Blogs / Cosmic Variance

Lonely heterosexual male physicists may wish to try their luck in New York City (via the consistently funny and frequently off-color Overheard in New York).

I suspect the LHC must be close to ready — they’re coming out with rap videos now.

Via Adam at US/LHC Blogs, although the video was posted by writer/rapper Katherine McAlpine, formerly of Physics Buzz.

I find it extremely amusing that when Radovan Karadzic, Serbian war criminal and fugitive from justice, wanted to disguise himself with an assumed identity in a suburb of Belgrade, he chose such an interesting occupation for his alter ego — purveyor of New-Age quantum nonsense.

No one knew quite how to react when it emerged that he had been selling “human quantum energy” diviners on the internet from a flat in surburban Belgrade, speaking at conferences for alternative health and maintaining an intimate friendship with a rather good-looking younger woman.

And this wasn’t just some cover story to fall back on when strangers inquired about what he did for a living; apparently, Karadzic really went all-out. (Including a website. Every international fugitive needs a website!)

He threw himself into the role. His articles in Healthy Life, a Serbian alternative medicine magazine, show a man who was fluent in new age thinking. “It is widely believed our senses and mind can recognise only 1% of whatever exists around us. Three per cent we understand with our hearts. All that remains is shrouded in secrecy, out of the reach of our five senses; however, it is within our reach in the extra-sensory manner,” he wrote in one article.

I love the quantification. Three percent we understand with our hearts! Hopefully, improved experimental precision will enable us to pin the correct figure down to the nearest tenth of a percent.

But he was devout, you have to had him that.

He was also interested in healing through the optimal use of ‘vital energy’, a quasi-mystical, non-physical dimension of the body, similar to the Chinese notion of ‘Qi’ and the Indian concept of the ‘chakra’ centres of energy in the body. “He was very religious,” said a woman who works at the magazine and knew him. “He had his hair in a plait in order to be able to receive different energies. He was a very nice man.”

At least, when he wasn’t ordering the Srebrenica massacre. That wasn’t really very nice.

Many of us appreciate that pernicious stereotypes about geeky physicists color the public’s perception of our field. But who among us is willing to take the necessary steps to shatter those stereotypes and show physicists for the dapper, charismatic heart-throbs they really are?

Fermilab theorist (and longtime CV reader) Mark Jackson, that’s who. As reported in symmetry’s blog, Mark has been chosen one of Chicago Magazine’s 20 Most Eligible Singles. Now, we know Mark, and can assure you that he is the shy, dedicated sort, who would vastly prefer to be alone in his office looking for cosmic superstrings than to have his ruggedly handsome face splashed across a magazine page to be gawked at by wistful single women throughout the Midwest. But, he also understands the importance of public outreach, and is willing to do what it takes to advance the cause.

At the magazine party to celebrate the feature, we have a reliable report that at least one woman threw her panties onto the stage as Mark was called up. As we say, whatever it takes.

This morning has me packing and preparing for a trip to England, to take part in the annual editorial board meeting of the New Journal of Physics and then to spend a few days visiting my family. A additional bonus is that a good friend of mine, a historian, will be in London at the same time, and I’m looking forward to getting well and truly screwed by the exchange rate when we sample some of London’s culinary delights. I expect that, as usual, our conversation will turn to some of the comparisons and contrasts between our fields.

So it was fun to see that Sky & Telescope is reporting on work by Don Olson and collaborators at Texas State University, in which they claim to have laid to rest the historical question of precisely when Julius Caesar landed in Britain. The Roman invasion has had open questions associated with it because although Caesar approached the white cliffs of Dover, Celtic warriors armed with spears (no doubt chanting “Romanes Eunt Domus“) deterred him from landing. The choice of an alternate site was guided by the tides, and it is this that has apparently opened the door to astronomers.

Olson calculated that the complex tidal patterns in August 2007 would mimic extremely closely those in August of 55BC, and performed several experiments in the English Channel during that month. He was fortunate to have at his disposal modern astronomical technology, the use of which was pioneered by Newton, and which has been perfected more recently by G. Smith - the so-called apple. Dropping this “apple” into the ocean from the pier at Deal (where Caesar is thought to have landed), Olson and team were able to understand the dates on which it would have been reasonable for the tides to bring the Romans from Dover to Deal. The answer appears to be August 22-23. As the BBC reports

This is the beach preferred by most historians but rejected by tide experts in the past. A modified reading of Caesar’s reference to the “night of a full Moon” also leads to the August 22-23 date, Dr Olson claimed.

“The scientists were right about the tidal streams and so were the historians about the landing site,” he explained.

So there’s a bit of something here for both my historian friend and me.

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.

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!

For his final guest post, Tom looks at a topic right up our alley: Einstein’s thoughts about religion. The difference being that he knows what he’s talking about, having written a book on Einstein.

Many thanks to Tom for chipping in this week. His previous posts are here and here, and don’t forget the Inverse Square Blog.

—————————————

The Jewishness of Albert Einstein.

