The sisters talked most of the morning. You
did your forty minutes of exercises. No one went to the pool or the beach.
Lunch, at Mary Lou’s request, was at Conch Republic Grill. The girls had
salmon; you had chicken quesadillas. You and Carol had unsweetened ice tea;
Linda and Mary Lou had daiquiris. French pastries for dessert (once again) were at 2600 Gulf
Boulevard (almost to the Clearwater City Limits). A final stop at John’s Pass
shops then you stopped at the condo for the rest of the afternoon. Everyone was
going to take a nap but so far no takers. – Amorella
1438
hours. I am looking out at the Gulf from my makeshift table/chair desk in the
bedroom. The girls are still talking. You’d think they’d be all talked out by
now. I talked for five minutes at the restaurant before the food arrived. That
was it. Carol told me I didn’t have to stop but I didn’t have anything more to
say. That’s what’s nice about rolling and or focused thoughts – I can write in
silence and readers, if they like, can read them in silence or not read them at
all. No one is disturbed by my interruptions, not even myself since I wasn’t
doing anything anyway. I did buy another cap, this time a black one – “Conch Republic ” above and “Grill & Raw Bar” below in white. Above the words is a
centered ‘pirate’ skull and bones icon. In small white print on the back the
cap says, “North Redington Beach”. Now I have enough caps. The last two are
propaganda for seafood. They fit my personality, which make them a lot more
authentic me than the CIA cap (which I still think is cool).
Being on a secret mission has been a long
time favorite fantasy for you orndorff. One of the highlights of your life was
smuggling in a package from a colleague in Sao Paulo’s “Graded” to the far west
countryside of Montevideo to his long time friend from their twenty to thirty
years of rural communal living in Paraguay. – Amorella
Don’t you find it strange, boy; that you, a
man of few if any secrets, would have had such a desire to have been a real spy
in a real governmental agency? – Amorella
1527
hours. I was influenced by the James Bond character and MI5 and MI6 but later I
was more influenced by the book A Man Called Intrepid by William
Stephenson and The Codebreakers by David Kahn.
** **
Sir
William Samuel Stephenson, Kt, CC. MC, DFC (23
January 1897 – 31 January 1989) was a Canadian soldier, air, businessman,
inventor, spymaster, and the senior representative of British intelligence for
the entire western hemisphere during World War II. He is best known by his
wartime intelligence codename Intrepid. Many people consider him to be
one of the real-life inspirations for James Bond. Ian Fleming himself once
wrote, "James Bond is a highly romanticized version of a true spy. The
real thing is ... William Stephenson.”
As head of the British Security Coordination,
Stephenson handed over British scientific secrets to Franklin D. Roosevelt and
relayed American secrets to Winston Churchill. In addition, Stephenson has been
credited with changing American public opinion from an isolationist stance to a
supportive tendency regarding America's entry into World War II. . . .
Selected and edited from Wikipedia
** **
** **
The Codebreakers – The Story of Secret Writing is a book by David Kahn, published in 1967 comprehensively
chronicling the history of cryptography from ancient Egypt to the time of its
writing. The United States government attempted to have the book altered before
publication, and it succeeded in part.
Overview
Bradford
Hardie III, an American cryptographer during World War II, contributed insider
information, German translations from original documents, as well as intimate
real-time operational explanations to The Codebreakers.
The
Codebreakers is widely regarded as the best
account of the history of cryptography up to its publication. William Crowell,
the former deputy director of the National Security Agency, was quoted in Newsday magazine as saying "Before
he (Kahn) came along, the best you could do was buy an explanatory book that
usually was too technical and terribly dull.”
Kahn,
then a journalist, was contracted to write a book on cryptology in 1961. He
began writing it part-time, and then he quit his job to work on it full-time. The book was to
include information on the NSA, and according to the author James Bamford, in
1982, the agency attempted to stop its publication. The NSA considered various
options, including writing a negative review of Kahn's work to be published in
the press to discredit him.
A
committee of the United States Intelligence Board concluded that the book was
"a possibly valuable support to foreign COMSEC authorities" and
recommended "further low-key actions as possible, but short of legal
action, to discourage Mr. Kahn or his prospective publishers". Kahn's
publisher, Macmillan and Sons, handed over the manuscript to the government for
review without Kahn's permission on 4 March 1966. Kahn and Macmillan eventually
agreed to remove some material from the manuscript, particularly concerning the
relationship between the NSA and its counterpart in the United Kingdom, the
GCHQ.
