Archive for September, 2008

A Commercial (with Money-Saving Coupon), Some Thank Yous, and an Animal Identification

Friday, September 26th, 2008

First, the big news: OnScreen DNA’s price has been reduced by $30! The standard edition of OnScreen DNA is now $39, and the Pro edition, which empowers user-controlled simulations of gene transcription and DNA replication, costs $69. You can read the press release; but, if you haven’t already—just to get an idea of how much easier it is to visualize and understand DNA’s double helical structure and the chemical bonds that underly it when you have a three-dimensional model to play with—why not download OnScreen DNA Lite (it’s free)?

OnScreen DNA is a virtual model, of course, which is good from a number of standpoints. It costs a lot less than a hardware one, and it can be animated to show the essential three-dimensional details of how DNA works. If you know someone who teaches DNA at any level, please tell them about OnScreen DNA. If you’ve wanted to come to a deeper understanding of DNA and how genes work yourself, please note that it is now a lot easier and less expensive to do so.

As an extra inducement to readers of this blog to try OnScreen DNA, here’s a coupon code to save an additional $20: hs908. Just enter that code in the appropriate box on the order page to get OnScreen DNA for only $19. This won’t work forever, so don’t count on it being there a month from now. OK, commercial over.

I need to catch up on thank yous and acknowledgements. As always, another blog’s linking to this one implies no endorsement of views in either direction.

David, the Christian physicist and novelist who writes the He Lives blog, linked to Conversations in the Club of Truly Smart People. Thanks again, David. Another Dave, he of the Not the Religious Type blog, mentioned the same post favorably and linked to On the Breaking of Bad Habits Acquired in One’s Youth: Smoking and Atheism. Thank you, Dave. Ropata of the Earth is My Favorite Planet blog also linked to the Bad Habits post. Thanks, Ropata.

Denyse, a very busy Catholic journalist and author on topics of religion and science, keeps three blogs going. We have exchanged some emails, and she has added the onscreen-scientist to the blog roll of Colliding Universes, which I’d say examines physics and biology from a thoughtful Intelligent Design standpoint. She also (with comments) linked to the two previously mentioned posts related to atheism and to the one on animal suffering, Cries in the Night. Thank you, Denyse.

My post about the anti-LHC campaign, Large Hadron Collider: What’s the Risk?, coming as it did a couple of days before the first proton beam circulated in the LHC, drew more traffic than even the computer troubleshooting ones have in the past. John of the Refugees from the City blog linked to my aforementioned LHC post in two separate posts: Mixed Nuts, in which he makes a thorough exposé of the dishonestly exaggerated credentials of Walter Wagner, the main instigator of the doomsday hysteria, and also looks at Rainer Plaga’s background and work, and Whooooo Hoooooo!, which summarizes the credentials of all notable LHC opponents. Thanks, John.

I have also exchanged emails with JoWynn, who wrote to tell me how much she and her husband appreciated my Reading Proust for the Last Time post. JoWynn, in addition to being a voracious reader (including books on particle physics!), maintains a blog largely devoted to her embroidery art (Parkview 616), despite a disabling condition that confines her to one room most of the time. Thanks, JoWynn. Judy of the Reading Proust in Foxborough blog said good things about the Proust post and also linked to it. Thanks again, Judy.

Finally, I’ve decided that the predatory animal whose strange wild sounds I couldn’t identify in my Cries in the Night post was almost certainly a raccoon, based on some sounds I’ve found online. It’s funny that out of all the raccoons I’ve seen in my life, I’ve never heard one make a sound that I can remember. So, just to return to that disturbing death struggle I overheard in the middle of the night, I now imagine that it was a raccoon that had caught a squirrel. The raccoon, lacking big, powerful jaws like a dog, could have been holding the squirrel in its mouth waiting for it to die of blood loss, internal injuries, etc. The squirrel, being still alive, could have made its cries and also have mustered up the strength for a desperate struggle to escape every few minutes, which would explain the fierce raccoon sounds mixed with thrashing around that I heard periodically.

On the one hand, I’d just as soon get those sounds and speculation about what was going on out of my head, but it’s also good to have the drama linked to known animals. It changes my view of raccoons, which I had known to be scrappy fighters by reputation (able to drown dogs that were foolish enough to pursue them into the water, for example), but had never seen or heard in action.

