Theology and the Natural Sciences

I was/am a little woozy from the one of those mild flus that I often seem to succumb to during breaks (presumably when I have the luxury to acknowledge them). And emerged to start an electronic conversation with Bob Russell about a visit he’s going to be making to Carleton, and to my Revolutions in Physics class, in a couple of weeks.

Bob is giving the inaugural Ian Barbour Lecture in Religion and Modernity: ‘Five Issues on the Frontier of Science and Religion: Ian Barbour’s Lasting Impact on the Dialogue’. And runs the Center for Theology and The Natural Sciences out in Berkeley.

I don’t know Bob Russell at all, but I do know Ian somewhat. The 1-line introduction to Ian Barbour: Ph.D. in Physics, Chair of Physics at Kalamazoo College at age 28, decided thereafter to go to Yale Divinity School, landed up at Carleton appointed in both Physics and Religion, and in 1999 was awarded the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion “in recognition of efforts to create a dialogue between the worlds of science and religion”.

I was introduced to Ian shortly after I came to Carleton — mutual friends thought that we would have areas of common interest. And they were right — I had struggled long and hard on a personal basis to understand issues of spirituality as a physicist, and what resolution exists in my head comes from my understanding of ideas from ‘complex systems’. And it turned out that Ian was also interested in complex systems thinking as illuminating some of the issues of things like free-will and consciousness. I have thoroughly enjoyed the few conversations I have had with him. And if quantum mechanics wasn’t so fascinating a source of mystery to me, I might go back to thinking about complex systems and religion, and consciousness, and … oh so many things … some day in a more serious manner.

In the meantime, though, the far more mundane task of orchestrating a successful visit from Bob to my class. He’s coming right at the end of the Newtonian mechanics section which I believe would be a perfect time to talk about free-will and determinism, for example (the 3-line syllogism I use to generate a writing assignment on this: ‘Matter behaves either completely deterministically or completely randomly. You are made of matter. Therefore you have no free-will.’) I am looking forward to seeing what this visit could do, both for the class and for me.

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Now playing: Snow Patrol – We Can Run Away Now They’re All Dead And Gone
via FoxyTunes

‘Tis the season

Two season-related projects on my mind today:

(1) Not-so-serious, but worthy of consideration. Consider the following set of ideas: We need to acknowledge that people like excuses for celebration in the dead of the winter, we need a good reason for exchanging gifts, new traditions arise best by glomming on to older ones, and we need to put up a good fight for creating secular rationalist traditions. Put them all together and you get a at-the-moment-lackadaisical push for a global holiday/tradition thing to celebrate Sir Isaac Newton’s birthday on the 25th of December.

[Ok, technically Newton was born Jan 4th 1643 but at that time, England had not converted to the latest papal calendar and his date of birth was recorded as Christmas Day, December 25, 1642. It's not as if the historical Christ was born on 25th December either.]

(2) The other, far more serious: ScienceDebate2008. To quote from the splash page, “Given the many urgent scientific and technological challenges facing America and the rest of the world, the increasing need for accurate scientific information in political decision making, and the vital role scientific innovation plays in spurring economic growth and competitiveness, we call for a public debate in which the U.S. presidential candidates share their views on the issues of The Environment, Health and Medicine, and Science and Technology Policy.”

I think this would be an exceptionally good idea for multiple reasons. It would be good for the country to hear what politicians have to say about these things, it would be good for the candidates to formulate sensible policy positions to be shared with the public on these issues, it would be good for science to be seen as this publicly important, and it would be good for science education if people realize all this. I am going to have students create policy papers relevant to this debate as part of my Revolutions in Physics class as well — it fits really well with the basic emphasis of the course. At the moment, I’m spreading the idea to as many people as I feel comfortable. Including through this blog.

Syllabi stories

I am struggling with syllabi for the next term. One is for Physics 120: Revolutions in Physics. It’s a light conceptual survey of physics, with a closer look at some ideas with historical, sociological and philosophical implications.

It’s a really fun course because I get to figure out a story to tell about physics. But finding the right text — and matching one’s lectures to it is a trick I am still learning. Then comes fitting the content into the time-constraints of a Carleton term, with its 70 and 60 minute teaching chunks spread over 10 weeks, with breaks, Tests and what not to be fitted in. That’s always a good exercise in editing and discovering of priorities — how long do I take to talk about quantum mechanics? Should I have an exercise on this day instead of a lecture? When should I do the ‘recap/review’ days? What’s a good time for this essay? It gets tricky! I’ve taught this course 4 times now, I think, and each time I tell the story slightly differently. This time is going to be a distinct shift, particularly because of a new text. I’m looking forward to figuring this term out.

