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Mistakes

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We outsource to Clifford the task of advertising the Categorically Not! events that KC Cole organizes at the Santa Monica Art Studios. Except for this Sunday, since I’m going to be one of the presenters, and I never shy from doing my own PR. The event (see blurb below) will begin at 6:30; everyone is welcome.

The topic is Mistakes! I think we’re all familiar with them. As the scientist, I suppose it’s my job to talk about mistakes made by scientists, and I’m not too proud to stoop to using Einstein as my example. He made some whoppers, and that’s not even including his personal life.

Any fun examples of scientific mistakes? Best would be those that teach some cute lesson about how true progress is impossible if you’re too timid to make mistakes, etc etc. Ideas are welcome.

Here is the blurb:

Blunders, boo boos, bloopers, errors, slip-ups, goofs, misinterpretations and misunderstandings. Everyone makes mistakes. In science, the notion of “mistake” is often itself misunderstood. Frequently, a “mistake” often turns out to be nothing more than a limited or skewed perspective. Or as Einstein put it, discovering a new theory is not so much like tearing down a house to build a new one as climbing a mountain from which one can see farther; the old “house” is still there, but is seen in a vastly different context. Mistakes in personal life and matters of policy can ruin lives; but “mistakes” in a humorous context can also make us laugh.

For our September 9th Categorically Not!, Caltech theoretical physicist Sean Carroll will talk about how mistakes are an inevitable part of scientific inquiry. From Aristotle through Kepler to Einstein, leaps in understanding have often been the offspring of wrong ideas, or right ideas that were suggested for the wrong reasons. (And what about Einstein’s so-called “biggest blunder”?) Sean is the author of a textbook on general relativity, lecturer in a course on cosmology offered by the Teaching Company, and a blogger at Cosmic Variance.

For a psychological perspective, social psychologist Carol Tavris will talk about her new book: Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why we justify foolish beliefs, bad decisions, and hurtful acts. She’ll describe the biases that blind us to our mistakes, make us unwilling to change unsupported beliefs, and allow us to think ourselves above conflicts of interest. She’ll also explain how the need to justify mistakes prevents us from realizing we might be wrong, ensuring we make the same mistakes again. The antidotes are the scientific method, and a sense of humor.

And as for sense of humor, the endlessly talented Orson Bean will talk about how mistakes are the basis of comedy. Orson won a Tony nomination for his role in Subways Are For Sleeping, appeared regularly on the Tonight Show with Jack Paar (and later Johnny Carson), and hosted numerous game shows (he is the last surviving panelist from To Tell the Truth). More recently, he played Dr. Lester in Being John Malkovich as well as numerous other film and TV roles. He is also the author of the book Me and the Orgone: One Guy’s Search for the Meaning of it All.

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Prof in a Box

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teachingcompany.jpg Thomas Benton, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, describes the process by which the Teaching Company produces its recorded college-level courses for popular consumption:

[L]ecturers are chosen on the basis of “teaching awards, published evaluations of professors, newspaper write-ups of the best teachers on campus, and other sources.” Selected professors are invited to give a sample lecture, which is then reviewed by the company’s regular customers. The most favored professors are brought to a special studio near Washington, where their lecture series is recorded and filmed.

It all sounds rather exciting, like the academic equivalent of being discovered in a coffee shop by a Hollywood casting director.

Yes indeed! And there I was, last April, toiling away at Teaching Company World Headquarters in Chantilly, Virginia, to produce a set of lectures on cosmology and particle physics. These are now available as Dark Matter, Dark Energy: The Dark Side of the Universe, a series of 24 half-hour lectures aimed at anyone with a DVD player and a smidgen of curiosity about the natural world. In plenty of time for Christmas, I may add.

Even though the lectures are nominally about dark matter and dark energy, I used them as an excuse to cover lots of fun stuff about general relativity, particle physics within and beyond the Standard Model, and the early universe. Here is the lecture outline:

  1. Fundamental Building Blocks
  2. The Smooth, Expanding Universe
  3. Space, Time, and Gravity
  4. Cosmology in Einstein’s Universe
  5. Galaxies and Clusters
  6. Gravitational Lensing
  7. Atoms and Particles
  8. The Standard Model of Particle Physics
  9. Relic Particles from the Big Bang
  10. Primordial Nucleosynthesis
  11. The Cosmic Microwave Background
  12. Dark Stars and Black Holes
  13. WIMPs and Supersymmetry
  14. The Accelerating Universe
  15. The Geometry of Space
  16. Smooth Tension and Acceleration
  17. Vacuum Energy
  18. Quintessence
  19. Was Einstein Right?
  20. Inflation
  21. Strings and Extra Dimensions
  22. Beyond the Observable Universe
  23. Future Experiments
  24. The Past and Future of the Dark Side

The Teaching Company does a great job with production, so there are plenty of riveting graphics along the way. The actual lectures are given in a tiny studio in front of just a couple of people, which is not my preferred mode of speaking; I much prefer to have a real audience that will laugh and furrow their brows in puzzlement, as appropriate. So I don’t think my delivery was as sprightly as it could have been, especially in the first couple of lectures when I was getting used to the process. But there’s always the content, I suppose. And I wear a variety of fetching jackets and ties throughout the lectures, so in addition to deep insights about the workings of the universe, you also get a fashion show.

