Posted on 07/26/2004 8:53:54 AM PDT by PatrickHenry
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN: What are the top questions bedeviling physicists today?
LAWRENCE KRAUSS: Three that I find fascinating are: What is the nature of dark energy? How can we reconcile black hole evaporation with quantum mechanics? And, finally, do extra dimensions exist? They are all connected. And they are all going to require some new insights into quantum gravity. But someone is going to have to come up with a totally new and remarkable idea. And it's hard to predict when that is going to happen. In 1904 you couldn't have predicted that Albert Einstein would come up with a remarkable idea in 1905.
I think the resolution to these problems is likely to be theoretical and not experimental. This is because direct experimental signatures that might point us in the right theoretical directions in these areas probably lie beyond the realm of current experiments. I'd also bet that the solution to these problems is not going to resemble anything being done now, including string theory.
SA: Is string theory the physics equivalent of The God That Failed, as some people used to say about communist ideology?
LK: Not exactly. But I do think its time may be past. String theory and the other modish physical theory, loop quantum gravity, both stem from one basic idea: that there's a mathematical problem with general relativity. The idea is that when you try to examine physical phenomena on ever smaller scales, gravity acts worse and worse. Eventually, you get infinities. And almost all research to find a quantum theory of gravity is trying to understand these infinities. What string theory and what loop quantum gravity do is go around this by not going smaller than a certain distance scale, because if you do, things will behave differently. Both these theories are based on the idea that you can't go down to zero in a point particle, and that's one way to get rid of mathematical infinities. The main difference, I think, between the two theories is that string is intellectually and mathematically far richer.
String theory hasn't accomplished a lot in terms of solving physical problems, but it's produced a lot of interesting mathematical discoveries. That's why it fascinates. Loop quantum gravity hasn't even done that, at least in my mind.
SA: Are you saying that string theory hasn't really gotten us anywhere?
LK: Neither string theory nor loop quantum gravity has told us much about the key unsolved physical problems -- most important, why does the universe have dark energy? That's the biggest question right now. One thing that has come out of string theory is the idea of plural universes or extra dimensions, and that's because string theory is based on extra dimensions. The only consistent string theory originally had 26 dimensions, and then it got lowered to 10. But the universe we live in is four-dimensional [three spatial plus time]. A lot of talk went into explaining how all these extra dimensions were invisible. Recently some people have been trying to turn that defect into a virtue by suggesting that the extra dimensions might actually be detectable.
SA: You've just finished writing a book about parallel universes. Do you think they're real?
LK: Let me answer you this way: it's an exciting area, and it's wonderful for graduate students. One of my former Ph.D. students is largely responsible for the recent surge of interest in this idea. But I think these extra dimensions smell wrong. What we are learning from elementary particle physics about the unification of all the forces in nature tends to point in a direction that is not the direction these large parallel universe models suggest. As beautiful and as sexy as they are, if I had to bet, I'd bet that these large extradimensional ideas are probably not right. We'll see.
SA: How did you come to write The Physics of Star Trek?
[Snip the response to that one]
SA: You are one of the few top physicists who is also known as a public intellectual. In the middle of the past century, that kind of activity by scientists was much more common. Albert Einstein, in fact, was an international celebrity, whose private views of everything from nuclear disarmament to Zionism were solicited by the press. Why do you think you're such a rare bird that way now?
LK: I can't speak for others. Besides my own research, I see part of my mission as trying to close the disconnect between science and the rest of the culture. We live in a society where it's considered okay for intelligent people to be scientifically illiterate. Now, it wasn't always that way. At the beginning of the 20th century, you could not be considered an intellectual unless you could discuss the key scientific issues of the day. Today you can pick up an important intellectual magazine and find a write-up of a science book with a reviewer unashamedly saying, "This was fascinating. I didn't understand it." If they were reviewing a work by John Kenneth Galbraith, they wouldn't flaunt their ignorance of economics.
SA: How did science illiteracy become socially acceptable?
LK: We all know how badly science is taught in many schools. So many middle school and even some high school teachers have no background in science. When my daughter was in the second grade and I went to her school, I was stunned by how her teacher seemed incredibly uncomfortable with having to teach even the simplest scientific concepts. I think this is common. And there is the reality that science has grown increasingly esoteric, making it more difficult for laypeople to grasp.
The truth is -- and I'm hardly the first to say this -- after World War II, American scientists became an isolated elite. The secrets that allowed them to change the world also allowed them to shirk responsibility for citizenship. Scientists became a class above society, rather than a part of it. And so for the longest time, certainly until the 1970s, many American scientists just didn't believe that reaching the public was important. Those were good times, with lots of money coming in. The wake-up call came in 1993, when Congress killed the Superconducting Super Collider. That was a real signal physicists were doing something wrong.
