physicshead

T.S. Eliot

2016-07-19T19:41:00.002+02:00

“Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm; but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.”

http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/101806-half-the-harm-that-is-done-in-this-world-is

Richard Feynman: Why science can't be the ultimate judge of moral questions

2016-04-19T14:09:00.004+02:00

I would like to make a little philosophical argument to explain why theoretically I think that science and moral questions are independent. The common human problem, the big question, always is “Should I do this?” It is a question of action. “What should I do? Should I do this?” And how can we answer such a question? We can divide it into two parts. We can say, “If I do this what will happen?” That doesn’t tell me whether I should do this. We still have another part, which is “Well, do I want that to happen?” In other words, the first question—“If I do this what will happen?”—is at least susceptible to scientific investigation; in fact, it is a typical scientific question. It doesn’t mean we know what will happen. Far from it. We never know what is going to happen. The science is very rudimentary. But, at least it is in the realm of science we have a method to deal with it. The method is “Try it and see”—we talked about that—and accumulate the information and so on. And so the question “If I do it what will happen?” is a typically scientific question. But the question “Do I want this to happen”—in the ultimate moment—is not. Well, you say, if I do this, I see that everybody is killed, and, of course, I don’t want that. Well, how do you know you don’t want people killed? You see, at the end you must have some ultimate judgment.

You could take a different example. You could say, for instance, “If I follow this economic policy, I see there is going to be a depression, and, of course, I don’t want a depression.” Wait. You see, only knowing that it is a depression doesn’t tell you that you do not want it. You have then to judge whether the feelings of power you would get from this, whether the importance of the country moving in this direction is better than the cost to the people who are suffering. Or maybe there would be some sufferers and not others. And so there must at the end be some ultimate judgment somewhere along the line as to what is valuable, whether people are valuable, whether life is valuable. Deep in the end—you may follow the argument of what will happen further and further along—but ultimately you have to decide “Yeah, I want that” or “No, I don’t.” And the judgment there is of a different nature. I do not see how by knowing what will happen alone it is possible to know if ultimately you want the last of the things. I believe, therefore, that it is impossible to decide moral questions by the scientific technique, and that the two things are independent.

("The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen Scientist", Richard Feynman)

Richard Feynman on generosity

2016-04-19T13:57:00.004+02:00

To see generosity you must be generous enough not to see the meanness, and to see just meanness in a man you must be mean enough not to see the generosity.

("Perfectly Reasonable Deviations From the Beaten Track")

Richard Feyman's letter to, and about, his former teacher, Abram Bader

2016-04-19T13:57:00.002+02:00

Dear Mr. Bader:

Thank you very much for your letter of congratulations. I am glad that you have seen the second volume of my textbook. The discussion we had about action was not the only one that I remember. I have a great deal to thank you for in aiming me and educating me in the direction of physics. I did not remember the time I asked you about the advisability of taking courses in education but I see that you supplied me with not only a good education but good advice. Another thing that I remember as being very important to me was the time when you called me down after class and said “You make too much noise in class.” Then you went on to say that you understood the reason, that it was that the class was entirely too boring. Then you pulled out a book from behind you and said “Here, you read this, take it up to the back of the room, sit all alone, and study this; when you know everything that is in it, you can talk again.” And so, in my physics class I paid no attention to what was going on, but only studied Woods’ “Advanced Calculus” up in the back of the room. It was there that I learned about gamma functions, elliptic functions, and differentiating under an integral sign. A trick at which I became an expert. Many years later when I was teaching mathematical methods of physics, to graduate students at Cornell, one of the students, wanting to object to the fact that I was dealing with such an advanced subject, asked me in what year I learned the subject. Before I could realize his purpose and how much my answer would bother him, I answered immediately, “in High School.” It was very exciting for me to have you as a teacher in High School, and you certainly knew how to stretch a young boy’s mind to the utmost of achievement. Thank you very much.

To:

Dr. E. U. Condon
Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics
University of Colorado
Boulder, Colorado

Dear Ed:

I had trouble writing the citation for Abram Bader, because I am personally involved, it is almost like trying to write my own. The best I could do follows:

“Mr. Bader is cited for his superb teaching of an exceptional student. Usually the truly outstanding student is left to go his own way. But when Abram Bader found Richard Feynman (who this year shared the Nobel Prize in physics) in his class he gave the boy great challenges, good advice and fascinating new information about physics. He excused him from paying attention in class but challenged him to use the time to learn advanced calculus from a book from his personal library. He fascinated him by explaining to him the principle of least action, a central point of almost all of Feynman’s work. Finally the student’s love and admiration for his teacher resulted in the boy’s wanting to become a teacher and scientist. Bader gave good counsel.”

The remark at the end is supposed to be subtle humor. He persuaded me, with considerable effort, to become a scientist of course. You may prefer to make it clearer, or avoid the “humor” as it may bother many of the teachers. I trust your judgment. Change the whole thing in any way you wish.

Sincerely yours,

Richard P. Feynman

("Perfectly Reasonable Deviations From the Beaten Track")

Richard Feynman's correspondence with a hater

2016-04-19T13:55:00.003+02:00

RAYMOND R. ROGERS TO RICHARD P. FEYNMAN, DECEMBER 17, 1965

Dear Sir:

I watched and listened to your discussion with members of K.N.X.T.’s news commentators tonight and was amazed at the colossal ignorance and smugness of your learning and achievements. Your use of the term “you guys” in your talk was sickning.

Your comments on smog was of a man intirely ignorant of the problem. You say there are many other problems more important than smog.With a civilization slowly dying in their own filth, what may these problems be? It will be solved just as soon as the financial hurt to the manufucturers and oil companys will be overcome.

I have never progressed beyond high school. My ambition was to attend Throop College which is now Cal Tech. My I.Q. was too low to get in. I served my apprenticeship as a machinist starting at ten cents an hour. My whole life has been to be the best machinist there was.

When I was retired from Technical Labortories (now T.R.W. Systems) on account of age I had worked up as far as I could go without a degree. Your smart young men from Cal. Tech. came over to tell me how things should be done. It sounded like the prattle of small children.

One part of the O.G.O. satalite was so poorly designed I told them so, and I could design one that would really work.They laughed at me, (a poor slob without an education).Two years later when O.G.O was was put into orbit that part was on O.G.O. exactly as I designed it.

Your discussion on atomic Energy was hardly of a man of letters.Your technical gobbledegook did not impress me one bit. Some times I think education is a handicap.

How did you get the Nobel Prize?

Yours Truly,

Raymond R. Rogers

RICHARD P. FEYNMAN TO RAYMOND R. ROGERS, JANUARY 20, 1966

Mr. Raymond R. Rogers
Gardena, California

Dear Mr. Rogers:

Thank you for your letter about my KNXT interview.You are quite right that I am very ignorant about smog and many other things, including the use of the finest English.

I won the Nobel Prize for work I did in physics trying to uncover the laws of nature. The only thing I really know very much about are these laws. I was asked by the TV station to appear on their news interview program, but what happened was that they asked me all kinds of questions about which I didn’t know anything. I had to answer them somehow or other, and I did my best, which you say is none too good.

But, we are both in the same boat, because although you have become a very good machinist and I a good scientist, neither of us really know about the smog problem. Just as my comments on it seem ignorant to you, so your comments on it in your letter do not seem so wise to me.

How would you like to receive a prize for being a great machinist, and then get on the TV to be interviewed by a group of men who don’t care a bit about machining and its problems, but instead ask questions about smog? The thing that hurts is that they don’t ask you about things that you love and have devoted your life to and received the prize for.

So, please excuse the fact that I wasn’t happy and polite during my interview, and had to answer questions about which I had no particular special knowledge.

By the way, one of my ambitions had been to be at least good in the machine shop, but everything I made fit poorly, my bearings wobbled, etc. Good machining is essential to building good apparatus for the precise and careful measurements required in physics to discover Nature’s laws. So, we physicists have always worked close to and depended on men like you and some of us (like Rowland, who made the first very precise ruling engines to make diffraction gratings) have been great machinists.

About using the words “you guys”—I am sorry it offended you, but it is because I never believed that people who used big words and very fancy speech were especially smart or good. I think it is important only to express clearly what you want to say. I admit though, that “you guys” doesn’t sound polite, so I guess that wasn’t so good.

Yours sincerely,

R. P. Feynman

("Perfectly Reasonable Deviations From the Beaten Track")

Richard Feynman letter to his Mom

2016-04-19T13:55:00.001+02:00

My Dear Mom;

You have nothing. A small room in a hotel. Stuffy and no home with friends and family in it.A job that gives no enlightenment or has no further aim than to be done each day, building nothing for yourself. No easy transportation but to be jostled by the crowds. Nor fancy meals, nor luxurious trips, nor fame nor wealth. Children who rarely write.You have nothing.

So say your friends, but they are wrong. Wealth is not happiness nor is swimming pools and villas. Nor is great work alone reward, or fame. Foreign places visited themselves give nothing. It is only you who bring to the places your heart, or in your great work feeling, or in your large house place. If you do this there is happiness. But your heart can be as easily brought to Samarkand as to the Hudson river. Peace is as difficult to achieve in a large house as in a small one. Feeling can be brought to any work.Your friends of wealth have nothing because of it that they would lose, if with more modest means.

In the sea of material desire that is our country you have found an inlet and a harbor.You are far from perfectly happy, but are as contentful as you can be, with your make-up in the world that is.That is a great achievement, or a great woman.

Why do I write this? Because you have told me these things many times, and I have nodded, vaguely understanding. But you mention them again and again, so perhaps you think I do not understand. For so few understand, each friend questions you, each relative hounds you with the query, how can you live in such a tiny place, how can you work in that unbearable shop with those horrible sales girls?You know how.They could never do it, nor can they live as contentedly in any other way, for they do not possess your inner strength and greatness. A greatness which has come to realize itself thru the knowledge that, beyond poverty, beyond the point that the material needs are reasonably satisfied, only from within is peace.

("Perfectly Reasonable Deviations From the Beaten Track")

Alice Dreger: E.O. Wilson

2016-02-14T11:02:00.005+02:00

[B]efore I talked to Wilson that day for nearly two hours, it had never occurred to me that he could have really suffered. He seemed to me too famous, too stately, too smart, too polished to have ever had his feathers seriously ruffled by anyone. Yet when I spoke with him, Wilson movingly described what it felt like to be repeatedly, publicly accused by his Harvard colleagues, Richard Lewontin and Gould, of promoting a dangerous right-wing science in his quest to help humans understand their own nature. Lewontin and Gould denounced Wilson’s work on sociobiology, for example accusing him in a group open letter to the New York Review of Books of “join[ing] the long parade of biological determinists whose work has served to buttress the institutions of their society by exonerating them from responsibility for social problems.” This letter made clear what Wilson’s kind of biological determinism had led to historically: anti-immigration laws, sterilization laws, and ultimately “the eugenics policies which led to the establishment of gas chambers in Nazi Germany.” At Harvard, positioning themselves under the banner of Science for the People, Gould and Lewontin, along with lesser-known scientific critics, had opposed Wilson’s alleged science against the people. A group called the Committee Against Racism (CAR) aggressively protested Wilson’s “racist lies” on the Harvard campus. In 1977, riffing on the criticisms of Gould and Lewontin, a CAR flyer warned, “Sociobiology, by encouraging biological and genetic explanations for racism, war and genocide, exonerates and protects the groups and individuals who have carried out and benefitted from these monstrous crimes.” (...)

Before talking to Wilson, I’d thought it couldn’t have been so bad before the Internet. But of course Lewontin and Gould were famous and beloved by the Left. They could rapidly publish almost anything they wanted about Wilson and his science, and with fewer venues for public debate, each of these attacks had a big impact. As I discussed with him how easily an individual’s research and public identity could be distorted, Wilson told me he could relate: “Gould and Lewontin could do something like that, change your identity to evil.”

I had asked Wilson if there had ever been a group of colleagues who had actively defended him at Harvard. He answered:

No. Unfortunately, no. In fact, I had several close friends in the Organismic and Evolutionary Biology Department who would sometimes speak to me and just say they were sorry it was happening. One was my close colleague Bert Hölldobler. We were working all the time together in the lab and field. We would spend long periods of time talking about it and trying to figure it out, trying to understand Lewontin. He gave me his unstinting support, and made it clear to Lewontin and others. But no one else said anything or did anything. I think they kind of weren’t one hundred percent sure about me. They thought maybe there was something to what Lewontin or Gould were saying. No one [except Hölldobler] ever offered any sympathy or any kind of help. (...)