I’m a bit late to this particular party, but I hear that there was a bit of a media and blog hullabaloo about a letter by Albert Einstein that was auctioned last month for 170,000 pounds. That doubles the previous record for an Einstein letter, and at least part of the reason for its record price seems to have been its content — what seemed to some a startlingly blunt assessment of religion in general. He wrote:

“The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.”

To get down to cases close to home:

“For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions.”

To be sure, he acknowledged, he was happy to identify himself as one of “the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity…” But clearly belonging to a community did not make him blind, deaf or dumb.

The reason I ignored this at first is that after fifteen years in the Einstein game I’m pretty tired of WWED appeals to authority, all that pouring through the great man’s quotations to find something to support whatever view one may have had in the first place.

The reason I’m picking it up now is that the letter raises a question that allows us with only a little leap of the imagination to begin to gather the intense pressure of the experience of being Jewish in Europe in the first few decades of the last century – especially if you were smart, prominent, public.

Just to get it out of the way: there is nothing surprising about this letter. Just five years earlier Einstein wrote that, when he was young he had experienced a bout of real piety, until:

“Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic orgy of freethinking, coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies.”

That revelation remained with him throughout his life, and he never made a secret of it. He refused to claim a religious affiliation in the papers he filed with the Austro-Hungarian government to take up a professorship in Prague. Told he had to claim something, he declared he was of the “Mosaic” faith – a construction that conveyed his disdain for the whole notion pretty well, IMHO.

And so it went. In 1915, he told one correspondent that, “I see with great dismay that God punishes so many of His children for their ample folly, for which obviously only He himself can be held responsible,” …. “Only His nonexistence can excuse him.”

Those who followed this malign, non-existent deity were fools. When he visited Palestine in 1921, Einstein was much impressed by the sight of Jews constructing cities and a way of life out of raw dirt and effort. But the sight of traditional Jews praying at the Wailing Wall seemed to him the “dull-witted clansmen of our tribe.” They made such spectacles of themselves, “praying aloud, their faces turned to the wall, their bodies swaying to and fro,” that to Einstein, it was “a pathetic sight of men with a past but without a present.”

That’s enough: the point is that Einstein made it clear in public, and even more so in private communications that have been in the public record for decades now, that revealed religion in general and orthodox Judaism in particular had no hold on him at all. When he used the term God, it was mostly just an off-hand short-hand: “God does not play dice” was another way of saying, as he did in the EPR paper, that “no reasonable definition of reality could be expected to permit” the excesses of modern quantum theory.

But all this begs the question why Einstein bothered to claim Jewishness, if Judaism itself as a practice and a body of belief had no hold on him.

Einstein himself gave two answers. The first was he saw in Judaism a framework and a fair amount of thought about how to live ethically with others. His take on the tradition pulled out of Judaism “the democratic ideal of social justice, coupled with the ideal of mutual aid and tolerance among all men” and a passion for “every form of intellectual aspiration and spiritual effort.” This is religion as heuristic – and specifically, Judaism as a sustained body of inquiry into certain problems that interested him.

The second, of course, was that he had no choice. Whatever he may have believed, others defined him: “When I came to Germany,” he wrote some years later as part of an explanation for his conversion to Zionism, “I discovered for the first time that I was a Jew, and I owe this discovery more to Gentiles than to Jews.”

It was more than the casual anti-Semitism that he experienced or perceived, dating back to his failure to get an academic job after finishing his college degree. Rather, Einstein’s strong identification not just as a person of Jewish background, but as a highly public member of both the Berlin Jewish community and the nationalist Zionist movement, is one measure of just how rapidly the nature of German anti-Semitism changed in the immediate aftermath of defeat in World War I.

I go into this at some length in this tome – from which most of the above comes, in one form or another. See chapter ten if you’re interested. In this venue, I want to make just two points abstracted out of that much longer story.

(more…)

For his second guest post, Tom follows in our proud tradition of fearless eclecticism,
mixing neuroscience and current events with a bit of materialistic philosophizing. His first post was here, and his third is here.

——————————————————————

Burrowing into tragedy: a story behind the story of the Iraq War Suicides.

My thanks to all here who gave me such a warm welcome on Monday (and, again, to Sean for asking me here in the first place).

This post emerges out of this sad story of a week or so ago.

Over Memorial Day weekend this year there was a flurry of media coverage about the devastating psychological toll of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The single most awful paragraph in the round-up:

“According to the Army, more than 2,000 active-duty soldiers attempted suicide or suffered serious self-inflicted injuries in 2007, compared to fewer than 500 such cases in 2002, the year before the United States invaded Iraq. A recent study by the nonprofit Rand Corp. found that 300,000 of the nearly 1.7 million soldiers who’ve served in Iraq or Afghanistan suffer from PTSD or a major mental illness, conditions that are worsened by lengthy deployments and, if left untreated, can lead to suicide.”

(For details and a link to a PDF of the Army report – go here.)

This report, obviously, is the simply the quantitative background to a surfeit of individual tragedy – but my point here is not that war produces terrible consequences.