We hadn't convinced the public -- or even all of our colleagues -- that it was worth billions to build this thing. And since then, it has become clear: to get money for what we do, we're going to have to explain it to the public. My predilection is to try to connect the interesting ideas in science to the rest of people's lives.
SA: The big public issue you've been identified with is fighting against creationist teachings in the schools. For the past couple years, you've spent your time traveling, debating creationists on proposed curriculum changes for Ohio's high schools. Was that fun?
LK: It was the least fun of anything I've ever done. Convincing people of the excitement of science is fun; trying to stave off attacks on science feels like the most incredible waste of time, even if necessary. I got drafted after several creationists were appointed to the Standards Committee of the Ohio State Board of Education. They were proposing new standards to create false controversy around evolution by introducing an ad hoc idea called intelligent design into high school science classes.
For nearly a year, I found myself in the middle of what was almost the equivalent of a political campaign. When it was over, we won and we lost. We won because we had kept intelligent design out of science classes. We lost because in the spirit of "fairness," the board added a sentence to the standards saying, "Students should learn how scientists are continuing to critically examine evolutionary theory." I strongly opposed this. I wanted them to say that scientists are continuing to critically examine everything.
As I feared, this sentence opened the door for the creationists' claiming that there is controversy about the accuracy of evolutionary theory. And it's come back to haunt us. Just the other week, I had to put everything I was doing aside because the creationists were back at their old games again in Ohio. One of the model lessons that came out was an intelligent-design diatribe. Basically, they snuck the whole thing in again, through the back door. This becomes so tiresome that you just want to say, "Forget about it, go on." But then you realize that this is exactly what Phillip Johnson, this lawyer who first proposed the intelligent-design strategy, proposed when he said something like, "We'll just keep going and going and going till we outlast the evolutionists."
SA: Do scientists trap themselves when they try to be "fair" and "give equal time" in their debates with the anti-Darwinists?
LK: Yes. Because science isn't fair. It's testable. In science, we prove things by empirical methods, and we toss out things that have been disproved as wrong. Period. This is how we make progress.
I'm not against teaching faith-based ideas in religion classes; I'm just against teaching them as if they were science. And it disturbs me when someone like Bill Gates, whose philanthropy I otherwise admire, helps finance one of the major promoters of intelligent design by giving money to a largely conservative think tank called the Discovery Institute. Yes, they got a recent grant from the Gates Foundation. It's true that the almost $10-million grant, which is the second they received from Gates, doesn't support intelligent design, but it does add credibility to a group whose goals and activities are, based on my experiences with them, intellectually suspect. During the science standards debate in Ohio, institute operatives constantly tried to suggest that there was controversy about evolution where there wasn't and framed the debate in terms of a fairness issue, which it isn't. [Editors' note: Amy Low, a media relations officer representing the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, says that the foundation "has decided not to respond to Dr. Krauss's comments."]
SA: Why do you find this grant so particularly disturbing that you single it out here?
LK: Because we're living in a time when so many scientific questions are transformed into public relations campaigns -- with truth going out the window in favor of sound bites and manufactured controversies. This is dangerous to science and society, because what we learn from observation and testing can't be subject to negotiation or spin, as so much in politics is.
The creationists cut at the very credibility of science when they cast doubt on our methods. When they do that, they make it easier to distort scientific findings in controversial policy areas.
We can see that happening right now with issues like stem cells, abortion, global warming and missile defense. When the testing of the proposed missile defense system showed it didn't work, the Pentagon's answer, more or less, went, "No more tests before we build it."
SA: Between your popular writing and your political work, when do you do science?
LK: In the quiet hours of the night, in between those things. I do it then--or when I have the opportunity to sit down with students and postdocs. It's amazing to me, when we do that, how much we can accomplish. I rely on that a lot lately.
There can be months when I'm working on other things, and I get very, very depressed. Talking about science is important, and it may be the most important thing that I do. But if I'm not actually doing science, I feel like a fraud. On the other hand, if I don't do the public stuff, I also feel like a fraud.
SA: Why a fraud?
LK: Because science is not done in a vacuum. It is done in a social context, and the results of science have important implications for society, even if it is simply providing a general understanding of how we humans fit into the cosmos.
Thus, simply producing new knowledge, without making any attempt to help disseminate it and explain it, is not enough. I think one cannot expect every scientist to spend time on the effort to explain science. But in a society in which the science is of vital importance and also in which many forces are trying to distort the results of science, it is crucial that some of us speak out.
