It’s the System, Stupid

With the latest election campaign well underway in Canada, I’ve found myself being increasingly drawn into “social media” such as twitter in order to keep up (fans, I know that’s no excuse for my lack of posting). Twitter has made the election much more engaging because the normal barriers in exchanging ideas are gone. I’m able to instantly send messages to some of the people with klout in the twitosphere, and the message snowballs from there. For example, when getting the word out for McGill’s latest votemob, I got some retweets from the Montreal Gazette and a few of the Canadian journalists active on twitter, which definitely reached a wider audience than my hundred followers. That twitter leverage was possibly translated into the success of the Vote mob movement at McGill, where we put together a video that even got a shoutout from Rick Mercer on twitter.

The vote mob movement is concerned about mobilizing the youth vote. In a climate that is already defined by 41% of eligible voters staying home on election day, among my 19-24 demographic, that number shoots up to 63%. To get that number just to the national average would be a huge achievement for our youth movement, but there is a more fundamental problem with our Canadian electoral system that would not see the extra youth votes translated into seats outside of key ridings. That those key youth swing ridings are subject to voter intimidation and  suppression tactics by the Conservatives is troubling, but the fact is that even without those dirty tactics, Election 41 is going to go to another Conservative minority government, if not a majority government. This means that key issues like education and the environment that are so important to youth will continue to be safely ignored by the governing parties, and voting apathy among youth will continue to rise to record highs.

The structural problem implicit in all this is the first past the post system. For those unfamiliar, Canadian voting works by casting ballots in the riding of the MP (Member of Parliament) who will sit in the house of commons. The party that recieves the most votes within that district gets the seat. Simple, right? That system would be ideal if our system had two parties to choose from, but in reality, Canada has 4 or 5 parties running in each riding. As a result, the mandate for the seat can come from a distinct minority of citizens,  like in Kitchener Center, where 60% of voters chose ABC (anything but conservative) but the seat went to a Conservative anyway.

I understand the rationale behind the FPtP system –  it leads to more majority governments which tend to be more stable and result in fewer elections. But by its nature, it is incapable of reflecting the true political makeup of Canadian voters, especially if the supporters are evenly spread out through the entire country. This is why we see the Bloc Quebecois get just under 1.4 million votes in the 2008 election and recieve 49 seats (as all their supporters are concentrated in quebec), whereas the Green Party recieves over 900 thousand votes all across Canada and gets no seats at all.  That Green vote represents 6.8% of all Canadians voting, and yet they have zero representation in our democratic process.

Worse yet, the FPtP system rewards gaming the system. In the 1990s, Canada had two seperate Conservative parties which tended to split that 40ish% conservative vote and result in liberal governments. In 2003, those two parties entered into a formal coalition agreement to “unite the Right” and created the new Conservative party of Canada. This consolidated that 40% vote while the larger ABC vote continued to be fractured between Liberal, NDP and increasingly the Green party. I have no doubt that the conservative successes in the decade that followed has more to do with manipulating the broken system to their advantage, (oh, and don’t even get me started  on the Senate) than any fundamental change in Canadian demographics.

Symptomatic of this problem are the various ‘strategic voting’ and ‘voteswapping’ campaigns that have been started, mostly in an effort to form an ABC government. The fact that we youth feel the need to collude with other youth voters just to get a few people representative of us shows you why apathy is so high among us. Even though there are 3 million students in Canada, because we are spread out, the FPtP system will not reflect our wishes. For the record, if our democraphic had actual power, our preferred government would be radically different than the one we have:

There is a solution: proportional representation. Something like the single transferrable vote system that has been used for years in Australia. I know, I know, it’ll never happen. The NDP, who suffer from the same ‘smeared support’ and ‘fracturing the left’ problems as other minority parties have been calling for this for years, and nobody ever listens to Jack Layton. It would certainly result in more minority governments, and GOD FORBID, working together with the socialists, environmentalists and seperatists that make up the fabric of our country in order to get things done for all Canadians. What it would also mean is that when you cast your vote (even for a party that isn’t the favored one in your region), IT WOULD COUNT. That system would be more chaotic, fragile, but dare I say it, democratic.

The powers-that-be have a vested interest in keeping FPtP intact — it keeps them in power. As long as nothing changes, the clear message to youth will be “your votes don’t matter, so you might as well stay home.” Unless we get serious about creating a system that is truly democratic, I expect that voter apathy will continue to rise, especially among the next generation of leaders. We can, and we are fighting it with the youth movement and our vote mobs, but even our complete mobilization of those 3 million students will be powerless to address the structural problems of our electoral system.