If cosmology isn’t your thing, the Teaching Company has an impressive array of courses on all sorts of stuff, from ancient history to modern jazz. It’s been getting good reviews, such as a recent Wall Street Journal article that refers to we lecturers as “reputable and often quite talented,” which I think is good. As Benton goes on to say:

Even as more and more people find higher education financially out of reach, or impractical to continue beyond early adulthood, recorded lectures — combined with the increasing availability of online lecture content and Web resources like the Wikipedia and countless blogs — are bringing on the Golden Age of the autodidact. I can’t help thinking that Diderot would approve, and I wish academe would do more to encourage such activities.

I’m sure Diderot would indeed approve, if he could just figure out how to work the remote on the DVD player.

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Hey, I Uploaded a Video

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Just got back from a great trip to Beijing, very enjoyable if a bit tiring, where much musing was done on the Primordial Existential Question, about which more anon. But I also mused a bit about what this blog needs, and I came to the conclusion that must have been obvious to everyone else long ago: more videos of me.

So, here you are. Thanks to some heroic efforts on the part of folks who would just as soon lurk behind the scenes, we now have video captured from the C-SPAN broadcast of our science panel at YearlyKos. Here is my talk, conveniently divided into two pieces to appease the YouTube gods. They are a little fuzzy, but you get the idea. I used the mysterious beauty of dark matter and dark energy as an excuse to make some didactic points about science and rationality and politics. (If I weren’t an atheist, I would have made a good preacher.) You can also find videos of Chris’s talk and Ed’s talk at their respective sites; Tara, who felt sorry for me for being given the impossible task of making the universe sound interesting, has the Q&A up as well.

But! Behind the fold, the true payoff!

…

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Glamorous Multimedia Lifestyle Update

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Yesterday morning I woke up moderately early to hie myself down to the NPR West studio in Culver City, where the magic of electromagnetism enabled me to participate in a BBC Radio 4 program, The Material World. Also appearing as a guest was Peter Woit, as we talked about — wait for it — string theory. It was fun, but to be honest, it wasn’t the most enlightening fifteen minutes I’ve ever spent, as too much time was spent talking about whether this ambitious scientific idea was overhyped or not, rather than making the effort to elucidate the idea’s successes and shortcomings in any substantive way. But perhaps I am just spoiled by blogs, where the constraints of time and space are felt much less keenly.

More interestingly, Peter in his post points to a blog I hadn’t heard of, The Atom Smashers. It’s by Clayton Brown, a filmmaker who is presently working on a documentary about particle physics. I won’t give too much away, except to encourage you to read it, and note that one of our bloggers plays a crucial role!

Then, a couple of hours after the BBC interview, I had a really interesting and fun meeting in Beverly Hills, which I’m not going to tell you about, or at least not now. Ha!

Tomorrow morning I will wake up truly early, in order to hop on a plane to scenic Billings, Montana, from which I’ll join an intrepid crew of bone hunters on a trip to the Kedesh Ranch in beautiful Shell, Wyoming. This is one of my occasional chances to join up with Project Exploration, as Paul Sereno and the gang lead some enthusiastic amateur paleontologists to dig up honest-to-goodness Jurrasic dinosaur fossils. I’ve done this a couple of times before, as recounted (naturally) in blog posts about the 2004 trip:

  1. Dinosaur Report I
  2. Dnosaur Report II

Here’s a picture of Paul and me, laughing in the face of danger as we stand astride an interesting geological formation:
Paul Sereno and Sean Carroll
Paul is the one who looks like a paleontologist in the field; I’m the one who looks like a theoretical physicist who someone dragged into the sunlight. He was also voted one of People magazine’s “50 Most Beautiful People” in 1997. But I am better at calculus!

Sadly, the seeming ubiquity of the internet has not managed to extend its way to the Kedesh Ranch. So no blogging. Cell phones don’t work there, either. In fact I’m pretty sure that this particular part of Wyoming is absolutely free of electromagnetic radiation of any sort. That’s the only explanation I can think of.

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Arbitrary Chronological Signifiers

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Well, I found a new job, moved across the country, and got engaged. What did you do this year? (On the other hand, I finished an anomalously low number of actual research papers. That should change in 2007, as I’m settled down and back in a groove.)

One of the nice things about 2006 (broadly construed) was that I got to meet a lot of people in person whom I had first come to know through their bloggy internet manifestations. So I thought I would share with you the inside scoop on some of the personas behind the web pages.

