Utopia and Dystopia of Academia

"Scenarios for the future of the Higher Education sector: Where will we be in 25 years' time?" is the title of a short paper by Eddie Blass, Anne Jasman, and Steve Shelley. One should add they are concerned with the Higher Education sector in the UK in particular. The authors offer 5 dystopian future scenarios as a warning, and with this hope to prevent the developments outlined. The paper is so short it's pointless to summarize it, you can read the PDF here, it's only 2 pages. If that's still too long, The Times Higher Education offers a 1 page summary of the 2 page paper.

The authors say they wrote in a "deliberately provocative language to evoke an emotional response." Maybe there's something wrong with me, but my only "emotional response" is that Brits have a funny idea of what's "provocative." They could probably learn a thing or two from reading certain blogs, but let's not name names. Anyway, this inspired me to come up with a worst case scenario. And since that depressed me, I'll add a best case scenario. Feel free to offer your scenario in the comments. Or, even better, post it on your blog, I'll add a link below. Rules of the game are: One utopian and one dystopian future scenario for academia in 25 years from now in less than 500 words each. (You can count words online here.)

Dystopia

Global competition of universities and research institutes is ranked by a tightly defined metric for scientific success (that grows out of the UK's Research Assessment Exercise). University departments turn into clubs that make deals on recruitment of star scientists. The universities have professional marketing departments that hype every paper, patent, award, and conference. Research performance as defined by The Metric becomes a prime interest of national politics and with that public accountability for all and every pen stroke spells the death for academic freedom. International companies pour money into the leading places to improve their company's image and get a hand on those scientists willing to join the industrial workforce.

Since success becomes a matter of attention rather than quality, public outreach departments schmooze their way into major newspapers and magazines. Star scientists host talkshows and give public lectures in front of thousands of people with lots of technical finesse and no content. Bribery of editors of high impact journals frequently makes headlines. Extreme competitive pressure renders unbiased peer review impossible, so it becomes replaced by "external review" from so-called "unbiased independent experts" frequently recruited among science journalists and research departments of major companies . The media wants its share of the money and eternally celebrates progress that is none, causing frustration and cynicism among the public. Like on the fish market, the winner is who screams the loudest and smells the least. Leading scientists find their private life rewritten in cheap magazines next to Hollywood starlets and members of the royal families.

One part of researchers conforms to the new rules and accordingly optimizes their output, connections and social skills. However, a small but increasing fraction of researchers finds higher education has turned into a farce. They refuse to participate in what they argue will eventually entirely stifle knowledge discovery and cause a breakdown of modern societies who are in need of constant innovation. These researchers form a scientific underground, a globally operating association of scientists most of which have to finance themselves from non-research jobs. Belittled by the star scientists, the scientific underground is helped by a few philanthropists' generous donations that allows to maintain online networks and occasional meetings. The resentment on both sides grows.

John had just handed out the second hot-dog when Lisa's cab came to a screeching halt directly under the no-parking sign. She jumped out and waved her flexiscreen: "Look at this!" John focused on the mustard to prevent his eyes from rolling heavenward. "That's 1.99," he said.

Getting a little carried away here ;-)

Utopia

Fed up with the inefficient use of resources in academia, scientists decide to take matters of management into their own hand. Instead of further conforming to nonsensical policies and wasting time being swept away by emergent community trends, they systematically study and monitor the dynamics of knowledge discovery itself. Based on scientific models that are constantly refined, they put into place a decentralized application- and hiring system that makes only moderate use of metrics and instead relies on accountability of peer's judgement. All research results are available open access, and suggested research projects and proposals are frequently openly available too, though many of these feature remain subject to constant flow and debate.

Transformative research is implemented depending on the field and stage of research where a community sees the need, and measures are taken to balance competition with collaboration. Social networking tools are refined to optimally filter information and connect dispersed knowledge and researchers all over the globe. Not only national boundaries dissolve: also the educational boundaries of academia soften and participation in research projects more often encompasses a variety of contributors with different background.

But most importantly, scientists' skills and interests become individually recognized, supported, and put to best use. The earlier one-size-fits-all positions that combined the duties of teaching, researching, reviewing, communicating, mentoring, administrating and managing are broken down into different education and career paths. This way, duties other than research are significantly reduced and talents are optimally utilized.

