Physicist Makes Movie

By: | October 18, 2012

As part of LWON’s unintended series on science and art, or maybe its focus on unexpected behavior in physicists, please meet David Kaplan.  He’s a Johns Hopkins theorist whose specialty is creating the theories beyond the theory that almost accounts for all the matter and energy in the universe.  As such, he was involved in Large Hadron Collider (the LHC) experiment that last summer found the Higgs boson.  But he hadn’t known they’d find it, no one knew they’d find it.  Theory had been predicting for 30 years they’d find it, but no data refuted or confirmed the theory; the large American collider to do the experiment had been cancelled, the LHC was being repeatedly delayed and was so expensive that they’d be given one shot and if no Higgs, then no more big colliders.  Physicists were getting older, their careers were shrivelling, they weren’t sleeping, maybe the very question was dumb.

In the midst of all this, seven years ago, Kaplan was explaining the what-if-no-Higgs story to a friend with a PhD in poetry criticism.  The friend was impressed:  at no other time in the history of science was there a single point at which a whole field could potentially come to a screeching halt.  It sounded like a white-knuckle movie.  Kaplan thought so too, so he made one. Continue reading →

My Daughter, the Dinosaur

By: | October 17, 2012

In August, I took my almost-four-year-old daughter to the dinosaur galleries in the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. The ceilings were lower and the clientele was shorter than I remembered from my own childhood, but the essentials were the same: the bones, the horns, the talons, and best of all, the enormous teeth. The better to eat you with, my dear. My daughter stood next to the disembodied T. rex skull and peered delightedly into its mouth, ready to climb in. “Holy cow!” she said.

As we left, she was quiet. And then she said, to no one in particular, “I don’t know whether to eat or be eaten.”

If you’ve spent any time around children, you know what happened next. Dinomania hit fast and hard, and within a few days my daughter was pronouncing hilariously long Latin words, gnashing her tiny teeth as she stalked the dog, and talking knowledgeably about the plant eaters and meat eaters that lived long, long, long ago — even before Grandma and Grandpa were born. Continue reading →

Blowing the whistle

By: | October 16, 2012

Fiscal year 2012 was a record year for whistleblowers. According to the Taxpayers Against Fraud Educational Fund, the U.S. government recovered more than $9 billion through lawsuits invoking the False Claims Act, legislation that gives private citizens the right to sue those that commit fraud against government programs (and share in any fines that are eventually collected).

A case against GlaxoSmithKline resulted in a record $3 billion in fines for illegal marketing and other misdeeds, Abbott Laboratories paid $1.5 billion for off-label marketing of drugs and Bank of America was hit with $1 billion in fines for mortgage and bank fraud. These were just the top three False Claims Act settlements of FY 2012, and the thing they had in common is that they were initiated by whistleblowers.

In theory, whistleblowing — calling out clearly unethical and/or illegal conduct — might seem like a no-brainer. When we witness bad behavior, most of us feel compelled to do something. Or at least, think about doing something.

But in real-life, calling out someone’s bad deeds is incredibly difficult, even if that person is a total scumbag. When you point the finger, there’s an implicit assumption that you’re better than the scumbag, and most of us don’t want to put ourselves in that position. After all, who among us is above reproach? (Not me.)

I’ve never been a whistleblower, but as a journalist, I’ve called liars out on their fabrications, and it never feels good. Continue reading →

Why Run When You Can Have Brunch Instead?

By: | October 15, 2012

Here’s my ideal Sunday morning: Wake up at 10 am, drink coffee, read, hit the farmer’s market, make brunch. Here’s what I did yesterday morning: Woke up at 7am, consumed a carefully calculated quantity of carbs, ran 20 miles, and plunged myself, fully clothed, into a bathtub of ice water. That’s what a lot of my Sundays have been like recently. I’m in training. In three short weeks, I’ll be running my first marathon.

A few weeks ago, I received an email from the race organizers. “If this is your first marathon, your body has probably never been so fit,” they wrote. In truth, my body has never felt more broken and decrepit. Every toe is blistered and swollen and my latest run left me with a blister above my belly button. Simple acts like getting out of bed sometimes send pain ricocheting through my hip socket. Training has been brutal. So brutal, in fact, that I’ve been complaining bitterly. After one particularly vicious rant, LWON’s own Christie Aschwanden, a killer athlete, sent me a note. “Why are you training for this marathon? You sound kind of miserable.”