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Reading Proust for the Last Time

Friday, September 19th, 2008

A few weeks ago, I sat down in my customary reading chair, leaned forward to pick up from their customary nearby place on the floor the last volume of my Pleiade edition of A la recherche du temps perdu and my Concise Oxford French Dictionary, which I need to refer to frequently enough to warrant keeping it in my lap while I read Proust (Petit Robert on the shelf close by should the Oxford not suffice), as I had done so many times in the months since I impulsively started my third trip (second time in French) through Proust’s roughly three-thousand-page masterpiece, then posed the small Oxford volume on my lap and opened the Pleiade Proust to the page marked by the one of its two yellow ribbon bookmarks placed most deeply into the book. It was only then that I realized that I had merely been unconsciously following the path of habit, for I had finished the final volume the night before. I suppose that’s when it really sank in that the long journey had been completed and that, considering my other interests and duties, the number of years that had elapsed between my last two readings of Proust, as well as my undeniable sharing of at least one essential characteristic with Socrates, I had very likely read Proust through for the last time.

Since I’ve already talked about Proust’s importance to me (Ronnie Knox, Marcel Proust, and I), it seems fitting that I look back briefly on that last reading and pass along a few somewhat idle thoughts. Some of what I’m going to say will refer to incidents or characters in the book, which may not mean much to anyone that hasn’t read Proust, but no one need need worry about a so-called “spoiler” appearing, as it is not the nature of Proust’s work to be spoilable.

The first part of the work, which deals with the narrator’s childhood and especially the vacations he spent away from Paris with his family at his Aunt Léonie’s house in Combray, the small town of his family’s roots, is the part that I have always found the most magical. Though my circumstances were very different from those of Proust (and the narrator in his work), I spent a lot of time in my childhood in the country, staying with my grandparents; and the scenes and people Proust depicts resonated strongly with my own memories, so much so that even on first reading, I felt the narrator’s childhood memories to be coming from within myself and not just from the book I was reading. Of course, this was exactly Proust’s intent, expounded in the final volume, Le temps retrouvé, where the narrator finally discovers the secret of art that thrusts him into almost literally full-time writing after decades-long writer’s block.

Reading Proust once more this last time, I already had within me the memory of my previous reading, itself ready to be awakened by Proust’s evocative phrases and images (like so many  crumbs of Petites Madeleines dropped into the full, waiting teacup of my mind), so that the feeling of having actually lived the narrator’s childhood was even stronger in the retelling (Yes, I remember exactly the sound the bell of the garden gate made when Swann rang to announce his arrival in the evening!).

I believe I enjoyed even more than before (though I can’t be sure after more than twenty years) all of the work that comes before the time the narrator takes Albertine to live with him in Paris. It’s sometimes very funny, sometimes very moving, and always insightful and illuminating about human nature (including in particular that of the portion of humanity he refers to as residents of Sodome et Gommorhe), society, social class, personality, sleep, dreams, habit, memory, desire, jealousy, vanity, adolescence, anticipation, disillusionment, obsession, sloth, illness, nature, political passions, death, writing, music, art, and the artist: to mention only a few, as they say. And let’s not forget Time and those pages of deep poetry, such as the closing ones of Du côté de chez Swann.

Although Proust completed his long work, he did not truly finish it; the last part is more like a late draft. He reconciled himself to the fact that he would not live long enough to polish it all, got it into publishable form, and was able to publish the better part of it in several volumes during his lifetime, famously paying for the printing of the first great volume himself. I think I was more aware of the ragged edges, multiple sketches for the same scene, and outright contradictions in the later volumes this time than in my previous readings, but perhaps those fade from memory, as they are not what makes Proust Proust. I found overly long and repetitious the narrator’s analysis of his obsessive jealousy of Albertine, the mistress he had turned into a virtual prisoner in luxury. The analysis of his obsession became itself obsessive.

Despite his dispassionate voice, or perhaps because of it, I couldn’t help feeling sorry at times for Proust the person, since his writing makes it clear (even explicitly at times, and the reader knows it is Proust speaking then, not a fictional character) that he knew, being one himself, that there were people who never inspired love in anyone else. I gather he was always in the position of having to buy a semblance of it. He talks of shared love at one point as something attainable by others, which seems contrary to his usual view of love as an unfortunate affliction, inevitably one-sided, based on jealousy and the fear of loss and the destruction of habit. I think he may have been missing something inside himself; but, in any case, there is no more detached and acute scientific observer of human nature and psychology, including his own, than Proust the writer. We can say about Proust that, having produced such a work as A la recherche du temps perdu, his suffering was not in vain; and there’s every reason to believe he felt the same way. For Proust, it was mainly through suffering that we are forced to transcend our ordinary, largely mechanical, lives in which habit dominates, and go deeply into our true selves; and Proust took advantage of those times to a rare degree.

It’s impossible to know what difference it would have made for Proust to have presented the feminine Gilbertes and Albertines of his book as the masculine Gilberts and Alberts they must have been in his life, but there is something unconvincing about his relations with them as painted in his book. And I have never been able to decide if one should interpret Albertine’s sexual attraction to women, and the narrator’s obsession with making sure she had no chance of acting on it, as a substitute for Proust’s own fear that his male paramours might actually prefer women to him or what. If the depiction were successful it wouldn’t matter, but it seems false somehow, which makes me look for some explanation outside of the realm of art.

