Second Breakfast

I’ve gotten behind in my “book reports” as of late.

This is a good and very provocative companion to Brian Greene’s Elegant Universe and Fabric of the Cosmos books.

Smolin, who is a practicing physicist, takes some very effective pot-shots at the whole string theory craze, both in terms of its actual useful results (very little), and the “everyone must get on the bandwagon” mentality that has, in his view, taken over the theoretical physics community. I can’t give the arguments justice, but I thought this a very readable, practical account of what string theory means today, what it has shown and not shown, and what some alternate approaches are that could actually bear fruit. The problem, as Smolin sees it, with string theory is that many of its ideas and predictions are so untestable and abstract as to be more philosophy than science. And if you can’t test it or try to disprove it, is it science at all?

What I found particularly compelling about this book is the last third, which focuses on the “sociology” of the physics community. Being married to a scientist, I’ve long given up any illusions about science as some “search for ultimate truth”, and Smolin confirms that view with a detailed and pragmatic view into what science is, what it does well (and badly), and what it means.

My astronomer friend Steve is less impressed with Smolin’s critique than I, as he feel that Smolin is expecting a level of proof or certainty out of a theory than one would demand out of any other theory. But as I understand it, string theory isn’t even a coherent theory, but more a set of ideas or descriptions about what a theory might look like, and at last count there might be 10⁵⁰ of them to choose from. There are something like 10⁸⁰ atoms in the universe.

An interesting read, particularly if you’ve read or seen Brian Greene’s stuff and want a well-reasoned alternative.

I picked up this and “A Man on the Moon” to read during my convalescence, which turned out to be a lot shorter than I had anticipated.

This is an account of the goings-on at NASA Mission Control during the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo manned spaceflight programs.  Kranz has an impressive career spanning Navy pilot, joining the Space Task Group, and quickly establishing himself in the emerging Mission Control organization.  Ultimately he would come to play a pivotal role in the almost-disastrous Apollo 13 mission, and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Nixon.

While many of the reviews of this book are quite positive and enthusiastic, I find Kranz’ account, while obviously informed and very authentic, to feel a little bit too autobiographical at times, and the accounts of the organizational minutiae and interpersonal dynamics aren’t terribly interesting.  What I was hoping for is a detailed account of the technical and engineering challenges that were overcome as part of the Apollo effort.  Instead Kranz is much more focused on the operational and ground support aspects, and the development of the processes, organizational structures, and methods to successfully run a manned spaceflight program. I will finish this out of curiosity and respect, but for me at least its kind of “hard slogging”.

I’ve always dug the space program, and am always happy to tune into “Apollo 13″ whenever it is on cable, and really enjoyed the HBO series “From the Earth to the Moon”. Both were produced by Tom Hanks, and are really excellent dramatizations of arguably the most historic accomplishment of the previous century.

Chaikin’s book includes a forward by Hanks, and is the result of an extensive series of interviews with the major players in the Apollo program, including the astronauts and the senior folks at mission control. The result is a very readable account of the manned Apollo missions, including a lot of insights in the character of the astronauts, the tensions that emerged, and the external pressures on the program.

I can’t say I necessarily learned a lot of new information, but it seems like a very accurate portrayal of the program — what happened, who did what, what was important and not.

I think most folks feel particularly disillusioned with the space program as it exists today versus the promise that it held after the moon missions. But even as Armstrong and Aldrin were taking their first steps on the lunar surface, questions about the continued viability of the program were already being asked, and it wasn’t long afterwards that the later planned lunar surface missions were canceled, and the program became mostly an excuse to use up the hardware already built for the purpose. Given the fear and likelihood of another catastrophic failure and loss of life, the sense was to “quit while we’re ahead”.

Chaikin makes an excellent defense of NASA in his closing comments. He says (my paraphrase) “If NASA can be accused of not knowing its purpose, it is because didn’t give it one”. The moon landings were the result of a number of important and simultaneous factors and pressures — the cold war and the prestige game with the Soviets, Kennedy’s assassination, and to some extent the Vietnam war. They came together to create a sense of national will and purpose that evaporated once we got there, and I think with the disillusionment that Nixon’s two terms engendered only served to fuel that feeling.