I asked Wilson to share the advice he would give to a younger scholar caught in his position, knowing one’s motives and research were being widely distorted in the public sphere. At the time, I had no idea I’d be finding solace in his response only a year later. He answered:

I think I would tell him or her to ignore it. Pay attention, I mean, and respond if there is some really scurrilous thing being said. But, as much as possible, ignore it, and keep working. And you’ll win in the end. I know it isn’t easy during fights. I always said to myself, “Don’t get into a pissing contest with a skunk.” Looking back, if you ask me, what I most resent about all that period, I think the answer, the older I get, the farther behind this gets, as it recedes, I must resent the amount of time I wasted. I spent countless hours talking with journalists writing stories about this. They’d come to me and say, “Well, Professor Lewontin just said so-and-so, Professor Gould just said so-and-so.” Or, “I’ve read in the latest thing that they’ve said this. What do you say to that?” they’d ask me. I couldn’t sit by and let them say something that was in fact declaring me a racist and a proto-Nazi. I couldn’t say, “No comment.” I just wasted enormous amounts of energy and just pure time I could have used for something much more valuable. So my advice would be, this too shall pass. Ignore it as much as you can. Conduct yourself with dignity and with courtesy and let it pass. (...)

The pressure to get ever more grants and to publish early and often has also led to a system wherein work is often published before it’s ready—before it is really finished and, more important, before it is really checked. Indeed, as I’ve wandered from discipline to discipline, I have again and again come across a stunningly lazy attitude toward precision and accuracy in many branches of academia. (Legal scholarship is the one notable exception.) Outsiders to academia would probably be shocked to overhear the conversations I have with science, medicine, and humanities scholars and journal editors about the need to fact-check work. It’s not that they argue with me. They ask me what I’m talking about. The push is to get the work out, to get that publication line on your productivity report, to score the high impact factor—all goals born of a system that supports individual competition for funding over the common need for a reliable body of knowledge. Who needs fact-checking when accuracy is not rewarded and sloppiness is rarely punished?

("Galileo's Middle Finger", Alice Dreger)

Alice Dreger: The Mead case

2016-02-14T11:02:00.003+02:00

MARGARET MEAD DIDN’T LIVE to see the ruining of her professional reputation. The New Zealand anthropologist Derek Freeman didn’t publish his book Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth until 1983, five years after Mead’s death. After that highly publicized work from Harvard University Press, Freeman’s misleading claims about Mead went through even better publicized iterations, and with each pass, they had more successfully damned Mead’s scientific reputation. By 1999, with the publication of The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead, Freeman had refined and simplified the story, marketing it perfectly for the sound-bite world: Determined by her personal political agenda to paint a sex-positive view of Samoan adolescence, Mead had allowed herself to be duped by two young Samoan women who had simply been joshing her with sexual fish tales of licentious adolescence. Mead had completely misrepresented human sexuality to the world because she’d been stupid enough to buy the joke these two young women were playing on her. Just an ideologically blinded dupe, according to Freeman, Mead turned out to be a dangerous spoiler of the scientific record on the nature of sex. In Freeman’s words, “Never can giggly fibs have had such far-reaching consequences in the groves of Academe.” (...)

In reality, Mead, like most twentieth-century scientists, had a reasonably complex view of human behavior, assuming and seeing contributions from both biology and culture. That was one reason she was sympathetic to the work Chagnon was doing; he, too, saw both biology and culture as important (...)

the anthropologist Paul Shankman of the University of Colorado–Boulder decided to devote a sizable chunk of his professional energies trying “to extricate Mead’s reputation from the quicksand of controversy.” (...)

Shankman was able to use Freeman’s own records to show that he knew Mead’s work to be substantially more sophisticated and rigorous than his negative portrait of it. In Shankman’s words, “Freeman was able to advance his argument only by very selective use of information, including the creative use of partial quotations and the strategic omission of relevant data at crucial junctures in his argument.” (...)

Shankman tells of Freeman’s 1961 trip to Sarawak, where he viewed sexually graphic tribal statues at a local museum: “Freeman was convinced that the erotic statues [there] not only were a perversion of authentic tribal culture but were also exerting a form of mind control over Freeman through their hypnotic power, a power that he was determined to break. Freeman also believed that the statues were being used by [a colleague] and the Soviet Union to subvert the local government. Indeed, Freeman thought [the colleague’s wife] was a Soviet agent.” Freeman then proceeded to destroy one of the statues. Concerned by his bizarre behavior, authorities eventually banned Freeman from further research in Sarawak. One of his colleagues told Shankman, “We all know he’s crazy, but we can’t say it!”

So as it turns out, it was not Margaret Mead or her supposedly joking informants but the strange Derek Freeman who managed to “hoax” the world. Freeman succeeded in part because he followed what I had learned is the number-one rule in making shit up: Make it so unbelievable that people have to believe it.

("Galileo's Middle Finger", Alice Dreger)

Alice Dreger: The Chagnon case

2016-02-14T11:02:00.001+02:00

A COUPLE OF MONTHS after my trip to Missouri, in January 2009, I drove three hours northwest from my home in East Lansing into the snow-covered woods near Traverse City, and knocked on the door of the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon. By then I had talked to enough scientists attacked by various progressive activists that I could guess how I would find the septuagenarian Chagnon—engaged in a sort of self-imposed house arrest, treated by his peers as cancerous and contagious, portrayed by his friends as a martyr and by his enemies as a Nazi, disoriented, ineffectively angry, and essentially stuck at the moment his controversy had fully broken. I guessed about right. (...)

I had decided to carefully investigate Chagnon’s story because his was said by scientists I now trusted to illuminate like no other the dangerous intellectual rot occurring within certain branches of academe—the privileging of politics over evidence. Chagnon’s appeared to be a story of what happens when liberal hearts bleed so much that brains stop getting enough oxygen. Although I had no hope of curing this pathology now infecting parts of the ivory tower, I thought it might at least be useful to study and describe an index case.

Long before accusations against him started making front-page news, Napoleon Chagnon had gained worldwide renown for his groundbreaking studies of the Yanomamö, an indigenous people who live in sparsely populated rain forest where Brazil meets Venezuela. Besides living among the Yanomamö and learning their language, myths, and rituals, in the 1960s Chagnon began gathering gigantic amounts of data on Yanomamö genealogies, movement of villages, gardening and hunting practices, infanticide, nutrition, causes of mortality, and on and on. While many of his colleagues in cultural anthropology were collecting and producing largely qualitative data—stories of various peoples—Chagnon wanted to make his study as aggressively scientific as possible. He seized all available opportunities to study the Yanomamö quantitatively, looking precisely, for example, at how causes of death correlated with age and sex, at protein intake, and at kinship patterns. Indeed, Chagnon was so oriented to the quantitative that he was one of the first anthropologists to bring a computer to a remote field site. This extraordinarily deep and broad work on a relatively isolated indigenous people was a boon for science. (...)

Chagnon saw and represented in the Yanomamö a somewhat shocking image of evolved “human nature”—one featuring males fighting violently over fertile females, domestic brutality, ritualized drug use, and ecological indifference. Not your standard liberal image of the unjustly oppressed, naturally peaceful, environmentally gentle rain-forest Indian family. Not the kind of image that will win you friends among those cultural anthropologists who see themselves primarily as defenders of the oppressed subjects they study, especially if you’re suggesting, as Chagnon was, that the Yanomamö showed us our human nature.

So Chagnon’s characterization of the Yanomamö as “the fierce people” alone could have gained him a fair number of academic enemies within anthropology, especially as cultural anthropologists moved en masse into political advocacy, including feminist and antiwar endeavors. (...)

The battles within anthropology between Chagnon and his detractors had finally exploded onto the world scene when, in 2000, following up on Chagnon’s disciplinary critics, the self-styled “journalist” Patrick Tierney started publicly alleging that, beginning in the 1960s, Chagnon had committed one atrocity after another against the Yanomamö. Tierney called his book on the subject Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon. The work focused chiefly on Chagnon and James V. Neel Sr., a famous physician-geneticist who had collaborated with Chagnon in South American fieldwork. Neel, who many people knew had been suffering from terminal cancer, died just before Tierney’s work came out, and people said the timing of Tierney’s publications wasn’t a coincidence; a dead man can’t sue for libel. But Chagnon was alive, and Tierney’s claims made his life a living hell, largely because of the decision by Chagnon’s colleagues in the leadership of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) to take Tierney’s book and run with it.

The whole thing really took off just before Tierney’s work was published. In September 2000, two anthropologists who had long been on Chagnon’s case—Terence Turner and Leslie Sponsel—wrote a letter to the heads of the AAA alerting them to Tierney’s soon-to-be-published work, summarizing the charges made against Chagnon and Neel, and sprinkling on lots of rhetorical pepper, including even an allusion to the Nazi scientist Josef Mengele. The Turner-Sponsel letter opened by announcing, “In its scale, ramifications, and sheer criminality and corruption, [the scandal] is unparalleled in the history of Anthropology.” Turner and Sponsel then recounted Tierney’s most sensational claims, including that Neel had, “in all probability deliberately caused” an outbreak of measles in 1968 by knowingly using a bad vaccine among the Yanomamö to test an “extreme” and “fascistic” eugenic theory. Turner and Sponsel accused Chagnon of supporting Neel’s efforts by carrying out research that “formed integral parts of this massive, and massively fatal, human experiment.” Additional charges included “cooking and re-cooking” data, intentionally starting wars, aiding “sinister politicians” and illegal gold miners, and—perhaps the most inflammatory claim—purposefully withholding medical care while experimental subjects died from the allegedly vaccine-induced measles. (...)

Before the Internet, cooler heads might have prevailed. (Insiders knew this was hardly Turner and Sponsel’s first attempt to pick at the big dog Chagnon.) Instead Turner and Sponsel’s juicy “tell all” letter wound up circulated all over the world virtually overnight, and of course the press didn’t dare sit on such a hot story long enough to find out what was true, much less learn the backstory. Most reporters simply reiterated the charges. A headline in The Guardian screamed, SCIENTIST “KILLED AMAZON INDIANS TO TEST RACE THEORY.” The quotation marks likely would be lost on much of the public. (...)

In sharp contrast to the AAA, various other scholarly bodies rose up immediately to object to what they saw as obvious falsehoods in Tierney’s work and by implication in the Turner-Sponsel memo. Fact-based criticisms of Tierney were issued by the National Academy of Sciences, the American Society of Human Genetics, the International Genetic Epidemiology Society, and the Society for Visual Anthropology. The University of Michigan—where Chagnon had been a graduate student and then faculty member, and where Neel had done most of his work—also issued a devastating point-by-point rebuttal of Tierney’s most problematic claims.

Why was the response of the AAA so anomalous? The answer can’t be that the AAA leadership remained unaware of factual challenges to Tierney’s claims, including devastating criticisms from Susan Lindee, a senior historian of science at the University of Pennsylvania who had written extensively about Neel. As soon as she got the Turner-Sponsel letter via e-mail, Lindee dropped everything except her class and ran over to Neel’s archives at the American Philosophical Society to see if she had missed something major. On the contrary, she immediately found extensive evidence that Tierney had gotten many things wrong. She issued an open letter saying so, and later reported her findings in person at the AAA meeting. Lindee found clear signs that the outbreak of measles had predated Neel’s arrival with the vaccines, so he could not have caused the epidemic, as Tierney, Turner, and Sponsel suggested. And although Tierney claimed Neel had tried to stop his colleagues from treating the Yanomamö so he could run a Nazi-like experiment to see who would live and who would die, Lindee found substantial evidence that Neel had done all he could to get ahead of the epidemic and save those who were already infected. (...)

Meanwhile, one scholar of the Yanomamö after another showed evidence that, contrary to the claims of Tierney, Turner, and Sponsel, Chagnon had not invented the Yanomamö reputation for ferocity, fighting, and abducting women. In spite of Tierney’s portrayal of Chagnon as the bringer of strife to a naturally Edenic people, various anthropologists and historians pointed to evidence for Yanomamö conflict and the kidnapping of fertile women dating back to long before Chagnon was even born.

Yet in spite of all these clear declarations that Tierney’s book amounted to a house of cards, the AAA had gone full steam ahead. That meant the AAA essentially bolstered Tierney’s claims against Chagnon and the late Neel and provided PR for Tierney’s book and New Yorker article, too. The Tierney-inspired free-for-all conducted under the auspices of the AAA enabled “scholars” to stand up at microphones and debate whether Chagnon was a “swashbuckling misogynist” and a fomenter of violence, to claim that various American and European scientists had been responsible for spreading Ebola around Africa, and to use the AAA Web site to throw up utterly undocumented charges against colleagues. (...)

