Yes we can; yes we did; yes we will

The blogosphere generally must be insufferable right now, but I can't help myself. 2:30pm summer time in Sydney; 10:30pm on the US eastern seaboard, and my (like-minded) workmates and I have been glued to the NYT website while pretending to work every few minutes. We can relax. Obama has won Ohio and held Pennsylvania; he pulled ahead in Virginia about an hour ago, and almost all the remaining votes are from Fairfax county which he has in a lock; Florida has been blue all day; and the networks are calling New Mexico for the Democrat. There is no plausible scenario where McCain can reach the White House with those losses. So it's over.

My excuse for being excited now is to watch the tally in North Carolina, which is on a knife-edge: I'm not well-enough acquainted with the layout to judge the remaining votes with confidence, although a lot of them do seem to be from populous, strongly Democratic centres. But just the thought of it is pleasing: North Carolina.

Come three months from now, we will have to be reminding ourselves: Obama is a politician; human nature didn't just change; our structural problems didn't just disappear. But for moment, I'm going to enjoy what has changed.

Giving credit where credit is due

One way or another the 43rd presidency will end today (and then really end again, on 20th January), with no true successor: a very different man will become, as they still say, the leader of the free world. Criticism of the president is a dime a dozen, and having a go at him became cheap a long time ago, so on this occasion it's appropriate to listen to six writers say what they will miss about President George W. Bush.

Because there are good things to say about him. GWB is by all accounts devoid of racial prejudice in his own dealings, and he showed a consistent will to generously resolve the problem of illegal (for which read: poor Hispanic) immigration to the United States, a token of real leadership and sensible priorities, and something that caused him no end of trouble with his own party. It is not much to your credit if you take a stand that causes you trouble with your enemies: if it causes you trouble with your friends, this is more to the point. (Shades here of PM John Howard and controls on assault weapons, a similarly principled stand for which I hope I have always given him full credit, my general disapproval of the man notwithstanding.) The Bush White House also showed a real commitment to opposing sex-trafficking --- what an earlier generation called “white slavery” --- an issue on which, until the last few years, so-called social progressives have been unacccountably silent.

On a related tack, there was a huge stink a while back when Representative John Lewis issued a warning to John McCain, invoking the name of segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace: everyone thought this was excessive because, well, McCain is pretty clearly no racist. However, there's a sense in which this was the whole point. There was an excellent NYT article the other week by Russ Rymer on “The George Wallace We Forgot”, explaining the relevance of the governor's tragic history, and why Lewis was speaking on good authority:

He [Wallace] might have carried a tolerant message into the Alabama governor’s mansion in 1958, but he lost the race after spurning the support of the Ku Klux Klan (which then backed his primary opponent, John Patterson) and being endorsed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Sadly for Wallace’s state, his region, his nation and himself, he did not respond as John Lewis did after his defeat by Carmichael. Mr. Lewis, whenever confronted with calls to divisiveness, chose to redouble his commitment to reason and tolerance. After his loss to Mr. Patterson, Wallace is said to have turned to an aide and declared, “I was out-niggered ... and I’ll never be out-niggered again.”

After Wallace finally won the governorship in 1962, his administration was never as race-hostile as his campaign appeals implied; black leaders found his office door open, and often his mind, too. But he would eternally pay the price for the methods he used to gain that office.

Albeit that politics is the art of the possible, there are some movements and tendencies with which no accomodation can be reached, and the writer paints an awful portrait of a reasonable man forced to retreat in dismay, and disarray, by a storm of race-hatred which he did not truly share, but which he had helped to unleash by his pandering. And now, his name is a byword. It's a sad fate, and something you might wish to be warned about: this, Rymer claims, is what Lewis was trying to do.

Apart from the election

In spare moments this last month, when not following the presidential election, I have been reading Byron Smith on studying ethics

and the New York Times:
On tainted milk ... 150 years ago
On Warren E. Buffett and the market crisis ... 101 years ago
On the seen versus the unseen, in health (read to the end ...)
On French Muslims in Catholic schools
On the Popularity of Steampunk (following a link)
On a long-serving Republican retiring from the House
On developing a healthier food economy
On letting the bedbugs bite, and on blood, more generally;

its columnist David Brooks, on “The Class War Before Palin”;

and the magazine, discussing When Judges Make Foreign Policy, including the following wonderful snippet:

The Bush administration, through its characteristic combination of boldness, historical ambition and operational incompetence, has given sovereignty a bad name, much as it has for unilateralism. But the constitutional principle here is actually one that most liberals also fully embrace: namely, the principle of democracy.

