In defense of Rick Perry

Media coverage of yesterday’s Republican debate has zeroed in on Rick Perry’s inability to remember the third of the three government departments that he said he wanted to eliminate.

Commentators are saying that this is the last straw for Perry. This may be true, given the shallowness of the political campaign and the people who cover it. But looked at dispassionately, why is it such a big deal? Which one of us hasn’t had such a moment? I know I have when giving public talks. Even at faculty meetings it very often happens that people forget the point that they wish to make even as they are trying to make it and we just move on because it is so common. In Perry’s case, he must have been nervous because his prior debate performances have been panned so badly. So I can understand why, when he did not immediately remember something, his brain froze.

While following this crazy Republican primary, I have to say that the one candidate whom I have got to like better as it went on is Perry. All the Republican candidates favor policies that I abhor, but on a personal level, Perry has a kind of appealing goofiness, a relaxed congeniality that is really quite appealing. In my opinion, even his widely ridiculed New Hampshire speech revealed a playful side. If it was because he was drunk, we at least know that he is not a mean drunk. His fellow Texan George W. Bush had a sneering, arrogant, supercilious, and condescending attitude to mask his ignorance that made him obnoxious. Bush had all the characteristics of a cruel and petty bully. Herman Cain is in the same mold as Bush, a thoroughly unlikable character. Perry, on the other hand, does not seem to have that same meanness or think that highly of himself and seems to be self-deprecatory. His ‘oops’ at the end of his flub was a telling indicator that he takes these things lightly, always a good sign.

As to the other Republicans, Mitt Romney has a smarmy, phony quality, Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann seem to be crazy religious nutcases who are quite capable of instituting vicious and hateful polices because they truly believe god wants them to do so, and Newt Gingrich is under the irritating delusion that he is some kind of genius when he is just a political hack long past his expiry date. Ron Paul, Jon Huntsman, and Perry are the only candidates whom I feel I could discuss politics with without being tempted to throw things at them.

I can understand why Perry is such a political powerhouse in his home state where he has lived and worked all his life. If he is familiar with the issues, his genial personality can work powerfully in his favor. His problem is that he is simply out of his depth on national and international matters and he does not have the debating smarts to mask his lack of knowledge or the bullying arrogance to intimidate his critics.

Relativity-13: Some concluding thoughts

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

A lot of things need to happen before the extraordinary claims of faster-than-light neutrinos are accepted as true. As Carl Sagan once said, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” The required evidence needs to take many forms: the results should be consistent and reproducible, corroborating evidence will have to be found, consistency with other phenomena will have to established, and alternative explanations for the phenomenon based on traditional physics will have to be ruled out. All this is going to take some time.

But if the result seems to hold up, even then it is not usually the case that scientists completely discard a highly respected old theory and start from scratch. While a few bolder scientists may take this opportunity to try and create a completely new theory, the majority of them usually seek to find minimal changes in the existing theory that would accommodate the new result.

As physicist Heinrich Pas says:

Even if true, this result neither proves Einstein wrong nor implies that causality has to be violated and time travel is possible. Things can move faster than the speed of light without violating Einstein if either the speed of light is not the limiting velocity as one can observe it for light propagation in media such as, for example, water. This can be modeled with background fields in the vacuum as has been proposed by [Indiana University physicist] Alan Kostelecky.

Or spacetime could be warped in a way so that neutrinos can take a shortcut without really being faster than the speed of light. As our three space plus one time dimensions look pretty flat, this would require an extra dimension (as proposed by [University of Hawaii at Manoa physicist] Sandip Pakvasa, [Vanderbilt University physicist] Tom Weiler and myself).

It was Einstein who suggested in 1905 that there is a limiting speed in nature and that this is the speed of light in a vacuum. I have already discussed in connection with Cherenkov radiation that when traveling in a medium such as water or glass or even air, the speed of light is reduced and it is possible to have other particles travel at speeds greater than light in that medium.

So one possible explanation for the OPERA neutrino results is to decouple the speed of light with the limiting speed. Perhaps what we call the vacuum has properties that slows down light from this potentially larger limiting value, and that this new upper limit is what should appear in the theory of relativity. If so, then having neutrinos travel faster than the speed of light in the vacuum would simply mean that neutrinos are slowed down less than light by the vacuum, similar to what happens in other media like the Sun or water or glass. This would require some additional adjustments to theory. Einstein said that the limiting speed must be an invariant for all observers and equated this limiting speed to the speed of light because it overcame some problems of consistency with Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory. Decoupling those two speeds may require us to refine Maxwell’s laws as well, at the very minimum. As is well known, there is no free lunch in science. You cannot make changes in one scientific theory without having to make adjustments in other theories so that they all fit together again.