Rather, the accounts of the Iraq War suicides — 115 current or former servicemen and women in 2007 – struck me for what was implied, but as far as I could find, not discussed in the mass media: the subtle and almost surreptitious way in which the brain-mind dichotomy is breaking down, both as science and as popular culture.

How so? It is, thankfully, becoming much more broadly understood within the military and beyond that “shell shock” is not malingering, or evidence of an essential weakness of moral fiber. PTSD is now understood as a disease, and as one that involves physical changes in the brain.

The cause and effect chain between the sight of horror and feelings of despair cannot, given this knowledge, omit the crucial link of the material substrate in which the altered and destructive emotions can emerge. PTSD becomes thus a medical, and not a spiritual pathology.

(This idea still faces some resistance, certainly. I launched my blog with a discussion of the attempt to court martial a soldier for the circumstances surrounding her suicide attempt. But even so, the Army is vastly further along in this area that it was in the Vietnam era and before.)

Similarly, depression is clearly understood as a disease with a physical pathology that underlies the malign sadness of the condition. (H/t the biologist Louis Wolpert for the term and his somewhat oddly detached but fascinating memoir of depression.)

This notion of the material basis of things we experience as our mental selves is not just confined to pathology. So-called smart drugs let us know how chemically malleable our selves can be.

More broadly, the study of neuroplasticity provides a physiological basis for the common sense notion that experience changes who we perceive ourselves to be.

All this seems to me to be a good thing, in the sense that (a) the study of the brain is yielding significant results that now or will soon greatly advance human well being; and (b) that the public seems to be taking on board some of the essential messages. The abuses (overmedication, anyone?) are certainly there. But to me, it is an unalloyed good thing that we have left the age of shell shock mostly behind us.

At the same time, I’m a bit surprised that the implications of this increasingly public expression of an essentially materialist view of mind haven’t flared up as a major battle in the science culture wars.

Just to rehearse the obvious: the problem with cosmology for the other side in the culture war is that it conflicts with the idea of the omnipresent omnipotence of God. The embarrassment of evolutionary biology is that it denies humankind a special place in that God’s creation, destroying the unique status of the human species as distinct from all the rest of the living world.

Now along comes neuroscience to make the powerful case that our most intimate sense of participating in the numinous is an illusion.

Instead, the trend of current neuroscience seems to argue that the enormously powerful sense each of us has of a self as distinct from the matter of which we are made is false. Our minds, our selves may be real—but they are the outcome of a purely material process taking place in the liter or so of grey stuff between our ears.

(There are dissenters to be sure, those that argue against the imperial materialism they see in contemporary neuroscience. See this essay for a forceful expression of that view.)

I do know that this line of thought leads down a very convoluted rabbit hole, and that’s not where I am trying to go just now.

Instead, the reports of the Iraq suicides demonstrated for me that the way the news of the materiality of mind is is slipping into our public culture without actually daring (or needing) to speaking its name.

That the problem of consciousness is still truly unsolved matters less in this arena than the fact of fMRI experiments that demonstrate the alterations in brain structure and metabolism associated with the stresses of war or the easing of the blank, black hole of depression. The very piecemeal state of the field helps mask its potentially inflammatory cultural implications.

To me this suggests two possibilities. One is that it is conceivable that when the penny finally drops, we might see backlash against technological interventions into the self like that which has impeded stem cell research in the U.S.

On the other hand, I don’t think that the public can be motivated or even bamboozled into blocking the basic science in this field. Too much rests on the work; any family that has experienced Alzheimers knows just how urgent the field may be — not to mention anyone with a loved one in harms way.

This actually gives me hope for a shift in the culture war. For all the time and energy wasted over the last several years defending the idea of science against attacks on evolution, with the cosmologists taking their lumps too – the science of mind could force a shift in the terms of engagement decisively in the right direction.

Or I could be guilty of another bout of wishful thinking. Thoughts?

Image: Brain in a Vat, article illustration. Offered in homage to my friend and source of wisdom, Hilary Putnam, who introduced the brain-in-a-vat thought experiment in this book. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

The classic three pillars of an academic position are teaching, research, and service. While the University Administration sometimes seems to think of “service” as being synonymous with “sitting on committees”, many of us enjoy taking the broader view.

As part of my service activities, this weekend I had the pleasure to talk with a roomful of fantastic young scholars from the McNair program (officially known as the Ronald E. McNair Postbaccalaureate Achievement Program). The program was named after one of the astronauts who was killed in the Challenger disaster). He was also a physicist with a Ph.D. from MIT.

The McNair program identifies promising undergraduates who either are low-income, are first-generation college students, or are from an underrepresented minority group. It then provides extensive mentoring to encourage the students to continue on to graduate school. The mentoring takes the form of supporting the students in research projects in their own departments, guiding them through the steps involved in preparing a strong graduate application, providing an additional resource for academic and personal advising, and waiving application fees.

If you haven’t run across this program, keep an eye out for it. If you know a student who might be a candidate, encourage them to apply. Even more importantly, if you have a chance to work with a McNair scholar, jump at the chance. These kids are phenomenal. They’re interesting and driven, and a pleasure to know.