In any case, I have to say that Albertine, despite the number of times her name appears in the work and her supposed great importance to the narrator, is not for me in the least a memorable character (one can hardly call her a character at all), in a work containing many that were very memorable. Consider Françoise, Charlus, or the narrator’s grandmother, for example. Perhaps this is because Albertine was based on a composite of more numerous real-life persons; or perhaps it reflects the distorting influence of money in Proust’s real-life liaisons, and the lack of trust inseparable from such relations, which must have made it impossible to know for sure what the “prisoner” was actually thinking. Or maybe the gender switch was just too difficult to pull off. It should be noted that Proust had no patience with the biographical sort of literary criticism, and I agree that these speculations have no bearing on the merit of his work.

No doubt because I am now of an age that can only be described as old, if not yet very old, I found the descriptions of the characters the narrator was seeing at a social gathering after an absence of something like fifteen years, to be rather dispiriting. During the narrator’s absence, time has been devastatingly cruel to most of the characters, and some are mocked openly by younger newcomers to the society scene. I might mention that Proust, who died in 1922, seems to have projected the last actions of his book well beyond his lifetime, based on the amount of aging of characters he describes, including that of Gilberte’s daughter, who couldn’t have been born before 1913, but is said to be about sixteen. This obvious fact has no doubt been noted before, and I only mention it because I had already felt that the passage of time seemed unrealistic, without having done any calculation. It is also in this last section that we encounter numerous contradictions in the text, including totally contradictory descriptions of how a character has aged.

Lest my words on the last volume make it seem that it wasn’t worthy of Proust, it should be noted that it is there that the narrator makes his inspired connection between the timeless realm into which the sudden onrush of intense memories triggered by unexpected accident takes one and the state of aesthetic contemplation into which it is the goal of art to bring one. In his flash of insight, the narrator recognizes that his experiences of powerful involuntary memories have revealed to him the way that literature might accomplish the aim of art: sweep us away from the habits of daily existence to plunge us deeply into our true selves. For whatever reason, it was only on my third reading of Proust that I felt I had fully gotten what he meant; and I was strongly impressed by how clearly the narrator (and obviously Proust) had come to see the urgent task of the rest of his life and at the same time the justification for his previous life.

Near the end of the book there also occurs one of the most striking images in the whole work (for me at least): that of Gilberte’s daughter, whom the narrator sees for the first time at about age sixteen, as his own youth personified and incarnate. I’ve experienced something similar in my own life, though without the transcendent vision. It’s one thing to see someone from our past for the first time in many years and note how he or she has grown older, as so have we; but the sight of that person’s child (before only a baby or even nonexistent) standing before us as a grown person presents us with an undeniably material measure of elapsed time, yet glowing with the mystery of existence.

Finishing a trivial book, or even a good one, is not an event to necessarily make one think of one’s mortality. Finishing a very long and very deep book of the very rare kind that alters one’s view of the world and life is like finishing a stage in one’s life, which feels like a farewell, and so makes one especially conscious of the finiteness of one’s time. Obviously, Proust’s book is such a one for me.

Have I read Proust for the last time? I can’t know that, and I don’t want to put the thought of a jinx in mind by any sort of prediction; but, just as the narrator of Le temps retrouvé had to consider that, even as he realized he had a great work before him, he also had a limited amount of time of unknown duration in which to accomplish it, since events both internal (organ failure) and external (accidents) beyond his control might prevent its completion, I too have to recognize the possibility of such unforeseeable events. Of course we are every one of us in that position, for whatever modest plans we might have, but as our years mount, we have to face the increasing likelihood that our projects for the future may be left unfinished. Blogs are good from that standpoint. One post per week is all I aim for.

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Large Hadron Collider: What’s the Risk?

Monday, September 8th, 2008

On September 10, 2008 the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN (European Center for Nuclear Research) is scheduled to reach another major milestone: the first injection of a proton beam into one channel of its enormous circular accelerator (27 kilometer circumference) astride the border between Switzerland and France near Geneva. Actual collisions of the two counter-circulating proton beams won’t occur until October 21.

The rather modestly named LHC, designed to shed light on some of the most fundamental questions about matter, including why matter has mass, is already one of the greatest technological achievements in history, just to have attained operability, no matter what discoveries it leads to. The matter-of-fact name was perhaps deliberately chosen so as not to raise comparisons with the ill-fated Superconducting Super Collider (SSC), whose name sounded a bit like an amusement park ride, and which was canceled by the US Congress in 1993 after billions of dollars had already been spent on it and cost overruns had made it a popular target; especially as a project in Texas started during a Republican administration. However, both in terms of the superconducting magnets required for its operation and the ultra high energy proton collisions it will produce, the LHC is by rights an SSC, albeit with only about a third the center-of-mass collision energy of what the one in the US was supposed to achieve.