Some anthropologists did try to fight back. In 2003, Tom Gregor of Vanderbilt University and Dan Gross of the World Bank launched a referendum in the AAA explicitly criticizing Tierney’s book and the AAA El Dorado Task Force (and thus implicitly criticizing Turner and Sponsel) for misrepresenting the Yanomamö measles vaccine history in such a way as to undermine ongoing vaccine campaigns that otherwise had the potential to save vulnerable people all over the world. The referendum passed by a ratio of 11 to 1. Then in 2005, Gregor and Gross put forth another referendum to withdraw the AAA’s acceptance of the Task Force Report. The motion passed by a ratio of about 2.5 to 1. Impressive, particularly considering that by then a fair number of science-oriented anthropologists apparently had quit the AAA because of what its leadership had done to Chagnon, Neel, and science itself. (One of my closest friends in East Lansing, a scientific anthropologist at Michigan State, told me that he had dropped his AAA membership right after the AAA had tried Chagnon in the kangaroo court held at the San Francisco meeting.)

But those referenda, coming fairly late in the game, couldn’t possibly undo the damage done to Chagnon’s and Neel’s reputations. Indeed, in some ways, they simply muddied the filthy waters more. When I came to the story, in spite of the AAA membership’s vote four years earlier to rescind acceptance of the Task Force Report—to essentially take back any hint of a guilty verdict—the report remained up on the AAA Web site, without any attached notice of the rescission. It included a number of ruinous (and completely unsupported) claims, including the allegation that Chagnon had paid his Yanomamö subjects to kill each other.

As for Chagnon, it seemed pretty clear his career had essentially been halted by the whole mess. He was supposed to have retired with his wife Carlene to this house in the Michigan woods so he would have a place to hunt, to fish, to run his dogs, and to write his memoirs. But from what I was hearing, his memoirs seemed to be stalled. And perched on a bluff, reachable only down a long driveway, this house seemed to me less like a sanctuary than a fortress. (...)

He told me he remembered, particularly vividly, how much it had meant to him when he got the call from Danny Gross telling him of the successful vote among the AAA membership to rescind acceptance of the AAA’s El Dorado Task Force Report. He told me of his colleagues at UCSB—Ed Hagen, Michael Price, and John Tooby in particular—fighting back by showing Tierney’s twisted use of sources and quotations. And he told me of how his friend Ed (E. O.) Wilson at Harvard, the founder of sociobiology, had called him every week to make sure he knew he was not alone.

Decades before, Chagnon had been the one defending Wilson. The most vivid instance had to be the time in 1978 when Wilson was presenting about sociobiology at a special session of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C. Wilson had broken his leg recently, so he was in a cast that stretched almost from his ankle to his hip. As he tried to speak, several members of the self-proclaimed “International Committee Against Racism” had rushed the stage, declared Wilson all wet, and dumped a pitcher of water over his head. Chagnon had been at the back of the auditorium, but he rushed up to try to knock heads together as necessary. Probably best for all, the ensuing pandemonium blocked Chagnon’s path. But Chagnon had been more effectual in various other venues at defending Wilson, particularly against what Wilson felt were misrepresentations by Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould, who were also at Harvard and who claimed to speak for the oppressed.

When the El Dorado storm hit, Wilson made sure to call Chagnon often to remind him of what mattered and give him some sympathy. (...)

He hastened to tell me of the time he and his best friend, the anthropologist Bill Irons, had tried to hold the first session on sociobiology in anthropology at a AAA meeting in the 1970s. A motion had been put forth to cancel the session because of the supposed dangers of sociobiology. Mead stood up and said the attempted ban was akin to book burning. Her words turned the vote in Chagnon and Irons’s favor, saving the session just moments before Ed Wilson arrived to participate. (...)

Everything became a bit clearer when I received a batch of photocopies from Sarah Hrdy, a primatologist who had been invited to join the task force but had declined. In the stack of documents Hrdy sent me, I found what was supposed to have been a confidential e-mail exchange dated April 2002 between Hrdy and Jane Hill, the chair of the task force. (To Hill’s credit, when I asked, she gave me permission to quote her message in my work.) A good friend of Hames and a supporter of Chagnon, Hrdy had written to Hill, after Hames resigned, to express concern over what was going on. Hill replied:

Burn this message. The book is just a piece of sleaze, that’s all there is to it (some cosmetic language will be used in the report, but we all agree on that). But I think the AAA had to do something because I really think that the future of work by anthropologists with indigenous peoples in Latin America—with a high potential to do good—was put seriously at risk by its accusations, and silence on the part of the AAA would have been interpreted as either assent or cowardice. Whether we’re doing the right thing will have to be judged by posterity.

So this was the heart of it: The task force knew “the book is just a piece of sleaze,” but in their view, Chagnon had to be strung up to save anthropology from Tierney’s bad rap.

("Galileo's Middle Finger", Alice Dreger)

Alice Dreger: The Craig case

2016-02-14T11:01:00.005+02:00

Months before I had gone to Columbia, Drew had sent me the “biology of rape” review Roughgarden had published in Ethology, and I assured Drew I remembered it. You don’t easily forget an essay in a scientific journal that calls for authors of a scientific monograph to swing in the wind. (Quoth Roughgarden: “Thornhill and Palmer are guilty of all allegations and they deserve to hang. But before stringing them up, let’s reflect.”) But even Roughgarden’s contempt for these guys would not have made me like them if they had actually said what they’d been accused of saying: that rapists should be excused and forgiven because their genes made them do it and that raped women had been asking for it. Of course, they hadn’t said that.

What Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer had said was that rape has a sexual component to it—that contrary to the claims of some feminists, rape isn’t merely an expression of unadulterated power. Thornill and Palmer marshaled evidence suggesting that some kinds of sexual coercion in some species, including humans, may increase the likelihood of reproductive success of some males. They also collected evidence showing that human rapists in general tend to be interested in women of childbearing age whom they find sexually attractive. Notably, Thornhill and Palmer took very seriously the harm caused to women by rapists and argued that truly caring for victims of rape meant taking seriously possible biological contributions to sexual coercion. While their work might help to explain rape—and, they hoped, even prevent and prosecute it—they certainly did not excuse, condone, or forgive rape. Contrary to Roughgarden’s assertions, they did not provide “the latest ‘evolution-made-me-do-it’ excuse for criminal behavior.” (...)

Then in January 2000, Randy and Craig published a summary of their forthcoming book in an article entitled “Why Men Rape” in the Sciences, a magazine of the New York Academy of Sciences. All hell started to break loose, and things only got worse when the book came out in April. (...)

One criticism after another came flying at Thornhill and Palmer, in the popular media, in the presses of the intelligentsia, and in the mail. As Craig showed me, the majority of these criticisms attributed to Craig and Randy various ignorant and obnoxious claims that they had never made. For example, in Time magazine, Barbara Ehrenreich suggested that Thornhill and Palmer seriously downplayed the amount of harm done to rape victims, even though the book takes that harm very seriously, even attempting to quantify it and make sense of variations in levels of harm. (Perhaps like Dr. Laura in the Rind case, Ehrenreich just couldn’t wrap her head around anything other than the classic story of sexual assault in which the victim is always irrevocably devastated.) A letter writer to the Los Angeles Times assumed that because Thornhill and Palmer said rape was sexual, they were also labeling it normal. The Nashville Tennessean’s headline called the work a “‘Can’t Help It’ Theory,” while the Manchester Guardian similarly announced “The Men Can’t Help It,” as if Thornhill and Palmer had concluded that men amounted to pathetic slaves to their evolutionary histories. Meanwhile, the Toronto Globe and Mail ran angry letters under the title “Are Men Natural-Born Rapists?” as if that was exactly what A Natural History of Rape had concluded, the reality of the book be damned.

The feminist writer-activist Susan Brownmiller seemed particularly furious, and no wonder. In their work, Randy and Craig directly took issue with Brownmiller’s highly influential opinion that rape is essentially about power and domination, not lust. (...)

Thornhill and Palmer shared Brownmiller’s desires for an end to rape and for compassion and justice for rape victims, but they argued that Brownmiller’s account of rape as primarily being about power didn’t match the facts. Men seeking power over women could find it in a number of ways, but the choice to rape a woman and especially the ability to sustain an erection during a rape suggested, at the very least, significant sexual arousal. Denial of that reality, Randy and Craig argued, would only lead to more harm to women.

As Craig recalled the public battles with me, he pulled out an example of Brownmiller’s influence. He handed me a pamphlet distributed by the University of California–Davis’s Rape Prevention Education Program, a branch of the university’s police department. Here’s some of what it said:

FACT: Sexual assault is an act of physical and emotional violence, not of sexual gratification. Rapists assault to dominate, humiliate, control, degrade, terrify, and violate. Studies show that power and anger are the primary motivating factors... .

FACT: Sexual assault victims range in age from infants to the elderly. Appearance and attractiveness are not relevant. A rapist assaults someone who is accessible and vulnerable.

Craig looked visibly disturbed as he read this stuff. Was it really ethical to suggest to a woman that she didn’t need to be concerned about how attractive a potential rapist might find her when she was in an environment where she was vulnerable? And did it really make sense to suggest that rapists were never motivated by sex? (...)

The year before Craig moved to Maine, in the Arizona neighborhood where he lived, a neighbor’s daughter had been kidnapped and murdered. “They caught the guy they thought had done it,” Craig recalled, “and said they had all kinds of forensic evidence that he had committed the crime. About three days after the body was found, I remember there were two headlines on the same page. One headline ... said something like ‘Autopsy Determines Victim Was Sexually Assaulted.’ Which I think everyone who heard about the case expected. But on the same page, the main headline said something like ‘Still No Motive Found.’”

Craig recognized that this juxtaposition reflected the standard dogma about rape—that rape (and thus also kidnapping and murder done to facilitate a rapist’s aims) were not explainable simply as a sexual act gone evil. (...)

While living in Maine, Craig got a call from an assistant district attorney in Arizona. About this, Craig told me,

My first thought was that I must have forgotten to turn in some library book that was now a year overdue. But the assistant DA said the rape/murder [of the neighbor] was coming to trial, and his job was to contact everyone who lived in that part of town to see if he could find anyone who had seen an angry interaction between the girl who was raped and murdered and the man who was accused.

Craig had nothing to offer. “I was curious about why he would need someone to report that specific thing, so I asked him, ... ‘Couldn’t you just argue that the guy was sexually attracted to this girl and he knew she would never have sex with him willingly?’” Couldn’t the DA reasonably postulate that the motive was sexual and the murder had been committed to cover up the crime?

The DA answered that that was basically what they had tried to argue, but “the defense said something like ‘scientists had proved rape is not sexually motivated. Instead it’s motivated by a desire for violence, control, or power.’ So that’s the motive that had to be established.” Craig found himself thoroughly frustrated. Did it really make sense to talk about rape as if it were a nonsexual act—especially when such a poorly evidenced claim gets in the way of bringing rapist-murderers to justice? Clearly, the populist dogma “could even let a murderer and rapist go free,” he said to me. (...)

In writing about the biological bases of sexual coercion, Craig inevitably encountered the work of the zoologist Randy Thornhill, who was interested in the same topic. In his studies of scorpionflies, Randy had found plenty of evidence that male scorpionflies prefer consensual sex, i.e., sex in which the female participates, typically in response to male presentation of a nuptial gift, something along the lines of a dead insect or a mass of hardened saliva. But if a male is unable to get a female to cooperate sexually—if, for example, he can’t get his legs on a gift—he will resort to forced sex, using a grabbing organ that appears to have evolved for just this purpose. Craig and Randy understood that humans differ radically in many ways—no one’s getting this girl into bed with a gift of petrified spit, and men don’t have a specialized rape-facilitating organ—but Craig and Randy also understood the value of recognizing that human sexuality has evolved. Some men’s rape of women might therefore be explainable with the tools of evolutionary biology. (...)

As one might predict, when the media frenzy set in around the book, Craig and Randy had the typical experience of those who challenge conventional wisdom. Commentators took the existing stories of good and evil, good guys and bad guys, acceptable claims and unacceptable, and tried to fit Thornhill and Palmer into those preexisting slots. Since Thornhill and Palmer seemed to be saying unacceptable things about rape—it does matter whether a victim looks sexually attractive to a rapist; rape is often about sex; biology does contribute to sexual coercion—that meant they had to be the bad guys. Thus, in the crunching of the daily media machinery, they were magically transformed into misogynistic apologists for rape. Then all you had to do was put into their mouths the words Bad Guys say about rape: “The woman was asking for it, and the guy couldn’t help himself.” And so came the hate mail and the threatening phone calls. About those, Craig told me, “Let’s just say I learned the legal line that separates official death threats from run-of-the-mill nasty e-mails and letters.”