These improvements unleash innovative power that overhauls some sleepy research areas and creates several new ones. Inspired by this success, leaders of a few future-oriented democracies decide to base their increasingly dysfunctional opinion- and decision making processes on modern scientific models. This results in particular in a dramatically different approach to the communication of information, the aggregation of opinions, and significant changes to the content and structure of the educational system.

This era would later become known as the 2nd scientific revolution, but John didn't know that. He was sitting in a seminar and had just decided the women speaking was clearly insane. But he liked the theme she used for the slides; he had not seen it before and wondered where to get it. She flipped to the next slide. "I'm not insane," John read "The theme is called "Sparkles in red" and is shareware."

---

More visions:

• Jérôme Chauvet's Utopia and Dystopia

Surfing the Universe

So what's Garrett Lisi up to these days?

“Surfing the Universe” is a unique new reality series that blurs the lines between scientist and athlete, breaking the popular perception of both. These are inspirational stories of young scientists at the forefront of their fields, who also love playing outside -- people living life to the fullest both intellectually and physically.

We call them ‘Scientific Adventurers’.

Host Garrett Lisi (a PhD in theoretical physics who’s also an avid surfer) is the epitome of a Scientific Adventurer. Having reached a high level of academic achievement in physics, Garrett discovered long ago the best way to balance his demanding life in science is with a constant stream of fun and adventure.

Part personal profiles, part science, mixed with sports adventures and travel, each episode will profile a new ‘scientific adventurer’ whose work includes anything from uncovering the mysteries of the human brain, finding a cure for AIDS, or a look inside the high energy particle collisions created by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva.

Then we’ll accompany our ‘scientific adventurer’for an exotic sports adventure: skiing the Alps, surfing in Tahiti, snowboarding in Alaska, kite surfing in Maui, paragliding in Chile, mountain climbing in Thailand, scuba diving in the Great Barrier Reef, and many, many more.

www.surfingtheunivserse.com

Not sure whether to laugh or to cry.

Is Physics Cognitively Biased?

Recently we discussed the question “What is natural?” Today, I want to expand on the key point I was making. What humans find interesting, natural, elegant, or beautiful originates in brains that developed through evolution and were shaped by sensory input received and processed. This genetic history also affects the sort of question we are likely to ask, the kind of theory we search for, and how we search. I am wondering then may it be that we are biased to miss clues necessary for progress in physics?

It would be surprising if we were scientifically entirely unbiased. Cognitive biases caused by evolutionary traits inappropriate for the modern world have recently received a lot of attention. Many psychological effects in consumer behavior, opinion and decision making are well known by now (and frequently used and abused). Also the neurological origins of religious thought and superstition have been examined. One study particularly interesting in this context is Peter Brugger et al’s on the role of dopamine in identifying signals over noise.

If you bear with me for a paragraph, there’s something else interesting about Brugger’s study. I came across this study mentioned in Bild der Wissenschaft (a German popular science magazine, high quality, very recommendable), but no reference. So I checked Google scholar but didn’t find the paper. I checked the author’s website but nothing there either. Several Google web searches on related keywords however brought up first of all a note in NewScientist from July 2002. No journal reference. Then there’s literally dozens of articles mentioning the study after this. Some do refer to, some don’t refer to the NewScientist article, but they all sound like they copied from each other. The article was mentioned in Psychology Today, was quoted in Newspapers, etc. But no journal reference anywhere. Frustrated, I finally wrote to Peter Brugger asking for a reference. He replied almost immediately. Turns out the study was not published at all! Though it is meanwhile, after more than 7 years, written up and apparently in the publication process, I find it astonishing how much attention a study could get without having been peer reviewed.

Anyway, Brugger was kind enough to send me a copy of the paper in print, so I know now what they actually did. To briefly summarize it: they recruited two groups of people, 20 each. One were self-declared believers in the paranormal, the other one self-declared skeptics. This self-description was later quantified with commonly used questionnaires like the Australian Sheep-Goat Scale (with a point scale rather than binary though). These people performed two tasks. In one task they were briefly shown (short) words that sometimes were sensible words, sometimes just random letters. In the other task they were briefly shown faces or just random combination of facial features. (These both tasks apparently use different parts of the brain, but that’s not so relevant for our purposes. Also, they were shown both to the right and left visual field separately for the same reason, but that’s not so important for us either.)

