Things I would blog about, if I weren’t on blogging vacation.
- A short piece I wrote for Seed about the arrow of time is now on the web. It’s basically a summary of the scenario that Jennie Chen and I are suggesting for spontaneous inflation. On a related note, Karmen at Chaotic Utopia has a series on complexity and time, starting here.
- Cocktail Party Physics advertises a call for proposals from Feminist Press.
Girls and Science: Call for Proposals
The Feminist Press, in collaboration with The National Science Foundation, is exploring new ways to get girls and young women interested in science. While there are many library resources featuring biographies of women scientists that are suitable for school reports, these are rarely the books that girls seek out themselves to read for pleasure. What would a book, or series of books, about science that girls really want to read look like? That is the question we want to answer.
I don’t know; seems to me, if we start encouraging girls to become scientists, pretty soon they’ll be replacing equations with hugs and instead of performing experiments we’ll just talk about our feelings or some such thing. That can’t be right.
- Janna Levin, author of the uniquely compelling How the Universe Got Its Spots and the brand-new A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, appeared on the Colbert Report! I can’t actually get the video to play, but maybe you can.
- Chris Mooney’s The Republican War on Science is now out in paperback. So all you poor liberals who couldn’t afford the hardcover edition now have no excuse.
- Speaking of books, Alex Vilenkin has come out with Many Worlds in One, about eternal inflation and the multiverse. Alex was the one who first realized that inflation could be eternal, and is a world-class cosmologist; whatever you may think of the issues, he’s worth listening to. (And don’t tell me that we cosmologists can’t have a little fun.)
- And Michael Bérubé also has a book out, What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?. So many books. Don’t these people know they’re wasting valuable time that could be spent blogging?
- George W. Bush has decided to close EPA regional libraries, to protect the public from information they don’t need.
What has been termed, “positively Orwellian”, by PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch, is indeed frightening. It seems that the self-appointed “Decider”, George W. Bush, has decided to “end public access to research materials” at EPA Regional libraries without Congressional consent. In an all out effort to impede research and public access, Bush has implemented a loosely covert operation to close down 26 technical libraries under the guise of a budgetary constraint move. Scientists are protesting, but at least 15 of the libraries will be closed by Sept. 30, 2006.
- On the other hand, John Kerry draws support from unseemly quarters, at least according to Yousuf al-Qaradawi.
Kerry, who ran against Bush, was supported by homosexuals and nudists. But it was Bush who won [the elections], because he is Christian, right-wing, tenacious, and unyielding. In other words, the religious overcame the perverted. So we cannot blame all Americans and Westerners.
So we really shouldn’t complain about the President.
- Weak lensing, uploaded to flickr by darkmatter. Amazing photos.
pretty soon they’ll be replacing equations with hugs and instead of performing experiments we’ll just talk about our feelings or some such thing. That can’t be right.
On the other hand, with all these men as scientists, it’s all beer bellies and farting and sitting around watching football, so….
I’ve got a blog review of Alex’s book in the works.
I frequently learn more about our culture from this physics blog than I do from the cultural blogs I visit. Today’s example: Janna Levin, her books (I’m especially interested in the novel about Gödel and Turing), and her appearance on The Colbert Report. Thanks for that.
A much simpler explanation for the arrow of time is a simple evolutionary universe. I’m not talking about a “family tree”, like Lee Smolin has proposed, I mean a truly evolutionary cosmological model, where our universe is nearly flat because leaps to configurations of greater entropic efficiency are the direction of evolution, as proven by our leap from apes to harness fire, and beyond…
That defines a true anthropic connection between humans and the forces, where the human evolutionary process carries a reciprocal connection to the forces.
This stuff falls from self-evident theory and observation as naturally as Darwin’s theory did.
Why this so hard for people to fathom, I’ll never know, given the comparitively EXTREME forms of speculation that are given more credence, but with less direct evidence.
