News from Cosmic Variance: John Archibald Wheeler passed away this morning.

To me, Wheeler was the greatest surviving name from the epic era of early 20th century physics.

There is no mention yet on any news site–including slashdot. Instead are headlines about the democratic candidates in a ‘Faith Forum.’ No time to note the passing of the father of the H-bomb, the author of a classic book on general relativity, the most profound and beautiful creation of mankind (seriously–quantum theories have greater practical impact, but nothing else achieves so much with such simple premises). No, we have to hear about our presidential candidate’s relationship with a magic man in the sky. Please kill me.

I hope this lack of attention is remedied tomorrow. As the post on Cosmic Variance was from a former student and personal relation, I’m guessing a formal public announcement hasn’t been made yet. He was a great scientist himself, but his legacy as a teacher is almost unparalleled. It would be impossible to measure the net influence his life had on the world, accounting for the knowledge and contagious passion instilled in this students. Alas, I was not one of them. Things would probably be very different…

Some advice on academic publishing from Tyler Cowan’s blog Marginal Revolution that I’ve been reading a lot of lately (though this is from an older post).

2. Get something done every day. Few academics fail from not getting enough done each day. Many fail from living many days with zero output.

7. Start now. Recall the tombstone epitaph “It is later than you think.” Darth Sidious got this one right.

8. Care about what you are doing. This is ultimately your best ally.

I have been failing #2 miserably. I go many days without producing anything beyond surviving a heavy day of classes. When looking at my output from the week I find that the sum is even less than the sum of its parts. Though my dogs would disagree; they get better walks when I’m being less productive.

Solution: keep a daily log of progress in a public place. Keep the pointed stick aimed toward your ear. According to #7: the time is now.

This is not the venue for this type of project. I have set a wiki system up I intended to use for my computational physics lab work, where students could record their project progress, attach data files and code, so its not lost to the world (student work does occasionally come in handy). But I was never quite able to get it running smoothly. Too many security & permission issues which weren’t behaving properly. I think I need to give this another go.

#8 is the true culprit in all my problems. I Never bought into my dissertation advisor’s field of research. My plasma work, I have an interest in, but I can’t really say I care much. In a week I’m giving a talk on a topic I do care about, titled Copenhagen & Tralfalmadore. Let’s see how that goes.

The universe just is.

1. Simultaneity is frame dependent. Events in one observer’s past are in another observer’s future. Distances in space and intervals of time are frame dependent. They are not good physical quantities, a property of the world independent of your frame of reference. However, spacetime intervals between events (in technical terms, proper times) are.

There is no way to uniquely divide up spacetime into present, past and future. There’s no physical reason to consider future events any less real than past events, as somehow conditional while the past is immutable.

2. Experiment has shown that the quantum world can not be simultaneously deterministic, causal, and local. One often uses “deterministic” and “causal” interchangeably. Here, deterministic means law abiding; non-random, while “causal” means that future events depend on past events, and not the other way around.

Quantum entanglement is always described in a non-local fashion. You can probably guess which of the three properties I prefer to toss out: causal. I believe we can demonstrate that quantum information can propagate either way in time, but classical information is thermodynamically constrained to propagate forward in time.

The biggest outstanding problem then becomes the measurement problem. There is, presently, no deterministic model of the projective measurement. But I believe I know the form of the solution.

The problem with quantum mechanics is that it’s linear. If you represent the state as a superposition in the basis of some Hermitian operator, it will always (well, generically anyway) remain in a superposition state. Until you apply the non-deterministic, non-linear projective measurement rule.

The key being non-linear. We already have a non-linear field theory: general relativity. I get the feeling that a non-linear, deterministic field theory, say one that can incorporate gravity, will yield the projective measurement in a decoherence-like process.

Decoherence is a problem because it depends on our description of the system. But this is true of all thermodynamic variables; that doesn’t make them less useful or accurate. It is basically just classical statistical mechanics on quantum systems. And it’s still, technically, non-deterministic. It demonstrates why we don’t observe superpositions, but it still has no mechanism of projection.