The participants had to identify a “signal” (word/face) from the “noise” (random combination) in a short amount of time, too short to use the part of the brain necessary for rational thought. The researchers counted the hits and misses. They focused on two parameters from this measurement series. The one is the trend of the bias: whether it’s randomly wrong, has a bias for false positives or a bias for false negatives (Type I error or Type II error). The second parameter is how well the signal was identified in total. The experiment was repeated after a randomly selected half of the participants received a high dose of levodopa (a Parkinson medication that increases the dopamine level in the brain), the other half a placebo.

The result was the following. First, without the medication the skeptics had a bias for Type II errors (they more often discarded as noise what really was a signal), whereas the believers had a bias for Type I errors (they more often saw a signal where it was really just noise). The bias was equally strong for both, but in opposite directions. It is interesting though not too surprising that the expressed worldview correlates with unconscious cognitive characteristics. Overall, the skeptics were better at identifying the signal. Then, with the medication, the bias of both skeptics and believers tended towards the mean (random yes/no misses), but the skeptics overall became as bad at identifying signals as the believers who stayed equally bad as without extra dopamine.

The researcher’s conclusion is that the (previously made) claim that dopamine generally increases the signal to noise ratio is wrong, and that certain psychological traits (roughly the willingness to believe in the paranormal) correlates with a tendency to false positives. Moreover, other research results seem to have shown a correlation between high dopamine levels and various psychological disorders. One can roughly say if you fiddle with the dose you’ll start seeing “signals” everywhere and eventually go bonkers (psychotic, paranoid, schizoid, you name it). Not my field, so I can’t really comment on the status of this research. Sounds plausible enough (I’m seeing a signal here).

In any case, these research studies show that our brain chemistry contributes to us finding patters and signals, and, in extreme, also to assign meaning to the meaningless (there really is no hidden message in the word-verification). Evolutionary, type I errors in signal detection are vastly preferable: It’s fine if a breeze moving leaves gives you an adrenaline rush but you only mistake a tiger for a breeze once. Thus, today the world is full of believers (Al Gore is the antichrist) and paranoids who see a tiger in every bush/a feminist in every woman. Such overactive signal identification has also been argued to contribute to the wide spread of religions (a topic that currently seems to be fashionable). Seeing signals in noise is however also a source of creativity and inspiration. Genius and insanity, as they say, go hand in hand.

It seems however odd to me to blame religion on a cognitive bias for Type I errors. Searching for hidden relations on the risk that there are none per se doesn’t only characterize believers in The Almighty Something, but also scientists. The difference is in the procedure thereafter. The religious will see patterns and interpret them as signs of God. The scientist will see patterns and look for an explanation. (God can be aptly characterized as the ultimate non-explanation.) This means that Brugger’s (self-)classification of people by paranormal beliefs is somewhat besides the point (it likely depends on the education). You don’t have to believe in ESP to see patterns where there are none. If you read physics blogs you know there’s an abundance of people who have “theories” for everything from the planetary orbits, over the mass of the neutron, to the value of the gravitational constant. One of my favorites is the guy who noticed that in SI units G times c is to good precision 2/100. (Before you build a theory on that noise, recall that I told you last time the values of dimensionful parameters are meaningless.)

The question then arises, how frequently do scientists see patterns where there are none? And what impact does this cognitive bias have on the research projects we pursue? Did you know that the Higgs VEV is the geometric mean of the Planck mass and the 4th root of the Cosmological Constant? Ever heard of Koide’s formula? Anomalous alignments in the CMB? The 1.5 sigma “detection?” It can’t be coincidence our universe is “just right” for life. Or can it?

This then brings us back to my earlier post. (I warned you I would “expand” on the topic!) The question “What is natural” is a particularly simple and timely example where physicists search for an explanation. It seems though I left those readers confused who didn’t follow my advice: If you didn’t get what I said, just keep asking why. In the end the explanation is one of intuition, not of scientific derivation. It is possible that the Standard Model is finetuned. It’s just not satisfactory.

