June 2011

Greetings from Qatar

/ 8 Comments

Not much blogging this week, as I’m at the World Conference of Science Journalists in Doha, Qatar. I’m informed that the technical term describing my role here is that of trailing spouse. But I did give a little talk on upcoming discoveries we should be looking forward to in particle physics and cosmology.

I’ll try to put up a more full report later. Right now I’ve just been guilted into blogging because I’m listening to a sexy and exciting panel about science blogs, staring Mo Costandi, Maryn McKenna, Jennifer Ouellette, Ed Yong, and Mohammed Yahia. And just to prove I’m here, I can show you what a sign inside Starbucks looks like in an Arab country.

Afterwards I’ll be headed to the souk to shop for scimitars.

Greetings from Qatar Read More »

8 Comments

Miss USA Contestants on Teaching Evolution

/ 52 Comments

Now that Twitter and Facebook have been invented, I don’t usually put up blog posts that simply link to someone else’s posts. (Although I wonder if that policy is a mistake.) But this morning I put up a link to a post at Jerry Coyne’s blog, and it was almost immediately deleted from Facebook. (The Twitter entry was fine, of course.) I wouldn’t even have known, except that someone commented that it had been “flagged as inappropriate by Facebook users.”

Of course, Facebook being Facebook, I have no idea whether this is a nefarious conspiracy or simple incompetence. Probably both. In any event, you should go check out the post, which comments on this YouTube video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkBmhM0R2A0

It’s a compilation of the answers given by contestants in the Miss USA contest to a simple question: “Should evolution be taught in schools?” Miss California, Alyssa Campanella, who eventually won the contest, gave a strong pro-science answer that will bring a smile to your face. At least, if you are finished crying and throwing objects at your computer monitor after seeing some of the other answers. Due to the vagaries of alphabetical order, Miss Alabama comes first, and it’s not pretty.

For the most part, the contestants are interested in being good politicians and keeping everybody happy, not in staking out courageous stances in the science/religion debates. But that’s exactly what’s so depressing: here we are, in the most advanced country in the world (albeit in its waning years), and it’s considered controversial whether we should teach science to our children. The question wasn’t even “should we teach creationism,” which is actually a harder issue (although still very easy). It was just whether we should teach straightforward science at all. Very sad indeed.

Miss USA Contestants on Teaching Evolution Read More »

52 Comments

Snobby Connoissuership

/ 43 Comments

xkcd raises an interesting issue or three. Click to see the exciting conclusion, starring Joe Biden.

Naturally, in less time than it takes to eat a sandwich there was a Tumblr account dedicated to Joe Biden eating.

But one can’t help but ask — is it true? Does it really not matter what it is we choose to lavish our attentions upon? Would we find as much depth and complexity in different cans of Diet Dr. Pepper as oenophiles would claim are lurking in a bottle of fine Bordeaux?

I think we have to say no. Some things really are more complex and nuanced than other things. I could provide examples, but they aren’t any better than ones you can imagine yourself.

That’s okay, it doesn’t make the comic any less funny. And there is a clever point that remains true: people pick and choose the things on which they lavish their attention. To one person, all jazz is just noise; another would say the same about classical, and another about punk. The real issue isn’t the existence of complexity, it’s how we choose to recognize and value it. If we went through life taking note of every fact around us, we’d go insane within minutes. Making sense of existence relies heavily on coarse-graining.

But there’s yet another issue! (Yes I know I’m spending too much time analyzing a single comic — or am I deviously making a point?) The cartoon didn’t choose Diet Dr. Pepper as its example, it chose pictures of Joe Biden eating sandwiches. And you know, there really is a lot of depth there. There’s a lot you could say about a large collection of such photographs. So the question is — are any of those things worth saying? Complexity might be necessary for great art, but it doesn’t seem to be sufficient. Paying attention to certain kinds of details seems rewarding in a way that paying attention to others is not.

Anyone have a simple demarcation between the two? When is complexity deserving of study, and when does it merit being ignored? I’m sure aestheticians have argued about this for centuries, and I’m not trying to break any new ground here. I’m just at a loss for a good theory, which isn’t a condition I like to be in.

Snobby Connoissuership Read More »

43 Comments

Back Through the Wormhole

/ 24 Comments

Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman, the hit (as these things go) show from the Science Channel, has commenced with its second season. It shows Wednesdays at 8 p.m. Eastern/Pacific time. If you watch tomorrow night’s episode, “Is Time an Illusion?”, there’s a good chance you will see me in a bar fight. Or at least in a bar, with fighting going on around me. And I’m pretty sure that if you wait until July 27th’s “Can We Travel Faster Than Light?”, you’ll see me throwing a Slurpee out of the window of a car to demonstrate addition of velocities. (What you won’t see is the long discussion we had about whether we should call it a “Slurpee” or a “Slushee.”)

I appeared on one episode of the show last year, and I’ve been on a few other science documentaries. But I don’t usually plug them ahead of time; not, as anyone who reads the blog will attest, out of any general reluctance to plug my stuff, but because you typically don’t get to see these shows before they air. And I’d just as soon not be associated with a complete piece of garbage.