The LHC project has not only managed to keep sufficient money coming in from various European governments to continue its construction over the last ten years; it has also been successfully dealing with a new threat to its operation, one which the SSC never had to contend with: the end-of-the-worlders. Although I wasn’t aware of it until a couple of months ago, there has been an effort going on for quite some time to halt, through legal intervention, the starting up of the LHC. This real-life drama resembles the movie scenario I imagined years ago and sketched in my post Dangerous Experiments, which I made before learning of the efforts to stop the LHC.

As the start of LHC experiments has drawn nearer, I’ve noticed an uptick in the number of people coming to this blog from Google searches related to the safety of the LHC, led here by links to an earlier post I made about it. It’s obvious that the stop-the-LHC campaign has succeeded in giving a good number of people the false idea that legions of alarmed “scientists” are trying to halt the LHC experiments. I hope this post will show just how farcical (and already routed) this army of (two) scientists opposed to the LHC is, thus helping to allay fears of an LHC-induced catastrophe.

The supposed danger of the LHC is based on the idea that high-energy collisions of the LHC proton beams might result in the production of microscopic black holes or hypothetical particles called strangelets and magnetic monopoles, which could, it is advanced, interact catastrophically with normal matter.

In contrast to my movie scenario, in this real-life drama the persons first raising the challenge to the experiment were not the ones who made the speculative calculations pointing to the possible production of the exotic objects (and who, it must be noted, saw no danger in them), but rather a couple of characters who had already tried unsuccessfully to halt the start of another accelerator experiment (Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory) some ten years ago, based on similar doomsday predictions, and who seem to specialize in imagining ways upcoming accelerator experiments might trigger massive destruction.

Since that other experiment whose safety they challenged has been running without the least hint of trouble for eight years, these would-be scientific Ralph Naders are, one would think, in danger of acquiring a reputation as “wolf-criers.” However, just because there wasn’t a wolf last time, doesn’t mean there is not one now, does it? Not logically, no. But let’s see some tracks or something.

Let it first be noted that there aren’t any particle physicists raising an alarm; not a one. The physics of microscopic black hole production is very speculative at this point and involves the existence of extra unobserved dimensions to the universe. While seeing them would thus be very exciting from the theoretical standpoint, the chance that any such objects would start gobbling up the world is nil, given that if such things can be produced in the LHC, they are being produced all the time by cosmic rays striking the Earth, and the Earth is still here. The same argument applies to all of the other potential exotic products. This is the CERN argument, but what of the scientists on the other side?

Since those making the original alarm cry (a “former nuclear safety officer” with an undergraduate biology degree, who sometimes claims to be a “nuclear physicist,” and a “science writer”) don’t really have sufficient credentials to impress many people on such issues, all of the recent anti-LHC propaganda has touted the concerns of two German scientists, who at least know how to write a paper full of equations.

Their doomsday predictions, however, are based on mutually exclusive scenarios, a point which the anti-LHC folks don’t mention, as it might make it seem they were saying “We’re not sure why it’s dangerous, but we’re just sure it is.” Though the anti-LHC web sites all refer to the “growing list” of scientists opposed to the tests, it pretty well comes down to a couple of men who have never worked in the relevant fields of physics; and the list of two shows no sign of growth.

CERN physicists and others have answered the arguments of the alarmists in a way that I find totally convincing. However, how can a non-scientist decide which scientists to believe? If the science is so clear why isn’t there unanimity? The first point I want to make is that, given the many thousands of scientists in the world, it is possible to round up a couple for almost any crazy idea. I recently came across a chemistry professor’s academic web page devoted entirely to the idea that the WTC towers had been destroyed by planted explosives rather than the airplanes full of jet fuel that slammed into them. And of course, who can forget the Berkeley professor who actively promotes the idea that the diseases and death brought on by AIDS has nothing to do with the AIDS virus (mere coincidence, unproven), but are instead due to drugs, including the very ones used to treat AIDS.

Still, given that there is a difference of opinion on such an important matter (even if it’s two without proven expertise against everybody with it); and given that the vast majority of us lack the training, education, and experience to judge the matter directly ourselves, it seems to me that an examination of the credentials, and to some extent the personalities, of the alarm sounders is warranted. The final decision for me is based on the categorical and definitive nature of the rejection of the alarmists’ claimed results by true experts in the relevant fields, but for those with less trust in expert authority a consideration of these other factors may carry some weight.