The book finishes with a chapter on SETI. Because of
the year of its publication, the book did not cover most of the history
concerning the breaking of the German Enigma machine, which became public
knowledge during in the 1970s). Hence, not much was said of Alan Turing. Nor
did it cover the advent of strong cryptography in the public domain, beginning
with the invention of public key cryptography and the specification of the Data
Encryption Standard in the mid-1970s. The book was republished in 1996, and
this new edition includes an additional chapter briefly covering the events
since the original publication.
Selected and
edited from Wikipedia
** **
1600
hours. Craig, Alta, Carol and myself went to Fort Huachuca to see the little
known museum on code-breaking.
** **
Fort Huachuca is a Untied States Army Installation in Cochise County
Arizona. The base lies approximately 15 miles north of the Mexican border and
is within the city of Sierra Vista. Home of the Army Intelligence Center and
the Network Enterprise Technology Command, Fort Huachuca is a hub of United
States Army communications technology and training. The base shares nearby
Libby Airfield with the civilian Sierra Vista Municipal Airport. Though never
used, the Libby Airfield runway served as a backup landing location for United
States space shuttles. . . .
Points of Interest on Fort
Huachuca
Fort Huachuca has all the amenities of any modern city. Soldiers and
families stationed at the base can enjoy a wide range of facilities including
housing, pools, gyms, a PX with adjoining food court, gas stations, banks and
the William Bliss Army Community Hospital. The base is also home to two
museums. The United States Army
Intelligence Museum displays the development and evolution of Army intelligence
operations and technology. The Fort Huachuca Museum covers the history
of the United States Army in the American Southwest. . . .
Selected and
edited from -- http://militarybases.com/fort-huachuca-army-base-in-cochise-az/
** **
Jean called and said she, James and Bill
were coming over for supper. You decided on Daiquiri Shak. You and Carol split
a wrap with sweet potato fries and you both had unsweetened ice tea. The others
went back to Port Tampa. The sisters are going to the pool for a bit. You
declined for a second night reasoning you already had your exercise for the
day. Part of the supper conversation was on sharing your first meeting and/or
date with one another. This added to the fun. You are listening to your Pandora
private station “Traveling Wilburys” and are into “Free Falling” at the moment.
– Amorella
1843
hours. I have some wonderfully mellow songs on my “Traveling Wilburys”.
Listening to “From Me To You” at the moment and now “Runaround Sue”. Okay, off
goes the music because I need to focus on what’s coming up.
You
found an article worth reading in your mailbox. Here it is. - Amorella
** **
Edge.org
May 27, 2015
---------------------------------------------------
THE THIRD CULTURE
---------------------------------------------------
LAYERS OF REALITY
A Conversation with Sean Carroll
SEAN CARROLL is a research professor at Caltech and the author
of THE PARTICLE AT THE END OF THE UNIVERSE, which won the 2013 Royal Society
Winton Prize, and FROM ETERNITY TO HERE: THE QUEST FOR THE ULTIMATE THEORY OF
TIME. He has recently been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Gemant Award
from the American Institute of Physics, and the Emperor Has No Clothes Award
from the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
I've always studied the laws of physics. I've always been
curious about how the universe works, where it comes from, what are the rules
that govern the behavior of the universe at the deepest level, so I do physics
for a living. I study cosmology and the Big Bang and what happened before the
Big Bang, if anything. It's a system of things that hooks up in very
complicated ways to our human scale lives. There's the natural world that
scientists study, and we human beings are part of the natural world.
There's an old creationist myth that says there’s a problem with
the fact that we live in a universe governed by the second law of
thermodynamics: Disorder, or entropy, grows with time from early times to later
times. If that were true, how in the world could it be the case that here on
Earth something complicated and organized like human beings came to be? There's
a simple response to this, which is that the second law of thermodynamics says
that things grow disorderly in closed systems, and the earth is not a closed
system. We get energy in a low entropy form from the sun. We radiate it out in
a high entropy form to the universe. But okay, there's still a question: even
if it's allowed for a structure to form here on Earth, why did it? Why does
that happen? Is that something natural? Is that something that needs to be
guided or does it just happen?
