Lee Smolin reviews Gravity’s Shadow: The Search for Gravitational Waves by Harry Collins, in American Scientist:

…despite the several billions invested in particle accelerators and detectors, there have been few truly major experimental discoveries in fundamental physics in the past 20 years. The fields that have continued to amaze are astronomy and cosmology, which are obviously healthy. But the only major addition to our knowledge of the elementary particles these past two decades was the discovery that neutrinos have mass. The list of new particles or effects that have been looked for—and so far not found—is longer: the Higgs particle, supersymmetric particles, dark-matter particles, proton decay, the fifth force, evidence of extra dimensions.

It is, then, very timely that Harry Collins has written a first-class study of how contemporary experimental physics operates. Collins is a distinguished sociologist, and in Gravity’s Shadow he demonstrates why it is important to go beyond superficial characterizations of science to study how groups of scientists actually work together and make decisions. Collins has taken as his subject the search for gravitational radiation.

Gravitational waves are ripples in the geometry of spacetime, analogous to electromagnetic waves. Just as moving charges and magnets produce light waves, masses when they accelerate inevitably produce waves in the gravitational field—a field that, as Einstein discovered in working out his theory of general relativity, is exactly the same as the geometry of space and time.

More here.

From The New York Times and the city of New York:

“Faced with a court order and unyielding demands from the families of victims, the city of New York yesterday opened part of its archive of records from Sept. 11, releasing a digital avalanche of oral histories, dispatchers’ tapes and phone logs so vast that they took up 23 compact discs.

For the first time, about 200 accounts of emergency medical technicians, paramedics and their supervisors were made public, revealing new dimensions of a day and an emergency response that had already seemed familiar.

In details large and small, the accounts of the medical personnel – uniformed workers who were often overlooked in many of the day’s chronicles, but were as vital to the response and rescue efforts as any others – provide vivid and alarming recollections.

They spoke of being unable to find anyone in authority to tell them where to go or what to do. Nearly from the moment the first plane struck the World Trade Center, they had little radio communication. As their leaders struggled to set up ordinary procedures for a “mass casualty incident,” the crisis gathered speed by the minute.”

You can find the archives here.

From Nature:

“What’s in sperm?” demands Tim Karr. Because sperm have to swim far and fast, biologists have come to view them like racing cars: streamlined and stripped down of all unnecessary bits and pieces. Generally speaking, the DNA in animal sperm is tightly packed inside a sleek head structure that contains little of the cytoplasm that fills most other cells. Behind the head is the midpiece, containing more than 50 power units called mitochondria that drive the lashing motion of the attached tail. But what does a sperm deliver? One popular misconception is that only the head enters the egg, while the tail is discarded. But in most species, the entire cell enters the egg — midpiece, tail and all. And in many mammals, midpiece and tail structures persist in the embryo for several cell divisions. This results in a large number of proteins and other molecules being delivered to the egg.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Nietzsche was born in Rocken, Prussia, in 1844, and died, having gone insane, in 1900. He was educated at Bonn and Leipzig and was self-educated (and dis-educated) thereafter. But who, really, was he? Heidegger is onto something when he advises us that philosophy can be possessed ”most purely in the form of a persistent question,” and that ”Nietzsche’s procedure, his manner of thinking in the execution of the new valuation, is perpetual reversal,” perhaps like life itself, not to mention Heidegger’s own devoted explications of Nietzsche. That arch-muse Lou Salomé, who knew him not only as a thought machine but also as a lover of sorts, stated the case more intimately when she wrote, ”In Nietzsche the most abstract thoughts habitually could reverse themselves into the power of moods which could carry him off with immediate and unpredictable force.”

Ecce homo, behold the man! As we peer down time’s long barrel to try to see him, his hand keeps turning the kaleidoscope.

More here.