For example Lubos Motl, a blogger in Pilsen, Czech Republic, believes that naturalness is not an assumption but “tautologically true.” As “proof” he offers us that a number is natural when it is likely. What is likely however depends on the probability distribution used. This argument is thus tautological indeed: it merely shifts the question what is a natural from the numbers to what is a natural probability distribution. Unsurprisingly then, Motl has to assume the probability distribution is not based on an equation with “very awkward patterns,” and the argument collapses to “you won't get too far from 1 unless special, awkward, unlikely, unusual things appear.” Or in other words, things are natural unless they’re unnatural. (Calling it Bayesian inference doesn’t improve the argument. We’re not talking about the probability of a hypothesis, the hypothesis is the probability.) I am mentioning this sad case because it is exactly the kind of faulty argument that my post was warning of. (Motl also seems to find the cosine function more natural than the exponential function. As far as I am concerned the exponential function is very natural. Think otherwise? Well, zis why I’m saying it’s not a scientific argument.)

The other point that some readers misunderstood is my opinion on whether or not asking questions of naturalness is useful. I do think naturalness is a useful guide. The effectiveness of the human brain to describe Nature might be unreasonable (or at least unexplained), but it’s definitely well documented. Dimensionless numbers that are much larger or smaller than one have undeniably an itch-factor. I’m not claiming one should ignore this itch. But be aware that this want for explanation is an intuition, call it a brain child. I am not saying thou shell disregard your intuition. I say thou shell be clear what is intuition and what derivation. Don’t misconstrue for a signal what is none. And don’t scratch too much.

But more importantly it is worthwhile to as ask what formed our intuitions. On the one hand they are useful. On the other hand we might have evolutionary blind spots when it comes to scientific theories. We might ask the wrong questions. We might be on the wrong path because we believe to have seen a face in random noise, and miss other paths that could lead us forward. When a field has been stuck for decades one should consider the possibility something is done systematically wrong.

To some extend that possibility has been considered recently. Extreme examples for skeptics in science are proponents of the multiverse, Max Tegmark with his Mathematical Universe ahead of all. The multiverse is possibly the mother of all Type II errors, a complete denial that there is any signal.

In Tegmark’s universe it’s all just math. Tegmark unfortunately fails to notice it’s impossible for us to know that a theory is free of cognitive bias which he calls “human baggage.” (Where is the control group?) Just because we cannot today think of anything better than math to describe Nature doesn't mean there is nothing. Genius and insanity...

For what the multiversists are concerned, the “principle of mediocrity” has dawned upon them, and now they ask for a probability distribution in the multiverse according to which our own universe is “common.” (Otherwise they had nothing left to explain. Not the kind of research area you want to work in.) That however is but a modified probabilistic version of the original conundrum: trying to explain why our theories have the features they have. The question why our universe is special is replaced by why is our universe especially unspecial. Same emperor, different clothes. The logical consequence of the multiversial way is a theory like Lee Smolin’s Cosmological Natural Selection (see also). It might take string theorists some more decades to notice though. (And then what? It’s going to be highly entertaining. Unless of course the main proponents are dead by then.)

Now I’m wondering what would happen if you gave Max Tegmark a dose of levodopa?

It would be interesting if a version of Brugger’s test was available online and we could test for a correlation between Type I/II errors and sympathy for the multiverse (rather than a believe in ESP). I would like to know how I score. While I am a clear non-believer when it comes to NewScientist articles, I do see patterns in the CMB ;-)


[Click here if you don't see what I see]

The title of this post is of course totally biased. I could have replaced physics with science but tend to think physics first.

Conclusion: I was asking may it be that we are biased to miss clues necessary for progress in physics? I am concluding it is more likely we're jumping on clues that are none.

Purpose: This post is supposed to make you think about what you think about.

Reminder: You're not supposed to comment without first having completely read this post.

Please leave nothing to my imagination

I've been sick the last few days, thus my silence. Stefan has lovingly fed me with chicken soup and porridge, so I now feel like a bag of oatmeal and am starting to cluck.

Happy New Year!

We wish all our readers a good start into the year 2010! We want to use this last day of the year to thank you all (yes, you all) for your visits, comments, feedback, links, and for making this blog so interesting!



