Register to Vote

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For American citizens, there is a Presidential election fast approaching. (Have you heard about it?) Election Day is Tuesday, November 4. It’s time to register to vote. The Obama campaign has set up a great tool that let’s you figure out whether you are already registered, and if not, prints out a form you can mail in to do so:

It works for Republicans, too! Even Republicans who want to vote for a Republican this time around, although those are increasingly scarce.

If you think this election is important, you can go even further and donate money. Ad buys are crucial, of course, but get-out-the-vote efforts will be equally important, and they don’t come cheap.

There are also various third party candidates. Sadly, the Socialist Workers Party has nominated Róger Calero, who was born in Nicaragua, and is therefore ineligible to be President. If he wins, it will be quite the constitutional crisis!

For those who can’t make it to a polling station on Election Day, deadlines are very fast approaching for absentee voting. Start here:

Note that there’s nothing stopping you from absentee voting even if you could vote in person on Election Day; if you’re feeling motivated right now but might be lazy on November 4, why not vote right away?

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The Blue Screen of Nonsense

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If you’ve run across Microsoft’s new ads, which aim to counter the witty “I’m a PC, I’m a Mac” series by Apple, you might have noticed this tweedy academic-looking guy near the end:

Years back, I had the idea that Apple should include more famous-for-academia types in its Think Different ads. Ed Witten, Jacques Derrida, Amartya Sen, people like that. But I didn’t actually call up any ad agencies to make the pitch. So I figured that Microsoft had the same idea, and was including some professor-type among its self-declared PC’s in order to lend some gravitas to the proceedings.

Yeah, not so much. The somber mug above belongs to none other than Deepak Chopra, celebrated purveyor of quantum nonsense. He did, of course, win the 1998 IgNobel Prize in Physics for “for his unique interpretation of quantum physics as it applies to life, liberty, and the pursuit of economic happiness.” So there is that. (In certain religious circles, there is an increasingly popular teaching known as the Prosperity Gospel. I wonder if I could make money writing a book about “The Prosperity Hamiltonian”?)

The construction of jokes comparing Deepak Chopra’s understanding of quantum mechanics to Microsoft’s understanding of software is left as an exercise for the reader.

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Telescoper

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From Andrew Jaffe, I just learned that Peter Coles has a new blog:

Peter is a theoretical cosmologist at Cardiff, in the UK, and the author of various interesting books.

And in case you didn’t notice it in John’s last post, there is a new blog by particle theorist Ben Lillie:

Ben’s thesis advisor was our very own JoAnne, so this is practically our blog-offspring. And it also reminds me that I never properly introduced the blog of my own former student, Eugene Lim:

Finally, for those who don’t scan the comments as well as the posts themselves, CV commenter (and distinguished string theorist) Moshe Rozali has joined David Berenstein at

Putting them all together, amount of blogging by respectable physicists has taken a substantial leap forward. We still have a long way to go to catch up to the economists.

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Want

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I have a birthday coming up, and this is definitely going on my Amazon.com wish list.

That is Swiss pilot Yves Rossy, flying at a height of about 6000 ft across the English Channel in his personal jetpack yesterday. He reached speeds of up to 125 mph before releasing his parachute and landing in England. Via.

This would make my morning commute quicker. More science would get done, and the world would benefit. Let’s start taking up a collection, right?

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Templeton and Skeptics

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On the theory that it is good to mention events before they happen, so that interested parties might actually choose to attend, check out the upcoming Skeptics Society conference: Origins: the Big Questions. It will be at Caltech, and will take just one day, Saturday October 4, with a pre-conference dinner the previous night, Friday the 3rd. The day’s events are divided into two parts. In the morning you get a bunch of talks on the origins of big things — I’ll be talking on the origin of time, Leonard Susskind on the origin of the laws of physics, Paul Davies on the origin of the universe, Donald Prothero on the origin of life, and Christof Koch on the origin of consciousness.

Then in the afternoon they change gears, and start talking about science and religion. Names involved include Stuart Kauffman, Kenneth Miller, Nancey Murphy, Michael Shermer, Philip Clayton, Vic Stenger, and Hugo Ross. It’s this part of the event that has stirred up a tiny bit of controversy, as it is co-sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation, famous appliers of lipstick to the pig that is the interface between science and religion. It’s legitimate to wonder why the Skeptics Society is getting mixed up with Templeton at all, and it’s been discussed a bit in our beloved blogosphere: see Bad Astronomy, Pharyngula, and Richard Dawkins.