Janet Maslin reviews The Fate of Africa: A History of 50 Years of Independence by Martin Meredith, in the New York Times Book Review:

In the words of an African proverb cited in Martin Meredith’s Sisyphean new volume: “You never finish eating the meat of an elephant.” That thought is summoned by the overwhelmingly difficult assignment that this historian, biographer and journalist has given himself. He has set out to present a panoramic view of African history during the past half century, and to contain all its furious upheaval in a single authoritative volume.

Everything about this subject is immense: the idealism, megalomania, economic obstacles, rampant corruption, unimaginable suffering (AIDS, famine, drought and genocide are only its better-known causes) and hopelessly irreconcilable differences leading to endless warfare. “The rebels cannot oust the Portuguese and the Portuguese can contain but not eliminate the rebels,” read a typically bleak 1969 American assessment of a standoff in Guinea-Bissau.

For the author, even organizing this information is a hugely daunting job. How can such vast amounts of information be analyzed for the reader? One way was to follow parallel developments in different places – which is more or less how Mr. Meredith works, with attention to the hair-trigger ways in which one coup or crisis could set off subsequent disasters. He is able to steer the book firmly without compromising its hard-won clarity.

More here.

3 Quarks Daily editor J.M. Tyree has a funny piece in The Believer. Unfortunately, the entire essay is available only to subscribers. Nevertheless, here is a bit, with a link to the rest of the teaser:

The opposite of a Renaissance man, presumably, would be someone who tried his hand at a number of different things and failed at all of them. Mostly forgotten today, Ignatius Donnelly (1831–1901) is worth a second look because he is quite possibly the greatest failure who ever lived. Donnelly, a bestselling writer and reform-minded congressman from Minnesota, might be dubbed the Great American Failure. Among the things that Donnelly failed to do were: build a city, reform American politics, reveal the facts about Atlantis, discover a secret code in Shakespeare, and prove that the world’s gravel deposits were the result of a collision with a comet. His dire political prophecies of class warfare and the imminent collapse of civilization also failed to come true.

Donnelly genuinely believed he was a genius, and that, by applying his mental powers to any problem, no matter how tangled or intractable, and regardless of the established body of relevant scholarship or scientific tradition, he could solve it with a fresh look. He was a kind of secular prophet, a combination of demagogue and revivalist tent-preacher, destined, he believed, to do great things. If Donnelly were alive today, he would probably be a “guru” on the lecture circuit, fervently putting forward his latest Theory of Everything. Congressman, master orator, pseudoscientist, student of comparative mythology, crackpot geologist, futurist, amateur literary sleuth, bogus cryptologist, Donnelly did it all with a charmingly boundless energy and a voracious intellectual appetite that utterly outstripped his real abilities.

More here.

Max Rodenbeck reviews five recent books in the New York Review of Books:

America’s past offers many examples of seeming setbacks being turned to dramatic and lasting advantage. The sinking of the battleship Maine is one that comes to mind, or of the liner Lusitania by a German U-boat, or of half the Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor. More recently, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan exposed a vein that allowed America and its allies to bleed the decaying Evil Empire, just as Saddam Hussein’s lunge at Kuwait in 1990 revealed an opportunity to score a number of American goals, from smashing this dangerous man’s army, to testing and displaying the power of new weapons, to warning potential rivals away from the Gulf’s crucial oil resources.

All these strategic overreactions had something in common. In each case, the identity and nature of the enemy were abundantly clear. In most such cases, too, little discussion took place to clarify the stakes involved, the advantages to be gained, or the optimum means for winning them. (Which usually meant the application of overwhelming force.)

Yet while the strikes against New York and Washington seemed to fit the first part of this historical template, they did not quite suit the rest. Here was yet another of the “sneak attacks” that seem to have punctuated America’s rise, demanding yet another crushing response. But where and who was the enemy? What was his motivation for attacking in the first place? What, beyond merely destroying this adversary, was the strategic prize waiting to be gained, a prize that surely must be worthy of an unchallenged global superpower? Which were the appropriate tools to be used for this broader mission? What were the risks?

By now it is clear that in pursuing the grand counterstroke, American policy has gone somewhat astray.

More here.