It’s at the end of the spectrum from my other responsibility, Quantum I and II. I love that pair of 5 week courses: the content is very interesting and challenging, and increasingly critical in understanding modern technology. Even the techniques of analysis are cool! It’s also my second course with this cohort of technically-trained juniors, who I look forward to sparking. With any luck I’ll induce one or more of them to join my research team which is going to shrink dramatically since I have two graduating seniors working with me.

Bits and pieces

Today was a day of small pieces of work, appropriate for one disrupted by dentist appointments and day-care holiday concerts. But bits and pieces add up: Crafting my own summary of the Referee report on the paper with Arik to help me think through the issues; submission of application for funding for, and trying to figure out the right visa for, my colleague Anatole to come visit; lunch with a colleague from the Dean of Students’ office (where we talked about Facebook, of course!); and a sudden flurry of email related to being on the Coordinating Board of The Anacapa Society. This last is best summarized by its mission statement: The Anacapa Society promotes research in all areas of theoretical and computational physics at primarily undergraduate institutions. The Society facilitates professional contacts and collaboration, and supports the distinctive role theorists at undergraduate institutions can play in physics, the intellectual community, and the broader world.

I learned early in the day that one of my physics teachers from college had passed away. Dr. Bhargava was more than a teacher, he was a mentor to a couple of generations of those of us who went on to become practicing physicists. To the extent that I think like a physicist — that is, ask questions in the right way and with the right attitude about setting up the problem and understanding context, etc — it is because of Dr. Bhargava, and also Dr. Popli, who passed away himself a while ago. Without that kind of training, the focus is often only on technical talent — you need that, of course, but it’s far from enough. I was a student at Brown University and happened to speak with Prof. Richard Stratt the day we all learned that Richard Feynman had died — Stratt told me he felt like he wanted to hang his papers at half-mast or something to acknowledge this major event. My papers are at metaphorical half-mast today.

Anomalous behavior

Meanwhile, back at the farm, another Referee report, this time not so positive, but not so negative either. This is a paper with my old friend — and recent colleague — Arik on an unusual or anomalous effect. It had been understood that some (perhaps many, perhaps most, depending on how you count) classical systems are chaotic and on the other hand, their quantum counterparts are NOT chaotic. This perspective has changed recently when considering so-called ‘open systems’, which accounts for local and random interactions with other nearby systems, termed environmental decoherence — in this case, the quantum system can be chaotic as well. What Arik and I show is the appearance of quantum chaos in a system where the classical system is NOT chaotic, which is a cool and unusual result; the stronger part of our claim is that quantum effects are responsible for the chaos.

The interesting thing about the current argument with the Referee is that no one’s denying that we are seeing chaos in the quantum system, and that the classical system is not chaotic. We are now in the middle of a technical discussion about the mechanism by which the chaos occurs, and whether or not quantum tunneling is involved, etc. And when I am not feeling grouchy about all the questions, I’m actually happy because, as always, answering the questions means we learn something more and something deeper about the physics.

Hey, wait, isn’t that what I just said about the writing assignment? Trying to persuade someone is indeed an excellent learning experience .

Student writing: Mathematics and the material universe

The week finished quietly enough. Part of the hands-on aspect of the writing workshop was to create a writing assignment which involved writing with numbers (or equivalent). I wanted, as noted a couple of days ago, to create one that answered the question: “How do I ask students to write so that they understand that the story of the material universe is written in mathematics, and quantitatively verified to be so?”

I came up with the following (draft version, to be polished for the actual assignment):

“You are making a presentation to some prospective Carleton students. Like you, these students are very math and science phobic. One of the reasons they are unsure about coming to Carleton is that they are concerned about the requirement of taking 18 credits in the sciences. They talk to you about this Physics course and think that it is fine to learn about what you have studied, but don’t understand why any mathematics is used in the course (other than ‘that’s what physicists do’).

Having taken this course, you know that mathematical thinking is a critical part of understanding the material universe. In 2-3 pages try to convince the prospies of this. Base your argument on our discussion, for example, of the transition in our understanding of planetary motion from data (Tycho Brahe), to its summary in phenomenological equations (Kepler) to a physical explanation (Newton’s Laws). Describe the mathematics we worked through: do not use equations, but only words to communicate the mathematics involved. This is not a formal piece, but a personal argument.

Grading rubric: Content, getting the mathematics right. Meta: Understanding the connection between the mathematics and the physics. Rhetorical: How this was integrated into a persuasive argument.”

It is reasonably well-understood, I gather, that getting students to argue for (or against, for that matter) something strengthens their understanding of the issues, and helps them integrate it into their world-view. I want students to ‘own’ this idea, in short. I don’t know what I feel about this assignment yet, but I got useful feedback from those colleagues who were sitting at my table, and some others. In general, since these workshops are really about hanging out with smart and fun people to talk about ideas of mutual interest, I had a good time.

