"Interstellar"

The other day I had the pleasure of seeing Michael Nolan's new movie "Interstellar". I had been looking forward to this since I learned that the physicist Kip Thorne was "science consultant" for the movie and indeed was responsible for the original script idea. As an undergraduate I bought and attempted to read Misner, Thorne and Wheeler's Gravitation, a book about general relativity which seems large enough to generate a considerable amount of the force that it describes, and that book crystallized for me a fascination that had begun much earlier when I ran across the writings of Eddington. So, galaxy-hopping space travel through relativistic wormholes - what's not to like?

In fact, it is more the metaphysics than the physics that stuck in my mind. And I don't mean the stuff about time-traveling gravitational-wave messages sent by our future selves. Rather, the basic premiss: Earth is dying. Time to move on out. Our destiny is elsewhere. For the human beings of Interstellar it is true in the most literal sense that "this world is not (or is no longer) my home - I'm just passing through." The contrast between settler and nomad, between farmer and hunter, goes back to the dawn of civilization, and in Interstellar it gets set up once again before any of the characters have an inkling that a return to space is possible. "Some of us used to be looking to the stars", says Cooper, the hero, to his father-in-law, as they sit on the farmhouse porch and gaze across the acres of corn, the only crop that will still grow on a blighted Earth. "Now, we're just scratching in the dirt."

The distances between the stars are so vast that they are insurmountable by any technology that we can realistically conceive of constructing for ourselves. Interstellar gets round this problem by imagining that a shortcut through the fifth dimension has been constructed - and placed in orbit near to Saturn - by superhuman intelligences, "block beings" from the far future. But why are the "block beings" so determined to empower the old human fantasy of leaving Earth behind? Wouldn't it be easier for them to scatter the seeds of some blight-resistant crops right here on the home planet? Or are they perhaps - despite Interstellar's moving appeal to the power of love across generations scrambled by relativistic time-stretching - more turned on by the cold clean certainty of physics in a vacuum than by the messy reality of biology: of life in the dirt?

"No man" (or woman), wrote C.S.Lewis, "would discover an abiding strangeness on the Moon who could not already discover it in his own garden." That desire for the moon and the stars - Cooper's desire - has moved artists and scientists, authors and engineers, for millennia. When humanity is small and the world is vast, it perhaps does little harm to believe that we can always "move on". But in the age of the Anthropocene that same attitude is just a step away from a toxic Rapture fantasy. Does Interstellar avoid this danger? It certainly tries to, but I am not sure that it is wholly successful.

Yes, it's a movie, not a treatise. But, here in reality, as far as we know, there are no wormholes. There is no Planet B. Christ returns to rule and perfect this world, not to snatch us away from it.

Maybe it's time for some gardening. For a little dirt.

 

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Presenting at TEDx

It's just been made public that I will be presenting at @TEDxPSU next March 1st.   The official announcement is on TEDx's Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/TEDxPSU) and the bio text is mostly copied from my Wikipedia entry, which makes me - and by implication the talk - sound super academic and scary.  (Especially since the previously announced speaker is PSU's football coach!)  

Anyhow, I plan to use my few minutes of fame to talk about the "Math for Sustainability" project.  I want to say two things.  The first thing is that mathematics - the "measuring, changing, risking, networking" toolkit that I have identified as central to MATH 033 - helps us see clearly, helps us to understand the choices and tradeoffs we are making today and the consequences that we are accepting for tomorrow.   The second thing though is that this clarity will not somehow absolve us from accepting responsibility for our values, as though we could somehow outsource  ethics to a giant cost-benefit analysis.  Feel free to share how you think these two themes, and this tension, can somehow be conveyed in ten minutes of TED format.

I have just started working with "speaker consultants", etc, about the talk.  It is clear that this is going to be very different from the kind of math lecture where the speaker walks into the room, fumbles around for a stick of chalk, and just goes with the flow.  I am nervous - and excited!   If you pray, pray that I will do this right.  It's a great opportunity.

AAR considers canceling scholarly conference, citing climate impact

Laurie Zoloth

H/T to @erikbfoley for alerting me to this news.

From the New York Times: "If the bioethicist Laurie Zoloth, the president of the American Academy of Religion, has her way, she’ll be remembered as the woman who canceled her organization’s conference, which every year attracts a city’s worth of religion scholars.