[First paragraph of the article, but I've moved it to the end:] Chair of the physics department at Case Western Reserve University, Lawrence M. Krauss is famed in the research community for his prescient suggestion that a still mysterious entity called dark energy might be the key to understanding the beginnings of the universe. He is also an outspoken social critic and in February was among 60 prominent scientists who signed a letter entitled "Restoring Scientific Integrity in Policymaking," complaining of the Bush administration's misuse of science. The public, though, might know him best as an op-ed writer and author of books with mass appeal. His 1995 work, The Physics of Star Trek, became a best-seller, translated into 15 languages. He is now finishing his seventh popular title, Hiding in the Mirror: The Mysterious Allure of Extra Dimensions, which he describes as "an exploration of our long-standing literary, artistic and scientific love affair with the idea that there are hidden universes out there." Krauss recently discussed his many scientific and social passions with writer Claudia Dreifus.
This is interesting because he's part of the evolution-creationism debates. And it's news to me that Bill Gates is funding the Discovery Institute.
You may want to read about the incarnations of Vishnu (the Hindu God of creation). The incarnations are fish, tortoise, boar, lion-man, dwarf, Parashuram, and then man. The dwarf as a small arboreal monkey. Parashuram is an upright primate. See the evolution? Fish -> amphibian -> mammal -> monkey -> man.
Unfortunately, Hindus tend to read this literally, worship Vishnu, and forget that the incarnations are telling us about evolution.
Even Mars is heating up, and the Germans now say "zee Sun isht brighter" (in their quaint broken-English fashion).
The problem for the professional grantsmanship researchers is they have to switch off from the Earth sciences to Astronomy ~ that's no small leap.
Actually, it's almost the opposite. It's something that almost nobody expected or wanted, but the effect of which became unmistakable in cosmological observations. It really upset a lot of applecarts a couple of years ago. It's a stub-your-toe physical fact that left the theorists scrambling to see where it fit in.
For the record, I expect that there really are extra dimensions.
Flame:
I think basic physics is in a rut. We haven't figured out any better way then chemical rockets to get ourselves around the universe and they were invented in the 20s. String theory is just a bunch of math without experimental proof or disproof. There are plenty of interesting physicial phenomenon to look at on the micro level that are ignored, e.g Casimir Effect, Zero Point Quantum Energy, Collapsing bubble fusion, etc. Everybody wants to stay out of the lab and just do math. That or they want multi-billion dollar toys to just do research.
Excellent interview.
In my opinion the Ramayana and the Mahabarata (the seminal books of Hinduism) are some of the best writings that have stemmed from human civilization. Some of the topics in them, even though they are wrapped in mythology, can easily compare with anything you could read from 'The Republic' or even the Bible (for example the Golden Rule was in the Hindu books thousands of years before Christ said it).
The funny thing is that even when it comes to gods, the conventional thinking is wrong. Most think Hinduism has a million gods, but in reality it is 3 in one. The Trimurti is the Hindu Trinity: Brahma the creator, Visnu (Vishnu) the Sustainer, and Siva (Shiva) the destroyer. That is the Trimurti. And, the Trimurti becomes one God .....Brahman (not Brahma, but Brahman) who is the three made one. Basically the same thing as the Trinity .....3 as one (God the father, the son, and the Holy Spirit). Infact one could say Visnu is a 'Christ figure' who comes to 'redeem' the Earth. And I believe his last incarnation was as Krishna, and that the next one (his last, which will be during the end of the world) will be as 'Kalki,' who shall come as a 'king on a white horse when the heavens open.' (Sound familiar?)
Hinduism has always been quite fascinating. It has so many layers and intricacies that what one at first finds silly starts to show its myriad convolutions that can really make one wonder. It seems like a simple faith at first, but it has very very very many facets. There is more to Hinduism than Hare Krishna devotees and many-armed deities. It can be quite deep (there are some articles i've read that, in my opinion, some of the weapons wielded by the deities seem like nuclear weapons, and some of their crafts seem remarkably like machines. Almost similar to the description of the 'spinning wheel' given in the Book of Ezekiel in the Bible. I believe the Hindu word for them is Vashista or something like that ....starts with a V I know. LOL).
Now, if i could only get a kiss from a deva!
Freegards, Spetz Shakti.
Unless I'm mistaken, the last two tests of the missle defense system have been rather spectacularly successful.
What am I missing?
I need go back to Starbucks to comprehend the deepness of you post.
Perhaps these "scientists" should have spent more time pursuing the truth, instead of money.
I found this an interesting choice of words.
Strangely like one of the religions on Delmak-O; among the main religious figures:
The Mentufacturer
The Form Destroyer
The Intercessor
The Walker-on-Earth
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