Crackergate

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PZ Myers has gone and gotten himself embroiled in another one of those imbroglios. For those of you who don’t trouble to read any other blogs, the story began with the report of a student in Florida who smuggled a Communion wafer — the Body of Christ, to Catholics — out of Mass. This led to something of an overreaction on the part of some local believers, who referred to the stunt as a “hate crime,” and the student even received death threats. (You remember the part of the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus says “Blessed are those who exterminate those who insult Me,” right?)

PZ was roused to indignation by the incident, and wrote a provocative post in which he volunteered to do grievous harm to Communion wafers, if he could just get his hands on any.

Can anyone out there score me some consecrated communion wafers? There’s no way I can personally get them — my local churches have stakes prepared for me, I’m sure — but if any of you would be willing to do what it takes to get me some, or even one, and mail it to me, I’ll show you sacrilege, gladly, and with much fanfare. I won’t be tempted to hold it hostage … but will instead treat it with profound disrespect and heinous cracker abuse, all photographed and presented here on the web. I shall do so joyfully and with laughter in my heart. If you can smuggle some out from under the armed guards and grim nuns hovering over your local communion ceremony, just write to me and I’ll send you my home address.

But the thing that took the whole mess to another level was the intervention of Bill Donohue, whose Catholic League represents the very most lunatic fringe of the Church. Donohue, who specializes in being outraged, contacted the administration at the University of Minnesota, as well as the state legislature. Later deciding that this level of dudgeon wasn’t quite high enough, Donohue soon after upped the ante, prompting a delegate to the Republican National Convention to demand additional security, as the delegates felt physically threatened by PZ and his assembled hordes. (The Republican convention will be held in the Twin Cities, about 150 miles away from PZ’s university in Morris, Minnesota.)

There is a lot of craziness here. People are sending death threats and attacking someone’s employment because of hypothetical (not even actual) violence to a wafer. Even for someone who is a literal believer in transubstantiation, threatening violence against someone who mocks your beliefs doesn’t seem like a very Christian attitude. Donohue and his friends are acting like buffoons, giving free ammunition to people who think that all religious believers are nutjobs. But it gets him on TV, so he’s unlikely to desist.

However.

We should hold our friends to a much higher standards than we hold our adversaries. There is no way in which PZ is comparable to the folks sending him death threats. I completely agree with him on the substantive question — it’s just a cracker. It doesn’t turn into anyone’s body, and there’s nothing different about a “consecrated” wafer than an unconsecrated one — the laws of physics have something to say about that.

But I thought his original post was severely misguided. …

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Stories of Sizzling Science

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So why didn’t I think of this? Marine-biologist-turned-filmmaker Randy Olson has a new movie coming out — Sizzle: A Global Warming Comedy — and has asked a bunch of bloggers to simultaneously post reviews, to generate some buzz out there on the internets. (Full listing here.) Next time I have a movie coming out, I’ll have to come up with something even more clever.

Disclaimer: I’ve met Randy a couple of times, and he handed me a review copy of the DVD (premiere is this Saturday) at the conclusion of an enjoyable Mexican dinner with a bunch of local science/media folks. None of this, of course, compromises my unswerving devotion to completely objective fairness, but the rituals must be observed.

This is a movie with a goal, and it’s fair to ask how well it achieved that goal. To which I would answer: so-so. I thought the execution was a bit rough in spots, to be honest. It was clearly done on a shoestring budget — a running gag was the search for a famous celebrity spokesperson, and a couple of C-list celebs were dutifully trotted out (with captions so you knew they had appeared on TV), but nobody is going to mistake this for a Spielberg film, or even a Michael Moore film.

Nevertheless: the goal was awesome! Namely (as I see it, maybe Randy would disagree), to make a movie about a scientific topic that would be interesting and perhaps even gripping to an audience that would generally not show up at movies about science. In particular, to make a movie with an actual narrative — one with characters, that told a story, all in the service of a scientific purpose. Sizzle is not a lecture, nor does it pretend to be. On the contrary, another running gag is the famous inability of scientists to cast their message in the form of a gripping story when they could instead take refuge in data-filled plots and multiply-qualified conditional statements.