Two weeks ago, at her organization’s gathering, which is held jointly with the Society for Biblical Literature and this year drew 9,900 scholars, Dr. Zoloth used her presidential address to call on her colleagues to plan a sabbatical year, a year in which they would cancel their conference. In her vision, they would all refrain from flying across the country, saving money and carbon. It could be a year, Dr. Zoloth argued, in which they would sacrifice each other’s company for the sake of the environment, and instead would turn toward their neighborhoods and hometowns."

In earlier posts (here and here) I did some simple calculations about the environmental impact of academic air travel.   It is significant.   Kudos to Dr. Zoloth for drawing attention to the issue, and for her practical, "turning the hearts to home" proposal to make a change.

Read the whole NYT article here.

Photo credit: From the New York Times article linked above.  Believed to be fair use.

 

 

Health update - 6 months

The road goes ever on

At the end of April I was admitted for surgery at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.  Over a delicate seven-hour operation, surgeons Kofi Boahene and Jeremy Richmon removed two tumors from the head and neck region.  One of them (Dr Richmon's) turned out to be cancerous, so after a month to get my strength back we returned to Hopkins in June (six months ago) for five weeks of intensive radiation treatment (Dr Harry Kwon) with supportive chemotherapy (Dr Christine Chung).

News of MATH 033

Here's a Penn State press release regarding MATH033!

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- Back in 2008, presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain famously argued whether properly inflating the tires on America's roads would be enough to offset the need to reopen offshore drilling.

After a semester in John Roe’s Mathematics for Sustainability course (MATH033), students will be able to whip out their calculators, estimate the numbers and make a determination about whether properly inflating tires is beneficial or not.

MATH033 is a newly introduced course at Penn State that will be offered in spring 2015. Through this unique course, the students will be able to study sustainability from a mathematics perspective.
“Engaged citizens need to be skilled in talking about these issues," Roe explained, “and not just glazing over when the numbers come up.”

The class will carry out specific case studies and analyze sustainability issues that range from local Penn State campus waste management to global warming. Students will learn how to analyze sustainability issues by asking fundamental mathematical questions: How large? How fast? How risky? How connected?

“This class is so different than any math class I've seen,” said graduate assistant Sara Jamshidi. “It introduces ideas and concepts that few people outside of math or research get to see, and I think it does so in a very down-to-earth way.”

The aim of the course is for students to become informed citizens who are able to engage in discussions about sustainable resources, pollution, recycling, economic change and similar matters of public interest.

“When most people think about math, sustainability isn't usually a topic that crosses their mind,” said teaching assistant Kaley Weinstein. “But almost any sustainable decision made by someone ultimately has math behind it.”

Weinstein continued, “Since sustainability can be applied to everyone's life, it is important that people know how the math behind sustainability works.”

This course fulfills a GQ (general education-quantification) credit and is intended for students who are not mathematics majors.

The course is scheduled to take place from 2:30 to 3:20 p.m. Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 115 Osmond. It is limited to 40 students, so interested students are encouraged to register now.

For more information about Mathematics for Sustainability, visit www.sites.psu.edu/mathforsust. To learn more about sustainability at Penn State, visit www.sustainability.psu.edu.

Praying the Te Deum and Benedicite

"Let us now sing the first six verses of the Tedium".

That at any rate is how my mutinous younger self parsed the vicar's injunction, herded into traditional Anglican worship every Sunday morning at school, and by no means a believer at that time.  The vicar, also, seemed in a hurry to get on with the service - I don't think we ever recited more than the beginning of the canticle Te Deum Laudamus ("We praise Thee, O God") taken over by the Book of Common Prayer from the Catholic liturgy and thought to be written in the fourth century AD.  

MOOC reflections

I'm three weeks into David Archer's Coursera course Global Warming: The Science and Modeling of Climate Change. There were several reasons I signed up for the course:

• I'm interested in understanding climate science better, and this seemed a better way to get a first-shot overview than diving straight into a textbook like Pierrehumbert's Principles of Planetary Climate or Kaper and Engler's Mathematics and Climate.
• I wanted to see whether there were ideas (both in terms of content and of teaching methods) that I could borrow for my Mathematics for Sustainability course next semester.
• And, I had never taken part in a MOOC (massive online open course) and I was interested to see what the experience is like.

 So, three weeks in, how is it going?  A few thoughts.