own right - is now being put to use in many different ways to explore the details of our cosmological models.