Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Sigh–Joi Ito watched the Ig Nobels, but I couldn’t get the webcast to play until now. So I am sitting here, on my Bavarian mountain, listening to the “Infinite Chopsticks” overture as I write this blogpost.

Meanwhile, I’ve been making do with Feedster searches for “ignobel” and “ig nobel“, and “igs.”
These turned up various stories in MSM: AP, ABC Science Online, The Guardian, and New Scientist.

And, would you believe, the Ig Nobels got blogged in

• French
• Russian,
• Spanish
• Chinese
• Japanese,
• Korean.
• Dutch (“Testikelprotheses goed voor Ig Nobel-prijs”)
• Vietnamese, and
• Portuguese (I think).

Ahh, I did get to see my own children at about minute 24 carrying “Frank Junior” onstage–he gets “introduced” about minute 33. And I see that Marc Abrahams has posted this year’s winners, releasing me from the heavy burden of secrecy. Ahhhh.

Wait–do two “aahhh”s make up for my initial “sigh”? “Subvocal utterance: A four-dimensional calculus”–if I could just publish such a scholarly paper, I might just win myself one of those Ig Nobel Prizes!

A recent scholarly paper by Richard Price asks, “In an expanding universe, what doesn’t expand?“

The expansion of the universe is often viewed as a uniform stretching of space that would affect compact objects, atoms and stars, as well as the separation of galaxies. One usually hears that bound systems do not take part in the general expansion, but a much more subtle question is whether bound systems expand partially. In this paper, a very definitive answer is given…

If parts of the universe grew, but others didn’t, here are my nominations…

• Let parking lots stretch while our cars all remain the same size.
• Let space inside airplanes get bigger while bodies stay constant.
• Let people get taller without anyone getting fatter.

Sadly,Price’s research has not yet stretched (sorry) much beyond models of classical atoms.

And real-life observation suggests opposite effects for every single one of my hopeful wishes….

Even more full-circle 2005 Nobel strangeness: 2005 Physics Nobel laureate Roy Glauber is a longtime star of the IgNobel Prize ceremonies.

Frank and I will be watching via this year’s Ig Nobel webcast (October 6) from a mountaintop in Bavaria (with good wifi.) And yet, despite our distance in physical space, Frank will have his own connection to the IgNobels this year for the very first time. Not a talking head, not a walk-on part, but (as the seasick Frenchman replied when the steward asked if he had dined) “Au contraire.”

All fans of funny ha-ha and funny peculiar should watch the IgNobels!

Blogging owes some 84.3%* of its success to our pleasure in learning more about people we already know, even slightly or virtually.

I had the pleasure last week of trailing along when Dennis Overbye gave Frank a tour of the New York Times backstage. (Much more impressive than backstage at CNN, BTW.) So of course I had to read more about Dennis and I came across an excellent
interview with Edge about his book Einstein in Love
whose summation I can’t resist sharing:

I know lots of people like Albert. I might be like him myself. He was a hopeless romantic, he lived on anticipation. He was always yearning for the next thing. He was always envisioning some wonderful life with somebody else, while grimly enduring life with the woman he was with. If I think about it, I would say that that was kind of the key to his psychology, that he had the lure of the perfect situation, the perfect person. Of course if you’re Einstein, you want everything that you want your way and then you want to be left alone. So you want love, and you want affection, you want a good meal, but then you don’t want any interference outside of that, so you don’t want any obligations interfering with your life, with your work. Which is a difficult stance to maintain in an adult relationship; it doesn’t work. Everything has to be a give and take.

Einstein always felt Paradise was just around the corner, but as soon as he got there, it started looking a little shabby and something better appeared. I’ve known a lot of people like Albert in my time, I have felt lots of shocks of recognition. I feel like I got to know Albert as a person in the course of this, and I have more respect for him as a physicist than I did when I started, I have more a sense of what he accomplished and how hard it really was to be Einstein than I did before. It’s a great relief to be able to think of him as a real person. If he was around I’d love to buy him a beer ….. but I don’t know if I’d introduce him to my sister.

Now you know more about Einstein, perhaps, than you wanted to. He could tell us his own side of it, if he just had a blog.

…there is no Internet. So one final quick post before I run out the door:

If the clouds part tonight, watch for the solstice full moon and planet display. In fact, this week is your best chance since 1987 to observe the full moon illusion, because the moon in this June is much lower in the sky than usual.

No, the full moon illusion is not what you see in this animated gif, it’s something different. Put down your mouse, go outside, and take a look!

Carolus Linnaeus (1707 – 1778) invented our double-barreled scientific naming (and shocked his contemporaries with his scandalous way of classifying plants: “Who would have thought that bluebells and lillies and onions could be up to such immorality?”).

Linnaeus was Swedish, but for varied odd reasons, detailed by
David Weinberger, his collection of specimens and the 3×5 cards classifying them ended up in London. Go read David’s entire post–it’s remarkable and loaded with intriguing photos–but here is my favorite theory-of-knowledge lightning bolt:

Linnaeus’ classification resulted from the nature of paper. Because you only have one card for each species, your order will give each species one and only one place. You will organize them by putting cards near cards like them, naturally producing an ordered series or a set of clusters.

