Gravity to the rescue

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Apparently nuclear bombs and Bruce Willis are two things that are just too hard to control. So if a massive asteroid appears to be on a collision course with Earth, a couple of astronauts have invented a new way to save us from this cosmic menace: a gravity tractor.

gravity tractor It’s a simple enough idea: instead of blowing up the asteroid, just use gravity to gently deflect it from its path. If you have plenty of warning, you can send up a spaceship that is as heavy as you can manage, and simply park it next to the asteroid. The gravitational pull of the ship will gradually tug the asteroid off course; a tiny force, indeed, but if you let it accumulate for a few years you might be able to do the job.

I confess to a certain amount of skepticism. The gravitational field of such a ship will be incredibly tiny, and even if you plug in the numbers and it seems to work, I would worry that other trace effects (e.g. outgassing or radiation from the ship) won’t be equally important and work in the opposite direction. And when I heard a report about the idea on NPR, there was a curious statement from one of the idea’s supporters, that it would work well for asteroids of such-and-such a mass. Where I was taught about gravity, the acceleration is independent of the mass, so that was a little confusing. It may be that the size of the thing is important — if the asteroid center of mass is too far away from the tractor, you’re in trouble, since gravity falls of as 1/r2.

But it’s certainly a more sensible idea than the one mentioned by John in an earlier comment, and again at the bottom of the gravity-tractor article: a space vehicle propelled by the pressure of the inflationary vacuum state, recently granted U.S. patent 6,960,975. That’s just completely crazy.

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Fighting discrimination

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This feisty blog has occasionally talked about issues of discrimination against minority-group members and women, in science, or in academia, or just more broadly. We have also, one must admit, occasionally taken the Bush administration to task for this or that example of egregious malfeasance. Thus, rigorously fair folks that we are, it’s only right that we also mention those instances when the administration takes time off from its busy schedule of intelligence-doctoring, operative-outing, deficit-growing, and hurricane-ignoring to actively fight the pernicious effects of discrimination.

So, here we go: the Justice Department is going to sue Southern Illinois University for discriminating against white males.

No, you can’t make this stuff up. SIU, like almost every university in the country, is seriously under-represented by minority groups among its graduate students; out of 5,500 graduate students, only about 8 percent are Latino or African-American (compared to over 20 percent of Americans). So they have a few fellowship programs that specifically target women and minorities, and help out a tiny number of people — perhaps 40 per year. The Bush administration, tireless warriors for social justice that they are, will stop at nothing to squelch this manifest anti-white bias:

“The University has engaged in a pattern or practice of intentional discrimination against whites, non-preferred minorities and males,” says a Justice Department letter sent to the university last week and obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times.

The letter demands the university cease the fellowship programs, or the department’s civil rights division will sue SIU by Nov. 18.

I don’t know about you, but if I’m going to discriminate against someone, I would be able to do a much better job than that. You know, like actually having fewer members of the discriminated class at my university than in the surrounding society, rather than significantly more.

Sadly, this is an issue that (even) scientists don’t always think very clearly about. There is a feeling in some circles that perfect fairness consists of taking the tiny part of society’s workings over which you have control, and pretending within that part that there is no such thing as race or gender, everyone should be treated equally. But in the real world, where we are not all born into equal circumstances and presented with equal opportunities, it makes perfect sense to recognize that and account for it when we recruit and train students.

Of course, people will complain that singling out minority-group status forces us to treat people according to some external characteristics rather than as individuals, and amounts to an insidious form of reverse racism, ultimately hurting the people it tries to help. This philosophically appealing position has the downside of being in flagrant contradiction with the evidence. Although it’s true that programs typically aim (small amounts of) resources at people because of minority-group status rather than a detailed understanding of their personal history in overcoming obstacles, the fact is that this clumsy strategy actually works. People gain access to education and training that they otherwise would not, and the result is that the pool of highly-educated and successful people grows more diverse, which helps both the people in those groups and the society as a whole. As crude as it is, the strategy of targeting fellowships at under-represented groups is both cheap and effective.

Deep down, nobody likes affirmative-action type programs. Nobody. We would all much prefer it if universities and other employers could truly ignore the race or gender of applicants and workers, because they were treated completely fairly throughout all of society. But that’s just not reality. And until it is, making a tiny little effort to help out people who have faced systematic bias throughout their lives — even if the efforts are clumsy and imprecise — is the least we can do.

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The soul of a space alien

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A couple of thousand years ago, we didn’t know much about how the universe works. It’s no surprise that our ancestors came up with a mishmash of beliefs about nature, humans, and our place in the cosmos.