I am on the record as saying that scientists should be extremely leery of accepting money from organizations with any sort of religious orientation, and Templeton in particular. (Happily, in this case the speakers aren’t getting any money at all, so at least that temptation wasn’t part of the calculation.) But it’s by no means a cut-and-dried issue, as we’ve seen in discussions of the Foundational Questions Institute.

Personally, I prefer not to have the chocolate of my science mixed up with the peanut butter of somebody else’s religion, and certainly not without clear labeling — peanut allergies can be pretty severe. But if someone wants to explicitly put on a peanut butter cup conference, that’s fine, and I don’t have any problem with participating. The problem with the Templeton Foundation is not that they coerce scientists into repudiating their beliefs through the promise of piles of cash; it’s that, by providing easy money to promote certain kinds of discussions, those discussions begin to seem more prominent and important than they really are. Perhaps, without any Templeton funding, the Origins conference would have devoted much less time to the science-and-religion questions, leaving much more time for interesting science discussions. This would have given outsiders a more accurate view of the role that religion plays in current scientific work on these foundational questions: to wit, none whatsoever.

The Templeton Foundation has every right to exist, and sponsor conferences. And there is undoubtedly a danger among atheists that they get caught up in a “holier than thou” competition — “I’m so atheist that I won’t even talk to people if they believe in God!” Which gets a little silly. I don’t think there’s anything explicitly wrong with the Origins conference; the Templeton-sponsored part is clearly labeled and set off from the rest, and it might end up being interesting. (Also, the conference concludes with Mr. Deity — how awesome is that?) Michael Shermer’s own take is here. But I look forward to a day when discussions of deep questions concerning the origin of the universe and of life can take place without the concept of God ever arising.

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Giant Steps

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Today would have been John Coltrane’s 82nd birthday. Here he is playing Naima.

And here is an interview from 1960. “The reason I play so many — maybe it sounds angry, because I’m trying so many things at one time, you see — I haven’t sorted them out. I have a whole bag of things that I’m trying to work through and get the one essential, you know?”

Here is a computer animation, to the tune of Giant Steps.

And here is a robot playing the Giant Steps solo. Not as good as the original.

Coltrane died in 1967, at the age of 40.

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The Domino Effect

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I gave a talk yesterday at the Center for Inquiry branch here in LA. It was a popular-level spiel on The Origin of the Universe and the Arrow of Time; click for slides. If I had been thinking, I would have advertised the existence of the talk before I had given it, rather than afterward. Either that, or I was trying to smoke out time-travelers.

But the real reason I’m even bringing it up is to give credit to this great YouTube video, found via Swans on Tea.

I was literally zipping through blogs yesterday morning while drinking coffee and preparing for the upcoming talk, when up popped this wonderful illustration of entropy and the arrow of time, which naturally I showed at the talk. And it features a kitty. (Schrodinger has his own cat, why shouldn’t Boltzmann?)

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No Blank Check

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Strictly speaking, $700 billion dollars (a couple of dollars for every star in the Milky Way) is not a completely blank check. But it’s pretty close. And that’s what the Treasury Department is asking for to buy mortage-related assets (“toxic waste”) from failing banks.

There is plenty of reason to believe that something dramatic has to be done, before our entire financial system up and dies. Talk all you like about punishing the heartless capitalists behind the mess, but if a long string of banks goes belly-up, nobody will benefit.

But, as Paul Krugman says, this is not the right deal. Mostly because of this paragraph in the proposed legislation:

Sec. 8. Review.

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

You’re kidding, right? Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson might be a smart guy, but he remains a cog in the Bush administration. The people who brought you the Iraq war, the Katrina response, Alberto Gonzales, Harriet Myers, and Guantanamo Bay. I don’t know about you, but when faced with a terrible crisis demanding immediate action, my first response is not “Let’s give those guys nearly unlimited power, with no oversight whatsoever.” An action that would be unique in American history, and possibly the largest transfer of power from Congress to the Executive branch ever.