In some sense this is a physics problem. I've become
increasingly interested in how the underlying laws of physics, which are very
simple and mindless and just push particles around according to equations, take
us from the very simple early universe near the Big Bang after 10 to the 100th
years to the expanding, desolate, cold and empty space in our future, passing
through the current stage of the history of the universe where things are rich
and intricate and complex.
We know there's a
law of nature, the second law of thermodynamics, that says that disorderliness
grows with time. Is there another law of nature that governs how complexity
evolves? One that talks about multiple layers of the structures and how they
interact with each other? Embarrassingly enough, we don't even know how to
define this problem yet. We don't know the right quantitative description for
complexity. This is very early days. This is Copernicus, not even Kepler, much
less Galileo or Newton. This is guessing at the ways to think about these
problems.
You
can think about the universe as a cup of coffee: You're taking cream and you're
mixing it into the coffee. When the cream and the coffee are separate, it's
simple and it's organized; it's low entropy. When you've mixed them all
together, it's high entropy. It's disorganized but it's still simple everything
is mixed together. It's in the middle, when the swirls of cream are mixing into
the swirls of coffee, that you get this intricate, complex structure. You and
I—human beings—are those intricate swirls in the cup of coffee. We are the
little epiphenomena that occur along the way from a simple low entropy past to
a simple high entropy future. We are the complexity along the way.
That's
a nice physical description. It also makes you think about things beyond the
simple physical description. It's talking about human beings suddenly. There're
questions here about the origin of galaxies, the origin of stars, the origin of
life. There're also questions about the origins of thought and cognition. There're
also questions about the origin and the role of meaning and mattering and
purpose in the
world.
My
medium-scale research project these days is understanding complexity and
structure and how it arises through the workings out of the laws of physics. My
bigger picture question is about how human beings fit into this. We live in
part of the natural world. We are collections of molecules undergoing certain
chemical processes. We came about through certain physical processes. What are
we going to do about that? What are we going to make of that? Are we
going to dissolve in existential anxiety, or are we going to step up to the
plate and create the kind of human scale world with value and meaning that we
all want to live in?
My
own work is that of a traditional pencil and paper theorist. I own a computer.
I mostly use it for email and looking at the Internet. What I do for a living
is take pieces of paper, or a blackboard, and I write equations. My job is to
take an idea, turn it into equations and then use those equations to make
predictions, hopefully to connect with the world that we see around us. I'm a
member of the Physics Department and the Theoretical Particle Physics Group at
Caltech in Pasadena. Most of us in that group are people like me: We're sitting
at our desks, we're chatting to each other at whiteboards, or going to
Starbucks over coffee and saying, "What if we added a certain field to the
inventory of the universe that interacted with other fields in such-and-such a
way? Would that help us understand the dark matter? Would that help us
understand the dark energy? Would it help us understand the mass of the Higgs
boson for example?"
The
general fields in which I've been working—theoretical particle physics,
cosmology, and gravitation—are ones that are significantly influenced by
experiments: Discovering the Higgs boson, discovering the patterns in the
microwave background, the leftover radiation from the Big Bang. We would like
to take these clues that the universe is giving us and turn them into
quantitative theories for how the universe works, and that's the traditional
understanding of what my job is.
A
lot of my work is talking. I talk to other theorists. I have graduate students,
postdocs, colleagues. People always ask whether I have a lab—no, I do not have
a lab. I have an office with a desk. I am lucky enough to be sitting at the
desk that Richard Feynman sat at back when he was a professor at Caltech. When
people ask me why, I explain to them that Feynman's desk gets given to the most
senior physicist who's not senior enough to warrant a brand new desk. That
turns out to be me at Caltech right now.
