Destroyer of Worlds

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I just finished Jeremy Bernstein’s Oppenheimer: Portrait of an Enigma – a very odd book.

Consider this – a passage so strange I had to read it aloud to Lissa. (The setup: Bernstein, our author, in addition to being an acclaimed writer for the New Yorker, was also a physicist, and spent several years in the 1950s at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. The occasion is an Institute party):

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Oppenheimer and his wife escorting a somewhat frail-looking man with thick glasses. I immediately recognized him as Godel. I had seen a great many pictures. He was one of my heroes. His theorem on the undecidability of mathematical truth was to me one of the most wonderful things I had ever learned and now, there he was, bearing down in my general direction. He was a notorious recluse, so it would never have occurred to me to have gone to his office. In any event, when the Oppenheimers stood within hailing distance they introduced me. Godel then said he had known my father in Vienna. Since my father had never been in Vienna, I attempted to explain. Godel then repeated that he had known my father in Vienna. I thanked him, and the Oppenheimers moved on.

Oppenheimer is intrinsically compelling, and Bernstein’s book is of a type that I love, the literary biography that is less comprehensive historiography and more personal biographical essay. (One of my favorite books of this type is Wallace Stegner’s biography of John Wesley Powell. It’s as much Stegner’s take on the West with Powell as the lens as it is anything else. Brendan Gill’s Frank Lloyd Wright biography also comes to mind.)

Detangling Oppenheimer from the legend that surrounds him is hard. This is the guy who recites in his mind the Bhagavad-Gita as the Trinity blast changes our world forever, “I have become death: the destroyer of worlds.” That’s the stuff of legend, and stories told and retold to the point of losing their original truth. Bernstein is not offering us a detailed account of the man’s life, so much as Bernstein’s own observations of that which is important about that life. It’s a helpful framework for looking at a very interesting character.

RealClimate

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A group of climate scientists, including Michael Mann, have launched RealClimate, a bloggish site whose authors describe it as “a commentary site on climate science by working climate scientists for the interested public and journalists. We aim to provide a quick response to developing stories and provide the context sometimes missing in mainstream commentary.”

This is very promising.

GNOME 2.9 Diaries

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Started a GNOME 2.9 build today. Here’s the bit of business I had to overcome.

The evolution-data-server build was crapping out because it couldn’t find “nspr.h,” a file from Mozilla’s Network Security Services. It was properly checking in the configure stage, and properly not finding it, but the appropriate compile flag wasn’t being set for some reason, so the build died.

(On Luis’ tinderbox it seems to be correctly not finding in and therefore not trying to use it.)

Solution: “–enable-nss=no” added to my jhbuild configure script. My 2.9 build rolls on.

St. Barbara

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Today we celebrate the feast day of Barbara of Nicomedia, patron saint of gunners.

If you’re worried about being hit by lightning or burning up in a fire, Barbara’s apparently also got your back. Versatile lass.

The story[1] is that Barbara was something of a beauty, but was uninterested in men, so her father did what apparently good Third Century dads did in such a situation – locked her up in a tower. (Today we try to amend the constitution, but those were simpler times.) I’ve found different versions of what eventually happened to her. Perhaps he handed her over to the Romans, who executed her. Perhaps it was her dad who lopped off her head. Whatever, apparently he got his comeuppance when he was struck dead by lightning.

In addition to being the patron saint of gunners, she appears to also offer the shelter of her piety to geologists, mathematicians and architects.

[1] Blackburn and Holford-Strevens, The Oxford Book of Days

The Climate Change Consensus

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Naomi Oreskes, a historian and philosopher of science at the University of California San Diego, yesterday published in Science a remarkable literature review.

Her question: Through international efforts like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, as well as professional societies like the American Geophysical Union, we’ve repeatedly seen the development and publication of consensus statements on the issue of climate change. Over and over, they say that greenhouse gases, emitted by humans, are changing the climate. But how does that reflect what’s actually being published in the scientific literature? In other words, as measured by the act of scientific publishing, how strong is the consensus?

Oreskes used the ISI database – the standard bibliographic reference source for the scientific literature – to find every paper on “climate change” publlshed between 1993 and 2003. She found 928. Her question: how many reject the consensus position on anthropogenic climate change. The answer: “Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position.”

The scientific consensus might, of course, be wrong. If the history of science teaches anything, it is humility, and no one can be faulted for failing to act on what is not known. But our grandchildren will surely blame us if they find that we understood the reality of anthropogenic climate change and failed to do anything about it.

Many details about climate interactions are not well understood, and there are ample grounds for continued research to provide a better basis for understanding climate dynamics. The question of what to do about climate change is also still open. But there is a scientific consensus on the reality of anthropogenic climate change. Climate scientists have repeatedly tried to make this clear. It is time for the rest of us to listen.

(via Chris Mooney and Crooked Timber, both excitedly awaiting the Tech Central Station response)

European Heat Wave

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A new analysis in today’s Nature by Stott, Stone and Allen[1] concludes that human-caused climate change doubles the odds of heat waves like the summer 2003 bender that killed at least 22,000 people:

Using a threshold for mean summer temperature that was exceeded in 2003, but in no other year since the start of the instrumental record in 1851, we estimate it is very likely (confidence level >90%) that human influence has at least doubled the risk of a heatwave exceeding this threshold magnitude.

Stott et al. make a very interesting point, which is worth quoting:

“It is an ill-posed question whether the 2003 heatwave was caused, in a simple deterministic sense, by a modification of the external influences on climate?for example, increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere?because almost any such weather event might have occurred by chance in an unmodified climate.”

In other words, you can’t just say “global warming caused the heat wave.” All you can do is look at ranges of statistical probabilities, and determine where this fits in. It’s an important point to remember in understanding climate change science. I’m glad they said it so explicitly up front.

[1] Human contribution to the European heatwave of 2003, Peter A. Stott, D. A. Stone and M. R. Allen, Nature 432, 610 – 614 (02 December 2004); doi:10.1038/nature03089