What is a consistent source of surprise is that so many people still cling to these dusty beliefs, no matter what variety of silliness it leads them to. One of the foundational beliefs of mainstream Western religions is that humans are somehow special in God’s eyes. Could anything shake us from such a conviction? Majikthise and Cynical-C point to one such thought experiment: a story from Catholic News Service about whether space aliens have souls. What would happen to our belief in our own singular status within creation if we found that there were other sentient beings out there, capable of thoughts and feelings and launching wars of choice?

Jesuit Brother Guy Consolmagno has thought about it, and reached an interesting conclusion: it wouldn’t change anything.

He said his aim with the booklet was to reassure Catholics “that you shouldn’t be afraid of these questions” and that “no matter what we learn, it doesn’t invalidate what we already know” and believe. In other words, scientific study and discovery and religion enrich one another, not cancel out each other.

If new forms of life were to be discovered or highly advanced beings from outer space were to touch down on planet Earth, it would not mean “everything we believe in is wrong,” rather, “we’re going to find out that everything is truer in ways we couldn’t even yet have imagined,” he said.

Not to be nit-picky, but the motto “no matter what we learn, it doesn’t invalidate what we already know” is not evidence that science and religion enrich each other, it is evidence of precisely the opposite. The distinguishing feature of science is precisely that it stands ready to invalidate its previous theories on the basis of new evidence. We approach the universe with an open mind, struggling to understand what it has to tell us; we don’t figure things out ahead of time and use the universe to fabricate a flattering story about ourselves.

But the next sentence was my favorite:

The Book of Genesis describes two stories of creation, and science, too, has more than one version of how the cosmos may have come into being.

That’s a tad misleading right there. Genesis does indeed have two stories of creation, one right after the other (the first starts at Genesis 1:1, the second at Genesis 2:4). The two versions are completely contradictory — in the first, God creates plants, and then animals, and then man and woman simultaneously; in the second, God creates man out of dust, then plants a garden, and woman is only an afterthought. And everyone knows why there are two mutually exclusive stories right after each other: they came from two different texts, written by different people at different times, edited together later into a single document. Fascinating as history, but not a stable foundation on which to build a view of the universe.

Scientists, it’s true, have lots of versions of how the cosmos may have come into being; heck, I have one myself. That’s how we work; we throw ideas out there, compare them to other pieces of information, and toss out the ones that don’t work. If new information comes along, we’re hoping that it conforms to our personally favorite ideas, but if not, that’s exciting and we look forward to learning something.

And when those space aliens get here, I’m definitely going to ask them what they think about the anthropic principle.

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From Experience to Metaphor

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I know that, despite your love for physics and baseball and the Supreme Court, most people really come to Cosmic Variance for one thing: literary theorizing. Well, it’s been a little thin on the ground here, so let’s redress the balance.

As oldtime Preposterous readers know, in March I attended a conference at the KITP in Santa Barbara on Science, Theatre, Audience, Reader: Theoretical Physics in Drama and Narrative (duly blogged about here and here). I participated in a panel discussion, chatting about how modern science provided an excellent source of raw materials for literary metaphors — much in the spirit of Clifford’s last post. The idea was straightforward, and doubtless not original: science is a product of the human imagination, but not a free product; it’s forced to some up with startling and counter-intuitive ideas by the need to conform to the data. And as experiments have probed into realms that are increasingly distant from everyday experience, these ideas have become increasingly bizarre and counterintuitive. The kinds of ideas — dark energy, curved spacetime, collapse of the wavefunction — that you probably wouldn’t invent by just sitting in a favorite cafe chatting with friends. And because these ideas are so unfamliliar, they suggest provocative and illuminating perspectives on ordinary human interactions. (Black holes as personality types, entropy as a metaphor for social decay — you know the idea.)

The respondent on the panel was Arkady Plotnitsky, a charming expatriate Russian who studied mathematics and physics in Leningrad (back when it was Leningrad) before moving to the States and becoming a literature professor. He encouraged me to write up my talk for publication in a special issue of Poetics Today, which I have finally done. So here it is: From Experience to Metaphor, by Way of Imagination (pdf file). Feel free to comment away, keeping in mind that this is not in any sense my area of expertise. (So, does this mean that writing articles for Poetics Today is a good way to advance one’s physics career? No, not really. Let’s say it’s a higher good.)

Now I want to see Michael Bérubé start publishing in Physical Review Letters.

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Sex in space!

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No, this isn’t one of those bait-and-switch titles. It really is about sex in space. Via Deepen the Mystery, a Guardian story on the hazards of sexual encounters on long-duration space missions.

They should be out-of-this-world experiences. But US experts have warned that sex in space will bring problems not pleasure for men and women heading to the moon and Mars.

A panel of scientists has told Nasa interplanetary passion could cause chaos to its latest plans to send humans on long missions.