I
am increasingly getting interested in a different kind of physics theorizing
that is not just writing down a new set of fields or a new model for particle
physics or cosmology, but taking the models we already know and looking at them
at a slightly different level of abstraction: Thinking about robust features of
entropy and complexity and how they play together. Just as one example, some
colleagues of mine and I are writing a paper which we call "The Bayesian
Second Law of Thermodynamics." This is taking Bayes's theorem, which is a
result in statistics. You want to update your likelihood, your belief in a
certain theory based on the information that you get—the data—the observational
outcome. Bayesian statistics is a very traditional way of thinking about the
increase of scientific knowledge. We start from possibilities. We learn more
and more because we collect new data. In some sense this is what you do every
time you look at any physical system. You thought it had certain properties,
you measure something about it, you learn more about it. We're marrying Bayes's
theorem in statistics to the second law of thermodynamics in physics, and we're
getting a new way to think about microscopic systems that you can measure in
the lab.
We're
learning a lot about how the fundamental laws grow into the macroscopic laws.
One of the interesting things, at a philosophical level just as much as a
scientific level, is the role of causation or causality. What causes what in
the natural world? It's fascinating to a lot of people. When you open up a book
on quantum field theory or particle physics, words like cause and effect appear
nowhere in the book. The traditional notion of causality is just not there. The
word “causality” might be misused a little bit to stand in as something that
says signals do not travel faster than the speed of light. But the idea A
precedes B and, therefore, A causes B is a feature of our big macroscopic
world. It's not a feature of particle physics. In the underlying microscopic
world you can run forward and backward in time just as easily one way as the
other.
This
is something we all think is true. It is not something we understand at this
level of deriving one set of results from another. If you want to know why
notions of cause and effect work in the macroscopic world even though they're
absent in the microscopic world, no one completely understands that. It has
something to do with the arrow of time and entropy and the fact that entropy is
increasing. This is a connection between fundamental physics, and social
science, and working out in the world of sociology or psychology why does one
effect get traced back to a certain kind of cause. A physicist is going to link
that to the low entropy that we had near the Big Bang.
Cosmology,
which is my home turf, is in a very interesting situation right now.
Remarkably, to anyone who was around when I was in graduate school, we
understand so much about the universe now that we didn't understand twenty,
twenty-five years ago. We understand its overall density, its likely future
fate, we know a lot about the primordial conditions and so forth, and it's put
us physicists in an awkward position. We love understanding things, but it
makes it hard to make progress. You make progress when there's something you
don't understand, some puzzle that is being given to you. The kinds of puzzles
we have from the data right now in cosmology are so big picture, so
non-detailed, that it's hard to know how to move forward. Why does the energy
of empty space have the value it does? Why did the early universe have such a
low entropy?
We
have ideas about this. The most famous single idea in modern theoretical
cosmology is inflation: The idea that the very early universe was almost
unimaginably tiny, but it inflated by an enormous amount in a very short period
of time and it smoothed out and became the universe we see today. It's a very
powerful idea traced back to Alan Guth in the late 1970s.
Inflation
seems to have an unfortunate or fortunate consequence, depending on how you
want to spin it—namely, that inflation takes this tiny region of space and
makes it really big. Part of that big region becomes our universe, but another
part of it just keeps inflating. It just keeps going, and more and more little
parts of the universe drop out and become regions of space like our own, or
regions of space similar to our own but different in other ways, maybe different
local laws of physics even. That rubs people the wrong way. Think about how
this picture developed: we have our observations, we have our universe, and
we're trying to explain it. We come up with a theory to explain it, and we
predict the existence essentially of other universes, and then the question is
a combination of science and philosophy once again. What do we make of these
other universes that we don't see? They're predicted by our theory. Do we take
them seriously or not? That's a question that's hard to adjudicate by
traditional scientific methods. We don't know how to go out and look for these
universes. We don't even think it's possible maybe to do so.
I'm
on the side that says you get to take your theory seriously until a better
theory comes along. We can't say there are definitely other universes, but we
can say it's very possible and we should take that seriously. Of course, it all
depends on inflation being right, which is why people were very excited when a
little while ago there was a claim by the BICEP2 collaboration—a radio
telescope that was looking at polarization of the leftover radiation from the
Big Bang—that they seemed to see a certain very faint signal which is exactly
what would have been predicted if inflation had happened. In fact, it was maybe
a little bit stronger than you would have expected, but you could find wiggle
room to make sense of that.
People
got very, very, very excited because it was the first direct evidence in favor
of inflation. That's a too-lucky-to-be-true kind of thing, like our meager
human intellects apparently successfully reached back to the first trillionth
of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang and figured out
what was happening. Unfortunately, the exciting result is probably not right.