This series has tried to explain why the proper scientific response to reports of a major discovery is skepticism. This should not be equated with dogmatic obstructionism because in the case of dogma, one starts with a belief that cannot be changed whatever the evidence. Skepticism, on the other hard, is merely resistance that can be overcome with sufficient evidence and reason.

Major theories in science are rarely overthrown on the basis of a single experimental result, though textbooks sometimes tend to give that erroneous image of scientific progress. Usually what happens when a surprising result crops up is that a few people start to look at it closely to see if the results can be replicated by other people in different contexts, and if the ancillary consequences of the new result are also seen.

If none of these pans out, then the original result is deemed to be due to an error (usually a subtle one in the case of careful scientists) or to some factor that was overlooked in the data collection or analysis. The latter is often referred to as a systematic error and is more common because it is hard to be sure that you have accounted for all the possible factors that can influence an experiment, especially if you are working at the frontiers of knowledge, pushing the limits. Sometimes, as in the case of cold fusion, an adequate explanation of the phenomenon within the standard framework is not discovered for a long time and a few scientists believe they do have a new effect and continue to work on it. Such theories die only when their advocates die out.

I doubt that the faster-than-light neutrino story will remain similarly ambiguous for too long but it is a difficult experiment and so may take years to sort out. The quickest resolution to such controversies is when the original experimenters find some error that causes them to withdraw their claim. The OPERA team already has plans to repeat the neutrino experiment with modifications designed to address at least a few of the concerns expressed so far. Another group known as MINOS also plans to repeat the experiment but at locations in the US, with neutrinos produced at Fermilab near Chicago and detectors in northern Minnesota or even South Dakota, the latter being a longer distance than that between CERN and Gran Sasso,

Whatever the final outcome, the faster-than-light neutrino reports have shone a light onto how science really works and that is always a good thing.

Just for the fun, I am ending this series with a word cloud made out of this series of posts. (Ignore the href and em items since these are merely html tags and have nothing to do with the content.)
word cloud.jpg

Corruption in sports

That corruption exists in professional sports is obvious, often caused by gambling. Usually when players get caught fixing results they face punishments of fines or suspension and exclusion form the game. Last week though, three Pakistani cricketers were sentenced to jail for periods ranging from six to thirty months for agreeing to fix games in return for money, in addition to fines and suspensions.
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Behind the scenes of the ‘Greek crisis’

The financial news of recent weeks has been consumed with the so-called Greek debt crisis. Whenever there is news that a deal has been reached to bail out that government, stock markets rise. When the deal seems to have collapsed, the markets fall. Although the reports act as if the Greek government or people are being bailed out, it is actually international banks that are the benficiaries. What I find extraordinary is that news reporters and commentators talk as if ‘calming the markets’ is the most important thing in the world and thus governments must do everything they can to make stock markets go up, even if those moves have devastating effects on ordinary people. This is why we need massive protests against the financial oligarchy, to show governments that there are other important elements of society whose interests need to be considered.
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Pandering on the pledge

Just recently I wrote about how easy it is for people to gum things up by pandering to religion and patriotism. As if to support my point, Republicans state legislators in Michigan have introduced legislation that would require all public school children to recite the pledge of allegiance each day.

In 1942, West Virginia passed a law requiring that students salute the flag each day while reciting the pledge of allegiance which at that time did not end with the words ‘under God’. The US Supreme Court ruled such actions unconstitutional in 1943, with Justice Robert Jackson writing in his majority opinion:

If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.

Relativity-12: David Hume and causality

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

Suppose that the claim that neutrinos can travel faster than light holds up. What are the implications?

As I said earlier in the series, this does not mean that Einstein’s theory of relativity is overthrown, since it always allowed for faster than light particles, though we had never observed them. But it does mean that Einstein causality, the idea that if two events are causally connected by a signal that travels from one event to the other, then all observers’ clocks will agree that the signal left the source before it arrived at the other end, will have to go.
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