Visual representation of data

I read a booklet by Edward Tufte last night as preparation for the writing seminar I am attending. As usual, whenever I re-read Tufte, I find his arguments a fascinating reminder of how the representation of data can be so crucial in analysis and persuasion. Of course, analysis is persuading yourself of the validity of your hypothesis.

The workshop itself today had some discussion about graphical representation and some about finding and using data sets of various sorts. The latter was fascinating, but in a way completely unrelated to my work as a physicist — we live in a truly data-rich world nowadays, and there’s information of various sorts that make you go ‘oh, cool, I didn’t know I could figure that out’. There was even a quick discussion of something called Swivel (which was termed the ‘you-tube’ of data, and it really is! Their tagline is ‘tasty data goodies’).

I was sitting with Josh, a mathematician, and Greg, a political scientist who is pretty quantitative and perhaps our table was getting a little obnoxious, given that we all play with numbers and graphs a lot more than many of our colleagues. Ah well.

Sort of coincidentally, I got email back from my friend Arnaldo in Brazil about a project I’ve been working on with him for, umm, let’s see, almost 5 years now, since we started it when he visited me, and I remember that my daughter had just been born that winter. We’ve generated one paper from it, and I’ve been sitting on some other results for quite a while now, since I can’t quite explain what we have. The ‘sort of’ coincidence is because one of the key points of this paper is pretty visual.

To understand this, take as fact at the moment that if you look at the difference between the quantum prediction and the classical prediction for the behavior of a system, as a function of various parameters — such as size and temperature — of the system, you get a fairly complicated relationship. And why would we care about this difference? Well, classical behavior is very different in principle from quantal, the latter is turning out to be very useful in all sorts of ways, and it would be nice to know when we crossed over from one behavior to the other.

You have to imagine here that this distance function is plotted on one axis, and the different parameters are along the other two axes — we’ll stay in three dimensions for now. And so you’ve got some weird looking surface in your 3-dimensional plot. But if you search for ‘scaling’, that is, if you rotate and squish the data in certain ways, this data collapses into a single curve. It’s a pretty dramatic effect visually, it says something deep about the way quantum and classical behavior is different and it’s not entirely clear to me why it does this. In short, a perfect thing to think about for years on end.

Here’s the ‘back’ story. The idea of looking for scaling came to me in the middle of a boring colloquium at Rice University — I remember doodling it on my notepad. I worked on testing the basic idea with my friend Bala and his student Ben, and we showed that it, in fact, worked in two systems. Since then some other people have also found that scaling exists in other systems, which was great, so I know we are not just fooling ourselves somehow. Next I asked Arnaldo if he’d like to help me with trying out new ways of testing for scaling. Turns out it still works, in fact the new way works even better, but we still can’t quite say why it works in the particular way it does. That is, why does the single curve we land up with have the shape it does?

Arnaldo’s nominally the computational expert on this, while it’s nominally ‘my’ project, that is, it’s in my field, so my being stuck is not good news. I have a very smart student, Parin, working on this, but he’s only 3 years out of high school, so …

I keep waiting for inspiration, but I might take my friend’s advice and rope in one of my competitors to see if they’d like to be a collaborator on this, in case they understand the result. That’s one of the pleasures, as mentioned earlier, of this stage of my professional life — I care more about understanding the physics than trying to hoard the credit for a paper or something. Losing the fear of competition is very liberating.

Writing with numbers

I spent the morning at a ‘writing with numbers’ workshop internal to Carleton. One of the cool things about Carleton is the number of opportunities to expand your horizons on how to teach, and to think and reflect about how you might practice your own craft, research as well as teaching. It’s usually done in the company of friends far from your own field, so you have to dig deep to come up with good broad principles.

I signed up for the workshop because I wanted to be forced to think about what assignments I am going to give my students in my ‘Revolutions in Physics’ class, which is a broad survey for non-scientists where I try to convey the ideas behind the very quantitative way in which physicists model the material universe, and to show humanistic issues behind these ideas. That is, I ask students to think about the philosophical, sociological, and poetic impact of physics. And it would be nice to have more structured assignments than I presently have.

I also figured it wasn’t a bad time for a gentle refresher on the use of numbers and quantitative thinking in my own presentations on research. And any workshop of this sort has proved a good time to chat with colleagues and to get to know them, which I generally enjoy greatly. Having skipped workshops for a few years now, I figured it was time to do one more.