The messages left on Randy’s answering machine were so frightening that a local sheriff did him the favor of recording the outgoing message for him in a very macho voice. His message indicated that the speaker was a law enforcement official, said that the call was being recorded, and reminded people that it’s against the law to call people up to tell them you’re going to kill them. The business about the police recording the call wasn’t true, but it helped. Randy (and his kids) no longer had to hear what people wanted to do to this Thornhill guy. Meanwhile, on Craig’s end, “Things were so bad that the police told me to take some precautions, like checking my car for car bombs every morning and varying my routine. I was even provided a special parking place on campus they thought would be safer.”

Craig mentioned one more thing that kept him going: the sense that he was right in a way that ultimately would help women. He had more and more reason to believe that was true because he was getting messages from rape survivors who told him they appreciated his understanding that the men who assaulted them had done so for sexual gratification. Some were even thanking Thornhill and Palmer in public.

In the Lifestyles section of the Dallas Morning News, Elizabeth Eckstein began her op-ed this way:

Finally. Finally, somebody is coming around to my way of thinking on the motivations of rape. I can say this because I survived an aggravated sexual assault by a serial rapist and, more important, two years of post-traumatic stress syndrome that included an exhausting state of hypervigilance, sudden panic attacks, yelling at God and the cold clench of fear in my gut. I also was consumed with an obsessive (some would say unhealthy) need to know why. Why me? Why him? Why rape? So I tried to find out. During my quest, I came across a lot of people who liked to quote the so-called experts and say things such as, “It’s a crime of violence, not sex” and “It’s a control thing.” Boy, did I hate those people. In my mind, they were wrong. I used to reply to those sorts in a real catty fashion. “He didn’t force me into the kitchen to break all the dishes. He didn’t make me smash all the furniture in the house. He made me have sex with him against my will. Sex, people, sex at gunpoint. Choice absolutely and totally removed from the equation. An act, typically one of love, reduced to its lowest and ugliest form.”

(...) At some point, Craig pulled an envelope out of the stack, and from the envelope pulled out a four-page handwritten letter from a guy serving time in a federal penitentiary in the South. Craig skimmed it, paused, and handed it to me, saying I needed to be sure that if I used this letter, I not identify the writer. The handwriting was neat, the prose clear, and the writer pretty well educated. He had read or heard of Randy and Craig’s article in the Sciences, and he was writing to give Randy his own opinion:

I know from repeated first hand experience that sex really is the central motivation to rape. Although this may not always be true with all offenders, or even all cases of adult rape, I know from my own self introspection through offender programming treatment, and from other adult offenders I’ve been in such programming with, that sexual attraction and instinctual sex urges acting as biological imperatives strongly motivated acts of rape (strangers/adult female). It’s frequently confessed.

The convict went on to explain about how rapists—presumably just like him—pick off females as attractive and “available” targets. He agreed with Palmer and Thornhill on this: “A dumb myth is that rapists go after any female.” The writer went on: “Although from a therapeutic view it is of course important that an offender in no way get to abrogate his guilt by placing blame on the victim’s real or imagined provocative behaviors, the school of thought [that says rape is not about sex] stymies and downplays the existence of these powerful motivations.”

How, the letter implicitly asked throughout, can rape be successfully prevented, and rapists treated or at least adequately controlled, if we deny the reality of men like this? The correspondent, a man hopefully locked up behind bars for a very long time, was clearly moved to commit a heinous crime by a pathological kind of lust. But a lust nonetheless.

Reading this letter, I found myself going still with fear. Or rather, a combination of fears: One part a fear of rapists like this man, who will see a sexual solicitation in a woman’s bending down to pick up her keys. One part a fear of ideologies like feminism—ideologies that might lead reasonable, progressive people like me to accidentally hurt someone for the sake of a more palatable or more useful argument. And one part a fear that anything I say can and will be used against me, as had happened to Craig. (...)

At the university of Missouri, after talking for hours with Craig Palmer, I went on to talk to the other interviewees I’d arranged to meet, but I found it hard to concentrate. I kept doing a really weird math: What’s worse, having your work denounced by an act of Congress or trying to help prevent rape only to be accused of fomenting it? What’s more terrifying, being charged with having sex with a research subject or getting a lesson in how to check for bombs wired to your car? And who is the real feminist, the one who reflexively sides with people who’ve been historically downtrodden or the one who does so only after checking the facts? (...)

Then of course there were predictable claims about my position: A non-queer person could never understand the reality of queer people. My work could silence trans women in the academy, women who allegedly lacked the privilege I allegedly had. One identity card after another was thrown down—which only made sense in a “feminist” room where you win simply by having the most identity cards. I found myself thinking that Women’s Studies is about as sophisticated a game as Go Fish. (...)

Rosa, April, and I left the conference room and started to walk down toward the hotel bar with a fourth woman whom we knew from intersex work and who had insisted on coming with us. But as we made our way, James suddenly came up to me.

“Alice, honey,” she said to me, towering over me, “I’m not done with you. In fact, I haven’t even started with you.” She said she was still going to prove Bailey had lied in his book. “I’m going to ruin your career.”

In a split second, Rosa stepped between us, and calmly spoke as if to me, though clearly actually speaking to James. “Alice,” she said, “the legal definition of assault does not require that a person touch you. You can call the police right now and report assault.”

At that, James hastily stepped away.

We went down to the hotel bar. It was the middle of the day, and yet after arranging nonalcoholic drinks for the other three, I ordered a gin and tonic for myself, and then another. As the sedative washed over my brain, Rosa told us about herself, mentioning that she had a degree in women’s studies but was tired of the bullshit of the field. She was finishing her master’s degree in public policy now, writing about her own experience of trying to change the sex on her driver’s license without being forced into medical procedures she didn’t want. She had some radical ideas about how to harness capitalism to push for transgender rights. Enough of the liberal feminist and queer rights rhetoric; it was time to use the existing economic system and work through for-profit institutions to make the world safe for trans people. In the meantime, while she finished her master’s, Rosa was working in the pawn industry in Connecticut. I got the sense that the guys in the business had had to accept her as a transgender woman because they had enough business smarts to know they needed her. (...)

I kept thinking: What if we became unafraid of all questions? Unbridled in our support of the investigation of “dangerous” ideas? What if we came together in the ivory towers, barricaded the doors, and looked at the skies? (...)

As we had talked in his office, Craig Palmer had said of his experiences: “From all this, I’ve learned more about the human species and how it can do things like lynch mobs and genocide and stuff. I’m not sure I’m glad to have that knowledge. One of my colleagues asked if the experience had lowered my view of the media. And I said no, it’s lowered my view of the species.” (...)

THE STORY I HAD BEEN TOLD about Mike Bailey and Craig Palmer and so many other white straight male scientists accused of producing bad and dangerous findings, the story I had willingly heard as an academic feminist in the humanities, was that these guys were just soldiers of the oppressive establishment against which we good guys had come to fight. They came from old dogma about human nature; we came from progress and social justice, and so we had to win. But here I was faced with the fact that not only were these scientists politically progressive when it came to things like the rights of transgender people and rape victims, they were also willing to look for facts that might get them in hot water. They very much cared about progress in social justice, but they cared first about knowing what was true.

That didn’t mean that these scientists (or I, or anyone else) existed without bias. It didn’t mean their work wasn’t shaped and sometimes tainted by politics, ideologies, and loyalties. But it did mean they tried to adhere to an intellectual agenda that wasn’t first and only political. They believed that good science couldn’t be done by just Ouija-boarding your answers. Good scholarship had to put the search for truth first and the quest for social justice second.

In Missouri, I realized that there’s a practical reason for this order: Sustainable justice couldn’t be achieved if we didn’t know what’s true about the world. (You can’t effectively prosecute and prevent rape if you don’t understand why, where, and how rape happens.) But there was also a more essential reason for putting the quest for truth first: it was who we scholars were supposed to be. As the little prop plane flew from Columbia, Missouri, toward the sunrise, of this I was sure: We scholars had to put the search for evidence before everything else, even when the evidence pointed to facts we did not want to see. The world needed that of us, to maintain—by our example, by our very existence—a world that would keep learning and questioning, that would remain free in thought, inquiry, and word.

Nevertheless I knew many of my colleagues in the humanities would disagree. I could practically hear them arguing against me, as if they were seated all around me in those cramped fake-leather seats, yelling to be heard above the churning propellers. We have to use our privilege to advance the rights of the marginalized. We can’t let people like Bailey and Palmer say what is true about the world. We have to give voice and power to the oppressed and let them say what is true. Science is as biased as all human endeavors, and so we have to empower the disempowered, and speak always with them.

Involuntarily shaking my head, I argued back: “Justice cannot be determined merely by social position. Justice cannot be advanced by letting ‘truth’ be determined by political goals. Only people like us, with insane amounts of privilege, could ever think it was a good idea to decide what is right before we even know what is true. Only insanely privileged people like us, who never fear the knock of a corrupt police, could think guilt or innocence should be determined by identity rather than by facts. Science—the quest for evidence—is not ‘just another way of knowing.’ It’s a methodical process of checking each other, checking theory against experiment, checking claim against fact, and fact against fact. It isn’t perfect, but look what it has gotten us: antibiotics, an explanation and a treatment for AIDS, reliable histories of the Holocaust, DNA-based exonerations of those falsely accused of crimes, spaceships on the surface of Mars—hell, the plane we’re flying in now.”

Where would we be, I wondered, if the pope had ultimately won out over Galileo, if he had succeeded in using his self-serving Catholic identity politics to forever quash Galileo’s evidence that the ancients and the Bible were wrong about the Earth? Power plays as morality plays, whether by popes or feminists, are just that—plays. I longed for the real world, longed to get away from discussions about “representations” of reality. I longed to pick apart each history to know what’s true, to have my work judged by others, to find evidence that an idea is right or wrong.

("Galileo's Middle Finger", Alice Dreger)

Alice Dreger: The Rind case

2016-02-14T11:01:00.003+02:00

I knew from my background reading that in 1998 Nancy Eisenberg (of Arizona State) and Ken had been the editors at Psychological Bulletin responsible for publishing a paper that came to be known as “the Rind paper.” Psychological Bulletin is one of the publications of the American Psychological Association, and at the time, Eisenberg served as editor in chief. As was typical for manuscripts submitted to the journal, Eisenberg assigned the submitted Rind paper to one of her two associate editors to shepherd it through peer review and revision. The associate editor assigned the task of managing the manuscript was Ken Sher.

Sher and Eisenberg had decided that the Rind paper—after it passed the usual peer-review process—would certainly be worth publishing. Bruce Rind, Philip Tromovitch, and Robert Bauserman had performed a meta-analysis of studies of childhood sexual abuse, or CSA. They took a series of existing studies—on college students who as children had been targets of sexual advances by adults—and looked to see what patterns they could find.

What had seemed particularly important to Sher and Eisenberg about the Rind paper was its parsing of which factors in cases of CSA were associated with long-term psychological harm. For example, the Rind paper’s analysis suggested that girls were more likely to be psychologically harmed by CSA than boys and that an incestuous family environment that also involved other forms of physical and emotional abuse was more likely to result in harm than nonincestuous CSA in less abusive environments. The paper also suggested that it did not make a lot of sense to lump together under the term childhood sexual abuse both (a) molestation of a five-year-old by a sixty-year-old, and (b) consensual sex that happens between a sixteen-year-old and a twenty-year-old. Yet the scientific literature sometimes did that. The paper therefore tried to bring a more scientific approach to a very heated topic.

But in taking seriously the idea that not everyone is devastated by everything termed childhood sexual abuse, Rind, Tromovitch, and Bauserman were saying something very politically incorrect: some people grow up to be psychologically pretty healthy even after having been CSA victims. In fact, Rind and company opted to go even further in their paper, suggesting that the term childhood sexual abuse seemed to imply that child-adult sex always led to great and lasting harm, whereas the data seemed to show it did not in a surprising proportion of cases. The Rind paper recommended that those studying the problem employ a more neutral terminology and sort out the different types of sex (and harm) occurring.