International law, as even its staunchest defenders must acknowledge, often fails to accord with democratic principle...

I have also been enjoying (thanks AJB for the link) John Cleese, on genes

The Green Baize Table Conspiracy

The insanely overdue writeup of my review talk, Quantum entanglement at the psi(3770) and Upsilon(4S), is now on the arXiv public preprint server, and will be included in the proceedings of the Flavor Physics and CP Violation conference. I was asked to give the review because of my involvement in a test of quantum mechanics by the Belle experiment: I wrote about this last year in the post Tangled up in (quantum) blue.

When I have spoken on these results, the most popular part of the talk has always been my explanation (included in the writeup) of an important counter-example, in the form of a conspiracy theory involving the Cigarette-Smoking Man. It seems that more physicists watch the X-Files than would generally admit to it.

The burden of the counter-example is that, if one is willing to countenance bizarre and conspiratorial alternative theories, the sort of study we did at Belle doesn't establish the quantum mechanical result it's trying to test. So we just do the best we can. However there are optical experiments that are immune to (at least this type of) conspiracy-theory explanation. This is the really remarkable thing, and why Bell inequality tests are considered such a big deal in physics. Based on such experiments, we conclude that the weirdness of quantum mechanics is a real feature of the world --- independent of whether quantum mechanics itself is ultimately correct. We might one day learn more, and go beyond the understanding we have from QM, but even so we'd be stuck with the fact that two objects "separated" in space, even many kilometres apart, can be (in a sense) inseparable, forming a single object, a single system. A whole, rather than two parts.

Keep your eyes on the Prize

I guess you-all have noticed that the 2008 Nobel Prize for Physics has been announced, and once again it's gone to a bunch of guys for work in particle physics: Yoichiro Nambu, Makoto Kobayashi, and Toshihide Maskawa. No complaints from me.

The results of my own experiment, Belle, have been instrumental in vindicating this work, particularly that of Kobayashi and Maskawa. We mention them daily, and not just because the experiment is based in Japan; the situation is the same on the other side of the Pacific, at the friendly-rival experiment BaBar at Stanford.

These gentlemen's work concerns spontaneously broken symmetries: the universally used example is balancing a pencil on its point. This situation is symmetric, but unstable. The stable configuration --- the configuration with lowest energy --- has the pencil dropping flat onto the table, picking out one direction at random over all the other possible directions it could equally well have chosen. The phenomenon is quite common in physics: the achievement of Nambu was to apply this to particle physics, in particular the strong interaction that binds the quarks, the atomic nucleus, and so on; the achievement of Kobayashi and Maskawa was to further explain the breaking of the "CP" symmetry, and in the process predict the existence of six types of quark. At the time they wrote their paper, three types were known, and the other three were found, one after the other, over the next twenty-two years. We set great store by this sort of bold predictive power. The final, spectacular confirmation of Kobayashi and Maskawa's work was the observation of CP violation in the B-meson system by Belle and BaBar in 2000-2002, with precisely the value expected on their model. At which point the entire field cried "Respect!", looked at their watches, and started counting down to the inevitable award of the Nobel. The real award, of course, had already been given in full.

[The Italian physicist Nicola Cabibbo has been left out of the party by the Swedish Academy. It was Cabibbo who first established the idea of "mixing" between types of quarks (in his case, "down" and "strange") that was then extended by Kobayashi and Maskawa. Including him would have spoiled the symmetry-breaking focus, but still: his friends have grounds to be disappointed on his behalf.]

There are various discussions, aimed at both the public and the press, at the Nobel Prize site; there's also a longer and rather Nobel-Prize-obsessed technical account by the Academy [warning! physics background required!] on the physics involved. As usual, there is also an accessible report in the New York Times science pages.

Why should you care? Well, CP violation is one of Sakharov's three necessary elements to explain how the universe can have lots more matter than antimatter: why the place is full of stuff, rather than the stuff (the matter and antimatter) having all just annihilated away to leave radiation alone. Why, in other words, it's possible for you to be here.