The specific issue: I have been frustrated by the disconnect — in all my introductory classes, not just this class — between how I see quantitative issues, and how students see them. I struggled to articulate it today: I see the universe as being described mathematically, but unlike my experimental colleagues, I don’t particularly care about numbers myself. I am far more interested in the story behind numbers, that is, the relationships between physically measurable quantities, and that’s what any equation tells me. Students, and I would guess mathematical novices in general, tend to get caught up in the details of the mathematics, and the numerical manipulation. So. How do I ask students to write so that they understand that the story of the material universe is written in mathematics, and quantitatively verified to be so?

Phys. Rev. Lett. Acceptance!

Never fails to give me an adrenaline rush: The collaborative paper with Anatole and Jiang-bin that was being re-considered at Physical Review Letters got accepted. W00t!

If I estimate how many papers I’ll publish in my professional life, and the number of them that will be Physical Review Letters papers (that’s the premier journal in physics, though something like ‘Nature’ or ‘Science’, which address all the sciences, is a more prestigious place to publish) it’s easy enough to conclude that every PRL acceptance deserves a pretty major celebration.

Like every paper that gets accepted or rejected, it has its own story, including some of the best Refereeing that I’ve experienced (not kind words, that’s cool but more to the point, we got intelligent, insightful, and constructive criticism). And an interesting back-story, too on how the paper got built. This is a collaboration where I truly felt like a ‘senior partner’ guiding my very talented collaborators through calculations and analysis.

For the record, the abstract:

“Low-order quantum resonances manifested by directed currents have been realized with cold atoms. Here we show that by increasing the strength of an experimentally achievable delta-kicking ratchet potential, quantum resonances of a very high order may naturally emerge and can induce larger ratchet currents than low-order resonances, with the underlying classical limit being fully chaotic. The results offer a means of controlling quantum transport of cold atoms. “

Some day it might be fun to talk that paper through. It’s one that talks about an interesting new effect, one with experimental verification possible, and is liable to generate some interest.

Logging Today

So, let’s see what I did today, for example:

School’s out at the moment: We have a term system with 10-week terms (quarters), the Fall term’s over, and this gives us a long break from Thanksgiving through New Years. It makes for a very nice period of more introspective work.

Over morning coffee I scanned some of the blogs I and news-feeds I read through Google reader (more references later) and also got started on David Brooks’ ‘Bobos in Paradise’ — got through a half-dozen pages. I am reading it because it might be useful as a reading for Cross-Cultural Studies, if I ever teach it again. It’s been fun teaching that course — Cross-Cultural Studies has bought me out in the past by paying for a single course replacement, but this isn’t something the Physics and Astronomy Department can usefully deploy every year. So things on this are always iffy. But still, having taught it twice now, I have it ticking away on the back-burner at all times, mostly an excuse to organize some of my reading on culture and sociology.

I ran a few miles in the morning, because I’ve always known, but now accept, and have started to act on, the fact that the more I exercise the better I do. The thing about being at a small college is that I’ve had quite a few useful work-related conversations while sweating it at the gym. Not today, though. After exercise, I went to my favorite cafe, which doubles as Northfield’s informal Faculty Lounge (for Carleton and St. Olaf, and the Macalester folks who live in town, for example) and got started modifying a small proposal to the American Physical Society. This is to ask for funds so that my Cameroonian friend Anatole, who is currently in Europe, can come here so we can continue to collaborate on transport issues (ratchets in particular) in nonlinear quantum and classical systems.

It’s not a lot of money that we are asking for, but it would be useful, but always, one of the main benefits of proposal-writing to me is getting my thoughts on a project’s plan of attack, for example, organized. Our last paper (in collaboration with Jiang-bin who lives in Singapore) got very nice reviews, which also pointed out that our arguments weren’t *quite* complete, at Physical Review Letters, and we are waiting for them to get back to us on the revisions we have made. But any decent paper of mine generates multiple questions in my head, and I’d really like to get some good one-on-one time with Anatole to get going on some of those.

I also ran into two colleagues/friends: DJ, from Carleton’s Office of Intercultural Life (we talked about Carleton’s Posse program a bit) and Adrienne, from Sociology/Anthropology (we talked about the dynamics of various departments around campus and about an upcoming workshop on writing about/with numbers that we are both attending).

Finally got to campus, and with my Chemistry colleague and close friend Dani completed formalities for registration for a workshop on increasing diversity in the sciences that we are both going to attend in January in the DC area.

Then I got to grab lunch — ran into Carol from the Writing Program, we talked about the writing workshop and about the ongoing accreditation exercise in which Carleton’s participating. It’s a weird and interesting process, I am still not quite sure what it’s about.

I took the afternoon off, but after dinner, having caught up with more administriva emails, am reading some of my favorite science blogs. For example, Philip Ball’s blog, which I discovered a couple of days ago.

And so the day goes.