The better data that has come in since then seems to say that what we thought
was a faint signal from inflation was in fact schmutz in the middle of the
universe. It was stuff from our galaxy, dust and magnetic fields getting in the
way. You know what? That's how science works. We make observations, we
interpret them, we make better observations. We learn more. Right now we're
back to where we were. Inflation might be right, it might not be right, we
don't know. Taking it seriously is definitely our job.
One
of the struggles that we have as modern physicists and cosmologists, is that
the conventional ways we have of talking about how to do science might be too
simplistic. One way we can put this that is very dramatic is, there is a
t-shirt or bumper-sticker-sized motto that was given to us by Sir Karl Popper
about what demarcates science from non science, namely, scientific theories are
falsifiable, which doesn't mean you can prove them wrong, it means that if they
were wrong you could prove them wrong. A good scientific theory according to
Popper sticks its neck out. It says, here's what I think is true about the
universe. There's something very definite that I'm saying. If you look for this
aspect and don't find it there, then that theory is not correct.
What
Popper had in mind was attacking things like Freudian psychoanalysis. He
thought that there was nothing that a patient could tell a psychoanalyst that
the psychoanalyst would not be able to say, "Ah, yes. I have a perfect
theory that would explain that." Popper felt that if you could explain
everything, you're explaining nothing. You're not sticking your neck out. This
idea that scientific theory should be falsifiable has caught on. Popper was not
completely right about that. He's not taken as the last word by any respectable
philosopher of science, but he was onto something important. He was pointing
out that a good scientific theory should be carefully definite. It can't have
infinite amounts of wiggle room.
Some
scientists, bless their hearts, have taken this subtle piece of philosophy of
science and made it a little bit overly simplistic. When we have a theory now,
like string theory which says that there's little loops of string at a
submicroscopic scale, or the inflationary universe scenario that says there are
other universes that we can't see, these theories are saying something very
definite. It's not like anything goes in these theories, but what they are
saying seems to be inaccessible to our practical experimental abilities. Maybe
even our impractical ones if you're talking about the multiverse that is
further away than we can possibly see.
In
some weird overly literal sense, these theories are not falsifiable because we
just don't know how to do the experiments to falsify them even though they're
saying something definite. In my opinion, if you ask Karl Popper about that, he
would say these theories are perfectly scientific, there's nothing wrong with
them. He never said it would be easy to falsify things, he just said that a
theory should make definite statements. But certain zealous colleagues of mine
are saying that because you can't see the other universes in the multiverse or
because you can't see the little super strings moving around, these theories
are not falsifiable and, therefore, should not count as
science.
It's
a bit of a tempest in a teapot because science is going to march on one way or
the other. The overwhelming majority of physicists and cosmologists do not
spend their time thinking about string theory or the multiverse. This isn't
what most working scientists do. It gets a lot of public attention, but
there're a small number of people who work on these ideas seriously. I'm one of
them. They will either pay off or they won't. They will either continue to be
fruitful and drive forward new research ideas or they will just fade away and
die. There is no danger to the scientific enterprise posed by people thinking
about the prediction of inflationary cosmology that there are other universes
out there.
Sometimes
the cosmologists or physicists who talk about these speculative ideas—the
multiverse, string theory, extra dimensions and so forth—they catch a bit of
heat from their friends and colleagues in the physics department back home
because if you look at the membership of the American Physical Society, the
percentage of people in the APS who are working on these ideas is very tiny,
but the percentage of popular physics books that talk about them is very large.
I
think that's fine, personally. I would think that; I'm writing books that are
exactly in this vein. The way that the person on the street is interested in
physics is never going to match exactly the research interests of the working
physicist, but the people on the street like the outputs of the typical working
physicist because they help build better machines, better technology, things
that change their lives. People thinking about the multiverse do not change
anyone's lives, but it provokes us to think about our place in the universe.
It's part of who we are as human beings. We should be asking these big
questions. It makes perfect sense for a physicist to share with the wider world
their speculative ideas as long as they're honest about the fact that they are
speculative, and maybe fifty years from now we'll know whether we were on the
right track or not.
