Go check out my new blog, Second Sight, if you are at all interested.

An article in New Scientist reports on musing by two reasonable and respected cosmologists— indeed, ones whom I’ve met myself— that our discovery of dark energy may have shortened the life of the Universe.

To which I can only say “foo”. And I say “foo” on two levels. Primarily, on the sensational way in which this is described by New Scientist. But secondarily, on the interpretations of quantum mechanics that respectable cosmologists are promoting.

First of all, for a bit of perspective. The actual research paper on which this article is based is available at arxiv.org, from which I will quote the end of the concluding paragraphs:

They are asking the question…. And what do we get out of “New Scientist”? Cosmologists observing the Universe may have shortened the life of the Universe! Geez.

If this is not an article tailored to feed fuel to the anti-science types who are warning of the dangers of “meddling in that which we do not understand and were not meant to understand,” I do not know what was. Now we have a respectable science magazine and two respectable cosmologists on record as saying just looking at the sky could hasten the end of the Universe ZOMG!. And while my quote of the scientific paper above may seem to restore respectability to Krauss and get him off the hook, he does have this sentence quoted in the New Scientist article:

The very first thing to keep in mind is that we are taking about timescales of 14 billion years. The Universe may die in 14 billion years instead of 140 billion years because we were so bold as to look at it, if you take the results of this too seriously. So there’s no need to worry about the effects this will have on the Christmas shopping season. (Well, unless the article itself raises worries.)

But there are other things to think about before we march to the offices and homes (including mine) of the two teams of astronomers who discovered Dark Energy, and burn them to the ground. Consider this. There are 100 billion stars in our galaxy. There are 100 billion galaxies similar to ours within our observable Universe. We know that planets are ubiquitous in our neighborhood of the galaxy. I will not make any estimation as to whether or not there are other life-bearing, or, more to the point, intelligent life-bearing planets in our region of the Galaxy. But do you really believe that nowhere in this observable Universe there is nobody else out there looking at the skies? I find that simply implausible.

More to the point though… this whole thing is reading too much into quantum mechanics. This is writing in a science magazine (New Scientist) interesting speculation that better belongs in science fiction (cf: Greg Bear’s interesting story “Schroedinger’s Plague”). I do have to admit that macroscopic consequences of Quantum Mechanics are something potentially very cool. But there are a lot of fuzz-heads out there who like to take things that scientists say about Quantum Mechanics and use it to claim that there some sort of scientific basis to their bogus mysticism (cf: How Much #%*! Can We Spew?). It sort of alarms me to see respected cosmologists quoted in a mainstream science magazine saying things about quantum mechanics that sound like Intelligent Design processed through the most stereotyped of post-modernist “reality is a social construction” deconstructionism.

There is real science behind this. There have been experiments showing the so-called Quantum Zeno Effect (also sometimes called “Quantum Non-Demolition”, unless I am mistaken) where a particle’s decay time can be delayed by observing it continuously. What happens here is that the particle’s “decay clock” is “reset” each time it is observed not to have decayed. I hereby poke Chad to talk more about this, because I suspect he knows a lot more about it than I do.

Is any of this real? In reality, we currently know so little about the true nature of Dark Energy, and so little about the conditions in the early Universe, that this is one of many thoughts that are out there in the theoretical mill being chewed on by people smarter than me. As we stumble our way towards some understanding of quantum gravity, we’re going to think a lot of “out there” things, many of which will turn out to have been completely on the wrong path, some of which may surprisingly turn out to be correct. There was a time not too long ago when some of the perfectly well understood consequences of quantum mechanics— e.g. the fact that nature is not deterministic, but stochastic, at its most basic level— seemed utterly nonsensical and impossible. Almost certainly something surprising will come out of quantum gravity. But we’re not there yet. So don’t become alarmed.

However, I may be proven wrong, but let me go on record as saying that I am deeply dubious that our Universe will turn out to behave as a quantum system in this manner. There is absolutely no doubt that quantum mechanics does have effects on macroscopic systems. Consider blackbody radiation, the spectrum of light we see from something like the Sun. The nature of that spectrum cannot be understood without quantum mechanics (and was one of the leading problems with late-19th-century Physics). However, the fact that you can’t explain the shape of the Sun’s spectrum without quantum mechanics does not imply that the Sun behaves as a quantum particle whose existence is in doubt when nobody happens to be looking at it. I suspect that the sorts of things we’re seeing here are the same kinds of “taking quantum mechanics too far out of its relam” mistakes.