I can’t claim to know the motivation of these scientific opponents of the LHC, but the fact that the two “real scientists” turned up to oppose the LHC basically at the last minute, only as it was ramping up for its start, and after the efforts to stop it had already gotten lots of media attention, cannot help but raise the suspicion that the desire for celebrity, whether consciously acknowledged or not, played an important role in their decision to make some quick (and half-baked, as it turns out) calculations that support the idea that the LHC experiments are extremely dangerous and to go public with them as part of a legal action trying to stop the LHC.

The chance to be in the limelight (possibly even to be mentioned on this blog!) by becoming an important figure in a controversy that is already getting a lot of media attention has to be a major temptation to some. I imagine that each of the anti-LHC scientist pair (though their results are in conflict) believes his own results are correct or at least might be correct. Neither has said he was “sure” his calculations and speculations were correct, just that they could be right, so that the LHC should not start on schedule. They’re covered, right? Let us briefly consider their credentials and histories, neither of which inspire confidence.

An anti-LHC website, in referring to one of the eleventh-hour alarmists, includes the phrase “German Astrophysicist Dr. Rainer Plaga concludes in his August 10, 2008 paper…,” which sounds pretty impressive. This online “paper,” however, turns out to be a “preprint” with the notation at the bottom of the first page “submitted to Elsevier,” which is not very enlightening to me, as Elsevier is a very large publishing house with many scientific journals and academic science books on its lists. In any case, it is not at this point a peer-reviewed publication, nor is it likely ever to be one. Plaga once worked at the Max-Planck-Institut für Physik in Munich, but now appears to be at the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) in Bonn, presumably no longer engaged in astrophysics, except perhaps on his own time.

Plaga’s personal web page (rplaga.tripod.com) bears this motto (from Karl Popper): “If you think you finally solved a problem, everything is lost.” This could be interpreted in various ways, I suppose, but given some of the other items on his page, I think it may refer to Plaga’s own propensity to advance theoretical results that he later has to retract after errors have been detected.

He chronicles one such evolution on the subject of neutrino theory. Just to quote a few phrases there: “Even though the issue discussed below seemed ‘very clear’ to me in 2002, it was not.” He had already told of his initial mistakes on the same topic:

“At that time I was absolutely sure I understood this issue quite well. In spite of this after posing me some questions she said: ‘You know what Rainer, I feel you do not really understand this deeply.’ I became a bit angry: ‘No, *you* are too dumb to understand.’ A few days later I came back to her and said: ‘I am sorry: you were right, I did not understand it at all.’”

And further:

”In 1996 I wrote a manuscript about this issue that came to the conclusion that neutrinos are Weyl particles… This  paper was wrong. In 2001 after countless further discussions I submitted a  correction.”

Plaga displays an admirable ability to acknowledge and correct past mistakes; however that does not seem to have had any effect on his willingness to advance new results with the utmost confidence, even when, or perhaps especially when, he encounters great skepticism or outright rejection from experts in the field.

Uh-oh. Now I’m reading a sad story about the treatment of Plaga’s theory of cosmic ray origins. Here we see Plaga raising the notion of fraud and conspiracy to uphold the prevailing theory he has challenged (technical details not important for this discussion):

“Since the work of Plaga and Dar mentioned below, not a single novel approach to the problem of the origin of low-energy cosmic rays (a problem of the century!) has been published. This seems almost surrealistic to me. In 2002 a paper by Enomoto et al. appeared in Nature … This paper is at the very verge of fraud, because its claims are in direct contradiction with facts given in the papers quoted by the authors. My  manuscript from June 2002 pointing this out was refused by Nature, thus avoiding to inform its readership of a complete failure of its editorial procedures.  Coresponsible for this desperate attempt to fabricate evidence in favour of the prevailing wisdom was [name omitted by this blogger as irrelevant]…”

Farther down, a passage makes one wonder if Plaga may not have become persona non grata in his research community, or at least to the editors of Nature. He writes (technical details again not important):

“The fact that this strong polarization was predicted in a paper from 1994 by G.Shaviv and A.Dar was not mentioned in the discovery paper by Nature. A Communications arising submitted by me in July 2003 to set the record straight was refused by Nature via an automatic junk mail delivered to me. A polite request for a brief statement explaining the rationale for avoiding to correct a seriously imbalanced report was never answered.”

I invite the interested reader to investigate more of Dr. Plaga’s web site. There he publishes the harshly critical comments about a paper he submitted (again on cosmic ray origins) made by scientists chosen to judge its fitness for publication. Plaga presents these peer review criticisms as allowing “interesting insight into the psychology of average researchers when faced with new ideas.” But the reviewers fault him, not for attempting to overthrow prevailing theory, but for doing it in a thoroughly inadequate way. The key fact is that Plaga sees himself as a superior intellect, whose theories are rejected because they are too revolutionary for ordinary minds. This history may be taken into account when looking at his latest attempt to make a name for himself.