Rind, Tromovitch, and Bauserman closed the paper with an attempt to avoid being accused of being apologists for pedophilia, reminding readers that just because an action might not harm does not make it morally right: “If it is true that wrongfulness in sexual matters does not imply harmfulness”—a point they attributed to my old pal John Money—“then it is also true that lack of harmfulness does not imply lack of wrongfulness... . In this sense, the findings of the current review do not imply that moral or legal definitions of or views on behaviors currently classified as CSA should be abandoned or even altered.”

Well, that little “we’re not advocating pedophilia” disclaimer sure didn’t work. Activist pedophiles saw in the Rind paper justification for us all to just get out of the way already and let them at little kids. Blatantly ignoring the point made at the end of the Rind paper, the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMbLA) called the Rind paper “The Good News About Man/Boy Love.” Thus the Rind paper became the gospel according to NAMbLA, a group whose mere logo can thoroughly creep you out. (The M for Man leans to the right, pushing against the little b for boy, as though the M is mounting the b. Seriously, that’s what it looks like.)

If NAMbLA saw a golden opportunity in the Rind paper, Laura Schlessinger had visions of platinum. In the spring of 1999, on her Dr. Laura Program, Schlessinger simplified the whole scene in predictable ways, making the Rind paper out to be junk science and suggesting that Rind and company were virtual pitchmen for pedophilia. The fact that the American Psychological Association (Psychological Bulletin’s publisher) then looked like the PR arm of NAMbLA was undoubtedly a delightful side effect from Schlessinger’s point of view. Schlessinger had no use for the APA, an organization that openly leaned left. She pulled out all the stops, ultimately encouraging conservative members of Congress to use the Rind paper to go after the APA. The not so honorable Tom DeLay, representative of Texas’s Twenty-Second Congressional District, was only too happy to heed Dr. Laura’s call. No doubt still stinging from impeaching Clinton without managing to remove him as president, DeLay found in the Rind paper a new sexual ticket to ride. And ride it he did.

By July of 1999, DeLay managed to get the House of Representatives to condemn the Rind paper by a vote of 355 to 0 (with 13 members voting only “present”). Just a few days later, the Senate followed suit, unanimously resolving “that Congress condemns and denounces all suggestions in the article ‘A Meta-Analytic Examination of Assumed Properties of Child Sexual Abuse Using College Samples’ that indicate that sexual relationships between adults and ‘willing’ children are less harmful than believed.” Congress also saw fit to condemn “any suggestion that sexual relations between children and adults ... are anything but abusive, destructive, exploitative, reprehensible, and punishable by law.”

And there you have it: the only scientific paper ever to be condemned by an act of Congress. (...)

What seemed to bother Sher most, though, wasn’t the stupidity of Congress. It was the way the American Psychological Association had handled the matter. In spite of being reasonably worried that the controversy might be used to cut federal funding to such institutions as the National Institute of Mental Health, initially the APA had done a good job keeping the politicians at the gate. Despite calls for the editors’ heads, they were not removed by the APA, and the APA kept Sher and Eisenberg apprised of what was going on. One of the senior staff even made a point of calling to acknowledge the stress Sher and Eisenberg had to be experiencing.

But then, as DeLay increasingly threatened to go after the APA itself, Raymond Fowler, the association’s chief executive officer, caved. He wrote what came to be known as the capitulation letter, assuring Delay that “the article included opinions of the authors that are inconsistent with APA’s stated and deeply held positions on child welfare and protection issues.” Meaning what, exactly? That the APA’s “stated and deeply held positions on child welfare” included that all victims of pedophilia must be profoundly and immutably harmed? (...)

Fowler announced that the APA would arrange for an independent review of the Rind paper, an unprecedented move and a seeming admission that if a paper’s PR was bad enough, the normal scientific review process could be subverted in the service of politics. Sher recalled to me that the APA turned to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) to do the review, only to have the AAAS do what the APA should have done: defend the scientific process from political meddling. Irving Lerch, chair of the AAAS Committee on Scientific Freedom and Responsibility, dressed the APA down:

We see no reason to second-guess the process of peer review used by the APA journal in its decision to publish the article in question... . We believe that disputes over methods in science are best resolved, not through the intervention of AAAS or any other “independent” organization, but rather through the process of intellectual discourse among scientists in a professional field.

Lerch also suggested in his letter that the APA might have done more to correct the public mischaracterizations of the Rind paper, rather than implicitly repeating them through capitulation.

Many saw Fowler’s letter on behalf of the APA as selling out not only the Rind paper’s authors, editors, and reviewers, but science itself. (...)

This was hard to swallow. So I swallowed a bit more of my drink and remarked to Sher how odd I thought it was that people would be so angry to hear that not every victim of pedophilia had had his or her life utterly ruined. It seemed to me the Rind paper contained a bit of good news for survivors, namely that psychological devastation need not always be a lifelong sequela to having been sexually used as a child by an adult in search of his own gratification. But simpler stories of good and evil sell better.

Remembering the whole fiasco, Sher recalled to me how the process had been rigged. The Congressional resolution condemned together both pedophilia and the Rind paper, so as Sher and Eisenberg later noted in a written reflection on the whole mess, “One could not vote in favor of the [Rind] article without voting for pedophilia.” If you wanted to try to distinguish pedophilia and the scientific process, abstaining from voting was the best you could do. Surely DeLay purposely set it up that way.

("Galileo's Middle Finger", Alice Dreger)

Alice Dreger: The Bailey case

2016-02-14T11:01:00.001+02:00

In 2003, three years before I came to the story, a group of transgender activists had kicked up a storm over a book by a Northwestern sex researcher, J. Michael Bailey, because in that book, Bailey had pushed a theory these activists didn’t like: Bailey had suggested that, in cases of men who become women, transgender isn’t just about gender identity, but also about sexual orientation—about eroticism. This, I already knew, was a no-no among certain groups of transgender activists who insisted that virtually all transgender people are born with the brain of one sex and the body of the other—that transgender identity is just about core inborn gender, not about erotic feelings. To opine about sexual orientation in conjunction with transgender the way Bailey did was to skip into a minefield created by four decades of intense social and medical battles over the nature of transgender identity.

Still, I thought I knew from my background in science studies and a decade of intersex work how to navigate an identity politics minefield, so I wasn’t that worried when in 2006 I set out to investigate the history of what had really happened with Bailey and his critics. My investigation ballooned into a year of intensive research and a fifty-thousand-word peer-reviewed scholarly account of the controversy. And the results shocked me. Letting the data lead me, I uncovered a story that upended the simple narrative of power and oppression to which we leftist science studies scholars had become accustomed.

I found that, in the Bailey case, a small group had tried to bury a politically challenging scientific theory by killing the messenger. In the process of doing so, these critics, rather than restrict themselves to the argument over the ideas, had charged Bailey with a whole host of serious crimes, including abusing the rights of subjects, having sex with a transsexual research subject, and making up data. The individuals making these charges—a trio of powerful transgender women, two of them situated in the safe house of liberal academia—had nearly ruined Bailey’s reputation and his life. To do so, they had used some of the tactics we had used in the intersex rights movement: blanketing the Web to make sure they set the terms of debate, reaching out to politically sympathetic reporters to get the story into the press, doling out fresh information and new characters at a steady pace to keep the story in the media and to keep the pressure on, and rhetorically tapping into parallel left-leaning stories to make casual bystanders “get it” and care. Tracking their chosen techniques was occasionally like reading a how-to activist manual that I could have written, but there was one crucial difference: What they claimed about Bailey simply wasn’t true.

You can probably guess what happens when you expose the unseemly deeds of people who fight dirty, particularly when you publish a meticulously documented journal article detailing exactly what they did, and especially when the New York Times covers what you found. Certainly I should have known what was coming—after all, I had literally written what amounted to a book on what this small group of activists had done to Bailey. But it was still pretty uncomfortable when I became the new target of their precise and unrelenting attacks. The online story soon morphed into “Alice Dreger versus the rights of sexual minorities,” and no matter how hard I tried to point people back to documentation of the truth, facts just didn’t seem to matter. (...)

[T]here is always a lot at stake politically and socially when you’re talking about transgender. And yet, while some of Bailey’s best friends really were gay men and trans women, in his clueless privileged way, he didn’t worry about his work’s political implications for sexual minorities. He worried only about what’s right scientifically, and he decided that Blanchard’s taxonomy was right about the salience of sexual orientation to male-to-female transsexuality. Bailey gave quite sympathetic portrayals of all the trans women in his book, including Juanita and Cher, and he firmly concluded that the ultimate happiness of individual transgender people is what matters most, even if transitions leave families or communities unhappy. But Bailey made the mistake of thinking that openly accepting and promoting the truth about people’s identities would be understood as the same as accepting them and helping them, as he felt he was. Where identities as stigmatized as these are concerned, it just isn’t that simple. The shame and derision accorded trans women like Juanita and Cher doesn’t disappear just because a few scientists may be personally fine with the idea that men might become women primarily because of reasons of sexuality, not “trapped” gender identity. As I came to learn, Bailey thought sexuality was a plenty good reason for lots of actions. But the trans women who attacked Bailey for his book understood that the world would probably not agree.

And they weren’t interested in finding out. They wanted the whole business of Blanchard’s taxonomic division shot down. Transsexuality should appear only as the public could stomach it, as one simple story of gender, a tale of “true” females tragically born into male bodies, rescued and made whole by medical and surgical sex reassignment. And there should be absolutely no mention of autogynephilia or any other sexual desires that might make trans women look to the sexually sheltered like the perverts they were historically assumed to be.

To understand the vehemence of the backlash against Bailey’s book, you also have to understand one more thing. There’s a critical difference between autogynephilia and most other sexual orientations: Most other orientations aren’t erotically disrupted simply by being labeled. When you call a typical gay man homosexual, you’re not disturbing his sexual hopes and desires. By contrast, autogynephilia is perhaps best understood as a love that would really rather we didn’t speak its name. The ultimate eroticism of autogynephilia lies in the idea of really becoming or being a woman, not in being a natal male who desires to be a woman. At least in fantasy, the typical autogynephile erotically desires a complete identity transformation—to be a woman, not to be a transsexual. So when the autogynephilic psychiatrist Richard/Alice Novic talks about her boyfriend stimulating her genitals, she refers to her “clitoris,” although anatomically what she has is a penis. The erotic fantasy is to really be a woman. Indeed, according to a vision of transsexualism common among those transitioning from lives as privileged straight men to trans women, sex reassignment procedures are restorative rather than transformative, because the medical interventions “fix” what some call the “birth defect” in their natal bodies. Some even reject the label of transgender or transsexual for this reason; to themselves they are simply women, outside now as they always were inside.

For Bailey or anyone else to call someone with amour de soi en femme an autogynephile or even a transgender woman—rather than simply a woman—is at some level to interfere with her core sexual desire. Such naming also risks questioning her core self-identity in a way that calling the average gay man homosexual simply can’t. One really must understand this if one is going to understand why some trans women came after Bailey so hard for naming and describing autogynephilia. When they felt that Bailey was fundamentally threatening their selves and their social identities as women—well, it’s because he was. That’s what talking openly about autogynephilia necessarily does.

In a nutshell—and this is really indisputable—it was Bailey’s dangerous dissemination of this part of Blanchard’s work that led a prominent transgender woman named Lynn Conway to begin what became a war against Bailey from her base at the University of Michigan, where she was on the computer engineering faculty. As Conway must have understood, Blanchard’s scientific work, always written in rather dry prose and published in hard-to-access specialist journals, could never pose the threat of Bailey’s The Man Who Would Be Queen, with its intriguing scope, engaging prose, sex-positive tone, and compelling personalized portrayals. Bailey’s book constituted a serious innovation. It could well bring Blanchard’s taxonomy—including news of autogynephilia—to the masses and change the public perception of women like Conway.

And so, within days of publication of The Man Who Would Be Queen, Lynn Conway sent an urgent e-mail to a trans woman ally named Andrea James:

I just got an alert about J. Michael Bailey’s new book. It’s just been published and of all places it’s co-published by the National Academies Press, which gives it the apparent stamp of authority as “science.” ... As you may know, Bailey is the psychologist who promotes the “two-type” theory of transsexualism... . Anyways—not that there is much we can do about this—but we should probably read his book sometime and be prepared to shoot down as best we can his weird characterizations of us all.

You’re probably wondering how I got that e-mail. The answer is that Conway developed what became an enormous Web site hosted by the University of Michigan for the purpose of taking down Bailey and his ideas. There she proudly and steadily recorded her efforts against Bailey, Blanchard, et al. In fact, it was her own university Web site that largely enabled me to figure out what she had really done and how Bailey had essentially been set up in an effort to shut him up about autogynephilia. (...)