There's
something interesting going on where there's a whole community of physicists,
advisors and students, who have been doing theoretical physics with very little
direct connection to observations. String theory in particular is like this. In
cosmology, which is closer to what I've been doing, people are pretty close to
experiments. We get new data in from the microwave background, from large-scale
structure, whereas in string theory there's been essentially no data or
observationally-oriented result that has changed the course of the field.
That's not surprising in retrospect. It's very hard. They're asking questions
that are very far away from the energy scales that we can reach in accelerators.
One
could reasonably worry that they forget what it is like to try to match the
data. The world is tricky. It's very rare that our ideas simply fit the right
way the first time. If you spend decades trying to come up with the right
mathematical description of nature without worrying about fitting the data, you
might forget that challenge and be satisfied for the wrong reasons. All the
work done by string theorists could, in the end, mean very little.
String
theory is a weird theory. It popped into our laps. Again, it makes predictions
about energies that we have no access to in our current experiments. It might
be wrong, but it's amazingly good. A theory in physics has a feeling about it.
It seems to make sense and work well and fit, or it just seems to crash and
burn very easily. String theory makes sense as a theory. It matches on to
things that we think are true about the world. It seems to be very, very
robust, very flexible. A lot of things can
happen.
It's
hard to bring it down to earth. It's hard to connect it to the world we see.
Either we will bring it down to earth and connect it to the world we see or
people will lose interest. People cannot maintain this optimistic idea that
we're going to get the right theory of quantum gravity, the theory of
everything, if it's literally decades and decades of people writing down
equations and never predicting the experimental outcome of anything. But we're
not there yet. It would be a terrible shame if we gave up on string theory when
maybe next year someone will figure out how to bring it in connection to
observations, or maybe ten years from now it will happen. This is how science
works, and this is it at
work.
There's
a great story about this woman, Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia. In a slightly
different world than our world, she would be known as a great philosopher, but
she was a woman in the 17th century, and there was no chance
of becoming a famous intellectual. Her father was very briefly the King of
Bohemia, so she became Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia. Then the Thirty Years'
War started and they went into exile because he was on the losing side of the
first early skirmishes. Growing up, her family, including her bothers and
sisters, made fun of Elisabeth because she was overeducated. She was very good
at foreign languages and geometry and astronomy. They called her "La
Grecque" for "The Greek." In exile she got to meet and got to
know René Descartes who was also in exile, from France. He was accused of being
an atheist because he thought too hard about the nature of God and so forth.
They struck up a friendship, but it was a combative friendship because Princess
Elisabeth didn't understand a fundamental part of Cartesian philosophy. It's
not that she didn't understand what Descartes said, she didn't believe it; she
thought it was flawed. She said, "You're a dualist. You think that
there's a body, and there's a mind—a spirit, a soul—immaterial, separate from
the body. But the body obeys the laws of nature." This is what we would
now call the laws of physics. "How does this mind, this soul that is not
made of material, how does it affect the body? How does the mind talk to, how
does it causally influence the body?"
Basically
Descartes never found a satisfactory answer to this question. He tried. He took
her criticisms very, very seriously. He imagined specific glands in the human
nervous system. The pineal gland was his favorite example of a way that signals
from the immaterial soul might be coming to you and giving you instructions. In
the modern world he would be very much against artificial intelligence.
Descartes didn't think that machines could think, so he needed some way that
the soul—the mind—could talk to the body, but it didn't
work.
Princess
Elisabeth's objections form a very solid basis for inspiring the kinds of
objections we have today to dualistic versions of the world, to theories of the
world that put consciousness or mind in a separate category or box than the
physical world. Everything that we've done in science for the last 300 years
has given us reason to believe that minds—consciousness—are not separate from
the stuff out of which we are made. It is an emergent phenomenon, if you like.
It is something that happens because of the collective interactions between all
the stuff that we are made out of. We are nowhere near understanding all of
this. There's a lot of research to be done.
A
bunch of people, Stuart Kauffmann, Ilya Prigogine, there are many people who
have talked about self organization and how individual, mindless pieces can
come together to make something that looks like it's thinking. But I would say
that this remains ill-understood. Very few our current ideas are going to last.
This is a great fertile ground for young scientists to think about. Academia is
a funny thing of course. Young academics, you would think, if they're studying
physics or chemistry or biology or whatever, they're spending their time
thinking about these deep questions of nature. Really they're spending their
time thinking about getting jobs because there are many more graduate students
who get PhD's than we can possibly turn into tenured professors.
