Anyone watching this evening’s episode of Comedy Central’s new Lewis Black vehicle, The Root of All Evil (10:30, 9:30 Central), might just see some familiar scientists and/or bloggers. Maybe.

Elsewhere, stars of the CBS sitcom The Big Bang Theory (about which more anon) seem to have been reading up on their Spacetime and Geometry.

No appreciable bump in my Amazon ranking, though.

One beautiful Fall day seventeen years ago I wandered into an office and my life profoundly changed. I was an undergraduate at Princeton, and was looking for a thesis advisor. Jadwin Hall was an intimidating place. Plenty of names familiar from my textbooks. Nobel laureates scattered about. And we were expected to just barge into their offices, and ask to work with them.

One office door was always open. As you walked by you could peek in, and see its occupant hard at work. Hunched over his notebook, scribbling away. Or standing by his bookcase, deep in thought. Most often at the blackboard, chalk in hand. This was John Archibald Wheeler, one of the legends of modern physics. He did foundational work on quantum mechanics, collaborating with Niels Bohr on some of the earliest work in nuclear fission. He invented the S-matrix. He played important roles in both the Manhattan project (atomic bomb) and the Matterhorn project (Hydrogen bomb). He made major contributions to general relativity, co-authoring with Charlie Misner and Kip Thorne the bible of the field. He was legendary for his way with words, coining such terms as wormholes, quantum foam, black holes, and the wave function of the Universe (the Wheeler-DeWitt equation). He trained generations of students; one of his first was Richard Feynman.

Fortunately, being a relatively clueless 20-year old, I was only dimly aware of these things. I was interested in gravity and cosmology, and I had heard Wheeler knew a thing or two about such topics. So I waltzed in, and asked if he had any projects I could work on. I staggered out of his office four hours later, laden with books, a clearly defined project in my hands. For the ensuing two years I spent essentially every weekday with Wheeler. Each morning I would rush over to his office, always to be greeted the same way: “What’s new?” I would have been up late the night before, desperately trying to find something interesting with which to answer that question. We would then spend hours working together, going over my results, scrutinizing my calculations, poring through the literature, brainstorming new ideas. Wheeler gave me a direct and personal introduction to the joys of research. We would break for lunch, and walk up to the faculty club. I often had trouble keeping up with him. He would always take the stairs (”No time to wait for an elevator!”). He would hook his arm into the banisters, and swing around, practically leaping from one flight to the next. This was 1990; Wheeler was 79 years old.

We would often work all afternoon (with the occasional interruption, the nuisance of having to leave for my class lectures). Every evening I would walk with him from Jadwin up across the full length of campus, to catch his bus. We would pass the corner of Ivy lane and Washington road, where he had scratched 137 into the concrete when they were pouring the sidewalk. We would pass Jones Hall, where he used to discuss relativity with Einstein. We would continue on through campus, crossing in front of Nassau Hall. Wheeler would insist we walk diagonally to the far gate, instead of exiting through the more convenient FitzRandolph Gate. An Undergraduate was not meant to exit FitzRandolph Gate until graduation, and Wheeler didn’t want to be responsible for what might occur were I to break tradition.

For two years I sat at the feet of the master, and I absorbed as much as I could. I learned about science, and about life. Wheeler had broad interests. We would often discuss biology, or history, or poetry. Over the ensuing years we kept in touch. We collaborated together on Wheeler’s last published paper.

Yesterday I spent a couple of hours at Wheeler’s bedside. I tried to say thank you. But it was impossible to convey how much he means to me, and how grateful I am to him. In that moment when I crossed the threshold to his office, I was embarking on a new path. I am still on that path, and every day I am grateful to him for showing me the way.

John Wheeler died this morning.

Today is my first true blogiversary — Preposterous Universe opened for business on Leap Day 2004, so I only get to celebrate once every four years.

Here is a random collection of some favorite posts, although this is off the top of my head so who knows what hidden gems were missed?

• Hallucinatory Neurophysics
• The World Is Not Magic
• Is This a Date?
• The God Conundrum
• Quantum Interrogation
• Feminism: Destroying the Planet
• How Did the Universe Start?

Here’s to the next four years!

… unless you have a white board to doodle on.

Jennifer has the scoop. If you look closely, you’ll see not only bits about entropy and Einstein’s equation (twice), but some hurricanes, stem cells, allusion to a recent blog post, and a clever design for a lunar lander.

Part of my recent blogging poopy-headedness has been dealing with a minor medical drama with my youngest kid. Over the past 3 or 4 months, we’d noticed that her speech was lagging behind her peers. At her age, lots of kids start to self-correct any unusual speech patterns (lisps, etc), but she just wasn’t doing it. She’d always been a bit delayed verbally compared to her older sister, but that just meant she was in the middle of the bell curve rather than a freak of nature, so we’d never been too concerned. However, in the midst of starting to look into speech therapy, I had an incident where it became completely clear that she just couldn’t hear me. Previously, we’d interpreted similar episodes as her just being very absorbed in what she was doing — if you’ve ever dealt with a three-year old, you know that they’re excellent at ignoring you when they choose. This incident was different, though, and pointed strongly at her being hearing impaired. A follow-up at the doctor’s confirmed our suspicion, when she could only hear the very loudest tone at any frequency. A bit after Christmas we got in to see the audiologists, who found that she had about 40 decibels of hearing loss. For comparison, dense foam earplugs are rated at a bit less than 30 decibels.