John Horgan’s op-ed in the New York Times:

To commemorate Einstein’s “annus mirabilis,” a coalition of physics groups has designated 2005 the World Year of Physics. The coalition’s Web site lists more than 400 celebratory events, including conferences, museum exhibits, concerts, Webcasts, plays, poetry readings, a circus, a pie-eating contest and an Einstein look-alike competition.

In the midst of all this hoopla, I feel compelled to deplore one aspect of Einstein’s legacy: the widespread belief that science and common sense are incompatible. In the pre-Einstein era, T. H. Huxley, a k a “Darwin’s bulldog,” could define science as “nothing but trained and organized common sense.” But quantum mechanics and relativity shattered our common-sense notions about how the world works. The theories ask us to believe that an electron can exist in more than one place at the same time, and that space and time – the I-beams of reality – are not rigid but rubbery. Impossible! And yet these sense-defying propositions have withstood a century’s worth of painstaking experimental tests.

As a result, many scientists came to see common sense as an impediment to progress not only in physics but also in other fields.

More here.

“NASA pisses away millions hauling H2O into orbit. But there’s a better way – recycle astronaut urine. Just one question: How does it taste?”

Tom McNichol in Wired:

People head to Reno for all sorts of reasons. Some want to gamble. Others are looking for a hasty wedding or quickie divorce. I’ve come to the Biggest Little City in the World to drink my own pee. Not straight up, of course. First, I’ll run it through a new NASA water purification system that collects astronaut sweat, moisture from respiration, drain water, and urine – and turns it all into drinking water.

NASA desperately needs this technology. Water makes for a heavy – and expensive – payload. Over the past five years, the agency has spent $60 million delivering potable water to the International Space Station on the space shuttle (6 tons at a cost of about $40,000 per gallon). Deploying the Water Recovery System on the ISS will cut the volume of water hauled into space by two-thirds and free up enough room on the shuttle for four more astronauts.

More here.

Anthony Duignan-Cabrera and Leonard David in Space.com:

MRO was designed to be “NASA’s google search engine”, Garvin said, to cut down the number of compelling places both at the surface and below the martian landscape that cry out for future exploration.

The spacecraft is carrying a hefty science payload to Mars, with six instruments designed to track Martian weather, resolve objects on the surface the size of a kitchen table and measure the planet’s composition and atmospheric structure with more detail than ever before.

“The MRO spacecraft is many things,” Richard Zurek, the mission’s project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), told SPACE.com prior to launch. “It’s aweather satellite, it’s a geological surveyor, and it’s a scout for future missions.”

The orbital spacecraft is expected to be the vanguard for two landers NASA plans to launch toward Mars in the next five years, and will identify potential landing targets. The Phoenix lander is currently scheduled to launch in 2007 and touchdown in the planet’s polar region. A large rover, the Mars Science Laboratory, is expected to launch in 2009.

More here.

Steve Chawkins in the Los Angeles Times:

A 74-year-old Nobel laureate in physics may face prison time for slamming into a van at more than 100 mph last year, killing one passenger and injuring seven others just south of Santa Maria, Calif.

John Robert Schrieffer, a former professor at UC Santa Barbara who won the Nobel Prize in 1972 for a theory he helped formulate at the age of 26, was driving on a suspended Florida license at the time of the Sept. 24 collision, authorities said Wednesday. He had nine speeding tickets on his record.

At an emotional hearing this week in a Santa Maria courtroom, Schrieffer tearfully apologized to the crash victims, who are members of a Ridgecrest, Calif., family and their friends.

But Santa Barbara County Superior Court Judge James Herman was unmoved, sending Schrieffer to a state diagnostic facility where he is to be evaluated for a possible prison term.

More here.  More on John Robert Schrieffer here.  Update here. [Thanks to Winfield J. Abbe.]

