Chauvinist Physics

Last week, the Internet grew three times in size, as countless bloggers posted their reactions to McCain's Vice Presidential pick. Just as Hillary's departure speech endorsement was sweeping women's suffrage issues under the rug, McCain and Palin pulled it out from under everyone's feet. The physics sphere seems to be especially in a twist. McCain's almost admirable traits (like his vow to fight global warming, and to keep creationism out of science classes) are negated by Palin's more conservative views. Even as governor of Alaska, Palin is far from convinced global warming is caused by humans, making it easy to justify turning a blind eye to environmentally friendly efforts. Its the same story with creationism - indeed, she is now the only candidate who is still open to adding creationism to the curriculum.

What does this mean for science? If she can brush off the opinions and efforts of thousands of professional scientists, what will she do with power?

Of course, there have always been hot points of contention between women and Science. The skewed distribution of the sexes in physics clearly illustrates that. Only five percent of physics professors in the US are women. Even in my own class, out of forty students, the two females serve as a daily reminder that there is heavy social stigma for women in physics.

Yet this distribution seems to be only with physics - math and chemistry seem to have equal proportions of the sexes. I cannot think of a singular event that gave physics this disrepute. If anything, the opposite is true - Marie Curie is the only human, let alone woman, that has won a nobel prize in two fields - physics and chemistry. Rosalind Franklin used X-ray diffraction to find the structur of DNA (even if the recognition is often directed to Watson and Crick.

More recently, "Einstein's big Idea: Ancestors of E=MC^2", a KPBS documentary, portrayed Émilie du Châtelet as a founder of Einstein's famous equation. Before this, I had never heard of her, as is the case with, unfortunately, many scientists (hopefully due to my cultural ignorance, not to being cultural derelicts). Emilie was, having been born in the beginning of the 17th century, extremely lucky in having recieved extensive education. An affair (a practice acceptable at the time) with no other than Voltaire introduced her to Newton's ideas. Her French translation of Newton's Principia Mathematica is still the most widely distributed today. Her connection to Einstein's equaion, while loose, was still groundbreaking for her time. She was able to prove by experiment that free-fall speed increased quadratically, not linearly, as was thought at the time. She actively published papers, and was well regarded in society. A biography is available on her iconoclast life and work.

When she died after giving birth to a fourth child, at the age of 42, Voltaire wrote that Emilie was "a great man whose only fault was being a woman".

a night to remember

Last night, I shook my idol's hand.

Grade school history courses do an impressive job of having us memorize the important names of our past - Gandhi, King, et al. Marie Curie, along with the honor of having my elementary school named after her, was also the only person to have won two Nobel prizes in different fields (Chemistry and Physics). Later, right before starting college, I became enchanted with the silver-tongued Richard Feynman, and have since read many of his lectures. Yet, for most of my academic career, I never seriously upheld any iconic figure above another. The majority of my persona was derived from my parents, as is the case undoubtedly for many children.

Now I am ashamed, because between eating worms in grade school and yesterday, I had largely forgotten about Bill Nye, the chemical engineer with six dozen bow ties, who was largely known for his science show "Bill Nye the Science Guy". Episodes were focused on specific topics ranging from evolution to planets to dinosaurs. The limited scopes allowed for the same repetitious learning technique that made Sesame Street so successful. In fact, much like Big Bird, Nye was funded by 'Viewers Like You' until its cancellation in 1997. He routinely interrupted my Saturday morning cartoon marathons and science classes throughout my entire academic career, including high school. Nye broke down the walls between science and students, and unfailingly illustrated just how "Science Rules!", as the show's theme song succinctly puts it.

Dr. Nye was not the first to use TV as a medium for education. In fact, ask anyone who grew up before the 90s what their favorite TV-scientist was, and the name "Mr. Wizard" comes up. Don Herbert, who passed away last June at 89 years old, was a childhood hero for countless scientists. He was the first person to suggest using television to teach children and most of his experiments were simple and repeatable at home, adding extra incentive to watch the show. After almost 550 episodes and a peabody award for his work, Don Herbert certainly added to the same generation that went to space and made computers universally accessible. Up to this point, the parallels between past and present are blatantly obvious. Yet today there seems to be a general and steadfast apathy for global warming. The Baby Boomers progressed mankind by reducing xenophobia, and whole heartedly applying themselves to the electronic age.

Last night, Bill Nye gave a lecture at UCI. After 3.5 hours of waiting in line, I saw Bill Nye, the Science Guy. The crux of Bill Nye's argument enforced that it was Generation Y's turn to fix the Earth, but offered suggestions for the individual, instead of goals achievable only with cooperation society.

Dr. Nye did not spend much time putting forth the evidence for global warming, and avoided repeating the generic seminar on melting ice bergs and rising temperatures. Instead he focussed on small solutions that painted what he envisioned for the future. Thematically, his speech was structured in two portions, the misconceptions and exaggerations of global warming, and simple ideas that could easily be applied. He shattered the notion that we would run out of fossil fuels, and pointed out that fossil fuels are everywhere. It's the good quality, cheap (relative to methods of refining other fossil fuels) that we will run out of. He systematically pointed out how our other source of energy - nuclear energy - is not only pollutive, but is also the most expensive energy source we have to date. Plus, he added, nuclear power plants only have a 40 year life span before they start breaking down.