The uncertainty before we got into the audiologists was kindof awful (though we of course were very chin up about it). We didn’t know if her hearing loss was degenerative, if it was correctable, and if, to what level. Mostly, however, I just felt terrible for her, because she’d been struggling for years just to understand anything that was going on around her. At the same time, I was tremendously proud of how well she coped, because damn, she was good at figuring out what you meant from not a whole lot of aural cues. Most people were shocked to find out that she was hearing impaired, because she can hold a conversation with you. However, once you know, you notice that during every few conversational back-and-forths, her ability to extrapolate your meaning would break down, and she’d get screwed up. So, all this time she’s been devoting a huge fraction of her tiny little CPU to a highly-advanced voice-recognition system.

In spite of the fact that she’s been good at passing, there are a number of traits that made a lot of sense once we knew about the hearing loss. For example, she has always been very self-contained and independent, but I suspect that’s largely because she only can process what she’s directly paying attention to. She never overhears conversations or background sounds, and so is frequently oblivious of what’s going on (again, it’s easy to miss this being a medical symptom, rather than a bad case of being three). She has great difficulty finding you in the house, since she doesn’t hear footsteps, doors closing, or water running.

The good news is that I now have no need to take advantage of my new knowledge of where to learn ASL in the Seattle area. The audiologists found that the problem was that her middle ear was filled up with the ear’s equivalent of snot, which is easily correctable with tubes. She had the surgery today, and it is like she’s a different kid. The change was dramatic, and essentially immediate. Suddenly, she’s chatty. She no longer pauses before answering you — I’d never noticed that she’d had this processing latency until it went away. She heard my husband from across the room. She swiveled instantly at hearing the ding of the elevator down the hallway. She is about a factor of ten times more engaged with everything around her, and it is so completely gratifying to witness.

I’m off to the American Astronomical Meeting in Austin shortly, but had a few links and bullets to get out of my head before hitting the road.

• This post about Female Science Professor’s worst jobs was one of the most amusinghorrifying reads of my winter break. For example:
  

  One summer I worked in the kitchen of a restaurant that was run by a man with a really bad temper and questionable rules to increase worker efficiency. For example, he decided that it would save time if we removed burgers from the grill with our hands instead of using implements.

• LSST (The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope) is one of my fave current astro projects, and they just got a hefty influx of money from the Charles Simonyi Fund and from Bill Gates. LSST is a stumpy 8-m telescope that will scan the sky repeatedly with a wide-field camera, essentially making a deep, multi-color movie of the sky. The data stream is a software geek’s dream, with objects that appear and disappear, by changing brightness and/or position, and that have to be identifiable within a 30 petabyte database. The image below gives a taste of it, showing some RR Lyrae variable stars in the globular cluster M3.
  
• The AAS has arranged a private screening of Real Genius. I am stoked!
• I threw one of my kids a science-themed birthday recently (totally unprovoked on my part, I swear). We messed around with making “rockets” from film canisters, water, and Alka-Seltzer, looking through diffraction gratings, and turning red cabbage water different colors using acids and bases. And, in shades of Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters, I got to make a volcano cake:
  

Andrew Olmsted was a U.S. soldier who occasionally posted at Obsidian Wings as G’Kar. He was killed yesterday in Iraq. Andrew (who I didn’t know personally) had written a piece with the specific intention of having it posted only in the event of his death. It was posted today by hilzoy.

I write this in part, admittedly, because I would like to think that there’s at least a little something out there to remember me by. Granted, this site will eventually vanish, being ephemeral in a very real sense of the word, but at least for a time it can serve as a tiny record of my contributions to the world. But on a larger scale, for those who knew me well enough to be saddened by my death, especially for those who haven’t known anyone else lost to this war, perhaps my death can serve as a small reminder of the costs of war. Regardless of the merits of this war, or of any war, I think that many of us in America have forgotten that war means death and suffering in wholesale lots. A decision that for most of us in America was academic, whether or not to go to war in Iraq, had very real consequences for hundreds of thousands of people. Yet I was as guilty as anyone of minimizing those very real consequences in lieu of a cold discussion of theoretical merits of war and peace. Now I’m facing some very real consequences of that decision; who says life doesn’t have a sense of humor?

I don’t think the war in Iraq was a good idea. But I have enormous respect and admiration for the people who volunteer and put their lives on the line to serve in the military; they’re not the ones who decide what wars to get into. My heart goes out to Andrew’s friends, colleagues, and family.