Which is great. Communicating generally, and storytelling specifically, are very particular skills that take a lot of effort to master. Too many scientists don’t think the effort is worth it, or are simply convinced that this is a skill they have already perfected. The best thing about Sizzle is that it proves the existence, by construction, of an alternative model. This movie has a story, featuring actual characters, and — best of all — the characters actually learn and grow and change during the course of the film. All in the service of conveying a scientific message!

Unfortunately, I don’t think the message is successfully conveyed. The movie ends up reacting so strongly against the traditional pitfalls of misguided scientific presentations — too much data, too little drama — that it falls victim to the complementary pitfalls. At the end, I wasn’t sure why I should believe that global warming was a real problem, outside of some appeals to authority (these scientists sure are trustworthy, aren’t they?) and emotional gestures (polar bears are cute! the aftermath of Katrina was sad).

So I commend Randy and the other people involved with Sizzle for trying to break the mold of traditional scientific discourse, and for reaching out to new audiences. But I think that there is a tricky balance that has yet to be successfully struck: on the one hand, respecting the science, and being honestly informative without hedging the truth in the service of persuasion; and on the other, telling a compelling story that draws people in without giving them the feeling that they are being forced to eat their vegetables.

Science is full of drama, excitement, and gripping stories. Making that excitement accessible to the wider world is by no means a simple thing, but it’s worth the effort.

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Beyond the Room

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I’m sure Ruben Bolling is making fun of people I disagree with, and not of me.

The underlying point is a good one, though, and one that is surprisingly hard for people thinking about cosmology to take to heart: without actually looking at it, there is no sensible a priori reasoning that can lead us to reliable knowledge about parts of the universe we haven’t observed. Einstein and Wheeler believed that the universe was closed and would someday recollapse, because a universe that was finite in time felt right to them. The universe doesn’t care what feels right, or what “we just can’t imagine”; so all possibilities should remain on the table.

On the other hand, that doesn’t mean we can’t draw reasonable a posteriori conclusions about the unobservable universe, if the stars align just right. That is, if we had a comprehensive theory of physics and cosmology that successfully passed a barrage of empirical tests here in the universe we do observe, and made unambiguous predictions for the universe that we don’t, it would not be crazy to take those predictions seriously.

We don’t have that theory yet, but we’re working on it. (Where “we” means an extremely tiny fraction of working scientists, who receive an extremely disproportionate amount of attention.)

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“There’s a black hole in my heart that I long to fill”

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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.

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What Do You Say?

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Here is a Q&A interview with me in the LA Times, to which I link only reluctantly, as somehow they managed to take a picture that makes me look like I’m wearing a bad toupee. And a halo! So that’s a mixed bag.

The interview was spurred by the recent Scientific American article on the arrow of time, and most of the questions are pretty straightforward queries about entropy and cosmology. But at the end we veer into matters theological:

Does God exist in a multiverse?

I don’t want to give advice to people about their religious beliefs, but I do think that it’s not smart to bet against the power of science to figure out the natural world. It used to be, a thousand years ago, that if you wanted to explain why the moon moved through the sky, you needed to invoke God.

And then Galileo and Newton came along and realized that there was conservation of momentum, so things tend to keep moving.

Nowadays people say, “Well, you certainly can’t explain the creation of the universe without invoking God,” and I want to say, “Don’t bet against it.”

I’m not really surprised that people bring up God when asking about cosmology; the subjects are related, like it or not. But I really do want to separate out the science from the religion, so in the context of an interview about physics I’m reluctant to talk about the existence of God, and I haven’t really perfected an answer when the subject comes up.

Anyone who reads the blog might be surprised to hear that I don’t want to give people advice about their religious beliefs — I do it all the time! But context is crucial. This is our blog, and we write about whatever we’re interested in, and nobody is forced to read it. Likewise, if I’m invited to speak or write specifically about the subject of religion, I’m happy to be perfectly honest about my views. But in a context where the explicit subject is supposed to be science, I would rather not bring up God at all; not because I’m reluctant to say what I believe, but because it gives a false impression of how scientists actually think about science. God just doesn’t come up in the everyday activities of a working cosmologist.