Times for avoiding work

When avoiding work in the past few weeks, I have been reading the New York Times

On chemotherapy for pregnant women with cancer
On real heroes, and fake stories, from September 11th
On memories of containment
On the tyranny of diagnosis
On weeping for the Rosenbergs, even though they were guilty

and David Brooks (one of the NYT's two resident conservatives),
On why experience matters, breaking with Republican message discipline for once, to tell us what he actually thinks before, rather than after, the election.

When avoiding all of the depressing news, I have been watching the muppets sing Danny Boy

Top five fantasy battle-cries

1. "Axes of the Dwarves! The Dwarves are upon you!"
Mentioned in Appendix F.I of The Lord of the Rings. Unlike the other war-cries mentioned here, this one takes itself 100% seriously. The films treated the dwarves as comic, and that's an easy enough step, but there wouldn't have been anything comic at all about a swarm of heavily-armoured men with axes, charging at you shouting this. Even if they were short.

2. "The weak shall perish!"
The battle-cry of Species 8472 in Star Trek: Voyager. If you think the sentiment is alarming, just wait until you see one of these guys in the flesh.

3. "Get away from her you bitch!"
Ellen Ripley, in the great Battle of the Single Mothers scene of Aliens. Fight scenes in science fiction can be formal and a bit bloodless, but this one is satisfyingly visceral. Even after watching it many times, you still feel the danger of it.

4. "Resistance is futile!"
The Borg, in the various newer Star Trek series, passim.

5. "Screw you guys: I'm going home!"
Eric Cartman, in South Park, at more-or-less any provocation.

Plus, special awards:

(i) (children's literature division)
Cited for meeting the challenge of representing non-violent violence, and resolve to carry out the same:

Merriman Lyon, in Susan Cooper's Silver on the Tree:

And whoever shall cut the blossom, at the moment when it opens fully from the bud, shall turn events and have the right to command the Old Magic and the Wild Magic, to drive all rival powers out of the world and out of Time.

(ii) (general division)
Cited for defiance in the face of certain defeat, and for general coolness:

Fingolfin, High King of the Noldor,
as described in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion:

... He passed over Dor-nu-Fauglith like a wind amid the dust, and all the beheld his onset fled in amaze, thinking that Oromë himself was come: for a great madness of rage was upon him, so that his eyes shone like the eyes of the Valar. Thus he came alone to Angband's gates, and he sounded his horn, and smote once more upon the brazen doors, and challenged Morgoth to come forth to single combat. And Morgoth came.

That was the last time in those wars that he passed the doors of his stronghold, and it is said that he took not the challenge willingly: for though his might was greatest of all things in this world, alone of the Valar he knew fear. But he could not now deny the challenge before the face of his captains; for the rocks rang with the shrill music of Fingolfin's horn, and his voice came keen and clear down into the depths of Angband; and Fingolfin named Morgoth craven, and lord of slaves. Therefore Morgoth came climbing slowly from his subterranean throne, and the rumour of his feet was like thunder underground. And he issued forth clad in black armour; and he stood before the King like a tower, iron-crowned, and his vast shield, sable unblazoned, cast a shadow over him like a stormcloud. But Fingolfin gleamed beneath it as a star ...

Hope and compromise, or, On not making a better world (2)

... There are, as we have seen, two types of question a moral doctrine may answer: what are the goods we may know within the world? And, what goods are appropriate to forming the right ends-of-action here and now? The kingdom of God is among the answers to the first of these questions. God has shown us his ultimate purpose in Jesus Christ, and will bring in the Kingdom of his Son. But what I have to discern is the concrete thing that is given to me to do in the light of that hope. And when somebody invites me to join in creating a new world free of misunderstanding and suspicion – just sign the petition here! – I know that he or she is bleary-eyed with moral hyperventilation. “Not everything that should be done, should by us be done,” said Paul Ramsey, articulating a basic principle of discriminating action.

That remark, made back in the nineteen sixties, was originally addressed to the need for a responsible foreign policy on the part of the United States. This reminds us that the bad idealist is not always a dreamy and ineffective poet, but can be dangerous. If my bewitchment with an ideal is combined with a great deal of practical energy, the negativity of the ideal will be the hallmark all that I do. Of such mental stuff is ideological tyranny constructed. Ideals must be focussed into practical and concrete conceptions of how we may do good. If a sense of the negative is a precondition for imagination, a sense of the positive reality of God’s good providence is a precondition for turning imagination into action. I ought not to linger among the yawning absences, but press on to the reality of what God does, and makes available to me to do.