Cramped in spaceships for years, surrounded by the starry void, astronauts thoughts are bound to turn to romance, states the report, ‘Bioastronautics Roadmap: a risk reduction strategy for human exploration of space’.

The resulting close encounters could have profound consequences, it adds. Without supplies of the necessary precautions, zero-gravity romps could lead to zero-gravity pregnancies.

Snickering aside, I’m sure it’s a real problem — send a bunch of people into isolation in close quarters for a period of years, and something will happen.

Now, I know that certain of my co-bloggers are reliable readers of the Guardian science section, but apparently they were going to keep this story to themselves. The extra value-added you get from Cosmic Variance, of course, is that we will actually link directly to the NASA Bioastronautics Roadmap from which the story derives. Although, as it turns out, a cursory inspection didn’t turn up anything nearly as off-color as you’d find in a novel by a recently indicted former high-ranking White House staffer. But this bit was interesting:

Serious interpersonal conflicts have occurred in space flight. The failure of flight crews to cooperate and work effectively with each other or with flight controllers has been a periodic problem in both US and Russian space flight programs. Interpersonal distrust, dislike, misunderstanding and poor communication have led to potentially dangerous situations, such as crewmembers refusing to speak to one another during critical operations, or withdrawing from voice communications with ground controllers. Such problems of group cohesiveness have a high likelihood of occurrence in prolonged space flight and if not mitigated through prevention or intervention, they will pose grave risks to the mission. Lack of adequate personnel selection, team assembly, or training has been found to have deleterious effects on work performance in organizational research studies. The duration and distance of a Mars mission significantly increases this risk. The distance also reduces countermeasure options and increases the need for autonomous behavioral health support systems.

Oh, great. I see a Stranger in a Strange Land scenario on our horizon.

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Mainstream breakthrough

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Let’s get this right out of the way: yes, Cosmic Variance did make its first appearance in the New York Times. We get a passing mention in Dennis Overbye’s article about Lisa Randall, for Clifford’s justified annoyance at Ira Flatow’s remarks on Science Friday about Lisa’s appearance rather than her science.

The NYT profile is a good one, managing to mix the personal with the scientific in a more interesting (and less objectionable) way. And they always do a nice job with the graphics; here is their version of the Randall-Sundrum brane-world construction. (Click to enlarge.)
Randall-Sundrum universe
Randall-Sundrum (versions one and two) is a great idea, one that I hope to discuss at length at some point. The basic notion is to have two three-branes (a three-brane has three dimensions of space and one of time) separated by a five-dimensional bulk that is highly curved. The nice feature is that the curvature acts not only on stuff passing through the bulk itself, but also works to rescale energies on one brane in relation to the other. So, what appears naturally to be very high-energy on one brane can be naturally low-energy on the other. This idea may help to explain the huge discrepancy (fifteen or so orders of magnitude) between the typical energy scales of particle physics (about one trillion electron volts, or one TeV) and that of gravity (the Planck scale, 1015 TeV).

But all the publicity, of course, is currently associated with Lisa’s new book more than with any recent breakthroughs. As predicted, I’ve written a review of Warped Passages, along with Michio Kaku’s book Parallel Worlds, which has now appeared in American Scientist. You’ll see that these are very different books, and it shouldn’t be too hard to figure out which I liked better. The holidays are coming — if there’s nobody in your family you like enough to get them my book or Clifford’s, you wouldn’t go wrong buying them Lisa’s.

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Even scarier

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Or if you really want to be scared, visit 3 Quarks Daily to read Abbas’s story of being arrested at JFK airport for beating himself up several years before. It should give pause to people who think that legal representation for suspected criminals is a sign of bleeding-heart weakness. Not, apparently, that being represented by a public defender is any better than simply throwing yourself on the mercy of the court.

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The Oval Portrait

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A busy Halloween for me, so I’ll shamelessly offer up an excerpt from the master — a bit from The Oval Portrait, by Edgar Allen Poe.

She was a maiden of rarest beauty, and not more lovely than full of glee. And evil was the hour when she saw, and loved, and wedded the painter. He, passionate, studious, austere, and having already a bride in his Art; she a maiden of rarest beauty, and not more lovely than full of glee; all light and smiles, and frolicsome as the young fawn; loving and cherishing all things; hating only the Art which was her rival; dreading only the pallet and brushes and other untoward instruments which deprived her of the countenance of her lover. It was thus a terrible thing for this lady to hear the painter speak of his desire to pourtray even his young bride. But she was humble and obedient, and sat meekly for many weeks in the dark, high turret-chamber where the light dripped upon the pale canvas only from overhead.