Rather than casting doubt on the very existence of Hawking radiation as a means of rapidly evaporating microscopic black holes, which has been the main alarmist approach, Plaga asserts that everyone has greatly underestimated its danger. Plaga speculates that the Hawking radiation from a microscopic black hole is suppressed until a certain mass has been attained, at which point the amount of energy released in Hawking radiation may equal that of a large thermonuclear bomb, thus endangering at least the vicinity of CERN if not all of Europe and the world. I am very optimistic that Dr. Plaga will once again, and happily I think this time, have to acknowledge that he has made another error, once the LHC has run safely for a year or so. Or perhaps much sooner.

Plaga’s current “reviewers” (Giddings and Mangano  of UC Santa Barbara and CERN, respectively) have already spoken, and they have detected a glaring error in his work on LHC dangers. Even assuming Plaga were right about the delayed onset of Hawking radiation, he overestimates it by a factor of 1023! That’s getting into Avagadro number territory.

I can’t help feeling a little bad for Plaga, but one has to recognize one’s limitations. Maybe Plaga’s humiliation, an unavoidable secondary effect of CERN’s need to publicly respond to his claims, through having the Giddings and Mangana analysis of his paper posted online will serve as a cautionary tale for those who feel tempted to jump into a controversy without sufficient thought or expertise. Perhaps Plaga will withdraw his objections. Whether or not he does, I expect we shall continue to see references to Plaga’s work, as though it remained fully worthy of respect and cause for grave concern, on the anti-LHC websites.

What about the other supposed big scientific gun of LHC alarmism? The “LHC Facts” blog describes him thusly: “To date, Dr. Otto E. Rössler is the most notable scientist to have the courage to speak out about the potential dangers of running the CERN Large Hadron Collider.”

“To date?” What are they waiting for? Isn’t it getting late? “Courage?” Is there something that these hypothetical scientists who share Rössler’s view fear even more than the end of the world? Or could it be that every last scientist wanting to wave a red flag has already surfaced?

Rössler turns out to be quite a strange fellow. He is an MD who stayed in academia, moved into biochemistry, and then made a name in the relatively new field of chaos theory. He seems to think of himself as a visionary, having founded a new field of physics called “endophysics,” which is supposed to take into account the observer’s inner state. Or something like that. Have you heard of it? Neither had I.

Recently, at the age of sixty-eight, Rössler, despite having no particle physics or blackhole physics credentials, announced that he had found important new results, alarmingly relevant to the destructive potential of microscopic black holes in LHC proton-proton collisions. Rössler variously estimates the likelihood of such blackhole production  by LHC as being from 10% to 50% though he appears to have pulled these numbers out of a hat.

What’s more, he has calculated that any stable, electrically neutral, microscopic black hole created in the collider (which, according to his theory, they all would in fact be) would destroy the earth in a mere four years (or rather well before that since the four years is for the Earth to have become the size of a marble) instead of the millions of years, which other “doomsday” predictors have estimated. This is due to two results he claims to have obtained: no Hawking radiation at all and a nonlinear growth (just a hunch of his, it seems) of the black holes, so that they become “planet eaters” in a short time. Even without external discrediting, it’s obviously impossible that both Plaga and Rössler could be right.

According to the English text on another web site I encountered, which includes a video interview in German, which I unfortunately don’t speak, Rössler has a solution to the LHC danger. Move the LHC to the Moon! It would only cost about three times as much as to do it on Earth, according to his calculations.

OK, this makes it pretty clear the guy does not have a firm grasp on reality. I’m sure he is a nice man, and he looks very kindly in the video, but, as I viewed his smiling face, this thought came into my mind: “I wonder what the German word is for wacky tabacky.”

Rössler says he has submitted his LHC-alarm paper “simultaneously to Science, Nature and Z. Naturforsch. to get the best criticism of the world, with the publishing rights going to the one who accepts first.” These being three of the most prestigious scientific journals in the world, Rössler is either making a joke within a paper supposedly written to stop the destruction of the world or demonstrating further divorcement from reality.

Can he seriously be thinking any journal at all would publish a paper that dissolves into a “street ballad” (which contains mysterious references to his being barred from his classroom and carried away by plainclothes police) and then goes on to talk about taking ten billion dollars from CERN to fund something called Lampsacus referred to in the ballad? I wasn’t sufficiently motivated to try to figure out exactly what Lampsacus is, but online searching revealed it to be some kind of internet community (I think) that Rössler has proposed. Here are a couple of quotes from Rössler on the Lampsacus web page. “So far, of course, Lampsacus does not exist and has no money….This is the most crazy homepage ever written.” Lots of craziness here for sure. Having absorbed that information, I can’t help wondering if his entry into the controversy may not have been a ploy by Rössler to publicize, if not finance, his pet imaginary project.