In
my field, and if you go to a good place—Harvard, Princeton, Caltech—you may, if
you get your PhD, have a 25 percent chance of someday being a tenured professor
somewhere. Everyone knows that and it causes for some nerve-wracking
interactions. In 1992 when I was still a graduate student, I got a phone call
and it was Stephen Hawking on the line. Sadly I wasn't there in my office. It
was Brian Schmidt, my officemate, who took the call. Stephen wanted to offer me
a job, a postdoctoral research job, and for various reasons I ended up saying
no. I went to MIT
instead.
Three
years later, again Stephen Hawking offered me a job. I had applied all over for
postdocs, and again I said no. I decided that I needed to go where I thought
the hottest, best work was being done right at that moment, and that was at the
Institute for Theoretical Physics at UC Santa Barbara where it's an amazingly
wonderfully interactive place in modern physics. That was where I finally met
Stephen Hawking. He visited Santa Barbara because that's where the good physics
was being done, and he had come there with his retinue of graduate students.
One of the graduate students was Raphael Bousso who is now a famous professor
in his own right. I was talking to Raphael and I said, "You should
introduce me to Stephen. I've never actually said hi to him." As a joke I
said, "I hope he's not mad at me because he did offer me a job and I
turned him down." Raphael said, "Oh, don't worry about that. There's
this one guy who turned him down twice." I said, "Yes, that was
me." Raphael's response was to run up to Stephen Hawking going,
"Stephen, Stephen. This is the guy. This is the guy who turned you down
twice!" And that is how I got to meet Stephen
Hawking.
The
good news was that it was my second postdoc in Santa Barbara. I'm looking for a
faculty job, a permanent position. Back in the early Nineties when I was first
applying, there was nothing interesting going on in fundamental physics or
cosmology. You could be a hot property in the job market just on the basis of
your promise and good letters. But in the meantime, while I was a postdoc,
interesting things started happening. The second superstring revolution
happened. We discovered the perturbations in the microwave background in
cosmology. Soon, the only people getting jobs were people working on that
stuff. I realized that in order to get a job I would need to start working on
something that other people thought was interesting, not just what I thought
was
interesting.
Unfortunately,
I was not an expert in anything that was thought to be interesting. All of the
things I was an expert on were my own quirky little interests that no one else
cared about. Fortunately, in 1998, the year before my post doc would have run
out, my old office mate, Brian Schmidt, helped discover the acceleration of the
universe. The fact that the universe is not only expanding, but expanding
faster and faster due to what we think is called dark energy; this was a
discovery in 1998. Brian shared the Nobel Prize for his efforts in the year
2011, but I like to remind him that in 1992 he was answering phones for me and
picking up the phone call from Stephen Hawking.
The
good news for me was I was a world expert in dark energy and the acceleration
of the universe before they discovered it. Suddenly I went from being ignored
to once again being a hot property on the job market. I got a wonderful set of
faculty job offers. I accepted a job at the University of Chicago, and I worked
hard on figuring out why the universe is accelerating. The bad news is I didn't
figure it out and neither did anybody else. These days I've moved on. It's
still just as good a problem as it was in 1998 or whenever, but it's hard to
make progress on that problem. We need to take a step back and do a little bit
more deep thinking about the underlying rules of quantum mechanics and gravity
before we're going to understand this
problem.
It's
a very weird relationship that academics have with the outside world, with the
wider world, especially in a field like particle physics where the last time that
an experiment or a theoretical discovery in particle physics had any impact on
anyone's everyday life was probably some time in the 1950s when we were
discovering nuclear physics and pions and things like that that might possibly
give rise to new technologies. These days the reason we do particle physics or
cosmology is purely for the sake of discovery; it's not for any practical
application in the future. We're being paid to do stuff because the human race
has decided that these questions are worth addressing. If we address them and
then don't tell anybody what we found, there's no reason for people like me to
exist.