In case nobody noticed, the high-energy photons that get released as the expanding universe “comes apart”, are critical to the creation of real massive particles from less-dense negative pressure energy… and this affects the gravity and entropy of the universe via an asymmetrical application of the second law of thermodynamics.
what if these female scientists menstruate all over an important piece of research?
Hi Sean,
thanks for the weak lensing pic and darkmatter@flickr link.
Some Magic optics and freeze framed photons!
=
“the extremely far past looks essentially the same as the extremely far future. The distinction between past and future doesn’t matter on the scale of the entire cosmos, it’s just a feature we observe locally.”
“If time is to be symmetric—if the direction of its flow is not to matter throughout the universe—conditions at early times should be similar to those at late times.”
I shall not add anything to that. Ley Us just say we agree on the fundamentals, though we (you+I) may have asymmetric views of the final picture – perhaps not so much imperfect mirror image versus ‘reality’, but rather the difference between a ‘negative’ or undeveloped photograph – and the ‘real’ image in its ‘real’ or true colours.
For clarification, not antagonism, I must ask, how does this differ from the Alchemical AEther?
After skimming through this post, I’m led to believe that the multiverse has entered into mainstream physics. Just out of curiosity, has a recent poll been conducted to determine the percentage of physicists who have bought into the concept of the multiverse?
CR, that is a frequently asked question:
http://preposterousuniverse.com/writings/cosmologyprimer/faq.html#ether
The dark energy doesn’t define a rest frame, it’s not a medium, and there is strong experimental evidence in favor of it.
The link to the Colbert Report segment works just fine here (in Northern Europe). I think the TV channel/web site registers where you’re accessing from and then decides whether you get to see the clip or not. For instance, I’ve watched two episodes of the new Battlestar Galactica series on Norwegian television and fallen in love with it. (Apparently, we’re two seasons behind the civilised world.) However, when I go to the official site for the show and choose the “watch a full episode” option, I’m told that “this video cannot be accessed from your region”. Also, on Comedy Central, for every clip I wanted to see, I had to suffer through 30 secs of utterly irrelevant and painfully pompous advertising for services that simply aren’t available over here. But now all those video ads have thankfully disappeared from that site. So I think it all depends on where you’re logging on from.
And Janna Levin was wonderful. It’s weird, but fake news journalist Stephen Colbert seems to know a lot more about how science actually works and what it is telling us about physical reality than the large majority of “real” science journalists.
interesting read in the seed magazine. i like the use of billiards in defining entropy, i am a fan of billiards myself.
perhaps we are too stringent on our boundaries of conception for what the universe looked like in the beginning?
i would suggest this idea for modeling the universe.
discus shaped but with a mirror cone shaped center mass. all rotating, (i wish i had an image, trying to describe a picture with words here) but the centroid mass not being perfectly centered. all points rotating the same speed you would have a “wobbling” effect so that on one side of the disk you have an expansion and on the other side you would have collapse. the expanding side would not be able to percieve the contracting mass due to the shear mass at the center. each side would abserve itself seperately… (am i making sense?)
then you would still be able to have low-high-low entropy cycles, the appearance of a “big bang/ big crunch” the energy of one side collapsing would fuel the other to expand, and it would explain why we can only account for a very small amount of the universe’s energy/mass…
just my thoughts… feel free to tear it apart, thats the only way to make it better!
Aaron
In the Estonian newspaper this morning, I read about Ene Ergma being narrowly edged out for the main position in the Estonian Parliament. She is an astrophysicist specializing in stellar evolution. When I asked my cousin to tell me more, I heard that she is also open, honest, accessible and friendly. I wonder with her and Angela Merkel if the world has a new category of female scientists/politicians. I think these women can be excellent role models for girls going into science.
{“Why did I go into politics? To defend science,” says Ene Ergma.}
Alex Vilenkin has a book out on eternal inflation? Cool!
Sean wrote: “Speaking of books, Alex Vilenkin has come out…”
Are there more of these stones that are in the Vilenkin link!???