WHEN BAILEY’S BOOK emerged in 2003, I didn’t pay much attention to the mushroom cloud expanding over Evanston, Illinois, where Bailey was tenured in Northwestern’s Psychology Department. At that time, I was still working on intersex at Michigan State. But people I knew were increasingly trying to get my attention focused on it. Paul Vasey kept telling me he couldn’t believe what transgender critics were doing to Bailey and even to his children and girlfriend, and Lynn Conway herself was calling me to help go after Bailey. In fact, as I found out via Paul, Conway had simply added me to her Web site’s list of outraged allies, apparently assuming I would agree with her. (...)

I couldn’t figure this guy out. How could someone so soft-spoken get into so much trouble? Why would someone so very polite and politically progressive write those few really obnoxious lines in his book? Could it be, perhaps, that he was not homophobic or transphobic (his book certainly wasn’t, nor did he seem to be) and not tone-deaf but merely tone-dumb? Maybe he was someone who could hear the political music around him very well but lacked the ability to sing along in tune. His book was rather like a generally elegant solo performance punctuated by a number of teeth-grinding sour notes.

In the next couple of days, I poked around a bit. I looked up Bailey’s work and saw that most of it consisted of serious peer-reviewed scientific articles, quite different from his chatty and footnote-free book. I came across his old twin studies—controversial work that had showed that identical twins are more likely to have the same sexual orientation than are siblings who are not genetically identical, strongly suggesting that sexual orientation may sometimes be inborn. Suddenly I placed his name: I had actually taught my undergraduates criticisms of Bailey’s work on twins many years before. Back in those days, saying gay people might have been born that way, as Bailey was doing, was politically unpopular among many gay-rights activists and among humanists in the academy, who were fighting any claims of unalterable or predestined “human nature.” Back then, too, Bailey had sounded proudly tone-dumb.

I dug a little more. Knowing that one of Bailey’s book’s critics had claimed Bailey had “abandoned” his wife and children, I took a close look at the personal information portion of his Web site. The Bailey clan appeared to be one of those post-divorce families that is still fundamentally a family. If Bailey was faking that, it was a convincing fake, but his critic’s claim that he had abandoned his wife and children had been very effective in skewing this wife and mother’s impression of him.

As I kept digging, I noticed something even more interesting: Many of the trans people whose scholarship and political work I had most admired in the last ten years had remained strangely silent in the Bailey controversy. They had apparently steered clear. As had I. (...)

In May I got an e-mail from Mike Bailey bemoaning the fact that Northwestern’s Rainbow Alliance, our university’s LGBT group, had invited Andrea James to speak. I confessed to Mike that I had never really sorted out the characters in his controversy and asked him to remind me who she was. He sent me a PDF documenting how, in 2003, Andrea James had downloaded pictures of Bailey’s two children, Kate and Drew, from Bailey’s Web site and put them up on her own site, www.tsroadmap.com. When the photos were taken, Kate was in elementary school; Drew, in junior high. James had blacked out the children’s eyes, making them look like pathology specimens, and asked in a caption below, whether Kate was “a cock-starved exhibitionist, or a paraphiliac who just gets off on the idea of it.” The text went on to say that “there are two types of children in the Bailey household,” namely those “who have been sodomized by their father [and those] who have not.”

I was pretty stunned. Others had told me about this tasteless stunt, but I had never seen it for myself. It was obvious James was trying to parody Bailey’s book, but to what end? What kind of person undermines a rights movement by using this kind of creepy tactic?

So I promptly wrote to the Northwestern Rainbow Alliance, first apologizing that I hadn’t previously introduced myself. I explained that being a long-distance part-timer based on the Chicago med school campus meant I had almost no interaction with the Evanston campus, where the Rainbow Alliance (like Bailey) was housed. I offered to speak sometime about intersex, and then got to why I was writing, namely to register my protest at James being invited to the campus. I said I didn’t think she was good for a scholarly institution, nor did I think she was good for trans rights. They didn’t answer. Frustrated, on the day before Mother’s Day in 2006, I blogged about this on my personal Web site. Knowing a bit about James’s tactics, I called the essay, “The Blog I Write in Fear.”

Behold the floodgates opening. Now a few people from the Northwestern Rainbow Alliance did write back to me, to take issue with my criticism of their decision, and several trans women did the same. Meanwhile, fan mail arrived from a number of sex researchers and from Bailey’s daughter, Kate, now a college student. Some trans women wrote to tell me that no matter how Bailey was wronged, he deserved whatever he got. A couple more trans women wrote to me that Bailey was right about them all, and James knew it—that that was the problem.

But the most interesting mail, from my perspective, came from trans women who wrote to tell me that, though they weren’t thrilled with Bailey’s oversimplifications of their lives, they also had been harassed and intimidated by Andrea James for daring to speak anything other than the politically popular “I was always just a woman trapped in a man’s body” story. They thanked me for standing up to a woman they saw as a self-serving bully.

In what in retrospect seems like a stupid move, I also made a point of writing to Andrea James to tell her about my blog and to suggest that she tone down her rhetoric lest she undermine the trans-rights movement. Oh, she didn’t like that. She didn’t like that one bit. She wrote back a series of nasty e-mails, including one referring to my son as my “precious womb turd.” (Paul soon took to asking after “the precious womb turd” when he called.) She also showed up at my office when she was in Chicago, leaving her card in my mailbox. Then she e-mailed me, subject line “Mommy Knows Best,” saying, “Sorry I missed you the other day. Your colleagues seem quite affable, and not as fearful as you... . Bad move, Mommy.” She closed, “We’ll chat in person soon.” My dean suggested I talk to university counsel, who asked that I check in with the university police. (...)

The book prize

Conway showed up. And not just online, but in person. She started making what she called “field trips” to Chicago. The purpose? “To meet and begin interviewing Bailey’s research subjects.” Via these field trips and interviews and Conway’s and James’s Web sites, the public image of the scene quickly changed into “Bailey versus all LGBT folk,” such that most people (like me) casually watching the kerfuffle soon thought all the trans women in Bailey’s book felt surprised, abused, and angry about the book’s contents.

Casual observers thus remained oblivious to something critical: even months into the mess, plenty of gay and transgender people who had read The Man Who Would Be Queen actually saw the book not only as an accurate accounting of various forms of “feminine males”—from femme boys to gay men to transkids to drag queens to cross-dressers to fully transitioned autogynephilic trans women—but also as wonderfully supportive of LGBT people. The reason for that would have been obvious, if you bothered to read the book: In it Bailey unequivocally supports the right of all people to be gender-variant, to enjoy whatever sexual orientations they have (so long as they’re not using anyone who can’t consent or hasn’t consented), to be recognized by the gender labels they choose for themselves, and to get whatever medical interventions they wish. But most people didn’t read the book; they read only the reports of Bailey’s alleged abuse. And so they understood this book to be a LGBT-bashing bible—specifically to be to the transgender community what Birth of a Nation had been to African Americans.

Nevertheless, if one read the book—something it seems few reporters on the controversy did—one would have quickly realized that it actually made perfect sense that the Lambda Literary Foundation (LLF) included The Man Who Would Be Queen as a finalist for the 2004 Lambda Literary Award in the Transgender/GenderQueer category. Although Conway’s site would claim that Bailey’s publicists had gotten the book nominated for that award, Jim Marks, then executive director of the LLF, later revealed that in fact the book “was added to the list [of nominees] by a member of the finalist committee and after the finalist committee had selected it, we went back to the publisher, who paid the nominating fee.” According to Marks, things turned ugly only when, immediately after the announcement of the finalists, Deirdre McCloskey contacted him to express her outrage. McCloskey told Marks the situation “would be like nominating Mein Kampf for a literary prize in Jewish studies. I think some apologies and explanations and embarrassment are in order.” Marks wasn’t sure what to make of all this:

While I was a little taken aback by the campaign of a university professor to relegate a book to a kind of Orwellian non-history, we might have considered taking administrative action and removing the book from the list if McCloskey’s view had been universally that of the transgender community. The LLF was in some senses an advocacy organization. Its stated mission was to advance LGBT rights through furthering LGBT literature. We would clearly have grounds for removing a book that was in fact hostile to the Foundation’s mission.

But Marks found that “McCloskey’s point of view, although widely shared, was not universally that of the transgender community. Among the torrent of e-mails we received, a minority came from transgender people who supported the book and urged us to keep it on the list.” Marks’s “main concern was maintaining the integrity of the nominating process.” He asked the finalist committee what to do; they revoted, and the vote came back in favor of keeping the book on the list.

A petition sprung up in protest, quickly reaching nearly fifteen hundred signatures. For her part, Conway encouraged her followers to go straight after the LLF committee members. She wrote on her site:

We thought you’d like to know who the gay men and lesbian feminists are who launched this attack on us. Following are the names, addresses, URL’s, and phone numbers of these people. We think that they should hear from you, so as to gain some comprehension of the scale of the pain they have inflicted on trans women throughout the world.

She added a note about lesbian feminist bookstores with a history “of welcoming only ‘womyn born womyn’”—a means of excluding trans women—and she “suggest[ed] that our investigators out there quietly gather evidence about any discriminatory policies employed by stores listed below, for future publication on this site.”

Meanwhile, under all this pressure, the LLF judges felt the need to vote one more time. According to Marks, on that round, one “member changed their vote and we withdrew the book from consideration.” (...)

Even amid the powerful disinformation and intimidation campaigns, there had actually been one reporter who had had the opportunity to learn and tell a story much closer to the truth near the start of it all. This was Robin Wilson at the Chronicle of Higher Education. As her “Dr. Sex” feature had revealed, Wilson had personally witnessed firsthand the warm relationships between Bailey and his trans women friends and book subjects out at the Circuit nightclub that evening in May 2003. She had herself reported that these women saw Bailey as “their savior.” She had spoken to Kieltyka, who—while upset over the label of autogynephile—had had a long and collaborative history with Bailey. (...)

AFTER NEARLY A YEAR of research, I could come to only one conclusion: The whole thing was a sham. Bailey’s sworn enemies had used every clever trick in the book—juxtaposing events in misleading ways, ignoring contrary evidence, working the rhetoric, and using anonymity whenever convenient, to make it look as though virtually every trans woman represented in Bailey’s book had felt abused by him and had filed a charge.

("Galileo's Middle Finger", Alice Dreger)

Feynman on egalitarianism

2015-10-26T13:55:00.001+02:00

"There was a special dinner at some point, and the head of the theology place, a very nice, very Jewish man gave a speech. It was a good speech, and he was a very good speaker, so while it sounds crazy now, while I’m telling about it, at that time his main idea sounded completely obvious and true. He talked about the big differences in the welfare of various countries, which cause jealousy, which leads to conflict, and now that we have atomic weapons, any war and we’re doomed, so therefore the right way out is to strive for peace by making sure there are no great differences from place to place, and since we have so much in the United States, we should all give up nearly everything to the other countries until we’re all even. Everybody was listening to this, and we were all full of sacrificial feeling, and all thinking we ought to do this. But I came back to my senses on the way home.

The next day one of the guys in our group said, “I think that speech last night was so good that we should all endorse it, and it should be the summary of our conference.”

I started to say that the idea of distributing everything evenly is based on a theory that there’s only X amount of stuff in the world, that somehow we took it away from poorer countries in the first place, and therefore we should give it back to them. But this theory doesn’t take into account the real reason for the differences between countries — that is, the development of new techniques for growing food, the development of machinery to grow food and to do other things, and the fact that all this machinery requires the concentration of capital. It isn’t the stuff, but the power to make the stuff, that is important. But I realize now that these people were not in science; they didn’t understand it. They didn’t understand technology; they didn’t understand their time."

(Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman)

How does a particle interfere with itself?

2015-09-14T14:11:00.001+02:00

The best answer is that we don't know. A more accurate one would be to say that we have several possible answers, most of which contradict each other and no way of telling which one is right at the moment. Here are some of the answers that have been proposed (it is incomplete as there have been many):

1. Instrumentalist approach: We don't know and we have no way of knowing. Quantum mechanics is simply a formalism for describing the probabilities that various measurement results occur and it always gives consistent answers. If you add some philosophical mumbo-jumbo to this then you get the Copenhagen interpretation.

2. Everything is a particle, but there is some kind of weird force that acts on particles to make them follow strange trajectories. The weird force (called the quantum potential) depends on the entire setup of the apparatus and is highly non-local. The most famous explanation of this type comes from Bohmian mechanics.

