Blogs / Cosmic Variance

Robert Novak, conservative pundit/journalist and TV personality, is retiring after being diagnosed with a brain tumor. Novak and I probably don’t agree on many things, and he isn’t called “The Prince of Darkness” for nothing (nor does he seem to especially mind). But brain tumors shouldn’t happen to anyone, so perhaps this is the place to share my Novak story.

Last September I gave a talk at a somewhat unusual venue: a conference at the University of Illinois on “Plato’s Timaeus Today.” Most of the speakers and attendees, as you might expect, were philosophers or classicists interested in this particular Platonic dialogue — which, apparently, used to be one of his most popular back in the Middle Ages, although it’s fallen a bit out of favor since then. But one of the central purposes of the Timaeus (full text here) was to explain Plato’s theory of the origin of the universe. (Briefly: the demiurge did it, not from scratch, but by imposing order on chaos.) (Also! This dialogue is the origin of the myth of Atlantis. It was not, as far as anyone can tell, a pre-existing story; Plato just made it up.) So the organizers thought it would be fun to invite a physicist or two, to talk about how we think about the universe these days. Sir Tony Leggett gave a keynote address, and I gave a talk during the regular sessions.

The point of my talk was: Plato was wrong. In particular, you don’t need an external agent to create the universe, nor to impose order on the chaos. These days we are reaching toward an understanding of the entire history of the universe in which there is nothing other than the laws of physics working themselves out — a self-contained, complete, purely materialist conception of the cosmos. Not to say that we have such a theory in its full glory, obviously, but we see no obstacles and are making interesting progress. See here and here for more physics background.

And there, during my talk, sitting in the audience, was none other than Robert Novak. This was a slight surprise, although not completely so; Novak was a UIUC alumnus, and was listed as a donor to the conference. But he hadn’t attended most of the other talks, as far as I could tell. In any event, he sat there quietly in his orange and navy blue rep tie, and I gave my talk. Which people seemed to like, although by dint of unfortunate scheduling it was at the very end of the conference and I had a plane to catch so had to run away.

And there, as I was waiting at the gate in the tiny local airport, up walks Robert Novak. He introduced himself, and mentioned that he had heard my talk, and had a question that he was reluctant to ask during the conference — he didn’t want to be a disruption among the assembled academics who were trying to have a scholarly conversation. And I think he meant that sincerely, for which I give him a lot of credit. And I give him even more credit for taking time on a weekend to zip down to Urbana (from Chicago, I presume) to listen to some talks on Plato. Overall, the world would be a better place if more people went to philosophy talks in their spare time.

Novak’s question was this: had I discussed the ideas I had talked about in my presentation with any Catholic theologians? The simple answer was “not very much”; I have talked to various theologians, many of them Catholic, about all sorts of things, but not usually specifically about the possibility of an eternally-existing law-abiding materialist universe. The connection is clear, of course; one traditional role of religion has been to help explain where the world came from, and one traditional justification for the necessity of God has been the need for a Creator. (Not the only one, in either case.) So if science can handle that task all by itself, it certainly has implications for a certain strand of natural theology.

Understanding that it was not an idle question (and that Novak is a Catholic), I added my standard admonition when asked about the theological implications of cosmology by people who don’t really want to be subjected to a full-blown argument for atheism: whether you want to believe in God or not, it’s a bad idea to base your belief in God on an urge to explain features of the natural world, including its creation and existence. Because eventually, science will get there and take care of that stuff, and then where are you?

And, once again to his credit, Novak seemed to appreciate my point, whether or not he actually agreed. He nodded in comprehension, thanked me again for the talk, and settled down to wait for his flight.

I had just stepped out of the shower yesterday (getting a bit of a late start, yes) when the building began to shake. We’re on the ninth floor of a twelve-story building in downtown Los Angeles, so it was quite exciting there for a while — the ground shook for maybe twenty seconds, the cat scampered under the bed, and an item or two had to be rescued from imminent spillage off of bookshelves. (Our cat has her own blog, so it usually takes quite a shock to drag her away from the internets.)

But a minor earthquake overall, just 5.4 on the Richter scale. No significant damage, even closer to the center (we were about 30 miles away). The interesting thing is that within seconds after the event you could hop to the US Geological Survey page to find a map of all the world’s recent earthquakes, and then home in on this one. Obviously most of the information is computer generated, although the main page for the earthquake does reassure you that “This event has been reviewed by a seismologist.”

So you can check out the Shake Map, of course:

We’re right on top of the dot labeled “Los Angeles.” But you can also find Google maps, travel times for the shocks,

and of course — waveforms!