Must the world be deterministic? The fact that I can’t imagine otherwise doesn’t necessarily make it so. I can’t put my head around what it would mean for it to be non-deterministic. If spacetime just is, then determinism is merely a statement that it is smooth. It’s much like the problem of stretching an elastic membrane over a hoop. The membrane finds a configuration where it has no unnecessary bumps and dips. We can find an equation that describes the shape, given the boundary condition (the shape of the hoop)*. You wouldn’t say the membrane is governed by the equation. It doesn’t give a damn about the equation, it just does its thing, as it has to do. That’s physics.

For the ancient Greeks, Necessity was the ultimate deity. Even the gods were subject to fate. We’ve simply learned to cope without the concept of a weaver.

Inspired by a Sean Caroll post. I take it for granted that “prove” means, in any context other than the confines of a formal language, what Sean explains.

*Most people could learn enough in about two years of college to handle the membrane-and-hoop problem. The problem of how physical fields are stretched over spacetime is proving a bit more difficult.

I was reading a bit today on the formulation of quantum field theories in a general spacetime.* The observation that the number of particles in a given volume (generally given by some number operator) is not frame-independent. Even in a pure Minkowski spacetime, the particle density will vary for observers using non-inertial coordinate systems.

So what do we have for curved spacetimes, where one can’t even define a privileged inertial coordinate system. Even the vacuum state can only be defined locally. By noting that the number of particles increases for accelerating observers, and applying the equivalence principle, we find black holes to be sources of particles. Hawking radiation. The gradient in the radial metric will produce a gradient of particle density. . Result: outgoing current of energetic particles, and an inward current of negative-energy particles. hmm.

* This very well could be the best conversation killer of all time.

I was just reading bump hunting at Cosmic Variance. It’s not as dirty as it sounds… it refers to a 2.5 sigma excess in a CERN scattering experiment that could be the Higgs boson. While it’s not statistically significant enough to start to get excited… yet… it got me thinking: could this be the first major scientific discovery blogged in real time?

To Foucault I would say, if I could… it’s not so bad. Once we get over the shock of discovering that the universe was not made with us in mind, all the meaning the brain can muster, and all the emotions it can bear, and all the shared adventure we might wish to enjoy, can be found by deciphering hereditary orderliness that has borne our species through geological time and stamped it with the residues of deep history. Reason will be advanced to new levels, and emotions played in potentially infinite patterns. The true will be sorted from the false, and we will understand one another very well, the more quickly because we are all of the same species and possess biologically similar brains. (p. 47)

I learned to read music early, though to this day I can only translate notation into sound, in real time, from the bass clef into a B-flat three-keyed brass instrument.

To know a piece of music, to own it, you have to memorize it. The few pieces I memorized on the guitar, say some of the Bach preludes, I hear in a completely different way. I can hear them physically.

Having also dabbled in theatre (and literary performance), I’ve experienced a similar channeling by committing words to memory. I sometimes spend spare (and solitary) time reciting snippets of drama & poetry (often at the same time).

The above paragraph, despite some poetic shortcomings, called out to me for memorization. <3 E.O.W.

Today I visited both places in Detroit worth visiting. The John K. King used & rare bookstore and Joe Louis Arena. With that out of the way, I might go home early. I picked up Bukowski’s Post Office (at the Wayne State bookstore, not John Kings) and have been laughing too hard to sleep.

Two crackpot talks at the Astronomy session today. The first fellow looked normal enough for a physics meeting, where the crowd featured grunge geek students, beard-and-suspenders unix gurus, typical variations on the unkempt gangly professor, and the guy you thought might have been a crazy homeless man until you saw his pocket-protector. The crackpot, with tweed coat and cheap tie, had a vague resemblance to Stewart Smalley, except his legs were about 35% too short for his body. So short, that you first wonder if they are functional, perhaps accidentally truncated. His low-sagging belt didn’t help this impression (he must have forgotten his suspenders). He seemed to have relevant things to say about the WMAP data analysis, applying his experience in MRI imaging to the situation. Then, when gently provoked by the moderator, he let loose a minor tirade which climaxed in concluding that the Sun’s Planckian spectra proves it is a solid.