I only knew of the one at Colby College ME, which I spotted some years ago at a Gordon conference. It had some wonderfully crackpot inscription about the need to discover a material known as a “semi-insulator” which will repel gravity and lead to fewer airplane fatalities. OK, I just googled it and found it at here.
THIS MARKER HAS BEEN PLACED BY THE BABSON GRAVITY RESEARCH FOUNDATION TO COMMEMORATE THE DISCOVERY OF A SEMI-INSULATOR IN ORDER TO HARNESS GRAVITY AS A FREE POWER AND REDUCE AIRPLANE ACCIDENTS
So there are at least 2…
At the time that I found it, I was on my way to give a talk about Anderson insulators, so of course a picture made its way into my intro …
Is this a joke? If it is, it’s not funny, if not, it’s sexist. Either way it reflects poorly on the author.
“Is this a joke?”
Does the Pope shit in the woods?
Now that’s funny!
Sadly, this isn’t as far wrong as you’d like: I’ve had waaay too many conversations about “March Madness” and basketball than I ever imagined as a physics undergrad. Who knew that the ability to sit through beer-enhanced conversations about tall men who probably couldn’t pass freshman physics was a valuable skill for career advancement.
I take it that the author’s comment about women in physics is not meant to be taken seriously. Of course, this doesn’t make the comment funny, nor harmless for that matter.
Sean, I find your proposal for the arrow of time problem very interesting, but I am not sure how it can avoid the “Boltzmann’s Brain” objection you described yourself in a recent post. You postulate an infinite de Sitter space in which a small patch starts inflating by a fluctuation, and this inflation evolves afterwards into our present universe. But ever from the moment of the fluctuation, all during the inflation and the post-inflation period, entropy in the patch is increasing -which means that the original fluctuation had to be more “unlikely” that the present state of the univere. Then isn’t it more likely to conclude that the present universe just fluctuated into existing as it is now instead of having evolved from the past? I don’t think any proposal to account for the arrow of time starting with a fluctuation in a time-symmetric background can escape this unacceptable “last-thurday-ist” conclusion.
In other words, my question is, how does having the inflationary phase in your model help to elude the old Boltzmann’s Brain problem?
I have to say I am pretty dissapointed with the the sexist joke/comments about girls only offering hugs and discussions about their feelings. I find most of the social commentary of the authors on this blog to be pretty dead-on most of the time, but that was a bit insulting. Having ‘grown’ up in the academic physics community, there is definately a sense that all behaviors ‘tradtionally feminine’ (for the sake of argument let’s say hugs) are not scientific while behaviors that are traditionally masculine (let’s say beer and farting for the sake of arguement) are somehow acceptable ‘scientific’ behaviors. As a woman, do I need to deny my femininity (and just plain good manners) to progress professionally? After all, it is the ‘more scientific’ people who are looked upone more highly and advance more easily; does being a woman automatically make me less scientific or does the perception that women are not scientifc prevent my peers from recognizing the value of my work??
Sorry, a bit heavy, but it got me thinking. Anyway, I suspect some hugs and discussions of feelings might actually brings some life into many of the cold, boring physics departments I have been part of….Of course, I was the one who would offer free yoga classes to my colleagues, so what do I know?
How can people not get that Sean was just parodying the stereotypes of sexists? Sarcasm must be really dead.
(Unless the expressions of outrage were really continuing the joke by squaring it, in which case I better shut up.)
I join Alejandro in mourning the sad inability of certain readers to appreciate subtle sarcasm. But I don’t think sarcasm is dead, not as long as The Daily Show and Colbert Report continue to be on the air…
Perhaps what we need is a sarcasm smiley…. or maybe sarcasm html tags ( I was going to write them in, but apparently, they get interpreted somehow). Of course, I would expect that any familiarity at all with Sean’s previous posts would obviate the need for this.
ASCII in general has too few characters to be a good carrier of something as complex as sarcasm…
That aside, thanks for an always interesting blog.