From The London Times:

DAVID took on Goliath yesterday when three first-time authors found themselves up against literary heavyweights on the longlist of the £50,000 Man Booker Prize. The publishing debut of Harry Thompson made such a dramatic impact on the Booker judges with his historical novel about Charles Darwin, This Thing Of Darkness, that they considered him worthy of comparison with J.M. Coetzee, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003 as well as the Booker in 1983 and 1999. In what was perceived as a particularly strong year for literature, this year’s list included Salman Rushdie, who won the “Booker of Bookers” for Midnight’s Children in 1993. This time, he has been longlisted for his forthcoming Shalimar the Clown, which is to be published next month.

More here.

From MSNBC:

Three figure-eight knots tied into strings may be the first word from the ancient Inca in centuries. While the Incan empire left nothing that would be considered writing by today’s standards, it did produce knotted strings in various colors and arrangements that have long puzzled historians and anthropologists. Many of these strings have turned out to be a type of accounting system, but interpreting them has been complex. The findings are reported in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.

More here.

Paul Maliszewski has a pretty amusing essay in The Baffler about Wacker and Mathews, a consulting team that helps businesses and organizations become more creative.

Wacker and Mathews say that they, like the alchemists of old, “challenge convention”; they show too much humility or perhaps are reluctant to brag. Ancient alchemists spent years of pointless experimentation and fruitless inquiry that resulted in only a few practical pay-offs and meager returns on their kings’ hefty capital investments. It was an alchemist, Wacker and Mathews claim, with not a little pride, who gave William the Conqueror the idea to fashion his army’s shields from hermatite, a hard mineral, more durable than wood, thus improving his ability to kick ass. Companies retaining the services and counsel of Wacker and Mathews cannot reasonably expect these two—“professional fools,” (http://firstmatter.com/promise.asp) as they call themselves—to help vanquish the competition and seize valuable market-share, or, for that matter, invade England. But don’t allow that failure, however obvious, to be the only measure of their value as authors, futurists, thinkers, and alchemists. Wacker and Mathews have in fact succeeded where every alchemist before them has failed. They have turned shit into gold.

Apologies that this post is a touch academic, but the Electronic Journal of Analytic Philosophy (which has some excellent content even if it looks like crap) has published Gilbert Ryle’s last letter to Daniel Dennett. It’s a pretty amazing letter that gets right to the heart of various philosophical problems. Here’s an excerpt:

I thought well of your Fodor-review [just then submitted to Mind , then under Hamlyn’s editorship]; but for reasons that I’ve forgotten, I’m anti-Fodor. But your review leaves me wondering 1) what on earth these ‘representations’ are supposed to be and do. Do I have them? Do I need them? Is their extension identical with that of Locke’s less pompous ‘ideas’? 2) What does ‘internal’ mean? Locke’s usual ‘inner’? If I run through the Greek alphabet a) in a sing-song; b) muttered; c) under my breath; d) merely ‘in my head’, is only d) properly ‘internal’? So when I mutter or intone ‘kappa’ audibly is this noise not a ‘ representation’ of an item in the Greek alphabet ? (On p13 [of the typescript] we hear about ‘representations of rules’. Sort of snapshots or echoes? Pinkish ones, or gruff ones?) Or if after dictating again and again a rule of grammar or chess, etc, the rule-wording goes running through my head by rote (like a maddening popular song), is that wording (or any word in it) a ‘representation’ of the rule–or of any part of it (if rules have parts)? From your review it seems that Fodor beats Locke in the intricacy of his ‘wires-and-pulleys’, when what was chiefly wrong with Locke was the (intermittent) intricacy of his ‘wires-and-pulleys’!

Jerry Coyne in The New Republic:

Exactly eighty years after the Scopes “monkey trial” in Dayton, Tennessee, history is about to repeat itself. In a courtroom in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in late September, scientists and creationists will square off about whether and how high school students in Dover, Pennsylvania will learn about biological evolution. One would have assumed that these battles were over, but that is to underestimate the fury (and the ingenuity) of creationists scorned.