What struck me also was how quickly the spaceflights became routine. No one pays much attention to a shuttle liftoff today (America’s Space Truck™), but even after Apollo 11, the later missions got less and less TV coverage, so that by the final mission, very little prime time coverage was given to the events on the lunar surface. NASA got really good at sending people to the moon, and as a result people stopped paying attention. This is a normal tendency in our bad-news-is-the-only-real-news mentality, but it surprised me how quickly the manned flights became passe.

Regardless of where the space program is today (Wired has a great piece this month on the burgeoning private space industry), it is still incredibly important I think to remember “we are now a spacefaring species”. Hopefully someday soon we will boldly go back to where we’ve already gone before, and beyond.

As a followon to yesterday’s post, I bring you this observation, courtesy of holysmoke.org:

Thermodynamics according to Isaiah

The temperature of Heaven can be rather accurately computed. Our authority is the Bible, Isaiah 30:26, describing Heaven: Moreover, the light of the moon shall be as the light of the sun and the light of the sun shall be sevenfold as the light of seven days. Thus, Heaven receives from the moon as much radiation as the Earth does from the sun, and in addition seven times seven (forty-nine) times as much as the Earth does from the sun, or 50 times in all. The light we receive from the moon is 1/10,000 of the light we receive from the sun, so we can ignore that. The radiation falling on Heaven will heat it to the point where the heat lost by radiation is just equal to the heat received by radiation, i.e., Heaven loses 50 times as much heat as the Earth by radiation. Using the Stephan-Boltzmann fourth power law for radiation, we have (H/E)4 = 50 where E is the absolute temperature of the Earth, 300 K (27 C). This gives H, the absolute temperature of Heaven, as 798 K (525 C)! (For old-fashioned Americans, that’s close to 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Your kitchen oven won’t get nearly that hot.)

The exact temperature of Hell cannot be computed. However, Revelation 21:8 says: But the fearful and unbelieving… shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone. A lake of molten brimstone (or sulfur) means that its temperature must be at or below the boiling point, 444.6 C (above that point, it would be a vapor, not a lake). We have, then, that Heaven, at 525 C, is hotter than Hell, at less than 445 C.

So who says that the Bible has no accurate and useful scientific data?

I so thoroughly enjoyed Greene’s “The Elegant Universe” that I was excited to pick up this book when I saw it came out in trade paperback. I think this is an even better book than its predecessor, and Greene’s lucid explanations of our current understanding of space and time are both passionate and entertaining. I found this book to be immensely satisfying, and it didn’t suffer from the “tough slogging” feeling that gave the previous book its rough spots.

This book takes a slightly different direction than Elegant Universe and focuses instead on the “texture of reality” as the title suggests. What are space and time? Are they fundamental? What are they made of? Does time exist? Does it have an “arrow”, as our common experiences would have us believe? Or are they illusory, or indicative of a deeper reality?

Greene uses both thematic and historical organization, so in typical “history of science” we see the development of ideas, and the changing, yet increasingly precise answers to these fundamental questions as our notions of the constituents and elementary properties of our universe have evolved. Greene has an amazing ability to construct vivid metaphors and illustrations of terribly abstract and mathematical ideas. He’s also fond (as I am) of the Simpsons, so we are treated to accounts of wormholes at the Kwik-e-Mart and Bart and Lisa’s relativistic adventures.

What’s great about really good science writing is the ability of the author to create a real sense of an unfolding story. Science isn’t about known facts and dry ideas, but a living enterprise that is constantly changing, a human story always unfolding. Science is as much about the people who do it as the knowledge and new ideas they uncover.

This kind of science writing really gets me excited about science, and I hope that Greene is turning on a new generation of readers to the excitement of one of humankind’s most interesting pasttimes.