3. Waves are real and particles are not, but there is a real physical mechanism that causes the waves to "collapse" in certain circumstances and behave like particles. There have been many proposals for what this mechanism is, but most of them disagree with the predictions of quantum mechanics. However, the differences can be very small and it is possible that we haven't detected them yet.

4. Everything is real, a.k.a. the many worlds interpretation. The wave-function of the universe is the only real thing and everything, including the experimental apparatus and you has to be included in it. When a "measurement" occurs and you look at the outcome, the universe seems to split into two pieces. This is very popular with popular science writers and science fiction writers because it is easy to explain, but most physicists can find many problems with it.

5. None of the above (re-open nominations): Either the question is unsolvable by physics, or the answer will come from some combination of deeper theories, such as quantum gravity and quantum information. These theories take a radically different view of what the universe is like, so they may solve the problem or at least explain why the question has no answer.

http://www.physicsforums.com/threads/how-does-a-particle-interfere-with-itself.14254/

Information: From Maxwell’s demon to Landauer’s eraser

2015-09-03T10:50:00.000+02:00

The thermodynamic and information entropies are essentially equivalent, S = kBH, with the factor kB introduced for dimensional reasons. (The information entropy H is dimensionless.)
The equivalence might appear strange at first glance, since S is related to the amount of heat reversibly exchanged with a reservoir and H characterizes the information content of a message sent through a communication channel. In 1957, however, Edwin Jaynes established a general relationship between the two using statistical inference. His approach can be illustrated by considering one of the classic problems of thermodynamics: determining the maximum work Wmax that can be extracted from a heat engine.

According to the second law, processes occurring at constant temperature T have Wmax = −ΔF = −(ΔE − TΔS), where F is free energy and E is energy. In other words, not all thermodynamic energy can be converted to work, as can mechanical energy; there exists a nonusable part given by TΔS. That result can be readily understood from the point of view of information. Any thermodynamic system can be described either microscopically or macroscopically. The microstate, characterized by the positions and velocities of all of a system’s constituent particles, contains complete information about that system. But typical systems contain so many particles—on the order of 1024—that the microstate isn’t experimentally accessible. By contrast, the macrostate—defined by macroscopic parameters such as temperature, pressure, and volume—is measurable but contains only partial information.

Jaynes recognized that entropy essentially quantifies the degree of ignorance about the state of the system—that is, the amount of microstate information that’s lost when one monitors the system macroscopically. Put another way, energy can be entirely converted to work only if the microstate, and hence the complete information about the system, is available. Jaynes’s observation provided a firm theoretical basis for Szilard’s notion of an equivalence between thermodynamic and information entropies. And it showed that the equivalence should, in principle, hold for any arbitrary system at equilibrium. The fact that thermodynamic entropy can only increase in an isolated system could be understood to imply that the information content of the system can spontaneously only decrease.

http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/magazine/physicstoday/article/68/9/10.1063/PT.3.2912

Never trust a log plot. And especially never trust a log log plot

2015-06-19T01:25:00.001+02:00

Never trust a log plot. And especially never trust a log log plot

http://jfi.uchicago.edu/~tten/Funny%20things/shankarquotes.html

Color is a visual perception

2014-12-15T22:07:00.000+02:00

[C]olor is not something out there in the world, separate from us.

"The agreed-upon technical definition of color," says Fairchild, "is that it's a visual perception."

So don't try to tell Fairchild an apple is red. He'll say, no it's not, technically — red is just your perception.

"I could change the color of illumination on that apple and make it look green or blue or something completely different," he says. "The redness isn't a property of the apple. It's a property of the apple in combination with a particular lighting that's on it and a particular observer looking at it."

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/11/10/361219912/if-the-same-shade-looks-both-yellow-and-gray-whats-color

Lev Landau on what constitutes measurement

2014-12-14T22:30:00.005+02:00

It must be emphasized that we are here not discussing a process of measurement in which the physicist-observer takes part. By “measurement”, in quantum mechanics, we understand any process of interaction between classical and quantum objects, occurring apart from and independently of any observer.

–Landau & Lifshitz, Course of Theoretical Physics, Vol. 3, Ch. 1

The extended Euclidean algorithm

2014-12-13T18:09:00.002+02:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hB34-GSDT3k

Bohr's Complementarity and Kant's Epistemology

2014-11-30T17:43:00.002+02:00

Things in themselves are to be contrasted with the objects of experience, which, according to Kant, are intrinsically relational: Things are given in intuition with determinations that express mere relations without being based on anything intrinsic; for such things are not things in themselves, but are merely appearances. Whatever we are acquainted with in matter are nothing but relations (what we call its intrinsic determinations is intrinsic only comparatively); but among these relations there are independent and permanent ones, through which a determinate object is given to us.

What we call the "properties of material objects" are only the expression of the cognitive relations that we establish with our environment; they are not "proper" to some object, but rather arise as an unanalyzable byproduct of our interaction with "it" (the quotation marks surrounding the word "it" are justified by the fact that, in Kant's approach, there are no such things as preconstituted objects placed before a passive sensorial or experimental apparatus). What exists beyond these cognitive relations and independently of them is in principle unreachable, since reaching it would precisely mean establishing a cognitive relation with it. So much so that some commentators concluded that, by the term "thing in itself", Kant merely refers to the impossibility of disentangling ourselves completely from the content of our knowledge, thereby drawing a sharp distinction between the bulk of what we know and our own contribution qua knowers.
(...)

Here too a close analogy with Bohr can be drawn. Starting from the observation that "the properties of atoms are always obtained by observing their reactions under collisions or under the influence of radiation", Bohr showed that the quantum of action compels us to acknowledge the existence of a fundamental "limitation on the possibilities of measurement". Unlike Heisenberg and others, however, Bohr did not endorse the interpretation according to which the "disturbance" introduced by the measuring agent prevents us from having complete knowledge of the properties of the object under study. Nor did he suggest that we should regard those properties as intrinsically fuzzy or unsharp. Rather, he pointed out that, given the "impossibility of a strict separation of phenomena and means of observation", the very notion of attributes that would be proper to the atomic object becomes unworkable. Since "interaction forms an inseparable part of the phenomena", any discourse about phenomena going on in nature independently of any measuring interaction appears to be meaningless. In his later writings, Bohr took a further step: he advocated the "interactionality conception of microphysical attributes", according to which properties can only be meaningfully defined in certain experimental contexts, and not in others.

One might in particular dismiss the presupposition that the experimental outcomes are about objects endowed with the same predicative structure as the moving bodies of classical mechanics. That is, one could accept that position and momentum are mutually exclusive, while at the same time rejecting the idea that they are jointly indispensable for describing some thing. The interpretation of C1, therefore, places us before a dilemma similar to that of the "object in itself": should we refer to a "micro-object in itself", characterized by successive, but mutually incompatible, interactive probings; or should we rather look for a new mode of objectification that retains nothing (not even the adumbration of a predicative structure) of the classical corpuscularian concept?

If we follow Bohr in adopting the first (conservative) strategy, we must ascribe a highly non-conventional status to micro-objects. Expressing this status in a Kantian idiom, we might say that Bohr's cloudy "micro-object" is a unifying symbol used as a regulative-heuristic device; it is not a tangible something.

However, if we adopt the "revolutionary" strategy of looking for novel forms of objectification, we become free to construe certain elements of the quantum symbolism as denoting previously unconceivable objects of knowledge. This is precisely how Schrödinger proposed that we should interpret the wave function.

www.bourbaphy.fr/bitbol.pdf

Alfred Korzybski: Mathematics as a language

2014-10-15T11:02:00.001+02:00

As an example of a mathematical abstraction, we may take a mathematical circle. A circle is defined as the locus of all points in a plane at equal distance from a point called the centre. If we enquire whether or not there is such an actual thing as a circle, some readers may be surprised to find that a mathematical circle must be considered a pure fiction, having nowhere any objective existence. In our definition of a mathematical circle, all particulars were included, and whatever we may find about this mathematical circle later on will be strictly dependent on this definition, and no new characteristics, not already included in the definition, will ever appear. We see, here, that mathematical abstractions are characterized by the fact that they have all particulars included.

If, on the other hand, we draw an objective ‘circle' on a blackboard or on a piece of paper, simple reflection will show that what we have drawn is not a mathematical circle, but a ring. It has colour, temperature, thickness of our chalk or pencil mark. When we draw a ‘circle', it is no longer a mathematical circle with all particulars included in the definition, but it becomes a physical ring in which new characteristics appear not listed in our definition.

From the above observations, very important consequences follow. Mathematizing represents a very simple and easy human activity, because it deals with fictitious entities with all particulars included, and we proceed by remembering. The structure of mathematics, because of this over-simplicity, yet structural similarity with the external world, makes it possible for man to build verbal systems of remarkable validity.
...
From what has now been said, it is probably already obvious that if any one wants to work scientifically on problems of such enormous complexity that they have so far defied analysis, he would be helped enormously if he would train his semantic reactions in the simplest forms of correct ‘thinking'; that is, become acquainted with mathematical methods.
...
In practically all universities at present, the mathematical requirements, even for scientists, are extremely low, much lower, indeed, than is necessary for the progress of these scientists themselves. Only those who specialize in mathematics receive an advanced training, but, even with them, little attention is devoted to method and structure of languages as such. Until lately, mathematicians themselves were not without responsibility for this. They treated mathematics as some kind of ‘eternal verity', and made a sort of religion out of it; forgetting, or not knowing, that these ‘eternal verities' last only so long as the nervous systems of Smiths and Browns are not altered.
...
From a structural and linguistic point of view, the historical development of mathematics shows that it is a first successful attempt to develop a language with a structure similar to the empirical structures, and shows the ideal conditions of producing languages.

When we had only positive numbers, we could add two and three and make five, we could subtract two from three and have the remainder one, but we could not subtract three from two. Yet the structure of this world is such that a further development in the structure of the language was imperative. Thus, if an object moves in a given direction with the velocity two feet per second, and some external factor imparts to it a velocity of three feet per second in the opposite direction, the original direction of motion will be reversed, and the object will move with the velocity of one foot per second in the opposite direction. Or, to give another example, some one has two units of money and he buys something which costs three units of money. He is then in debt one unit.

Such facts necessitated the introduction of negative numbers and so made subtraction always possible. If the motion in one direction or the amount of money in our pocket was called ‘plus two' units, and we subtract from it three units, the results were ‘minus one', meaning a conventional reversal of direction, or sense, for motion, or a debt, instead of a possession, for money.

Experimental facts of division again necessitated the expansion of this language.

Thus, fractions were introduced so as always to allow of linguistic division. The ‘imaginary' number, i= -1, was introduced to allow, in all cases, the extraction of roots . For a long ‘time', the number i= -1 was considered almost mystical, but, of late, when a physicist or an engineer finds it in his equations, it is almost an unmistakable indication for him to look for some wave-motion in the world.
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There is nothing absolute about it, as all mathematics is ultimately a product of the human nervous system, the best product produced at each stage of our development. The fact that mathematics establishes such linguistic relational patterns without specific content, accounts for the generality of mathematics in applications.

If mathematics had physical content or a definite meaning ascribed to its undefined terms, such mathematics could be applied only in the given case and not otherwise. If, instead of making the mathematical statement that one and one make two, without mentioning what the one or the two stands for, we should establish that one apple and one apple make two apples, this statement would not be applied safely to anything else but apples. The generality would be lost, the validity of the statement endangered, and we should be deprived of the greatest value of mathematics. Such a statement concerning apples is not a mathematical statement, but belongs to what is called ‘applied mathematics', which has content. Such experimental facts as that one gallon of water added to one gallon of alcohol gives less than two gallons of the mixture, do not invalidate the mathematical statement that one and one make two, which remains valid by definition. The last mentioned experiment with the ‘addition' of water to alcohol is a deep sub-microscopic structural characteristic of the empirical world, which must be discovered at present by experiment. The most we can say is that we find the above mathematical statement applicable in some instances, and non-applicable in others.

Not assigning definite meanings to the undefined terms, mathematical postulates have variable meanings and so consist of propositional functions. Mathematics must be viewed as a manifold of patterns of exact relational languages, representing, at each stage, samples of the best working of the human ‘mind'. The application to practical problems depends on the ingenuity of those desiring to use such languages.