As you lay out your cards, like next to like, you are drawing a map of knowledge. The largest units are kingdoms, not because Animals, Vegetables and Minerals somehow lord it over the particular creatures they contain but because kingdoms are the most inclusive territories on political maps. Knowledge thus derives its nature from the paper that expresses it: Bounded, unchanging, the same for all, two-dimensional and thus difficult to represent exceptions and complex overlaps, and all laid out in a glance with no dark corners.

“…it is not enough, before commencing to rebuild the house in which we live, that it be pulled down ..
it is likewise necessary that we be furnished with some other house in which we may live commodiously during the operations…”
René Descartes (1596– – 1650), Discourse on Method)

Descartes boldly set out to question all his beliefs– but didn’t question the need for some “code of Morals,” even though he expected that ultimately he would replace them with new guidelines of his own.

His first principle was to conform to the laws and customs of people around him,

“…adhering firmly to the Faith in which, by the grace of God, I had been educated from my childhood, and regulating my conduct in every other matter according to the most moderate opinions, and the farthest removed from extremes, which should happen to be adopted in practice with general consent of the most judicious of those among whom I might be living…”

This moderate and rational praise for conformity deeply impressed me when I was a teenager learning French. Re-reading it now, I see that I mis-remembered something fairly important. I (mis)remembered that Descartes urged conformity to avoid fruitless arguments with our neighbors, leaving us more time and energy for nobler goals.

I’m glad I cleared that up, though I don’t expect to be tested on Descartes again very soon…

Rebecca Mackinnon is promoting Valentine sonnets. I’m not posting my efforts–Joho’s will beat everyone for humor if not for love–but, speaking of Valentines and love, I love this 1983 picture of Frank Wilczek with legendary physics bad boy R.P. Feynman.

Yes, that’s the Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman Feynman, the Challenger disaster frozen O-Rings Feynman, safe-cracking, bongo-playing, Tuva-loving, 1965-Nobel-Prize-winning, 1918-1988 Richard P. Feynman.

About this photograph–first, roll your mental cameras back even farther, to 1972, the year I met Frank Wilczek. When I think back to those intense happy days, I can remember earnestly playing Bob Dylan records and moving the needle to tracks I thought Frank “should” hear. And I’ll never forget his introducing me to Feynman, by which he meant the tattered red three-volume Lectures in Physics he’d read by himself in high school to learn about physics. He sat me down next to him on some seedy Grad College sofa, put the first volume into my hands, and waited to enjoy the delight I would surely feel as soon as I started reading. These books were an intellectual treasure that he couldn’t wait to share–only later did I find out they were also a part of his personal odyssey–if I hadn’t been in love with him before, I would surely have fallen in love with him right then.

Now–ten-plus years, lots of physics, and two great kids later–we get to 1983. Murph Goldberger sent us this photo of Frank with Feynman at his (Murph’s) 60th birthday bash. No wonder Frank looks happy–even if Feynman is teasing him and our friend Sam Treiman is giving him “devil horn” fingers…

Long ago, in a galaxy far away–that is, in 1990 or so, when I was
doing an oral history of math for the Institute for Advanced Study–I
coaxed lots of the Institute’s math and physics types into a softball
team that I christened the Princeton Eulers.

Despite weekly practice and gallons of Gatorade, we had an unspeckled
record of gallant defeat–one year by a ragtag team of historians, the
next by a pick-up team from Princeton University. We did have the best
Tshirts and the best pizza party, which we financed by selling An Abelian Grape,
my $1.50  photocopied collection of math-and-physics jokes I’d
heard over lunch, literally cut-and-pasted from dot-matrix printouts.

Mathematical biologist Joel Cohen
was our most generous patron–he bought 10 copies! Then he suggested
that he and I should merge science-joke collections for a real book.
Two years later, Simon and Schuster’s Fireside (paperback) house
published Absolute Zero Gravity, by Betsy Devine and Joel E. Cohen.

Within months, our editor left Simon and Schuster, leaving our book an
orphan, soon out of print. Of course you can still get copies on the
web–but I urge would-be-readers to avoid sellers who want $25 or more.
It’s a little paperback book that originally sold for $8–and the jokes
that went into it have been widely told elsewhere since then. I still
get people emailing me “great science jokes” that are word-for-word the
version I wrote down for AZG.

If you recently tuned in just for
Nobel-Prize-family-backstage-surprises
blogging–or if you’re an old reader who wouldn’t mind hearing less
about Nobel Prizes–well, this situation categorically reminds
me of a joke I once wrote for Absolute Zero Gravity:

1. According to Fields Medalist Enrico Bombieri, there are three kinds of mathematicians: those who can count, and those who can’t.
2. I happen to believe that people can be divided into precisely two
   categories: those who believe that people can be divided into precisely
   two categories, and those who don’t.
3. If you agree with me, let me ask you this: which category is Bombieri in?

But I digress. If you are a Nobel-only reader, you can avoid the rest of this blog by subscribing to the RSS feed for its just-Nobel-gossip posts. If you prefer Nobel-free blogging–well, as they say for New England weather changes, just wait a while…