Here's our 2009 visitor statistic, shown is the weekly average:


And here is the country share for an average day (not an annual average). Shown are only countries with a share larger than 1%:

		Perc.	Country Name
		34.25%	United States
		8.45%	Germany
		7.31%	Canada
		5.25%	India
		4.79%	Australia
		4.11%	United Kingdom
		4.11%	Hungary
		3.20%	Singapore
		2.51%	Unknown	-
		2.05%	Poland
		1.37%	Sweden
		1.37%	Taiwan
		1.37%	Austria
		1.37%	Turkey
		1.14%	Philippines
		1.14%	United Arab Emirates
		1.14%	Saudi Arabia
		1.14%	France

Seems the Swedes have still somewhat to catch up :-)

And here's Backreaction's Best of 2009. If you have some hours of 2009 left to kill, check these out:

• Book Review: “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins
• Conservative solutions to the black hole information problem
• Water is blue ... because water is blue
• Is 1 = 0.999999... ?
• The Unreasonable Effectiveness of the Human Brain
• Why are modern scientists so dull? And why that question is nonsense.
• What is fundamental?
• That Photon from GRB090510
• Light Bulbs and the Solar Energy Production
• Science, Writers, and the Public - A bizarre love triangle

What is a scientific prediction?

After my bachelor's degree I changed field from mathematics to physics. I wanted to understand, at least to some extend, the world around me. Mathematics seemed to entail an infinite amount of possibilities whose each and every relevance wasn't clear to me while physics is tied to reality by experiment. Basically the reason why I'm a phenomenologist today is that I know how easy it is to get lost in the mathematical universe, and that this getting lost has clearly addictive qualities.

In the last decade in high energy physics one could notice a trend towards more phenomenology. While I welcome this for obvious reasons, here as in any aspect of life one can desire too much of a good thing. I've read quite a few of papers where the word "phenomenology" was used merely as decoration, and in other cases "phenomenological" is essentially an excuse for inconsistency. Such fashion trends in the community and their side-effects however aren't really surprising. What is surprising though is that the demand for "predictions" has been picked up by the public and has been used sometimes inappropriately as a measure for scientific quality. Thus I thought it would be worth clarifying what a scientific prediction is and isn't.

1. A scientific prediction is a statement about a future event.

That is to say the prediction was made without knowing whether it is correct. Strictly speaking this doesn't necessitate it to be about a future event, but it's hard to reliably show one didn't know about a measurement that was already made (a possible scenario is that available data wasn't analyzed with regard to a specific hypothesis). If you calculate the cosmological constant to be in agreement with the today measured value it's not a prediction, it's a postdiction. While it is certainly preferable to calculate the outcome of an experiment before it was done to avoid confirmation bias, this isn't always how it works. Sometimes theory is ahead, but sometimes the data is in already and awaits a theoretical explanation. Science is in the first line about understanding. Explanations, even if not predictions, are valuable. However, if there is something genuinely new about an explanation it will typically also imply new predictions.

2. A scientific prediction is based on a scientific theory. That means in particular it is reproducible (by everybody with the appropriate education), consistent, and the theory it is based on is not in conflict with available data already.

If you dreamed a meteoroid will crash into the White House on New Year's day, that's a prophecy, not a scientific prediction. Same for the recurring remark that the LHC might create angels at 14 TeV collision energy. That's funny, but not a scientific prediction. You may find it inconvenient that your theory be reproducible because this means other people must be able to understand it without your help. However, if you aren't able to communicate how your theory connects to state-of-the art science, it's your fault and not everybody else's fault. Likewise, if your theory comes with a prescription only to use it for this effect, but not for this effect because it doesn't work there for reasons only you understand, that's not a scientific theory. If your theory predicts a fourth lepton generation but has the side-effect that atoms are unstable, tough luck. See here for what it means for a theory to be consistent.

3. A scientific prediction is falsifiable. In practice this means often it's implausifiable.

Falsifiable means that your prediction can be shown to be wrong. This typically though not always implies the prediction has to be quantitative. "You will die" is not a scientific prediction: if you're still alive in 200 years, it could still be you will die someday. "At least 99.99% of people your age who smoke 1 pack per day will be dead 80 years from now," is a scientific prediction because 80 years from now you can look at the data and see whether I was correct (or rather somebody else will have to look, cough).

In physics, scientific theories often contain parameters and a measurement does not indeed falsify the theory but constrain the parameters until they are constrained so much it's point- and useless to consider a theory further. A good example is Brans-Dicke theory. If there are deviations from general relativity of the Brans-Dicke type, they are so small you can forget about them. Same for violations of Lorentz-invariance, time-variation of the structure constant, and so on. These are not falsified but tightly constrained. Reason why in high energy physics new theories are often not actually falsifiable is that for a new theory only small deviations from already extremely well confirmed theories are allowed. We know that our present theories are correct to high precision and new theories cannot differ by much or they are false already. If the deviation is too small however, it becomes unmeasurable.