- "Science and Sanity", Alfred Korzybski

Max Tegmark: Infinity does not exist

2014-10-03T02:05:00.000+02:00

I was seduced by infinity at an early age. Cantor's diagonality proof that some infinities are bigger than others mesmerized me, and his infinite hierarchy of infinities blew my mind. The assumption that something truly infinite exists in nature underlies every physics course I've ever taught at MIT, and indeed all of modern physics. But it's an untested assumption, which begs the question: is it actually true?

There are in fact two separate assumptions: "infinitely big" and "infinitely small". By infinitely big, I mean the idea that space can have infinite volume, that time can continue forever, and that there can be infinitely many physical objects. By infinitely small, I mean the continuum: the idea that even a liter of space contains an infinite number of points, that space can be stretched out indefinitely without anything bad happening, and that there are quantities in nature that can vary continuously. The two are closely related because inflation, the most popular explanation of our Big Bang, can create an infinite volume by stretching continuous space indefinitely.

The theory of inflation has been spectacularly successful, and is a leading contender for a Nobel Prize. It explained how a subatomic speck of matter transformed into a massive Big Bang, creating a huge, flat and uniform universe with tiny density fluctuations that eventually grew into today's galaxies and cosmic large scale structure, all in beautiful agreement with precision measurements from experiments such as the Planck satellite. But by generically predicting that space isn't just big, but truly infinite, inflation has also brought about the so-called measure problem, which I view as the greatest crisis facing modern physics. Physics is all about predicting the future from the past, but inflation seems to sabotage this: when we try to predict the probability that something particular will happen, inflation always gives the same useless answer: infinity divided by infinity. The problem is that whatever experiment you make, inflation predicts that there will be infinitely many copies of you far away in our infinite space, obtaining each physically possible outcome, and despite years of tooth-grinding in the cosmology community, no consensus has emerged on how to extract sensible answers from these infinities. So strictly speaking, we physicists are no longer able to predict anything at all!

This means that today's best theories similarly need a major shakeup, by retiring an incorrect assumption. Which one? Here's my prime suspect: ∞.

A rubber band can't be stretched indefinitely, because although it seems smooth and continuous, that's merely a convenient approximation: it's really made of atoms, and if you stretch it too much, it snaps. If we similarly retire the idea that space itself is an infinitely stretchy continuum, then a big snap of sorts stops inflation from producing an infinitely big space, and the measure problem goes away. Without the infinitely small, inflation can't make the infinitely big, so you get rid of both infinities in one fell swoop—together with many other problems plaguing modern physics, such as infinitely dense black hole singularities and infinities popping up when we try to quantize gravity.

In the past, many venerable mathematicians expressed skepticism towards infinity and the continuum. The legendary Carl Friedrich Gauss denied that anything infinite really existed, saying "Infinity is merely a way of speaking" and "I protest against the use of infinite magnitude as something completed, which is never permissible in mathematics." In the past century, however, infinity has become mathematically mainstream, and most physicists and mathematicians have become so enamored with infinity that they rarely question it. Why? Basically, because infinity is an extremely convenient approximation, for which we haven't discovered convenient alternatives. Consider, for example, the air in front of you. Keeping track of the positions and speeds of octillions of atoms would be hopelessly complicated. But if you ignore the fact that air is made of atoms and instead approximate it as a continuum, a smooth substance that has a density, pressure and velocity at each point, you find that this idealized air obeys a beautifully simple equation that explains almost everything we care about: how to build airplanes, how we hear them with sound waves, how to make weather forecasts, etc. Yet despite all that convenience, air of course isn't truly continuous. I think it's the same way for space, time and all the other building blocks of our physical word.

Let's face it: despite their seductive allure, we have no direct observational evidence for either the infinitely big or the infinitely small. We speak of infinite volumes with infinitely many planets, but our observable universe contains only about 10^89 objects (mostly photons). If space is a true continuum, then to describe even something as simple as the distance between two points requires an infinite amount of information, specified by a number with infinitely many decimal places. In practice, we physicists have never managed to measure anything to more than about 17 decimal places. Yet real numbers with their infinitely many decimals have infested almost every nook and cranny of physics, from the strengths of electromagnetic fields to the wave functions of quantum mechanics: we describe even a single bit of quantum information (qubit) using two real numbers involving infinitely many decimals.

Not only do we lack evidence for the infinite, but we don't actually need the infinite to do physics: our best computer simulations, accurately describing everything from the formation of galaxies to to tomorrow's weather to the masses of elementary particles, use only finite computer resources by treating everything as finite. So if we can do without infinity to figure out what happens next, surely nature can too—in a way that's more deep and elegant than the hacks we use for our computer simulations. Our challenge as physicists is to discover this elegant way and the infinity-free equations describing it—the true laws of physics. To start this search in earnest, we need to question infinity. I'm betting that we also need to let go of it.

Max Tegmark (Physicist, MIT; Researcher, Precision Cosmology; Scientific Director, Foundational Questions Institute)

http://edge.org/response-detail/25344
2014

Freeman Dyson: The Collapse Of The Wave-Function

2014-10-03T02:04:00.002+02:00

Fourscore and seven years ago, Erwin Schrödinger invented wave-functions as a way to describe the behavior of atoms and other small objects. According to the rules of quantum mechanics, the motions of objects are unpredictable. The wave-function tells us only the probabilities of the possible motions. When an object is observed, the observer sees where it is, and the uncertainty of the motion disappears. Knowledge removes uncertainty. There is no mystery here.

Unfortunately, people writing about quantum mechanics often use the phrase "collapse of the wave-function" to describe what happens when an object is observed. This phrase gives a misleading idea that the wave-function itself is a physical object. A physical object can collapse when it bumps into an obstacle. But a wave-function cannot be a physical object. A wave-function is a description of a probability, and a probability is a statement of ignorance. Ignorance is not a physical object, and neither is a wave-function. When new knowledge displaces ignorance, the wave-function does not collapse; it merely becomes irrelevant.

Freeman Dyson (Professor of Physics, Institute for Advanced Study; Author, Many Colored Glass; The Scientist as Rebel)

http://edge.org/response-detail/25350
2014

Amanda Gefter: Structural Realism

2014-10-03T01:41:00.003+02:00

Structural realism—in its metaphysical version, championed by the philosopher of science James Ladyman—is the deepest explanation I know, because it serves as a kind of meta-explanation, one that explains the nature of reality and the nature of scientific explanations.

The idea behind structural realism is pretty simple: the world isn't made of things, it's made of mathematical relationships, or structure. A mathematical structure is a set of isomorphic elements, each of which can be perfectly mapped onto the next. To give a trivial example, the numbers 25 and 52 share the same mathematical structure.

When the philosopher John Worrall first introduced structural realism (though he attributes it to physicist Henri Poincaré), he was trying to explain something puzzling: how was it possible that a scientific theory that would later turn out to be wrong could still manage to make accurate predictions? Take Newtonian gravity. Newton said that gravity was a force that masses exert on one another from a distance. That idea was overthrown by Einstein, who showed that gravity was the curvature of spacetime. Given how wrong Newton was about gravity, it seems almost miraculous that he was able to accurately predict the motions of the planets.

Thankfully, we don't have to resort to miracles. Newton may have gotten the physical interpretation of gravity wrong, but he got a piece of the math right. That's why, at weak masses and small velocities, Einstein's equations reduce to Newton's. The problem, Worrall pointed out, was that we mistook an interpretation of the theory for the theory itself. The fact is, in physics, theories are sets of equations, and nothing more. "Quantum field theory" is a group of mathematical structures. "Electrons" are little stories we tell ourselves.

These days, believing in the reality of objects—of physical things like particles, fields, forces, even spacetime geometries—can quickly lead to profound existential crises.

Quantum theory, for instance, strips particles of any sense of "thingness". One electron is not merely similar to another, all electrons are exactly the same. Electrons have no inherent identity—a fact that makes quantum statistics drastically different from the classical kind. Anyone who believes that an electron is a "thing" in its own right is bound to lose big in a quantum casino.

Meanwhile, all of nature's fundamental forces, including electromagnetism and the nuclear forces that operate deep in the cores of atoms, are described by gauge theory, which shows that forces aren't physical things in the world, but discrepancies in different descriptions of the world, in different observers' points of view. Gravity is a gauge force too, which means you can make it blink out of existence just by changing your frame of reference. In fact, that was Einstein's "happiest thought": a person in freefall can't feel their weight. It's often said that you can't disobey the law of gravity, but the truth is you can take it out with a simple coordinate change.

Recent advances in theoretical physics have only made the situation worse. The holographic principle tells us that our four-dimensional spacetime and everything in it is exactly equivalent to physics taking place on the two-dimensional boundary of the universe. Neither description is more "real" than the other—one can be perfectly mapped onto the other with no loss of information. When we try to believe that spacetime is really four-dimensional or really has a particular geometry, the holographic principle pulls the rug out from under us.

The physical nature of reality has been further eroded by M-theory, the theory that many physicists believe can unite general relativity and quantum mechanics. M-theory encompasses five versions of string theory (plus one non-stringy theory known as supergravity) all of which are related by mathematical maps called dualities. What looks like a strong interaction in one theory looks like a weak interaction in another. What look like eleven dimensions in one theory look like ten in another. Big can look like small, strings can look like particles. Virtually any object you can think of will be transformed into something totally different as you move from one theory to the next—and yet, somehow, all of the theories are equally true.

This reality crisis has grown so dire that Stephen Hawking has called for a kind of philosophical surrender, a white flag he terms "model-dependent realism", which basically says that while our theoretical models offer possible descriptions of the world, we'll simply never know the true reality that lies beneath. Perhaps there is no reality at all.

But structural realism offers a way out. An explanation. A reality. The only catch is that it's not made of physical objects. Then again, our theories never said it was. Electrons aren't real, but the mathematical structure of quantum field theory is. Gauge forces aren't real, but the symmetry groups that describe them are. The dimensions, geometries and even strings described by any given string theory aren't real—what's real are the mathematical maps that transform one string theory into another.

Of course, it's only human to want to interpret mathematical structure. There's a reason that "42" is hardly a satisfying answer to life, the universe and everything. We want to know what the world is really like, but we want it in a form that fits our intuitions. A form that means something. And for our narrative-driven brains, meaning comes in the form of stories, stories about things. I doubt we'll ever stop telling stories about how the universe works, and I, for one, am glad. We just have to remember not to mistake the stories for reality.

Structural realism forces us to radically revise the way we think about the universe. But it also provides a powerful explanation for some of the most mystifying aspects of physics. Without it, we'd have to give up on the notion that scientific theories can ever tell us how the world really is. And that, in my humble opinion, makes it a pretty beautiful explanation.

Amanda Gefter (Consultant, New Scientist; Founding Editor, CultureLab")

http://edge.org/response-detail/11260
2012

Lee Smolin: Mathematics and physics

2014-10-03T00:36:00.002+02:00

...
The experience we have of the world existing within a flow of time is, according to some religions and many contemporary physicists and philosophers, an illusion. Behind that illusion is a timeless reality, in modern parlance, the block universe. Another manifestation of this ancient view is the currently popular idea that time is an emergent quality not present in the fundamental formulation of physics.

The new viewpoint is the direct opposite. It asserts that what is real is only what is real in the moment, which is one of a succession of moments. It is the same for truth: what is true is only what is true in the moment. There are no transcendent, timeless truths.

There is also no past. The past only lives as part of the present, to the extent that it gives us evidence of past events. And the future is not yet real, which means that it is open and full of possibilities, only a small set of which will be realized. Nor, on this view, is there any possibility of other universes. All that exists must be part of this universe, which we find ourselves in, at this moment.

This view changes everything, beginning with how we think of mathematics. On this view there can be no timeless, Platonic, realm of mathematical objects. The truths of mathematics, once discovered, are certainly objective. But mathematical systems have to be invented-or evoked- by us. Once brought into being, there are an infinite number of facts which are true about mathematical objects, which further investigation might discover. There are an infinite number of possible axiomatic systems that we might so evoke and explore-but the fact that different people will agree on what has been shown about them does not imply that they existed, before we evoked them.

I used to think that the goal of physics was the discovery of a timeless mathematical equation that was isomorphic to the history of the universe. But if there is no Platonic realm of timeless mathematical object, this is just a fantasy. Science is then only about what we can discover is true in the one real universe we find ourselves in.
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The view that time is real and truth is situated within the moment further implies that there is no timeless arbiter of meaning, and no transcendent or absolute source of values or ethics. Meaning, values and ethics are all things that we humans project into the world. Without us, they don’t exist.
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Lee Smolin (Physicist, Perimeter Institute; Author, Time Reborn)

http://edge.org/response-detail/10945
2009