  • PZ Myers of Pharyngula — I was expecting a mild-mannered Midwestern biology professor, and here it turns out he’s a fire-breathing atheist! Who knew?
  • Melissa McEwan of Shakespeare’s Sister — from the blog you’d think she was a kind soul with a soft spot for Al Gore and a mysterious ability to inspire talented individualists into productive group action. Right you are!
  • Rob Knop of Galactic Interactions — rumored to ride a unicycle into work. Rumors are always true. He totally should have won.
  • Bitch Ph.D. of the eponymous pseudonymous blog — red-haired, beautiful, juggles multiple men while raising precocious child. And has a Ph.D.! You are right to be afraid.
  • Chris Mooney of The Intersection — young, intense, focused on saving the world. Thank goodness somebody is.
  • Eszter Hargittai of Crooked Timber — much taller in real life than on the internet! Has been known to put orange juice in the microwave oven.
  • Dan Drezner of the eponymous blog — like me, booted out of the UofC under inexplicable circumstances. Understands what it’s like to be written about in major news media for reasons other than the reasons you’d really like to be written about.
  • Jennifer Ouellette of Cocktail Party Physics — she seems nice.
  • Lindsay Beyerstein of Majikthise — shorter in real life than on the internet! Of course, on the internet she is a towering figure, far beyond what seems appropriate in one so young.
  • Michael Bérubé of the eponymous blog — who knows? He speaks in a rapid stream of French and Latin puns. But I have the vague impression that he is as engaging and impressive in person as you might surmise from the virtual persona.

And here, in traditional year-ending list-making style, are some of my favorite posts from the year past. Feel free to mention your own, in the unlikely event that I’ve missed something really good. And my lazy good-for-nothing co-bloggers are welcome to choose their own!

You’ll notice that I couldn’t limit myself to the traditional just one per month. Count yourselves lucky that I resisted the temptation to list them all.

Here’s to a joyous and interconnected 2007!

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Coast to Coast

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This Sunday night (Dec. 3) I’ll be appearing on Coast to Coast AM, a popular radio show hosted by Art Bell. The show is broadcast live, starting at 11:00p.m. Pacific time (2:00a.m. Eastern), and runs for three hours. Since I’m sure everyone will want to stay up to listen, you can find your local affiliate here.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the show, Coast to Coast (originated by Bell, now hosted by him on weekends and by George Noory during the week) specializes in discussions of, how shall we put this, esoteric phenomena. UFO’s, psychic powers, ghosts, that sort of thing. The hosts generally take a non-judgmental attitude, while callers and guests have been known to get quite enthusiastic. But the show also tackles more straightforward science topics, as well as politics, religion, civil rights, and what have you. Bad Astronomer Phil Plait has been on the show several times, debunking the craziness of Richard Hoagland and other crackpots.

I won’t be sharing any inside information about alien abductions — we’ll be talking about time travel and the dark sector. Okay, to the untutored eye, those topics don’t seem any more respectable than the paranormal, but we’ll be sticking quite closely to the normal, thanks very much. I hope to get a chance to talk about how respectable science is distinguished from UFO and ghost studies — it’s not quite so easy to move beyond the “I know the difference when I see it” level of distinction. But I think it’s crucially important to preach not only to the converted, but also to the skeptical. The fact that we can talk about dark energy and time travel in a rigorous scientific context should be all the evidence anyone needs that the real world is more than marvelous enough; there’s no reason to cling to ideas that don’t fit in with what we know about science.

And for C2C regulars who are just discovering Cosmic Variance for the first time, here are some older posts that touch on the ideas we’ll be talking about on the show — dark matter, dark energy, and the nature of time. Looking forward to the show!

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Love and Blogging

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Peter Pan should have been a cosmologist. I mean, if you want to stay forever young, nothing puts things in perspective like contemplating our place in a fourteen-billion-year-old universe. You tend to take a long view of things.

But eventually, one must grow up and start acting like an adult. Did you realize, for example, that many grownups participate in an institution known as “marriage,” which apparently involves tying your entire future history (and let’s be clear about this — I fully expect to be immortal) to that of another person? Someone, obviously, who you better like an awful lot. And who better be able to put up with you. Trust me, you really don’t want to interact with me before I’ve had my coffee in the morning.

How in the world is one expected to find such a person, in a world full of interesting but flawed characters? Well, there’s always the blogosphere. Two kindred spirits, tapping away at their matching MacBook Pros, could find each other across thousands of miles in a way that was heretofore impossible.

All of which, in a fumbling and hopefully-charming way, is to say that it’s happened. I’ve fallen hopelessly for the beautiful and talented Jennifer Ouellette, science writer extraordinaire and proprietess of Cocktail Party Physics. I first plugged her blog (completely innocently! honestly!) back in March, and we met in person at an APS meeting, of all places. Best conference ever.

And, various cross-country jaunts and countless emails later, we’re engaged to be married. If it’s clear that you’ve found the perfect person with whom you want nothing more than to spend the rest of your life, you might was well get the presents, right?

Expressions of astonishment that I could have done so well by myself, and wonderings aloud concerning what in the world Jennifer must be thinking, may be left in the comment section. You needn’t tell me how fortunate I am — I know.

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