As you can guess, implausibility is not binary but a continuous scale, thus people frequently disagree on exactly when to discard a theory. (MOND anybody?) As far as I am concerned everybody can decide for themselves how to waste the time of their life, as long as they don't waste other people's time.

That a theory is implausified rather than falsified is quite common if very good theories are available already as in theoretical physics. But in other fields falsification is easier. The dopamine level might just not correlate with schizophrenia. Holy water doesn't sanitize your hands. The world is older than 10,000 years, etc.

A statement is a scientific prediction if all three above explained requirements are fulfilled. If you you have suggestions for improvement of my definition, please leave in comments.

What you should have learned from this post:

• Not every statement about a future event is a scientific prediction. More commonly it is a prophecy.


• While making predictions is a merit of a theory, it's neither a substitute for scientific quality nor an indicator for promise.


• Explanatory power of a theory can be valuable even if not predictive.


• Theories in physics often have free parameters that can be constrained, rather than an ansatz being generally falsified.

Find of the Week

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The anonymous referee is thanked for their comments on this manuscript. GFL acknowledges support from ARC Discover Project DP0665574. GFL also thanks the possums that fight on his back deck at 4am, waking him up and giving him plenty of time to think before his kids wake up at 6am, and also thanks Bryn and Dylan for reintroducing him to Jason and the Argonauts.

From:
Geraint F. Lewis, Matthew J. Francis, Luke A. Barnes and J. Berian James, Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 381, L50–L54 (2007), "Coordinate confusion in conformal cosmology,"
arXiv:0707.2106v1 [astro-ph].

Weltmaschine

While the LHC is hibernating until February next year, outreach efforts are not on hold. Here in Germany, there is a nice exhibition on tour, called "Die Weltmaschine". This means literally the "world machine" – somewhat better than the "big bang machine", but finding a catchy but not misleadingly bombastic name for the LHC seems to be a challenge.



Anyway, the exhibition, organized by DESY, the German particle physics laboratory based in Hamburg, was on display this December in Heidelberg, in the large foyer of the Kirchhoff Institute for Physics of the University. Experimentalist from Heidelberg are contributing to the ATLAS, ALICE, and LHCb experiments.



The exhibition provides a nice introduction in the known facts and open issues of particle physics, and in the techniques to accelerate particles and detect and analyse the collision products. I was there on Saturday afternoon last week, and was surprised that quite a lot of people were around, despite the cold and the snow that had gripped Heidelberg that weekend.



The most fascinating exhibit to me was a spark chamber, where the ionisation of gas by charged particles triggers sparks between high-voltage wires.



Although this is detector technology that is not used anymore at the LHC, it is compelling how it makes visible the constant shower of ionising particles in the cosmic radiation, which we usually are completely unaware of. It was quite easy to catch a couple of events with my digital camera, just by photographing the chamber at random moments:





The next stopover of the exibition will be Frankfurt – if you are around by chance in the second half of January, it is worth a visit.

Merry Christmas!

We wish all our readers happy holidays and a merry Christmas! And if you're not christmassing we wish you a great time anyway.

To continue our blog's Christmas tradition, we have a little fun quiz for you. In times of Google it's actually not easy too come up with something that is neither too difficult nor too easy to answer. However, since Google is still working on their picture recognition software here's a pixelized question. Whose noses are these:



Hint: These are all very well known (living) scientists in the high energy physics/quantum gravity community.

The correct answer is an ordered list of six names. The first who posts the correct answer in the comments wins the 2010 Hubble wall calendar, and I put on top a NORDITA pen and a neck lanyard. If it looks like you're not getting anywhere, I'll leave more hints in the comments. Ready? Set. Go!

The day will be coming when your phone does recognize noses...

So this is Christmas

Last weekend, I flew to Germany in an attempt to escape the Swedish snow just to find Germany equally white yet ten degrees colder. Several airports were closed, dozens of flights got cancelled, the highways were a disaster. To top things off, when we arrived in Stefan's apartment we found the heating didn't work. You see, the apartment has a brand new energy-efficient floor heating. It's so efficient it doesn't heat. The thermometer lingered at 10°C, Nome, sweet Nome. Landlords are on vacation in Guadeloupe. We sent them a text message saying, I paraphrase, fix the frikkin heating and we wish you a happy melanoma.