Back when my oldest kid was 2.5 and planning her Halloween costume (a guaranteed-to-terrify “pink monster princess”), she pointed out that “last year, I was the one who was scared, but this year, I’m going to scare both those guys!”. I knew that one of the guys had to be our neighbors’ friend Pete, who’d unknowingly traumatized her with a rather horrific mask the previous year, but I was stumped about the other. I asked who the “two guys” were, and she replied, “Pete…and SANTA”.

Her relationship with Santa has thus always been, well, complicated. She’s fascinated, and troubled, and yet remains devoted to the idea of Santa. As she nears 7, she oscillates between a deep suspicion that her parents are somehow complicit and a joyful hope that Santa is as real and bountiful as he’s always been (with the latter state taking the lead as Christmas morning approaches). Over the last year, I watched her pragmatic, rationalist core battling the idea of a magical figure who somehow figures out the ultimate just-in-time logistics delivery problem, and I thus was not sure that her belief in Santa was going to survive till December. It did, but with an increasing number of tests and conditions, as she remembered what Santa’s handwriting looks like, and is sharp enough to notice if Santa uses any familiar wrapping paper.

The reason that she couldn’t quite give up Santa yet is simple. At this point, Santa makes her happy. Deeply, contentedly happy. On some level she knows that the mechanics of Santa go against everything else she understands about how the world operates. And yet, the idea that there is still a little bit of magic that might operate in her very own life makes her giddy.

As adults, even the most rational of us sometimes make small concessions to that joy in letting ourselves believe in something wonderful, but not sensible. When I bowl, I firmly believe that absurd amounts of body english after the ball has left my hand are key to keeping the ball out of the gutter. I obviously “know” that this can’t possibly help, but it makes me really happy to indulge my belief that it does. I have friends who have chants that will make parking spaces open up, who carry umbrellas to prevent it from raining, or who have magical articles of clothing that are critical to the success of their favored sports team. All of these beliefs are obviously absurd, but satisfying nonetheless.

Which in the end, is why I typically stay out of the God vs the Atheists discussions in the blogosphere. I am soft enough of heart to take no pleasure in trying to argue people out of something that makes them deeply happy. I find no evidence for what they believe, and I profoundly disapprove of any attempt to institutionalize those beliefs beyond an individual church/synagog/mosque, but I just cannot build up a big head of steam to fight against individuals’ believing in something that helps them cope with life’s frustrations, tediums, and cruelties. I am not blind to the evils that have been visited upon us in the name of organized religion. Yet, individually, there are many people whom I value and love who also take comfort from believing in God. Individually, their belief causes no harm to anyone. They still support teaching of evolution in schools, and don’t abandon free will in favor of waiting for God’s Will to be manifest. They will still be friends with a godless heathen like myself. While this “mostly harmless” manifestation is not true for all religious individuals, it dominates in those that I know personally, making me loathe to engage in sweeping criticisms of theists, even while I struggle with concerns about the impact of invasive institutionalized religion.

I won’t defend my tolerance with well-reasoned arguments, since I have none. Other writers and readers of this blog have given this topic far more rigorous thought than I. Instead, the tolerance grows out of the same inkling that it would feel a bit small for me to take away my daughter’s belief in Santa before she was ready to stand without it.

It has been a dodgy couple of days for news about my part of England.

Yesterday I watched with pride as my hometown football team - Wigan Athletic - scored three goals in the first half against Blackburn. This then turned to horror as they conceded three, with my pride eventually recovering after they pulled a couple back for a scrappy 5-3 victory (first in thirteen games).

Then (via PZ) I find out that the same type of creationist nonsense that we’re forced to waste time and effort fighting in the U.S. is rearing its empty head in England, and in Lancashire no less! As the Observer reports

The AH Trust, a charity set up last year by a group of businessmen alarmed by the direction in which they see society heading, has identified a number of potential sites in the north west of England to build the £3.5m Christian theme park.

The trust claims it already has a number of rich backers who are keen to invest in the project, which will boast two interactive cinemas, a cafeteria, six shops and a television recording studio, allowing it to produce its own Christian-themed films and documentaries.

Oh the horror! What is going on in my home country? And this isn’t just a place to churn out rip-offs of The Passion of the Christ; they have other issues

‘The church in this country is in crisis and many church leaders living in Australia, America and Canada have openly proclaimed that God has left the church in England,’ the trust states on its website.

‘Evolution has falsely become the foundation of our society and we need the television studio to advocate Genesis across this land in order to remove this falsehood, which presently is destroying the church foundation.’

It just brings tears to my eyes. But I’ll end on a note of pride. Even better than Wigan breaking their losing streak at football is to read this about your hometown

The theme park’s anti-evolution bias and its emphasis on Genesis has raised eyebrows among planning officials, according to Jones, who originally wanted to build the park at the site of an old B&Q store but was refused permission by the council.

‘Wigan council slammed the door in our faces. You mention the C [Christian] word, and people don’t want to know,’

It just warms your heart doesn’t it?

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

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

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

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

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

Physics will be a little bit duller without him.