Back in the real world, a couple of real experts in the field of general relativity, at CERN’s request, have already examined Rössler’s work (the “scholarly” version with the mathematical details, not the one with the smiley faces and Lampsacus street ballad) and noted fundamental errors of understanding, essentially branding it the work of a novice who hasn’t mastered the basics of the theory. They say that he is trying to revive the flattened road-kill of an old conjecture, long since disproved by incontestable experimental evidence. I believe them: this is science. Since Rössler’s whole argument rests on an already disproved conjecture (which even he acknowledges must be erroneous!), I am willing to bet the planet on the falsity of his alarm cry. I don’t believe that the laws of the universe are capricious: once disproved, disproved for good. Beyond that, Rössler even committed further errors in attempting to apply the bad idea.

So, it is clear that CERN has had to devote quite a lot of time, money, and effort in answering safety questions raised by incompetent people. What is the proper way to respond to situations like these? Should physicists be required to go through the details of every claim someone without previous standing in the field comes up with in order to proceed with a new experiment at the frontier of knowledge?

I know from experience, and I imagine most physicists will know what I’m talking about, that there are many crackpots in the world who think they have found holes in Einstein’s work etc. and who are always eager to show their findings to any real physicist they encounter. Now, Plaga and Rössler obviously have a greater command of mathematics than the algebra-challenged dreamers I’ve encountered, but the same psychological phenomenon, the desire to do something great and overturn the existing scientific order, seems to extend to some scientists.

I think CERN has taken the right approach. However much a waste of time it may seem, the safety issues have to be addressed for maintaining public confidence, but also, I think, as a model for future behavior. Perhaps some experiment in the future really will be deemed too risky, as we start delving deeper into the structure of space-time and possibly hidden dimensions. Should even a small subset of actual researchers in a relevant field believe there to be a danger, then caution, diligence, and delay would be in order.

To summarize where matters stand with regards to LHC’s safety: really only a couple of men who are capable of putting their objections to the LHC experiments forward in a form that roughly follows that of a standard scientific presentation have done so; and their calculations and arguments have been judged slap-down wrong on very basic grounds with which no one with expertise in the relevant fields could quarrel.

A couple of gnats have flown into a bug zapper. And this is the best that the opposition to LHC has been able to come up with. All of the other potential dangerous scenarios anyone has been able to dream up, however implausible, have also been shown not to be of concern because of the failure to observe such effects already in nature as a result of naturally occurring cosmic ray events. The CERN page on LHC safety (http://public.web.cern.ch/Public/en/LHC/Safety-en.html) has all the debunking papers online for pdf download or viewing.

Having done the research to write this piece, I’m now less tolerant of this whole anti-LHC stunt than I was before. Of course, it is reassuring to see just how empty the arguments for the catastrophe scenarios are. But mixed with that is the frustration of recognizing that a couple of cynical publicity seekers (or possibly fortune seekers) along with a couple of incompetent scientists (one of them very eccentric, to put it mildly) with a desire to be in the limelight have been able to cause so much trouble for CERN, and consequently the advancement of science. Now I’m seeing stories of physicists involved in the LHC getting death threats, which is a natural result of the dishonest fear-mongering tactics of the anti-LHC group. I hope the security of CERN is really good.

Once again, hats off to CERN for remaining calm in the face of provocation, even as the opposition continues to trumpet thoroughly annihilated arguments against the LHC. As an American, I’d like to congratulate the European science community and governments for being able to bring the LHC to completion after we here in the USA were unable to sustain our effort on the SSC. Everyone who seeks to know more about how this beautiful universe works must be grateful. Best of luck to all involved!

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Cries in the Night

Monday, September 1st, 2008

A few weeks ago, as part of my post called “On the Breaking of Bad Habits Acquired in One’s Youth: Smoking and Atheism,” I examined a couple of quotes from atheists, which I had once liked, in a misery-loves-company sort of way. One of these passages was by Richard Dawkins, who has become, I think, the leading spokesman for atheism as a laudable, desirable, even necessary ideology, one to which he seeks to win converts through writings, personal appearances, and selling atheist-logo tee shirts.

In rereading the Dawkins excerpt, I was rather surprised to see how much of his case for there being no God rested on the observed suffering inherent in the animal world, where the contest between predator and prey propels the evolution of species, which here on Earth has led to thinking creatures that may view the process with pity, anguish, and dismay. Dawkins cannot forgive God for doing it this way, and denies His very existence as a consequence. He would rather have no God than what he sees as a cruel God. He cannot reconcile his innate sense of a loving God with the facts of the biological world. In a sense, he is rejecting his Father for cruelty to animals.