The second crackpot, the final speaker of the session, was an exquisitely ancient fellow in a well-pressed suit and a posture of defeat. One doesn’t often see the most senior physicists at these sorts of meetings, unless their face is on the poster. Even then, they are usually more animated. These are gatherings for young up-and-commers to up-and-come in your face. So this gentle old gentleman, looking distinguished yet confused, took the stand with some anticipation. He proceeded to read his carefully crafted notes with the calm cadence of a historian narrating the significance of some forgotten relic. Except his topic was an eclectic cosmology which made no sense. I had no chance to make sense of it, as he spent too much time relaying the whimsical names he gave to various unobservable features of this cosmos, rather than giving us any idea what the purpose of the whole thing was. All this time I wonder: what is an octogenarian doing dreaming up crazy, pointless cosmologies? That business should be left to bitter grad students and a bag of weed.

Red Wings lost in overtime, 3-2.

He was drawn back into the fight when he learned that the town of Grantsburg, Wis., passed a law in 2004 restricting the teaching of evolution. Mr. Zimmerman organized deans from across Wisconsin to sign letters critical of Grantsburg’s decision. Next he recruited biology professors and religious-studies professors. Then came anthropologists and geologists. But the effort did not move the Grantsburg board. “The response was, These are just academics,” says Mr. Zimmerman.

…A friend who is a minister wrote a letter and sent it around to other ministers. Eventually, they collected 200 signatures from clergy in Wisconsin, which carried far more weight than the voices of academics. The school board backed down and adopted a less restrictive policy, says Mr. Zimmerman.

WTF is wrong with people? “They are just academics…” but they will listen to clergy. Somehow I doubt if their car breaks down they say, “they are just mechanics” and have it towed to their church for a faith tune-up. Granted, there are those that choose faith-healing over medicine, but I doubt they are on that school board. Why is it so hard to swallow the fact that that people who devote their lives to understanding how the world works actually know more about it than they do?

Most people have no idea how deep the rabbit-hole goes. Are they simply in denial over the immeasurable ocean of their ignorance? It is a defining moment when you finally apprehend just how much you don’t know. These school boards are run by emotional toddlers, cozy in their egomaniacal blanket of omniscience. They know the mind of God, and it is their own.

Let’s just look at the titles of some recent news articles.

The one I brought up in the last post is called “Anti-Darwin Bill Fails in Utah.” What exactly is an anti-Darwin bill? The guy is already dead, I don’t think we can do much to him. It was an anti-science bill. You can’t even separate natural selection from the rest of science.

Today: “Nev. Proposal Raises Evolution Questions.” The proposal does no such thing. It should read: “Nev. Proposal Demonstrates Complete Ignorance of the Theory of Evolution.” You can’t raise legitimate questions if you have no knowledge of the subject. The bill was proposed by masonry contractor who says such idiotic things as: “…nowhere in the fossil record is there an indisputable skeleton of a transitional species, or a ‘missing link.’” The article does not mention this statement is entirely nonsensical… according to the theory of natural selection, every species is transitional. It would not be biased to point out such a fundamental misunderstanding. Yet it is not done, probably because the journalist doesn’t know better himself.

From an NY times article by Kirk Johnson.

In a defeat for critics of Darwin, the Utah House of Representatives on Monday voted down a bill intended to challenge the theory of evolution in high school science classes.

First of all: yay! The Dover case has legs. The IDiots will have to regroup as they did after “creation science” was struck down in the 80’s. But second: the critics of Darwin? Yet another implied equation of the theory of natural selection with Darwin. This should read: the critics of science, or the critics of reason.

These small rhetorical points have a cumulative effect on how science is perceived and understood. Not long ago, I stuck my neck out on the Cosmic Variance site, saying we (scientists) should have a means to call out these misrepresentations (even little ones) and hold journalists accountable for their words. I was ignored. But the question remains in my mind of what even could be done? I don’t think Letters to the Editor would be effective. What else is there?

Perhaps I’ll write a simple, polite note to the author of the piece pointing out the error.