I also plan to take down the archives from the blog’s former site, in part of an ongoing effort to make it so that people at Vanderbilt don’t have to depend on me to maintain computers there.

I have not decided yet if it is going to be worth the effort to try to set up archives on an independent site for posterity. Likely this will not happen. If there is anything you’ve ever read here that you think you want archived— either because you thought it was worth reading, or because you think you might want to send me abuse about it later— you will want to make copies of it now.

I’m finding that as I’m involved in my new job, while I still do get a charge out of posts like the Big Bang post I did the other day, my heart isn’t 100% in this.

Also, after the deleted post yesterday, I’m just too digusted with the nature of academia at our forefront research institutions (and with Vanderbilt in particular– as anybody who reads this knows, I already bore a fair amount of bitterness towards that institution, and now I have a huge amount of disgust with Vanderbilt’s Physics department). Yes, in the past I got a lot of mileage out of echoing those complaints, and I know that I hit something of a chord because of the response I received. Heck, even to this day news stories get generated in part by my own meta-issues with academia. But the fact is that I’m out of it now, and I’m finding myself really wanting to move on and not remain so mired in the issues that drove me into clinical depression and eventually drove me out of the field. They are not my problem now, and I’m not enough of the crusader type to want to fix the world even though I’ve been booted from it.

I truly do regret having to give up teaching college. Ironically, yesterday when I visited Vanderbilt, I also dropped by the Society of Physics Students meeting, and really enjoyed meeting and saying “hello” to the students. I loved the science, I loved the teaching, and I loved interacting with the students… but the academic politics and the nutty standards of “rigor” that Universities think they are applying wrecked it all. And learning what I learned about the academic politics reminded me that, yes, however wistful I may have been in the interactions with students, I made the right decision by fleeing that environment.

The fact is that my heart just is not in this astronomy blogging gig right now. I have moved on, and I really want to move on. I will make myself unhappy if I continued to be mired in what I was mired in before. And, the fact is that I don’t have enough left over cognitive energy to be making the kinds of astronomy breaking news and pedagogical posts that composed what I think were the best of Galactic Interactions. Astronomy and teaching remain two of my passions, and some day I may try to come back to it. In the the mean time, however, farewell.

It is possible at some point in the future I may change my mind, and want to start blogging again— about astronomy, or about something else. I can’t predict if I’ll ever be able to re-join the scienceblogs.com family, but in any event I’ll link to it from my personal home page. If for whatever reason you may have some interest in that possibility, periodically check that page, as I’ll assuredly drop a link there to any public blog that I’m doing.

Our system is screwed up. Never shed light on anything, because you’re small and it could hurt you. If a festering wound exists somewhere, just try to get away. Don’t try to point it out. Especially if it’s not your problem any more.

Choose your battles, and let other places that are screwed up stay screwed up.

A lawyer on retainer. Jesus Christ. No, I’m not going to jail, but civil law practically limits the reality of free speech in this fucked up and litigious society.

I always find these sorts of stories depressing, because there is an important perspective that is lost. In the story, we hear that one side of the legal thinks it boils down to one simple question:

But he’s wrong. There is another simple question we could be asking here:

To often, in stories about expansion of what is called “intellectual property rights” (i.e. exclusive copyrights, patents, and trademarks), we hear about how it’s “property,” and how violation of these things is theft. Very, very, rarely do we hear the fact that these things are also limitations on freedom of expression.. Indeed, the conflict this NPR story focuses on is entitled “Whose Property?”, and the other side of the lawsuit is a guy who wants to continue to profit by selling licensing rights to his father’s photographs:

Here, the side against this expression-squelching law has completely accepted the notion that “intellectual property” is just like other forms of property.

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t have copyrights or trademarks at all. I am saying, however, that the very terms of the debate stilt the debate towards copyright maximalism, and ever expanding copyright restrictions and terms… and that we have lost sight of the fact that copyright is a sacrifice of our freedom of expression, and its benefits need to be evaluated against that sacrifice.

Let us suppose this California law becomes the standard, a federal law or widely adopted amongst all the states. Now suppose that 50 years from now somebody writes an article entitled “Where It All Went Wrong” about early 21st century American presidential politics, and wanted to include the following image (which I grabbed from the US Dept. of State website):

To do so, the article’s author would have to get permission from four estates: the estate of G. W. Bush, the estate of D. Cheney, the estate of C. Rice, and the estate of the photographer.