But on the basis of what I’ve seen so far — last week’s episode, and several from last year — as well as talking to the show’s creators, I genuinely think that Through the Wormhole is well above the usual standard of quality one expects for these endeavors. Not that anything is perfect — there are one or two times when you’ll be thinking “how in the world did that person get interviewed here?” But there’s clearly been a lot of effort made to get the science largely right, and more importantly to take on big topics and tell something approaching a coherent story about them. Programming like this is growing thin, even on Discovery and the Science Channel, so when it appears and succeeds it should be applauded.

Also? Morgan Freeman read my book. So I at least owe him this much of a plug.

Back Through the Wormhole Read More »

24 Comments

Charity Pitches

/ 27 Comments

Don’t worry, we’re not asking for money. Admittedly, that’s what usually happens when the word “charity” appears, i.e. at our Donors Choose challenges. But now I have a whopping $100 burning a hole in my pocket, due to my plucky third-place finish in the 3 Quarks Daily contest. Back when I was a struggling grad student or post doc, this would have gone straight to pay for Ramen noodles or whatever. But now that I am a faculty member who lives in a nice house and drives a fancy car, I can pay it forward a bit.

Thus, I’m going to take the $100 and match it myself, donating $200 to charity. (Yes I know, the big spender. Hey, it was only 3rd place.) There are plenty of charities I know about already, but I thought that since these ill-gotten gains were based on the blog, I should ask the blog for advice.

So in comments I’d like to get your pitches for a worthy cause I might not have heard of. The winner — in a contest judged only by me — will get the $200. It will be most effective if you leave both an explanation of why this charity is so great, and a link to an easy way to donate.

Of course there is a hidden agenda here — while I’m giving away this huge pile of money, anyone else who reads the list is welcome to be inspired to donate as well. No pressure, except that you would be a better person and feel good about yourself.

Pitch away.

Charity Pitches Read More »

27 Comments

Chirality and the Positron’s Mustache

/ 16 Comments

Woke up this morning to the happy news that my post “The Fine Structure Constant is Probably Constant” walked away with the Charm Quark (i.e., tied for third place) in this year’s 3QuarksDaily science blogging prizes. Many thanks to Lisa Randall for judging and Abbas Raza and the 3QD crew for hosting. And of course congrats to the other winners:

  1. Top Quark: SciCurious, Serotonin and Sexual Preference: Is It Really That Simple?
  2. Strange Quark: Anne Jefferson, Levees and the Illusion of Flood Control
  3. Charm Quark: Ethan Siegel, Where Is Everybody?

I already have a great nominee for next year’s contest. One of the most confusing things in particle physics is the notion of “chirality.” The related notion of a particle’s “helicity” is relatively easy to explain — is the particle spinning in a left-handed or right-handed sense when compared to its direction of motion? But a massive particle need not have a direction of motion, it can just be sitting there, so the helicity is not defined. Chirality is the same as helicity — left-handed or right-handed — for massless particles moving at the speed of light, but it’s always defined no matter how the particle is moving. It had better be, since the weak interactions couple to particles with left-handed chirality but not ones with right-handed chirality! (And the opposite for antiparticles.)

It all gets a bit heady, and you can’t give a real explanation without going beyond simple pictures and actually talking about the quantum wave function. But Flip Tanedo at Quantum Diaries has given it an heroic effort, which I insist you go read right now. I don’t want to reproduce the whole thing — Flip was more careful and thorough than I ever would have been, anyway — but I will tease you with this one picture.

Isn’t that the cutest pair of elementary particles you’ve ever seen? I smell a Quark in this lepton’s future.

Chirality and the Positron’s Mustache Read More »

16 Comments

Why We Need the Higgs, or Something Like It

/ 35 Comments

In the comments to the previous post, Monty asks a perfectly good question, which can be shortened to: “Is the Higgs boson really necessary?” The answer is a qualified “yes” — we need the Higgs boson, or something like it. That is, we can’t simply take the Standard Model as we know it and extend it to arbitrarily high energies without new physics kicking in.

The role of the Higgs field is to break the symmetry of the electroweak interactions, as discussed here. We think that there is a lot of symmetry underlying particle interactions, but that much of it is hidden from our low-energy view. In technical terms, the electroweak theory of Glashow, Weinberg and Salam posits an “SU(2)xU(1)” symmetry, that somehow gets broken down to “U(1).” That unbroken symmetry gives us electromagnetism, a force carried by a massless particle, the photon. The broken symmetries are still there, but their force-carrying particles become massive when the symmetry breaks — those are the W+, W–, and Z0 bosons.

There’s no question that something breaks the symmetry. The question that is worth asking is: “Can we imagine breaking the symmetry without introducing any new particles?”

…

Why We Need the Higgs, or Something Like ItRead More »

Why We Need the Higgs, or Something Like It Read More »

35 Comments

D0 Decides to be Debbie Downers

/ 18 Comments

Alliterative title stolen shamelessly from the lovely and understanding Jennifer Ouellette, who blogs background about the hunt for new particles at Discovery News.