Earthquakes are so much better with science. The only downside is that I spent the immediate aftermath looking for the kitty rather than drying my hair, so I went through the rest of the day with the dreaded “earthquake hair.”

On June 25, our son Ian Robert Conway Erbacher was born. His mom, my wife and partner in particle physics crime, Prof. Robin Erbacher, labored some 14 hours to deliver him, pushing rather hard for about three hours at the end. Robin’s jogging and exercise during pregnancy, well into the eigth month, seemed to pay off here! He was big: 9 lb 4 oz, and 21 inches at birth, but even after the tight squeeze on the way out he was just fine.

We made a somewhat unusual choice with his name. His first name, Ian, is a name that Robin and I both liked. He has two middle names. Robert is for his great grandfather Robert Boche, Robin’s grandfather, who was a well known geneticist and one of the first people to study the effects of nuclear radiation on living organisms, as part of the Manhattan Project. He passed away last year at the age of 96. Conway is my last name - had to get that in there - and I have two Conway children from my first marriage, both college age now (Jenny is at Berkeley and Alex is starting this fall at the University of Chicago). Robin is the third of three sisters, and the last to have children, so Ian will carry the Erbacher name on.

Ian is special in another way - he was conceived in vitro. (This was due to problems on my end stemming from mumps orchitis when I was a young adult…despite the fact that I previously successfully fathered two children.) Neither Robin nor I had known much about IVF, but ended up learning more than we ever expected about endocrinology and embryology. This technology is incredible. In short, the woman’s ovaries are stimulated during an otherwise normal cycle to overproduce eggs, the eggs are harvested, fertilized, and if all goes well, up to about three of the fertilized pre-embryos, which at this stage have divided to about 6-8 cells, are put back into the womb on day 3. Some clinics wait until day 5, at which stage the pre-embryos are blastocysts. Not all 6-8 cell embryos make it to the blastocyst stage; only about a quarter or so do. Waiting for day 5 can be emotionally trying for the couple.

So it’s a game of statistics and skill. In our case, we were able to get 11 eggs from Robin, of which 9 were mature enough to fertilize. Of these they managed to successfully fertilize 6, using a micromanipulation technique called intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI). They hold the egg with a micropipette, suck up one of the sperm with a microscopic needle, somehow having cut the tail off, and inject the sperm head into the egg. This is, to my mind, one of the greatest feats of modern medicine…I am still in awe.

So, of the six fertilized eggs, by day 3 we had these three pre-embryos:

As pre-embryos go, well, these have good cell division but you can clearly see some extra “fragmentation” material inside. Ideally one would like to see eight clear cells, with only a little fragmentation. But, we were assured, it is quite normal that such pre-embryos result in healthy babies. The fragments are absorbed at later stages somehow - this happens in normal embryos routinely. So we put all three back that day, leaving none for cryopreservation (statistically there was little point). We got incredibly lucky: one of them made it to the blastocyst stage, implanted, and became Ian nine months later. We’d beaten odds of around one in four or five! For a while we referred to him as “Seven of Nine”.
Of course we went through all the tests you can imagine. There is no reason to believe that IVF babies are more likely to have any sort of problems than naturally fertilized ones. Ian passed with flying colors, and by Christmas we started to let ourselves breathe a little easier.

Robin had a great pregnancy, and kept in great shape. Ian arrived more or less right at term, and now we are three weeks into the little guy’s life, getting to know him better. (Sleep…hmmm…could use that.)

It’s amazing to look at this little person and wonder whether he’ll see the dawn of the 22nd century. He should have quite a ride through this one!

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!

Hi again!

It has been almost six months since I last posted at Cosmic Variance, which most certainly marks me as highly neglectful. I wasn’t intending to take such a break. In fact I had hoped that a byproduct of my new commitment to travel less would be more consistent blogging. However, as it turns out it has been a rather stressful few months, and only now do I feel that I can make an attempt to once again write somewhat regularly.

The primary source of my stress is something about which I can’t really complain; I have been making an important career decision. This has now come to an end and, after being on leave in the Astronomy Department at Cornell next semester, I will be leaving Syracuse in January to become a Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania.

I have had a wonderful eight years at Syracuse, in a supportive department and university and with wonderful colleagues and students. These factors, and the deep friendships I have within the department, made this a very difficult decision to make. However, now that I have made my decision I am obviously extremely excited about my new position and am looking forward to my future at Penn. There will be plenty to write about this in the coming months (including at least one more surprise), but I wanted to use this post merely to explain my absence and hopefully to get back into the swing of writing.

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.