Good question. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | October 13, 2012

October 8 – 12

This week, Christie remembered Karen, and reminded us that the “beating cancer” narrative is pernicious and false.

From his review, I can’t tell if Richard liked Einstein on the Beach, or endured it.

Tom tells us about a book made at scales small that light particles are too fat for perception.

Ginny reviews The Time Cure, a book that purports to hold the cure for PTSD.

“A Buddhist god holding a swastika as evidence of an ancient master race in Asia”: you pretty much have to read Heather’s story about the iron man.

 

A real cancer hero

By: | October 12, 2012

In the photo, Karen is smiling. We’re clowning around, engulfed in a spring day with nowhere to be but out on our bikes. Breast cancer has already pushed its way into Karen’s life, but the demon is on hiatus, and she has gleefully stuffed her bra to announce that cancer can take her breasts but never her sense of humor.

This month marks six years since Karen Hornbostel died. I’ve been thinking of her this week as the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency released 1,000 pages of evidence showing a vast doping conspiracy by Lance Armstrong and his entourage. The affidavits, emails, bank records and other documents paint a picture of Armstrong as a bully and a cheat.

I wish Karen was around to discuss Armstrong’s downfall. She admired Lance, and in many ways, she modeled her cancer fight after his. In 2003, the Lance Armstrong Foundation (now Livestrong) awarded Karen its “Spirit of Survivorship” award. It was an honor she proudly accepted from Armstrong himself. Like him, she vowed never to yield to cancer, and indeed she fought it to her last breath.

The USADA documents show that Armstrong cheated to win his seven Tour de France victories. The evidence is now overwhelming. The heroic, triumphant tale he (and Sally Jenkins) depicted in his books was a fraud. As Bonnie Ford explains at ESPN, “anyone who remains unconvinced simply doesn’t want to know.”

Understandably, the news is difficult for many fans to hear. No one likes to feel suckered, and fairy tales like Armstrong’s appeal to us precisely because they represent the world as we wish it was. When given the choice, who wouldn’t want to believe that something good could come from cancer — that it could turn a punk kid from Texas into a virtuous warrior who fought his disease and his sporting opponents with honor and integrity?

Continue reading →

A Day at the Opera

By: | October 11, 2012

“Bern. 1905.”

This simple declaration of setting—space; time—comes about a quarter of the way into Einstein on the Beach, the 1976 opera by Philip Glass and Robert Wilson currently in revival on a world tour. The brief spoken passage is one of the few, if not the only, that is unaccompanied by music. (Actually, the line in the revival is “Bern, Switzerland. 1905,” but I prefer the original for its abruptness.) The line is immediately followed by a frenetic 13-minute ballet in which ten dancers, always at nothing less than a gallop, trace and retrace geometric patterns with slight variations. As I watched their exertions during a recent matinee at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, I thought, “What they’re doing is superhuman.”

And then I thought, “And yet they’re human.”

Not that the word superhuman implies doing something that humans can’t do. But it does imply doing something that humans don’t do—at least not without pushing themselves beyond what we otherwise think that humans can do.

Which, I realized with a start, is what Einstein did in Bern in 1905.

Continue reading →

The Latest Thing in E-Readers: Scanning Electron Microscopy

By: | October 10, 2012

Have you ever turned a buckskin whincher, or cradled a chicken-egg recursion device in the palm of your hand? Or caught a quantum of anti-matter and held it by the tail?

They’re all quite possible, it turns out, though you need Big Science for one, and a quite a lot of art for the other two. Come to think of it, my brother might be the only person ever to have done all three.

Mike is a physicist, see, so trapping anti-matter is just part of his day job. Buckskin whinching though? That’s where his friend Rob Chaplin comes in. Rob’s day job, at least part of it, is inventing things that don’t exist, but probably should. The original buckskin whincher appeared in three stories from Carl Sandburg’s 1922 book, Rootabaga Stories. Only it’s never pictured or described, so Rob reverse engineered it from first principles.* Because that’s the way he thinks. Continue reading →