This brought up memories of a friend who did his first postdoc in NYC and ended up sleeping in the kitchen during the winter because the stove was the only reliable heat source. No kidding. But, hey, Germany, you're almost there! Consequentially, we thought it's the right conditions for some serious Christmas bakery.

Baking activities start with a visit to the parental kitchen, grabbing everything that looks useful, for example the huge collection of cookie cutters and related utensil (it also never harms to have a look into the fridge and the wine rack). It follows a Google search for the recipes, and sending the husband to the grocery store. You do have a rolling pin, yes? Wait. Last time we used a wine bottle. No, he still doesn't have a rolling pin. Pleasantries of living in German suburbia, stores are closed from noon to 3pm. Let me submit this manuscript then. And where's the maintenance guy who wanted to look at the heating? And can you grab me a coke on the way?

Sun starts setting and it looks like we're ready to go, so turn on the stove then. He doesn't know how to turn on the stove. Never used it before. Can't be so difficult, can it? What's this button for, and what's this light and is this on now. Where's your laptop. The laptop. Yes, for the recipe. Where's the mixer. The mixer. Here's the mixer.

Can't bake, no music. Your laptop can do music right? Wait, here, online radio. Get a bright smile in only 6 months, no braces. Must be an US station then. War is over. Good, butter. Butter is too cold, in the microwave. Microwave doesn't work. Why doesn't the microwave work. Because it's unplugged. Okay, mixer out, microwave in, on, where's the sugar? Did you take the sheet out of the oven? Why aren't the eggs in the fridge. Let's open the wine. Is this your phone ringing? The scale doesn't work, battery is dead. Pling. Shit, butter is too hot now. Why doesn't the mixer work? Because it's unplugged. Microwave out, mixer in. Don't you have a splitter. Jingle bells. Oops, flour on the laptop. Drums please for the cookie dough. Way too sticky. Hand me the wine. Wass the recipe sayin? Put in fridge for 3 hours. 3 hours? Put in freezer for 5 minutes then. Can you answer the phone? Your stove stinks. Did you see this month's SciAm is about the multiverse. No, really?

Where's the 3rd pack icing sugar? The 3rd? Yes, I think two times 250 is less than 600. Ohm. Okay. We'll scale it down. 5/6 times 8 eggs is. Ooh. How much flour? Doesn't matter, scale doesn't work anyway. Here's my favorite story of the year: Plumber goes bankrupt and sets out to blow up clients who haven't paid their bills. That happened only some miles from here. Well, you better pay your bills, man. Here's the splitter. Wait, shit, there goes an egg. Santa Claus is coming to town? Take the dough out of the freezer. Damn, it's frozen to the plate. Where's the rolling pin. Okay, now it's glued to the table. Why did you buy walnuts for the hazelnut cookies? Ohm. First round into the oven! Oops, egg yolk on the laptop. Have we send any Christmas cards yet? Why not? More wine?

Did you put the sugar in the fridge or was that me? Second sheet into the oven. Did you hear that JHEP will be published by Springer from Jan 2010 on? Let's do some little Springer's then. How's your colleagues taking it hat Springer is now part of the Swedish empire? Who's dreaming of a white Christmas? Can you sprinkle some chocolate here? Oops, chocolate on the laptop. I think you could need a new one. These cookies smell very done. Hothothot. Not on the plastic! Watch out, the cable. Did I tell you I've put together the Christmas quiz for the blog. The blog. Yes, the b l o g. What's the phone doing on the baking sheet? When you're done eating the cookies, can you figure out where the cinnamon is?



24 hours later: the cookie turnout rate is higher than 50%, the laptop survived it, and the house is now nicely warm. And in case you missed the essential piece of information: We will continue our Christmas tradition from 2007 and 2008 and have a little quiz for you also this year. It is presheduled for Dec 25th 8am East Coast Time.



Recipes used to heat the house: Butterplätzchen and Haselnussmakronen.

From a Distance

So pretty!

via PZ Myers

Who wouldn't want to be able to travel faster than the speed of light?

Let it Snow

We've had a little bit of snow here in Stockholm the last days. (Yes, Rhett, that's what we call snow). Not the heavy Ontario-kind of snowfall with 2 feets in 3 hours, but a two days lasting persistent drizzle that made it up to a feet or two, depending on how far you're outside the city.