The Scopes trial of our day–Kitzmiller, et al v. Dover Area School District et al–began innocuously. In the spring of 2004, the district’s textbook review committee recommended that a new commercial text replace the outdated biology book. At a school board meeting in June, William Buckingham, the chair of the board’s curriculum committee, complained that the proposed replacement book was “laced with Darwinism.” After challenging the audience to trace its roots back to a monkey, he suggested that a more suitable textbook would include biblical theories of creation. When asked whether this might offend those of other faiths, Buckingham replied, “This country wasn’t founded on Muslim beliefs or evolution. This country was founded on Christianity and our students should be taught as such.” Defending his views a week later, Buckingham reportedly pleaded: “Two thousand years ago, someone died on a cross. Can’t someone take a stand for him?” And he added: “Nowhere in the Constitution does it call for a separation of church and state.”

More here.

Salman Rushdie in the Times of London:

In Leeds, from which several of the London bombers came, many traditional Muslims lead lives apart, inward-turned lives of near-segregation from the wider population. From such defensive, separated worlds some youngsters have indefensibly stepped across a moral line and taken up their lethal rucksacks.

The deeper alienations that lead to terrorism may have their roots in these young men’s objections to events in Iraq or elsewhere, but the closed communities of some traditional Western Muslims are places in which young men’s alienations can easily deepen. What is needed is a move beyond tradition — nothing less than a reform movement to bring the core concepts of Islam into the modern age, a Muslim Reformation to combat not only the jihadi ideologues but also the dusty, stifling seminaries of the traditionalists, throwing open the windows of the closed communities to let in much-needed fresh air.

It would be good to see governments and community leaders inside the Muslim world as well as outside it throwing their weight behind this idea, because creating and sustaining such a reform movement will require, above all, a new educational impetus whose results may take a generation to be felt, a new scholarship to replace the literalist diktats and narrow dogmatisms that plague present-day Muslim thinking.

More here.

The incomparable Iain Sinclair has a new LRB essay on the aftermath in London:

They waited patiently, with plastic water and floral tributes, for their turn in the small garden of remembrance that had established itself around a tree in a fenced-off corner of the station frontage, between Euston Road and York Way. Despite the sombre aspect of the witnesses, this multi-faith shrine felt Mexican: a mass of conflicting colours, adapted football shirts, written-over flags, pink bears, white dogs. Sunlight dazzled on cellophane. The trunk of the sturdy whitebeam disappeared into a mound of banked flowers. A woman in a Red Cross uniform stood beside the tree with a Kleenex box held discreetly behind her back. At the point of entry, further boxes of two-ply tissues were stacked, ready to cope with an outpouring of confused emotion. An unnoticed accident of railway architecture, a suitable nowhere, was the sanctioned memory site, a cloister of mummified flowers.

Read the whole essay here.

I’m reminded of the fact that the first time we went down to the World Trade Center site to witness the collapsed buildings and smoking wreckage piled up stories high, there were National Guardsmen posted at Broadway and Maiden who were also equipped with boxes of tissues. We needed them, too.

From Scientific American:

The poison frogs of Central and South America are as deadly as they are beautiful, thanks to chemicals called alkaloids that they secrete through their skin. Indeed, the venom from a single golden poison frog, for example, can kill 10 humans. Now researchers have unlocked the secrets of their counterparts in Madagascar and found that they employ the same method of acquiring thier toxins: through careful food consumption. Studies of frogs in the Neotropics indicated that a diet rich in ants provided the alkaloids.

More here.

From Live Science:

Toxitolerant organisms can withstand high levels of damaging agents. They can be found swimming around in benzene saturated water or in the core of a nuclear reactor. One species of bacteria, Deinococcus radiodurans, can withstand a 15,000 gray dose of radiation – 10 grays would kill a human and it takes over 1,000 grays to kill a cockroach. Extraterrestrial life forms would most likely need to possess similar tolerances to radiation, as the atmosphere on other planets, or lack thereof, filters out much less radiation than Earth’s. “If it works this way on Earth, it’s likely to happen elsewhere,” says Spear, the University of Colorado scientist. “When you look up at the stars, there is a lot of hydrogen in the universe.”

More here.