This raises in its turn the question of “compromise”. Compromises are the decisions, explicit or implicit, that render ideals practicable. We compromise when we discard certain aspirations as unrealisable – either absolutely or simply in the circumstances... As a model of good compromise we may take lawgiving, which is the fashioning of a community norm that enables a multitude to live together in a disciplined manner to the fullest extent it is collectively capable of... An idealistic law is a vicious law, that requires too much; it has not compromised sufficiently with the practicalities of conformity and enforcement. A demoralised law, on the other hand, has required too little; it has not exploited the ways in which law can help the multitude live better. The well-framed law follows the very difficult line on which sustained attempts to hold one another to what we ought to do are fruitful and effective.

But there can be bad compromises as well as bad ideals, and not every difficulty ought to put us off...

So Oliver O'Donovan, in the third of his 2007 New College Lectures titled “Morally awake? Admiration & resolution in the light of Christian faith.” All three of the lectures were excellent, and very much in O'Donovan's signature style: dense, thoughtful, eirenic, and grounded.

[This material is reprinted with permission from New College: the college at all times retains ownership of the intellectual property rights to all New College lectures material (in printed or electronic form). The lectures are available in PDF and MP3 form at the College website for personal review and study, but may not be retransmitted without express permission.]

First beam at the LHC

This afternoon, CERN will attempt to circulate a proton beam in the Large Hadron Collider for the first time, and it's turning into quite a big public event. For further information see

• the news item on the website of the Sydney Uni particle physics group, where I work;
  
• a roundup of comments from Australian physicists at the Australian Science Media Centre; and
  
• the earlier announcement by CERN.
  

The event will be covered live in a webcast. The public lecture at Sydney Uni tonight, by my colleague Kevin Varvell and the science communicator Karl Kruszelnicki, has unfortunately (or fortunately!) already sold out.

UPDATE: We got beam all the way (27 km) around the ring. It went quite smoothly, and everyone is pretty stoked. Concerning the potential of the machine, as usual, the report in the New York Times puts it well: speaking about the new physics we hope to see, they write

those discoveries are in the future. If the new collider is a car, then what physicists did today was turn on an engine, that will now sit and warm up for a couple of months before anybody drives it anywhere. The first meaningful collisions, at an energy of 5 trillion electron volts, will not happen until late fall,

meaning of course the Southern Hemisphere's spring. Serious physics running will then follow in 2009.

As for the public lecture in Sydney, I thought Kevin and Karl did a very good job. One drawback, although nothing to do with the physics: it was standing room only at the Footbridge Theatre, and they were turning people away, including folk who'd RSVP'd as they were asked to do. Not good. We can only apologise for it: events have overtaken us and we've been overwhelmed by the interest people have shown. Sorry to those who missed out.

Mal's speech, or, On not making a better world (1)

This report is maybe twelve years old? Parliament buried it, and it remained buried, until River dug it up. This is what they feared she knew. And they were right to fear. 'Cause there's a whole universe of folk who are going to know it too; they're going to see it.

Somebody has to speak for these people.

You all got on this boat for different reasons, but you've all come to the same place, so now I'm asking more of you than I have before --- maybe all. [Because] sure as I know anything, I know this: they will try again. Maybe on another world, maybe on this very ground swept clean. A year from now, ten, they'll swing back to the belief that they can make people ... better. And I do not hold to that.

So no more running. I aim to misbehave.

In the DVD commentary on Serenity, Joss Whedon describes this as Mal's “St Crispin's Day speech”, and it's instructive to compare it against the original. Much as I love both the speech and the film, the comparison is not entirely flattering.

Let us be clear: Whedon holds that schemes to change the human condition are doomed to fail, and that it is wicked to make the attempt; I do not want to complain about this. There was quite enough utopianism last century to last us for ... well ... some time. We are not free of its pull, and there is a certain tendency lurking around the so-called progressive strand in our society that cleaves to the idea that if only we could make this modification, this tweak, then everything would fundamentally change for the better. I am happy for someone in popular culture --- even better, given the topic, for someone in geek-cult culture --- to set up a stall in opposition to this.