Then he gave us a short tour of his home, showing the solar panels, the on-demand water heater, and my favorite part - the electricity meter turning the wrong way. The seminal idea in presenting his house is the same as his show. He tore down the barriers between his fame and the audience, and illustrated exactly how anyone can reduce their energy consumption.

Throughout the entire presentation, he emphasized America's singularly small role in global effort to find a solution. He presented the audience with simple ideas that have been used for decades in other countries, but not the United States. Notably, he talked about the new markets and business opportunities that we should take advantage of, instead of the need to save the environment. Throughout, he presented a very real attitude toward global warming, and managed to keep every audience member intensely engaged for 1.5 hours - no small feat! "Together, we can change the world!" he emphasized, sometimes jokingly adding "and get rich!" here and there.

I shook his hand at the end, along with roughly half of the 600 person audience. I do not know many people who have the opportunity to shake hands with their idol, but the feeling was intensely personal. The handshake I received seemed disproportionately long, time froze, his hands were warm. It sounds silly, and I've washed my hands since last night. Still, I will not soon forget Bill Nye's lecture. Science Rules!

"Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing."
-Benjamin Franklin

doubting science helps science

The creationist documentary "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" sounds as controversial as the title suggests. No one expected too much havoc before its nationwide release on April 18, but the blogosphere has managed to beat the real world once again. Two nights ago, at the mac store in the Mall of America, biology blogger PZ Myers recounted how he was specifically targeted and expelled from an advanced screening of the film. Richard Dawkins, author of "The Selfish Gene", and famous proponent of evolution, was allowed to enter. The irony only deepens, if you're interested in the eye witness account.

What this situation as a whole exemplifies is not hypocrisy of religious leaders, or the hardheadedness of evolutionary biologists, or any stereotypes invoked by any belief. The lines of separation between major schools of thought are becoming more and more defined. To believe in one theory means casting all doubt for it, and turning a blind eye towards all other competition. Obviously, this is the case between evolution and intelligent design, but this pattern is being paralleled in many other parts of our world: political parties, nationalism, racism, even between different sects of the same religion. Many of these facets can be traced back to the the age old schism between science and religion.

In "The Meaning of it All", a national best selling collection of lectures given at the University of Washington in Seattle in 1963, Richard Feynman eloquently explains that the rift between science and religion is rooted in their respective philosophies. Science is based on doubt and constant uncertainty, whereas religion requires unquestioned faith, as illustrated by today's disagreements. Evolution is a theory, which can be disproved by only 1 anomaly. Creationism and Intelligent Design are religious beliefs, and are held to be the indisputable truth to its supporters.

This intrinsic disparity has been around since the first part of the seventeenth century, with Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes' treatise on scientific method and logic. Unsurprisingly, the dogma that everything revolved around the earth was disproved just around then as well. I would touch upon the disproof of the flat earth model by Columbus' voyage a century before, but this is a ccommon myth. The earth's spherical shape has been widely accepted since the second century BCE. The center of the universe, however, was heavily defended to be the earth by the Catholic church until 1757.

The geocentric system is a system in which the Earth is the center of the universe, and all other celestial bodies revolve around it. While is has long been shown to be false, an interesting study by Jon D. Miller in the New York Times determined that one in five Americans still believed the sun revolved around the Earth. While there is no doubt that the majority of those 20 percent were just ignorant, there are still a handful that take geocentricity as a simple god-given truth. Naturally, there is an official website and a few people on the web dedicated to advertising their arguments for the geocentric blogosphere. Naturally, complete faith and literal interpretation of the bible is required for agreement with their logic.

The day of judgment for geocentricism is often dated to the 17th century, when Galileo Galilei first found evidence for a heliocentric system. After drastically improving the telescope , Galileo discovered what he described as a few nearly invisible stars near Jupiter. He determined that they were orbiting the planet within the following days. Collectively, these moons are referred to as the Galilean moons. However, with the unforgiving white out that is the Catholic church against him, Galileo's ideas were tossed aside as impossible. Shortly thereafter, Galileo realized that every phase of Venus, our closest neighbor to the sun, is seen from Earth, a phenomenon that agreed with the Copernicus heliocentric system. Today, star's light aberration offers undeniable proof that the earth is not the center of the universe.

If you believe that the earth revolves around the sun, you are wrong. If you believe that the sun is the center of our solar system, you are wrong. The true rotation point is between the centers of the sun and the Earth, at an imaginary point called the barycenter. Because the sun is over 300,000 times the mass of the Earth, the rotation axis is very close to the center of the sun. Still, with precise enough measurements, the sun's wobble is discernible, as it rotates around the barycenter between itself and the Earth. Ex-planet Pluto and its former moon (now the second member in a double dwarf planet system), and double star solar systems clearly revolve around each other. So in reality, our entire solar system revolves around the barycenter created by the distribution of our planets.

This is only a nuance of a well understood system, but this and other subtleties of our world can remind us that even the most generally accepted ideas can stand to be questioned. I do not offer even a broad solution to the disagreement between creationists and evolutionists, but perhaps a little more humility can calm the drama. Whether one is right, or both are wrong, we all live on the same rock. By agreeing to disagree we can move on and understand more of the beauty in our world, whether God made it or not.

"We are not smart. We are dumb. We are ignorant. We must maintain an open channel." -Richard Feynman