There's
a great argument to be made that as a field we have an absolute obligation to
reach out to the broader public. This is part of the human project to
understand our world and we scientists are trying to contribute to that. Part
of that contribution is not only making the discoveries but sharing them as
widely as possible. Yet, within academia there's no question that it hurts your
career to write books, to go out there and to talk to the public. There're two
aspects to that. One is you're taken just a little bit less seriously because
you're spending time talking to the person on the street rather than to your academic
colleagues. I'm a straight, white male doing this and I get some disrespect for
it. I cannot even imagine what it is like for women, for example, who do this
because they're already looked at with suspicion by the paternalistic dominant
number of people in the field. That's one thing. The other thing of course is
that when it comes to getting jobs and getting tenure, universities are
governed by fear. They're very fearful that they will hire you, give you an
academic position, and then you will stop doing research. You'll have tenure
and you'll be there for decades, and they will have wasted a slot on you. If
you let them believe that you had any interests in addition to doing research,
then they'll be worried. They'll be worried that you'll take up those interests
and do them more full-time once you have your tenured job. Yes, you're doing
research now, but once we give you tenure you'll just write books and go
sailing around the world or something like that. They're very afraid of
that.
It's
very unfortunate. We need outreach. We need education. We need public
engagement and excitement. The public is there. They're ready. They like it.
They are underserved by us talking about these wonderful ideas in physics and
science more broadly, and yet academia doesn't reward it. There are some people
who will just do it anyway because we're stubborn and we like doing it, and we
think it's important. I would be much happier with the future of my field if I
thought that, in a more systematic level, we were ready to support people who
spent time and some of their effort doing outreach and talking to the public as
well as doing cutting edge
science.
I'm
in a funny but wonderful position. I'm a research professor in physics at
Caltech. There are few research professors in the world at all and very few of
them are theorists. Usually a research professor is a job for an
experimentalist working on some big apparatus or something like that.
Fortunately for me, Caltech has a big pile of money that they're using to pay
my salary. I'm a professor. I have students. I could teach classes if I wanted
to, I don't have to teach any class that I don't want to. In many ways, for
someone who wants to spend time also writing books and reaching out to the
public, it's a wonderfully flexible position, and in the meantime I get to do
research.
If
there's any one thing, if I had restrictions that I was only allowed to do one
thing, it would be doing scientific research. That's what makes me most
excited—writing papers, trying to figure out new laws of physics. In my current
position I get to take those hours of the day that a regular professor would
use teaching or doing service to the university, and I get to use them writing
books, giving lectures, trying to reach a broader audience. That will last as
long as Caltech tolerates
me.
It's
very strange because if there are other physicists who aren't reading my papers
because they're not exactly in my subfield, a lot of them just don't know I'm
doing research at all because they don't read my papers, but they do know about
my books. The books have a broader impact than the papers do. I had colleagues
who were surprised I'm writing books. I've had other colleagues who were
surprised I'm writing papers.
I
like to think that the book writing, public outreach activities can be not
oppositional to doing research. I have been inspired to do research projects by
thinking about different ways of talking to the public, and I think that you
can get the word out there even to your own scientific colleagues by writing a
good book.
To me, the perfect popular
science book is one that anybody can read, but your professional colleagues can
read with enjoyment and getting some benefit out of it. You're talking about
ideas in a way that they might not have heard of from you giving a seminar or
something like that. Especially in the Internet age, we should go for the
richest, thickest possible ecosystem of communication. We should communicate
through books, through videos, through Twitter, through science publication,
through seminars. These are not in competition with each other; they are all
moving in the same direction.
Selected
and edited from – EdgeDOTcom – “Layers
Of Reality” A Conversation With Sean Carroll
[5.28.15]
** **
2047
hours. I like the above essay. I did not watch the video because it takes too
long to do so. It is optimistic about science even though the fields of science
have human problems.
The article is not what you thought it would
be but it provides you with a reaffirmation about studying humanity within science
is not only interesting but that the studying actually moves beyond the
academic classroom. This reaffirms for you that my idea of putting the blog
online was a good decision even though the blog is not an academic subject but
it is and can be a subject of interest to some in the world beyond the
academics of the formal classroom. – Amorella
2053
hours. The blog allows me to feel that I am the classroom and the class at the
same time. Interested readers are appreciated. For me, at this time in life, I
am in a good place partially of my own making, and partially of Amorella’s
making. Life is good. Thank you, Amorella.
Post. - Amorella
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