So here we have science, marching on. Just last week we heard that CDF, one of the big experiments at the Tevatron at Fermilab, had collected more data relevant to a mysterious bump they had previously reported around 150 GeV in collisions that produced a W boson and two jets. The new data (7.3 inverse femtobarns, up from 4.3 fb-1 previously) made the bump look even more prominent, rather than watching it regress back down to the mean. The discrepancy is now more than 4 sigma, giving license to get just a wee bit excited that new physics might be on the loose.

Now D0, the other big experiment at the Tevatron, is ready to weigh in — and the “D” stands for “damper,” it appears. Here’s a blog post at symmetry, a link to the technical paper, and a webcast for a talk that will happen this afternoon at 4:00pm Central Time. You knew that Jester would be on the case, and he is.

But this picture tells you all you need to know.

With 4.3 fb-1 of data analyzed, the CDF bump should be just barely visible, as indicated by the dotted line labeled “Gaussian.” But there doesn’t seem to be anything there. And it’s not just you; the collaboration estimates that the probability that there is really a bump there is less than 10-5. Not very encouraging, really.

But still — it does seem to be there in the CDF data. So what’s going on? At this point, it’s not clear. Both experiments are extremely mature and well-understood, and the collaborations are good at what they do, so it is likely to be something very subtle at work. It still could be new physics, that is somehow playing games with us, but certainly the prospects don’t look as good today as they did yesterday. Look like science is going to have to march on a bit more before everything is clear.

D0 Decides to be Debbie Downers Read More »

18 Comments

Preaching to the Unconverted

/ 83 Comments

And now for something somewhat different. After I posted my article on “Does the Universe Need God?“, there were a few responses at the Intelligent Design blog Uncommon Descent, including a list of questions by Vincent Torley. Vincent then went the extra mile by inviting me to write a guest post for UD. Not my usual stomping grounds, but I ultimately agreed, precisely for that reason.

Here’s the post, which I’m cross-posting below. This might be controversial, as a lot of people on my side of things will say that there’s little point in engaging with people on the other side. And admittedly, this is a subject where feelings can be pretty entrenched. But you never know — not everyone has their mind made up on every issue, and it’s good to try to explain yourself to unsympathetic audiences on occasion. That’s all I tried to do here — to explain how I think about these things, not necessarily to pick a fight or even persuade any skeptics. I tried pretty hard to be as clear and unpretentious as I can be. (Success is for you to decide.) In a world of shouting and diatribe, I remain optimistic that real communication can occasionally occur! We’ll see how it goes.

——

I wanted to thank Vincent Torley and Denyse O’Leary for the opportunity to write a guest blog post, and apologize for how long it’s taken me to do so. I’ve written an article for the forthcoming Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity, entitled Does the Universe Need God?, in which I argued that the answer is “no.” Vincent posed a list of questions in response. After thinking about it, I decided that my answers would be more clear if I simply wrote a coherent argument, rather than addressing the questions individually.

My goal is to try to explain my own thinking to an audience that is not predisposed to agree. We can roughly break people up into two groups: naturalists such as myself, who think that the best explanation we have for the universe involves physical quantities obeying laws of Nature and nothing else; and those who believe that a better explanation can be found by invoking a powerful being/designer/creator/God. (For the sake of simplicity I’m going to use “God” to refer to this notion, but feel free to substitute the more accurate description of your choice.) Obviously there are many nuances that are being passed over by this simple distinction, but hopefully it will suffice for this moment.

The dispute between these two camps isn’t one where people often change their minds at the drop of an argument. Minds do change, in either direction — but typically after extended periods of reflection, not suddenly in response to a single killer blog post. So persuasion is not my goal here; only explanation. I’ve succeeded if an open-minded person who disagrees with me reads the post and still disagrees, but at least understands why I hold my positions. (After giving an earlier talk, one of the theologians in the audience told me that I had persuaded him — not that God didn’t exist, but that the argument from design wasn’t the way to get to Him. That sort of real-time response is more than one can generally hope for.)

What I want to do is to elaborate on some crucial aspects of how science is done that bear directly on the issues raised by my article and some of the responses to it that I’ve seen. In particular, I want to talk about simplicity, laws, openness, explanation, and clarity. This isn’t supposed to be a comprehensive treatise on the philosophy of science, nor is it especially rigorous, or anything really new — just some thoughts on issues relevant to this conversation.

I will be taking one thing for granted: that what we’re interested in doing here is science. There are many kinds of consideration that may lead people to theism or atheism that have nothing whatsoever to do with science; likewise, one may believe that there are ways of understanding the natural world that go beyond the methods of science. I have nothing to say about that right now; that’s a higher-level discussion. I’m just going to presume that we all agree that we’re trying to be the best scientists we can possibly be, and ask what that means.

With all that throat-clearing out of the way, here’s what I have to say about these five issues.

…

Preaching to the UnconvertedRead More »

Preaching to the Unconverted Read More »

83 Comments
Scroll to Top