This was the second recent incident when I was prodded into talking about atheism when I would have liked to have stuck with physics. At my talk in St. Louis in front of the American Astronomical Society, I was introduced by John Huchra, the incoming AAS president. He had stumbled across “Why (Almost All) Cosmologists Are Atheists,” and insisted that I tell everyone why. So I gave a version of the above argument, presumably in an equally clumsy fashion: whether or not you choose to be religious, it’s a bad idea to base your belief on natural theology (reasoning towards God from evidence in the physical universe), as science has a way of swooping in and explaining things that had previously been judged inexplicable by purely natural means.

And I think that’s very true, but I think something stronger as well: that claims about God can be separated into two classes — (1) those that are meaningless, and (2) those that can be judged by standard criteria for evaluating scientific claims, and come up wanting. But it’s an argument I just don’t want to force on an audience that came for some science. After all, there are plenty of claims that I think are true, but I don’t feel an urgent need to insist on every single one of them in every imaginable venue.

For example: with the acquisition of a reliable low-post presence in the form of Elton Brand, the Sixers will be challenging for the Eastern Conference title this year and for the foreseeable future. Undoubtedly true, and an important fact about the universe that everyone should really appreciate, but not something I’ll be bringing up at my next physics seminar.

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Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Quantum Mechanics, But Were Afraid to Ask

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Sorry, not in this post, but upcoming. I’m scheduled to do another episode of Bloggingheads.tv with David Albert, and we’ve decided to spend the whole hour talking about quantum mechanics. Start with the basics, try to explain this crazy theory and some of its outlandish consequences in ways that anyone can understand, and then dig into some of the mysteries of measurement, superposition, and reality.

So — what do you want to know? What are the really interesting questions about QM that we should be talking about?

One thing I don’t think we science-explainers get as clear as we could is the idea of the Wave Function of the Universe. It sounds scary and/or pretentious — an older colleague of mine at MIT once said “I’m too young to talk about the wave function of the universe.” But it’s a crucial fact of quantum mechanics (arguably the crucial fact) that, unlike in classical mechanics, when you consider two electrons you don’t just have a separate state for each electron. You have a single wave function that describes the two-electron system. And that’s true for any number of particles — when you consider a bigger system, you don’t “add more wavefunctions,” you beef up your single wave function so that it describes more particles. There is only ever one wave function, and you can call it “of the universe” if you like. Deep, man.

Here is another thing: in quantum mechanics, you can “add two states together,” or “take their average.” (Hilbert space is a vector space with an inner product.) In classical mechanics, you can’t. (Phase space is not a vector space at all.) How big a deal is that? Is there some nice way we can explain what that means in terms your grandmother could understand, even if your grandmother is not a physicist or a mathematician?

(See also Dave Bacon’s discussion of teaching quantum mechanics as a particular version of probability theory. There are many different ways of answering the question “What is quantum mechanics?”)

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Democracy

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Happy Independence Day!

Democracy
Leonard Cohen

It’s coming through a hole in the air,
from those nights in Tiananmen Square.
It’s coming from the feel
that this ain’t exactly real,
or it’s real, but it ain’t exactly there.
From the wars against disorder,
from the sirens night and day,
from the fires of the homeless,
from the ashes of the gay:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.
It’s coming through a crack in the wall;
on a visionary flood of alcohol;
from the staggering account
of the Sermon on the Mount
which I don’t pretend to understand at all.
It’s coming from the silence
on the dock of the bay,
from the brave, the bold, the battered
heart of Chevrolet:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

It’s coming from the sorrow in the street,
the holy places where the races meet;
from the homicidal bitchin’
that goes down in every kitchen
to determine who will serve and who will eat.
From the wells of disappointment
where the women kneel to pray
for the grace of God in the desert here
and the desert far away:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

Sail on, sail on
O mighty Ship of State!
To the Shores of Need
Past the Reefs of Greed
Through the Squalls of Hate
Sail on, sail on, sail on, sail on.