But he, the painter, took glory in his work, which went on from hour to hour, and from day to day. And be was a passionate, and wild, and moody man, who became lost in reveries; so that he would not see that the light which fell so ghastly in that lone turret withered the health and the spirits of his bride, who pined visibly to all but him. Yet she smiled on and still on, uncomplainingly, because she saw that the painter (who had high renown) took a fervid and burning pleasure in his task, and wrought day and night to depict her who so loved him, yet who grew daily more dispirited and weak.

And in sooth some who beheld the portrait spoke of its resemblance in low words, as of a mighty marvel, and a proof not less of the power of the painter than of his deep love for her whom he depicted so surpassingly well. But at length, as the labor drew nearer to its conclusion, there were admitted none into the turret; for the painter had grown wild with the ardor of his work, and turned his eyes from canvas merely, even to regard the countenance of his wife. And he would not see that the tints which he spread upon the canvas were drawn from the cheeks of her who sate beside him. And when many weeks bad passed, and but little remained to do, save one brush upon the mouth and one tint upon the eye, the spirit of the lady again flickered up as the flame within the socket of the lamp. And then the brush was given, and then the tint was placed; and, for one moment, the painter stood entranced before the work which he had wrought; but in the next, while he yet gazed, he grew tremulous and very pallid, and aghast, and crying with a loud voice, ‘This is indeed Life itself!’ turned suddenly to regard his beloved:- She was dead!

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The Grinch Who Stole Fitzmas

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I think this is going to be one of those holidays that I grumble about in an unappealing Scroogish manner, rather than embracing with a childlike innocence. Fitzmas, for those who have been hiding from the Inter Net these past few weeks, is the day when cherubic investigator Peter Fitzgerald hands down his indictments in the Plamegate scandal, sticking a pointy dagger of righteousness into the icy heart of the Bush administration. The day itself was yesterday, as Fitzgerald fingered Scooter Libby for perjury, making false statements, and obstruction of justice; more indictments may be on the way, perhaps including the Prince of Darkness himself Karl Rove. (Although deserving of the moniker, I don’t think many people really call Rove the Prince of Darkness — the label has been appropriate for so many GOP operatives, it’s kind of lost its punch.)

The liberal blogosphere has been gleefully awaiting this day, when they finally get to see some justice brought to the pack of medacious scheming liars currently running the country. Atrios, to pick on him unfairly, has been hoarding bottles of champagne in anticipation.

Personally, I’m not in the holiday spirit. The recent troubles for the White House are not a “positive good” so much as a “minor slowing-down of a tremendous amount of positive bad.” For one thing, indicting a few administration aides, even quite influential ones, on perjury charges is just not that big a deal. For another, putting a crimp in the White House’s style just doesn’t seem like a cause for celebration; it perhaps generates some mild satisfaction, but mostly a melancholy appreciation of the depths to which the country has sunk.

A lot of people, in perfectly good faith, believe that invading Iraq was the right thing to do, for various reasons. That’s fine, we can disagree. But does any reasonable person deny that the Bush administration engaged in a systematic campaign of lies and distortions to get us there? Does anyone in their right mind think that these folks made a careful and conscientious effort to ascertain whether Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction, and then presented the case to the world honestly as they best understood it? And are there sensible people out there who aren’t deeply bothered by this?

It’s sobering to understand that we are ruled by a group of people who (1) have only a tenuous connection to reality themselves, and (2) have absolutely no hesitation in using lies and intimidation to put into action the policies they want. It’s a dangerous combination, one that should be off-putting to conservatives just as much as liberals. When the current leadership of the Republican party wants something to be true, sincere arguments for or against that thing are completely beside the point. Saddam had WMD’s. Saddam was involved in September 11th. Human-produced emissions have no affect on our climate. Tax cuts reduce the deficit. Life is intelligently designed. The world supported us in Iraq. There’s nothing else we could have done after Katrina. Evidence for or against these propositions has no weight in their calculations.

Yesterday a friend of mine told me a story that she was told by a friend of hers, well-known explorer Sylvia Earle. Apparently Earle found herself at a fancy White House dinner, seated next to Trent Lott of all people. Innocent that she is, Earle thought this would be a great opportunity to explain to him the various ways in which our activities are wreaking havoc with the environment, in the oceans as well as in the atmosphere. After listening patiently to her over the course of dinner, at the end Lott nodded his head and said, But you have to understand that the long-term fate of the Earth doesn’t really matter to us, since everything will be re-arranged when the Lord returns on Judgment Day.

These are not the opinions of some fringe kook — these are the people who are ruling the country.

So I’m not in much of a celebratory mood. (To be fair, neither is Atrios.) We’ve been beaten senseless in a back alley by a group of a dozen thugs, and Fitzgerald’s indictments are like catching one or two of them for jay-walking violations. Even if by some miracle we could see the entire adminstration thrown out tomorrow, my mood would simply be one of relief, not of joy. Since that’s not about to happen, it’s all we can do just to minimize the damage.

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