We can, and ought to do better to reflect the true political nature of Canada. Anything less is a failure of the democratic process.

Power Bracelets, Power Fraud

These fashionable accessories can be found on the wrists of a huge cross-section of society, and are endorsed by celebrities like David Beckham, Shaquille O’Neal, and Robert De Niro. Numerous testimonials on slick websites offer glowing reviews of how Power Balance wristbands improve strength, balance, and flexibility simply by slipping one on. If it sounds too good to be true, that’s because it is.

In December 2010, Australian consumer protection advocates managed to put the manufacturer of the Power Balance wristbands under the harsh light of real scrutiny. As a result of this legal inquiry, Power Balance was forced to retract advertisements, issue a formal apology, and offer refunds for the $60 wristbands. Of particular note in their apology was the description of the scientific basis of their claims:

We stated that Power Balance wristbands improved your strength, balance, and flexibility. We admit that there is no credible scientific evidence that supports our claims and therefore we engaged in misleading conduct.

Despite this damning admission, the same misleading claims have continued in other markets unabated, including in Canada. On the main website of Power Balance International, any links to the Australian affiliate have been conspicuously scrubbed even though the Australian page with the apology is still active. In comparing the Canadian and Australian pages, the FAQ section that contains the misleading “scientific” explanation is absent from the Aussie page, while still prominent on the Canadian website. There is still no indication on the Canadian page that the product has no credible scientific basis. A representative for Power Balance was contacted for an explanation of these discrepancies, but never responded.

For the record, Power Balance and similar energy bracelets do not work as they’re described. The explanation offered alleges that the bracelets function because of holograms “treated with energy waves . . . [that are] believed to resonate and work with your body’s natural energy flow to help enable you to perform at the best of your abilities.” In a double blind test, scientists could not tell the difference between the “embedded frequency holograms” and Pez candy. Furthermore, the material used for the “embedded hologram” is mylar, a material used in other industries as an insulator that acts to stop many different types of “energy fields.” While this idea of a human energy field may be popular and widespread, it is not a scientifically meaningful concept that can be demonstrated to exist.

The popular Q-Ray bracelets are another example of a product that claims to work by “balanc[ing] your own negative and postive [sic] energy forces, optimizing your Bio-Energy.” The unique feature of the Q-Ray are magnets, which have long been a staple of quack medicine. Our blood does contain iron in hemoglobin, but the particular state of that iron is not magnetic. Even static magnetic fields thousands of times larger than those found in the Q-Ray – such as the ones in MRI machines – are not powerful enough to cause measurable effects on blood or tissue. Actually, the effects of small magnetic fields on living tissue, after decades of extensive clinical testing, have not been found to be statistically significant enough to reliably be called good or bad, so any reported benefits from wearing the bracelets are likely to be psychological.

At best, the whole “magic bracelet” idea is no better than a placebo. A BBC investigation into the Power Balance wristbands found no difference between the real thing and a generic plastic lookalike. Those generic plastic wristbands are available from the manufacturer for as low as $3. Power Balance sells these exact items for at least $40 dollars, which is about a 1,300 per cent markup over the knockoff. For a product that is admitted to have “no scientific evidence to support their claims,” that is quite a profit margin. In fact, Power Balance has made so much money from this scam that they could afford to buy out the Sacramento Kings’ Arco Arena, which is now the Power Balance Pavilion. At least someone isn’t suffering from the recession.

This shamelessness isn’t new – James Randi, founder of the James Randi Educational Foundation, has spend much of his considerable career dealing with pseudoscientific claims. In an interview at a McGill’s symposium “Confronting Pseudoscience: A Call to Action,” he remarked: “When we say ‘pseudoscience,’ what we’re really talking about is bad logic and faulty reasoning. These things are damaging to society precisely because societies take actions, and when you take actions based upon dumb ideas, you are likely to take dumb actions.”

“What needs changing is the way the media deals with the conflicting claims of science and pseudoscience. You can’t be ‘fair and balanced.’ You can only be fair or balanced. To be fair is to tell the truth; to be balanced is to tell a truth, tell a lie, and then let the public determine which is which – and this, of course, isn’t fair to anyone.”

From a consumer protection standpoint, the truth is that these products are a scam. They are nothing more than modern snake oil that may make you feel better, but only because of the placebo effect. You should know that you could probably keep that $40 and get the exact same thing for $3. That is, if you still want one.