Does this sound to you like the legal landscape of a society that values freedom of expression?

Woah, slow down… cosmic rays? Right, you hear the term all the time, but do you really know what they are? They are charged particles that rain down on Earth from space. Really! Kinda cool, huh? There are charged particles— mostly protons, or hydrogen nuclei, but with some heavier ions mixed in— smacking into our atmosphere all the time. Some of them have extremely high energies, higher energies than those to which we can accelerate particles in our best particle physics accelerators. Of course, the very highest energy cosmic rays are the rarest.

Thanks to a recent study by the Chandra Space Telescope, we have direct confirmation of the model that cosmic rays are produced in supernovae.

In fact, the Solar System is awash in charged particles, many of which come streaming off of the Sun. A “cosmic ray” proper, however, has a higher energy than most of the particles coming off of the Sun, and comes from outside the Solar System. The production mechanism for these cosmic rays is called the “Fermi mechanism,” and involves compressing magnetic fields in supernova remnants.

The path of a moving charged particle will be bent in the presence of a magnetic field. Indeed, magnetic fields can “capture” moving charged particles (both from the Solar wind and cosmic rays), causing them to spiral about it. We have bands of charged particles, the so-called “Van Allen Belts”, around the Earth; these are particles trapped in the Earth’s magnetic field. As the particles spiral along the fields, they crash into the atmosphere near the North and South Poles, where the magnetic field lines dip down into the earth. The result of the collisions of these particles with the atmosphere is what can be seen on earth as aurorae.

Supernova remnants have two things. First, they have strong magnetic fields; we’ve known this for a long time. Second, they have expanding gasses. In general, if you have a gas whose particles are partly charged, magnetic fields will move along with the gas. As the high-velocity gas in a supernova expands into the interstellar gas around it, you get shocks where the expanding gas collides with the ambient gas. You will also have magnetic field lines getting compressed, as the magnetic fields in the expanding gas plow in to the ambient magnetic fields out there.

Charged particles moving about the field lines of expanding gas will bounce back and forth between the expanding magnetic fields and the ambient magnetic fields. As the two field lines come closer together, the magnetic fields pick up energy. It’s similar to bouncing a tennis ball between two trucks coming towards each other. Each time the tennis ball collides with one track and bounces back towards the other, it picks up a bit of the kinetic energy of the oncoming truck, getting faster and faster and faster.

Normally, the charged particle would stay trapped in these strengthening magnetic fields (the compressing magnetic field lines) forever. However, there is enough junk there that eventually the charged particle— potentially moving quite fast now— will bounce off of something and get scattered out of the supernova remnant. At that point, it goes flying through the Galaxy as a cosmic ray.

The new observations show hot spots in X-rays appearing and disappearing in the shocks at the edge of a supernova remnant, which results from the sporadic production and release of the charged particles, some fraction of which will run into planets and be observed by the residents there as cosmic rays.

(Hat tip: Roger Amdahl of the Second Life “Astro News” group.)

I’m no longer in academia, but as those who are longtime readers of my blog know, I became painfully aware of how sexist the culture of Physics is and how amazingly unequal the playing field is for women— not just, or not even primarily, because of differential standards, but because of the atmosphere that is created by that culture. I also became painfully aware how amazingly in denial a lot of men (and even a few women) are about the pervasive and sinister effects of that atmosphere.

One would often see borderline open misogyny hiding behind protestations that Physics needed to maintain their “meritocracy” — the existence of which I have argued previously is a myth. (And before you get all huffy and point out that I’m just sour grapes because I “wasn’t good enough” to stay in academia myself, bear in mind that not only did I win multiple awards for my research, including one from Vanderbilt itself, before Vanderbilt made it clear that I wasn’t going to get tenure, but also that I held these opinions back when things were still looking promising for my future at that place.)

In Free Software, however it’s far worse.

Whereas the number of women in biology and chemistry has improved a lot in recent decades, the number of women in Physics creeps up much more slowly. Meanwhile, in computer science, the number of women has actually be declining. As for the absolute values of those numbers, one need only look at a picture of a Linux Kernel Developers’ Summit to realize that within statistical uncertainty, the number of Y chromosomes is the same as the number of people in the picture.