More substantively, though, the plan is outrageous on the face of it. It is a feature of late capitalism that the government will occasionally have to bail out failing institutions. But typically the way that happens is for the government to simply take over the institution entirely, and sell off what it can. Here, the plan is to simply pay huge amounts of money for terribly bad assets — leaving the companies (and their managers) to get on with their lives and their valuable assets. As Josh Marshall put it: this is moral hazard on steroids. Taxpayers swallow the toxic waste, and Wall Street breathes a sigh of relief.

There’s no question that part of the idea here is “Something needs to be done in a hurry — let’s smash something through that gives us unchecked power, while everyone is panicking and not likely to ask too many questions.”

No economist, left or right, likes the plan. Obama is against the blank check, although doesn’t seem to be putting his foot down. McCain is thundering righteously against the robber barons on Wall street, as he has been doing — well, for at least the last week, before which he tended to thunder righteously against overzealous government regulators who were restraining Wall Street’s creativity. Change you can believe in.

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Talking About LHC Safety

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In the latest Science Saturday at Bloggingheads, Jennifer and I zip from the breathtakingly topical — the Large Hadron Collider, what it’s good for, and why you shouldn’t be scared of it — to the profoundly eternal — calculus, and why people are scared of it.

I’ve finally settled on a proper response to questions about whether the LHC will destroy the world. (After the initial response, I mean.) It comes in two parts.

Part One: To an inquisitive person who is asking in good faith, who has heard a bit about disaster scenarios involving black holes swallowing the Earth, and wants to know why we’re so sanguine about the possibility of global cataclysm. Sure, we can explain that it’s really unlikely you would even make a black hole, and even if you do, that all of physics as we understand it predicts that such a black hole would evaporate away, and that this has been carefully studied.

But the better, and punchier, response is simply: there’s nothing the LHC will do that the Universe hasn’t previously done many times over. This is, of course, the conclusion of the recent paper by Giddings and Mangano. It’s long been understood that the energies attained by high-energy cosmic rays are vastly larger than those created by the LHC; the collisions at CERN aren’t the most energetic in the universe, they’re just the most energetic ones created by human beings, that’s all. But the alarmist brigade, desperate for continued relevance, came up with a loophole: what if black holes are created, but ones from cosmic rays simply escape the Earth’s gravity, while those created at the LHC sit around and eat us up? What G&M show is that, even if that were possible, cosmic rays bumping into to white dwarfs and neutron stars would have created black holes that did get stuck, and would have eaten them up. But the fact is, we see plenty of white dwarfs and neutron stars in the sky; so that’s not a danger. It has nothing to do with any arrogant presumption that we understand physics at high energies, or the evolution of microscopic black holes; it’s simply that there is no scenario in which such black holes are created without having other observable effects. (See a nice write-up of this by Michael Peskin in the new APS online review magazine, entitled simply Physics.)

Part Two: Experience reveals that, even if you carefully explain why there is no allowed scenario in which black holes swallow the Earth, some stubborn folks will still say “But you can never be perfectly sure! So why take the risk?” For them, it makes sense to switch from science and turn to an analogy. (Experience also reveals that people would rather nitpick at the ways in which the analogy is imprecise, rather than addressing its point; but we soldier on.)

So imagine that you go home to cook dinner — you boil some water, drop in some pasta, and pull a jar of tomato sauce from the fridge. But wait! Are you sure you want to open that jar? After all, if you ask any hyper-careful science-type of person, they will tell you that they can’t be absolutely sure that this innocent-looking sauce doesn’t actually host a virulent mutated pathogen. It’s possible — not very likely, but possible — that when you open that jar, a deadly virus will kill you dead, and proceed to eliminate all human life over the course of the next two weeks.

What is the chance of this happening? Very, very small. But not strictly, absolutely zero. And, we must admit, the consequences of being wrong are very bad indeed. And frankly, how much enjoyment are you going to get from that jar of tomato sauce, anyway? The only logical and moral choice would be to forgo the sauce entirely, and just enjoy your pasta plain.

Except this is nuts, of course. Even if the consequences of an action would be truly cataclysmic, sometimes the chances of it happening are so low that we have to take the risk. Or, more accurately, we choose to take the risk, because science never proves anything beyond any possible doubt, and we can’t help but take such improbable risks all the time. Maybe there is a fleet of invisible alien spaceships hovering over head, testing our commitment to unlocking the secrets of the universe, and they will destroy the Earth with their alien death-lasers if we don’t turn on the LHC. There’s a chance!

And that’s a chance I don’t want to take.

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