But there is more to the speech than resolve against such overreaching folly. I spoke approvingly of Whedon's ethic in an earlier post, but it is not without its own self-indulgence. It is, of course, romantic, and in a wishful-thinking kind of way. Mal and the other Browncoats, the losing side in the War for Independence, are nothing if they are not the Confederacy: courtly, honourable, local, and resistant of the encroaching, homogenising, antiseptic modernism of their opponents. But the Independents are a fantasy of the Confederacy, defeated in an Honourable Cause without slavery or intransigence or any real wickedness of their own. (Cf. the Bajorans in DS9, who were contentious, superstitious, and caste-ridden, as well as being plucky and Unjustly Colonised.) This is having one's cake, and eating it, all at once.

The speech itself contains an indulgence more modern, and in its way more worrisome. Finally, it says, and reluctantly, I have been goaded into action by a decisive and indisputable evil: an evil with a conveniently vast and identifiable roll-call of victims. Now I can, and I should, act; and I will be justified in acting.

Am I wrong to see the image of a certain Western sensibility here? I mean the tendency, at once jaded and enthusiastic, that needs to label some evil as “genocide” before it can be seriously opposed; the demand that any worthy military effort must be assimilable to the fight against the National Socialist Party of Germany. There is a lot of this about, and it will not do: on the one hand, we did not know that the Nazis were going to perform genocide when we (rightly) chose to fight them; on the other hand, we (and I do mean we, i.e. including myself) have at least in the case of Iraq made war recklessly, while in the grip of the view that We Have To Do Something.

The calculus, in having recourse to violence, is just not this binary.

Lately ...

... I have been grateful to my small band of loyal blog-readers, who have had very little encouragement from my side. In my defence: as well as doing my job, I took a whole week off work (including three days fully off the grid) for the first time in about a year. Along the way, I managed to watch two very good and very different films that I have been meaning to see for years: United 93 and The Company.

I have also been reading xkcd on Google Maps and teleportation;

two stimulating and accessible articles on why the early appearance of life on earth tells us very little on how “likely” life is, and whether we are alone in the universe: one on priors, and one on conditioning, matters that should forever be labelled “Handle With Care”;

Geoffrey Wheatcroft, in the Guardian back in May, on why it's unkind to 1968-ards to ask “where are they now?”;

and from the New York Times:
how trolls think people should just get over being hurt by words;
why there's merit in putting expert witnesses in a hot-tub;
and Judith Warner, writing against transparency:

For if public figures, purported leaders, “owe” us anything, it’s some kind of role modeling in the sphere of public discourse. They should not feed our basest appetites for dirt. They shouldn’t encourage us in the ugly side of our national quest for the ostensible truth in all things political – that tendency we have, that we hold in common with other spiritual heirs of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, to get the whips out and flay alive those who reveal themselves in ways that don’t jibe well with the public mood.

Behind the Times

Coping with jetlag, and avoiding vast piles of mail after my travels in recent months, I've been catching up on some reading. Here are the highlights.

From the New York Times:
On reintroducing worms
On low birthrates
On quoting Bob Dylan in legal opinions
On energy-efficient production in Japan
On suicide prevention, and survivors
On why 'We have to have a talk about Barack Obama'
On the (exceptional) American practice of excluding evidence
On satire, and the New Yorker cover

Olivia Judson's NYT-hosted blog also has an excellent post on getting rid of the term 'Darwinism', for the sake of evolutionary studies. This is the third in a series celebrating Charles Darwin: the first and second posts are also good.

From Leszek Kolakowski (thanks, Laurence, for the link):
How to be a Conservative-Liberal-Socialist

And from the London Review of Books:
Hugh Pennington on why the unburied dead don't spread disease, and why it's harmful that people (and governments) believe that they do

The subscription section also includes Rosemary Hill's review of the recently published translation of Hermann Muthesius' 1904-05 Das englische Haus , which is an excellent read; and Muthesius sounds full of insights.

Why, Muthesius wonders, do the English leave town planning to be ‘handed over to the lowest order of intelligence’, creating incoherent city centres? Why do they bother to experiment with blocks of flats which don’t suit the national temperament and would, if multiplied, mean ‘the demise of one of the best aspects of the English heritage’? English children will never thrive in them. Today, as the Modernist-inspired tower blocks come down and public housing looks again to low-rise and terraces, and as Birmingham, Manchester and other cities attempt to redeem their centres from the ravages of the postwar planners, it is the great-grandchildren of Muthesius’s subjects and indeed the great-grandchildren of their cooks and butlers who are remaking the English house. We watch property programmes on television night after night ...