Without denying the truth of animal suffering, I usually just try to put it out of my mind and avoid it. I eat meat. I love to eat meat, I might even say; though I do it without thinking about what I am eating or how it came to be on my plate. This is a rather unnatural situation. Until very recently the slaughter of animals was not hidden, so almost all people were either involved in it or witnesses to it. I even killed some chickens at my grandparents’ as a boy, and the image brought to my mind by the expression “running around like a chicken with its head cut off” is vivid and rather disturbing.

We can also note that there is a wide gap between the hunter and the non-hunter in the industrialized world. I was struck by this a few minutes ago when looking at a picture on the internet of the governor or Alaska, Sarah Palin, newly announced as John McCain’s running mate, posed, along with her younger daughter, with the very bloody carcass of the caribou she had just shot. The sight is almost shocking to this city dweller, though I have seen plenty of kills in my younger days. Does our move away from killing represent progress or an evasion of our nature?

From recent occurrences in my life, I can’t help thinking that I am being forced to consider more deeply animal suffering and the cruelty of nature. First there was the Dawkins quote itself, which just came into my mind back when I wrote the post referenced above. I hadn’t thought of it in years; and, when I started to look for it, the only part I could remember was the “universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose,” not recalling what those “precise properties” were supposed to be. Then on my recent visit to Texas my mother several times referred to the cruelty of nature as witnessed by the vicious gang-pecking of birds in the tiny aviary of the assisted living facility she lives in.

But all that was nothing compared to what I experienced a couple of nights ago. I was awakened sometime in the night by what I at first thought was a cat fight. I mean with real felines; and not the preliminaries, but when they are really going at it tooth and claw. That was more or less what it sounded like, but with only one cat. That sound became mingled with a heart-rending cry of pain or call for help by what I took to be a young animal of some kind. It might not have been young, and I can’t for the life of me decide what kind of animal it was. I think I can eliminate any domesticated animal though. It did not sound like a dog or cat of any age. It sounded a bit like a wounded rabbit, but softer, less raspy, and terribly plaintive, as though calling for a parent to come to the rescue. Could it have been a squirrel? We have lots of those, but it was a far different voice from any of the sounds they make ordinarily.

After the cat-fight sound had ended, the cries of pain or for help went on and on at several-second intervals. Two or three more times, spaced at five or more minute intervals, the original cat-fight sound resumed, once or twice accompanied by a rustling of leaves or undergrowth that seemed to be made by a fairly large animal.

What was going on? Was there some kind of cat and mouse game in progress, where the predator animal would release the prey animal and then capture it again? Was the wounded, scared animal in some sort of hole that the predator animal was trying to get it out of? Did the prey animal garner the strength and desperate courage to fight back or  attempt escape at intervals?

Perhaps it was a cat with a young squirrel, but there was no yowling mixed with that hissy attack sound I heard. We have raccoons around, but I’ve never heard one sound like that. Could the prey animal have been a young raccoon? Again I’ve never heard one sound like that. Actually, I’m not sure I’ve ever heard any sound from a raccoon. We also have possums and skunks in the neighborhood, but I suppose the possum would have fallen into its playing possum state and we would have smelled a skunk. The predator animal almost sounded birdlike. Do owls make such noises? Obviously, I’m mystified.

I went to the window to look out into our back yard but couldn’t see anything. I think it may have been happening on the other side of our back fence in a neighbor’s yard. My wife, who had been half asleep, was finally awakened by one of the cat-fight sound outbursts, but she was spared hearing the other pitiful cry. Finally, mercifully, all sounds stopped.

I lay awake a long time after all the sounds of the night had ended. It was almost as if I were being tested. So, you think it’s easy to dismiss Dawkins’s position, do you? Or perhaps I was being told something. I have certainly been compelled to think about animal suffering more.

I’m far from being knowledgeable about all the world’s religions, though I know there is a great deal of overlap in their teachings of right and moral conduct. Still, it seems to me that Christianity is more accepting of suffering than any of the other religions; not that it necessarily has a ready and satisfactory explanation for the inherent suffering in the world. The Fall only deals with stepping over the threshold from blameless animal to human being, as I read it. But Christianity posits the unjust suffering of Jesus, deemed God incarnate, as having been essential for the redemption of the world. Perhaps there is some deep connection between God and suffering in the world that Christianity has discovered. Try as we might, can we separate love from suffering in this world?

Simone Weil believed that it was only through suffering and fully recognizing how terribly contingent our position as creatures in the material world is that we are able to reach across the infinite distance that separates us from God. I don’t feel that is true, but these cries in the night have set my my mind off in the other direction. I’m wondering, and not wanting it to be true, if God is not crucified continually in Creation; if that is not the necessary condition for Creation; and if the cries of that animal in the night, and all such cries, are not a sign and measure of God’s love.

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