It’s coming to America first,
the cradle of the best and of the worst.
It’s here they got the range
and the machinery for change
and it’s here they got the spiritual thirst.
It’s here the family’s broken
and it’s here the lonely say
that the heart has got to open
in a fundamental way:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

It’s coming from the women and the men.
O baby, we’ll be making love again.
We’ll be going down so deep
the river’s going to weep,
and the mountain’s going to shout Amen!
It’s coming like the tidal flood
beneath the lunar sway,
imperial, mysterious,
in amorous array:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

Sail on, sail on …

I’m sentimental, if you know what I mean
I love the country but I can’t stand the scene.
And I’m neither left or right
I’m just staying home tonight,
getting lost in that hopeless little screen.
But I’m stubborn as those garbage bags
that Time cannot decay,
I’m junk but I’m still holding up
this little wild bouquet:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

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Prediction Contest Update

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The task was to predict how the popular vote in the 2008 Presidential Election would break down, expressed as Obama’s fraction of the total votes that will go to Obama+McCain, and also to give a standard deviation. The winner will be the prediction whose Gaussian distribution function has the largest value at the real fraction, whatever it turns out to be.

Entries are now complete, and here they are, in handy graphical format:

Pretty, isn’t it? But a tad cluttered. Zooming in a bit:

And, in case you are one of those jumbled in the middle there, zooming in a bit more:

The mean (unweighted — sorry) prediction was that Obama would win 53.6 percent of the McCain/Obama popular vote, while the median was 53.2. The average standard deviation was 1.2%. Clearly, for predictions anywhere near the popular values, a fairly small standard deviation was required for one’s curve to poke up past the crowd; indeed, some predictions with large errors are already mathematically eliminated. Like — me. That’s what you get for going first. Here is an even closer zoom, vertically as well as horizontally, centered on my 55.5 +- 1.5 prediction:

See that aqua-colored bell curve, reaching a peak of about .27 at 55.5? That’s me, swamped by narrower neighbors. Confidence pays! I think there are about 20 entries out of 61 that have a nontrivial chance of winning.

(If we were serious and respectable, we would have kept the predictions [and, crucially, the total number of entries] secret until they were all announced. We are neither serious nor respectable.)

See you in November.

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Waiter, There’s a Derivative in my Cereal

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You can learn a lot by reading scientific papers. For example, I’ve known for a while now that the Hubble parameter tells you how fast the universe is expanding — it’s the (conveniently normalized) first derivative of the scale factor, for you calculus-philes out there. The deceleration parameter tells you how fast the universe is decelerating — it’s the second derivative, telling us how the expansion rate is changing with time. (Of course now we know that it’s really accelerating, but we didn’t know that back when the phrases were introduced.)

Less well known, but more amusing, is that the third derivative — how is the acceleration changing as a function of time? — is characterized by the “jerk.” Makes sense, when you think about it — when you jerk at something, you are not just pulling it (causing acceleration), but pulling at it faster and faster. It nevertheless leads to fun if predictable jokes, with this person or that being labeled a “cosmic jerk.”

Do we really need a name for the fourth derivative, telling us how the jerk is changing with time? Apparently we do, as it has been denoted the “snap.” I just learned this from this new paper:

Cosmic Jerk, Snap and Beyond
Authors: Maciej Dunajski, Gary Gibbons

Abstract: We clarify the procedure for expressing the Friedmann equation in terms of directly measurable cosmological scalars constructed out of higher derivatives of the scale factor. We carry out this procedure for pure dust, Chaplygin gas and generalised Chaplygin gas energy-momentum tensors. In each case it leads to a constraint on the scalars thus giving rise to a test of General Relativity. We also discuss a formulation of the Friedmann equation as unparametrised geodesic motion and its connection with the Lagrangian treatment of perfect fluids coupled to gravity.

The best part is this footnote:

The analogous expressions involving 5th and 6th derivatives are known as crackle and pop. This terminology goes back to a 1932 advertisement of Kellogg’s Rice Crispies which `merrily snap, crackle and pop in a bowl of milk.’

I suppose there is also some interesting science in there. But now I really want to write a paper that makes use of the 5th time derivative of the scale factor. The words are too delicious to resist.

Waiter, There’s a Derivative in my Cereal Read More »

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