Recently on the “daily updates” (i.e. front) page of Linux Weekly News, there have been links to a couple of articles (one, two) about increasing the number of women actively participating in open source software development. What is most depressing about this is the storm of comments that come. Whereas sometimes I was a little shocked about how misogynistic physicists are in their honest protestations that men must just be “smarter”, physicists are nothing compared to what the open source geeks are. It’s really quite embarrassing.

One thing that you always see is studies pointing to different IQ ranges in men and women. This is a really common canard. Never mind the fact that IQ is widely recognized as being a test that is subject to sociological systematic errors, people seem to latch on to it (and other similar types of tests) as a completely reliable measure of “intelligence.” There is also the fact that “intelligence” simply cannot be a single-valued thing. But, most egregiously, there is this implicit assumption behind all of these protestations that it is one’s “intelligence” (whatever that is) that is the primary predictor of success and great contribution in fields such as physics or software development. That is, at best, a naive view. As with anything else, success is largely predicated on your ability to market yourself, how aggressive you are in pushing yourself and your agenda, and how good you are at networking with the other people who are going to be judging you and deciding whether or not you are able to stay in the field and hence to be able to keep making contributions. “Intelligence” of a certain level is a prerequisite, but you don’t have to be the best to make great contributions, and being the best won’t keep you in if you don’t have the absolutely essential self-marketing abilities.

This is even more true in the wild-west, each person for his or herself nature of open source software development than it is in physics, where the molasses of institutional approval and policy can at times help to moderate the depredations of the most offensive individuals.

At Linden Lab, there are assuredly more men in engineering (operations and development) than there are women— just like in the community at large. But I believe that the disparity is lower, which I think says positive things about the culture that has been fostered largely from the beginning by CEO Philip Rosedale. When I read comments on lwn.net threads about how people have met and talked to women and “they” just don’t share the interests and aptitudes that the commenter does about these techie things, it just makes me wince. I have met multiple women at Linden who are clearly every bit as much of a techno-geek as I am, if not more so. Just this last week I participated in a couple of code reviews with a woman who’s every bit as much (if not more so) a Perl hacker as anybody else you could find— I don’t know this woman well enough to have any clue about her fashion sense, but even if she doesn’t dress “like a geek,” I know everything I need to know about her, in some actual depth now, to have absolutely no doubts that her “intelligence” (whatever that is) about Perl-type development stuff is at least as good as mine. And I don’t feel threatened by that… rather, I realize, hey, here’s another person I can ask questions of if I’m trying to figure things out. (Which I’ve already done.)

On a side note: it’s interesting to me how many subcultures like to congratulate themselves for being of above average intelligence. I’ve seen this on mailing lists for roleplaying gamers (who are convinced that they are more intelligent than the general community) and science fiction readers (likewise). Somehow, enjoyment of RPGs and reading science fiction are supposed to be evidence of intellgence; I don’t get it, but it’s a very pervasive idea. In physics and in software development, it’s worse, for there everybody in the community is convinced that only the most intelligent are able to get into that community at all. They are convinced not only that are they smarter than everybody else, but they’re all really out there on the extreme tails of the distribution, and that nobody not on those extreme tails is capable of making a contribution.

To which I say foo. Look, I know I’m smart, it would be false modesty to say otherwise. I suspect I’m of above-average intelligence. But I really, really doubt I”m out on the tail of the distribution; I think I’m probably just somewhere around one sigma on the high side of the distribution for most ways in which that distribution might meaningfully be measured (which, of course, is at the moment purely hypothetical). However, I am highly skilled both as an astrophysicist and as a software person, and able to make great contributions. What I really don’t understand is why so many other people who are similar feel the need to sit around and convince themselves that they and everybody like them are way the hell out on the tails of the distribution. What’s worse is when they combine that with various studies that seem to indicate that men and women occupy those tails differently to justify misogyny. It’s just sick.

For the last several weeks, Science Friday has been simulcasting over NPR and in Second Life, using Nashville’s WPLN audio stream for the purpose. (I had nothing to do with that!) Meanwhile, Ira Flatley, the 2nd life avatar of Ira Flatow (and his extensive staff), together with hosts, listen to and repeat on air the occasional question that comes from the sundry people present. Meanwhile, all of us carry on a text conversation about what we’re hearing on the radio, sometimes with various tangents.

If you’re interested in this drop by next week. Science Friday is hosted in the Science School region in Second Life.