Ingrid had mentioned that the local Christmas tree would be right in front of my window. Since then I had nightmares of blinking Christmas lights that would spoil my nightrest till Newyear. The technical term is "preventive pessimism." The tree however turned out to be decently minimalistic and developed its full beauty with some inches of snow on it.



This brought to mind a reader question: do you celebrate Christmas?





I am flying to Germany on the weekend and will be on vacation until the first week of January. Thus, expect blogging to be photo-heavy and sparse. But I promise continuation of the causal diagrams will follow sooner or later :-)

What is Natural?

Our recent discussion on my post The Nature of Laws brought up a new topic that deserves a post on its own: What is Natural? I have frequently found physicists arguing something to be natural or unnatural. I usually stay clear of this for reasons that I hope to get across in the following.

First, arguably everything we observe in Nature is "natural." Thus, calling anything that we observe - may that be the Yukawa couplings or homosexuality - "unnatural" is an oxymoron. Likewise, calling something we do observe "natural" is as meaningless as calling apples "biologic."

But I'm not a linguist. Thus, leaving aside the question whether "natural" is a good nomenclature, what physicists refer to as unnatural are dimensionless parameters much smaller or larger than one. The qualifier "dimensionless" is essential since it is meaningless to talk about the value of dimensionful constants: In the right unit system they are always equal to one. (The Earth weighs exactly one Earthmass. Clearly an indication for intelligent design.) If you don't have dimensionless constants, you take ratios.

For example General Relativity. You have two parameters there. The one is the Planck mass, the other one is the cosmological constant. Take the fourth power of the Planck mass and divide it by the measured value of the cosmological constant, the ratio is 10¹²⁰. That's what is commonly called unnatural. (The ratio of the cosmological constant to the present matter density on the other hand is about one. Since the density however is time-dependent, this then causes what is known as the "coincidence problem:" why are they about equal "right now." See, it's hard to satisfy a physicist.)

This notion of naturalness goes back to Paul Dirac. Sometimes used is also a refinement of naturalness offered by 't Hooft ("Naturalness, Chiral Symmetry and Spontaneous Chiral Symmetry Breaking") which takes into account that perfect symmetries too are unnatural and thus small parameters are okay if they arise from small violations of these symmetries. In his article, 't Hooft had the following to say about the cosmological constant: "Quantum Gravity is not understood anyhow so we exclude it from our naturalness requirements."

If you follow this line of thought it naturally brings you to the fine-tuning and hierarchy problems in the standard model.

Now let me tell you why I stay clear of these arguments. It doesn't matter how you turn it, in the end our notion of naturalness is based on what evolution has taught us is natural. The bears your ancestors hunted down did not differ in size more than some orders of magnitude, if you go into a forest you're unlikely to find a tree 10¹⁷ meters high, and so on. We are used to things being somehow average. In addition, our brains are constructed to look for simple, all-encompassing explanations which we find "beautiful." That's why books like "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" are bestsellers, that's why we look for patterns in the masses of the standard model, and that's why there are so many string theorists. (And isn't that a beautifully simple world-view?)

The naturalness arguments are eventually based on the idea that whatever a fundamental theory looks like, it does conform to this ideal: There's one or only a few parameters. They are neither fine-tuned nor appear in unreasonably large ratios. We, the stuff we are made of, and our universe, is somehow "natural," "average" or "mediocre." However, if you continue to ask "why" at this point you'll notice how the scientific basis crumbles away under your feet. Why should this be? Because very small parameters make you feel uneasy? Because you don't find many parameters a satisfactory explanation? Because it's not pretty? Because it smells like intelligent design?

It's not that I don't share the perception that a theory that unifies all the particle interactions with only a few parameters of order one and a few dimensionful ones would be "beautiful" and seems "natural." After all, my ancestors too did hunt bears. Neither do I discard the value of such considerations. They are useful guides, they show us the limitations of our current theories and point us into a direction. I however also think one should not elevate naturalness to a sacred principle. Maybe Nature is just "unnatural." Maybe the parameters in the standard model come about in a process much more complex anybody has imagined so far. Maybe they are just coincidence. Maybe Tegmark is right and we live in a level 5 multiverse or swhatever.

Bottomline: The universe just doesn't care whether you like it.