EDITORIAL NOTE: This piece originally appeared in print in the McGill Daily, and is cross posted here with permission. The original article can be found at this link

Canadian vs. American Politics: Interesting like a Car Crash

Anybody who has talked to me for more than five minutes knows that I’m pretty damn obsessed with American politics. It’s a scratch that I itch essentially every day by watching The Rachel Maddow show (who my girlfriend jokes is my lesbian girlfriend) and The Lawrence O’Donnell show. Both of them are screamingly left wing in the parallel universe of American politics, but I find them to be pretty damn centrist in their messaging. At any rate, the fact that I watch them so faithfully has more to do with the state of American politics in 2011 than anything else.

This isn’t to say that I haven’t been keeping up with Canadian politics as well, but that has been stuck in this perpetual ‘pre-election’ nonsense. Harper has been divining the polls and knows he is pretty much guaranteed a majority in the next election, which will probably occur in May. He’s done some deliciously Orwellian things like try to change the official “Government of Canada” letterhead into the blatantly partisan “Harper Government”, or needlessly screw with the long form census in order to piss on statisticians and demographically important information. At this point in the 5 year regime, Harper and his meticulously picked cronies are able to do pretty much whatever they want, including suspending our democracy not once, but twice because the opposition parties are so ridiculously incompetent that they can’t even organize themselves enough to , you know, oppose anything. So Harper continues without challenge, bringing in inexcusable minimum sentencing on drug charges, dropping billions of bucks on new jetfighters without a bidding process, and unapologetically breaking elections Canada law in a huge ‘in-and-out’ scheme. To name a few. To his credit (what little credit is due), he has continued in public works spending, which is decidedly socialistic in nature.

But, the unwritten rule of Canadian politics is that “Canadians hate an election”. Both Harper and the opposition knows that whomever calls the election first will be punished at the polls, which is why Harper has been essentially goading the opposition with American style attack ads to provoke them into calling an election. It’s delicious that Harper wraps himself in the Canadian flag while simultaneously pushing for more American style policies like namely corporate tax breaks and Faux-News style propaganda. The Conservative party base is the oil patch and Southern Ontario tv-fed suburbanites like the drones that elected Rob “War of the Cars” Ford to Mayor of Toronto. That boorish asshole has succinctly demonstrated the viability of America style “anti-elitism” which plays so well in the suburbs.

That brings me to my ongoing obsession with American politics. Since the 2010 midterm elections, the new republican majority in the house has been an incredibly duplicitous charade of mind-bogglingly hypocritical politic decisions. Let us review: The number 1 priority of these conservatives was the “Paris Hilton” tax cut, which will cost America’s economy an additional 700 billion dollars of deficit spending per year, while simultaneously delivering average savings of over one hundred thousand bucks to people with a million bucks or more. It was so important that every elected republican in the Senate was willing to defund the military in order to extort Obama and the American taxpayer I guess those multi-billionare elites like the Koch Brothers who already own the plurality of all wealth in the United States really get what they pay for with their millions of dollars of anonymous attack ads totaling some 87 million bucks. With that out of the way, John “Cry-me-a-river” Boehner was free to focus on jobs. To that end, he announced (surprise) a tax-cut filled budget which would kill approximately 700,000 jobs! When questioned on the job-reducing aspect of his job ‘creating’ bill, he remarked “So be it“. Stay Classy, Boehner.

With his agenda to drive America back into the ditch by destroying the livelyhood of thousands of families complete, Boehner continued his attack on the American people by allowing various draconian anti-abortion bills up for voting. Some of them would literally allow hospitals to turn dying women away from critical care if assistance required them to perform an abortion, and others redefined rape to effectively allow non-violent abuse to not count. That’s right, America- GOP 2011 doesn’t want your daughter to have the option to terminate the pregnancy if she was drugged and raped, even if she’ll die as a result of the pregnancy. Republicans are also evidently pro-cancer, as they voted to defund Planned Parenthood, a service which screens millions of women for cancers, not to mention provides important information for people who live in one of the ‘abstinence only’ regions of America. Never mind all the workers, nurses and staff that work there, or the countless of millions of dollars saved in avoided health complications.

The GOP, practically by definition, is the party that will work whenever possible to screw over the little guy by standing up for billionares. How else could you explain Republican Governor of Wisconsin Scott Walker’s refusal to negotiate with public unions, even when they have given into all of his demands which would allow him to balance his self-sabotaged budget. This is the same Scott Walker who doesn’t have time to negotiate with Union leaders, but could give a  20  minute call to someone he thought was campaign contributor and billionare David Koch. The American people do not agree with his duplicitous bullshit, with clear majorities in Wisconsin indicating their disapproval of his blatant union bashing. There have been tens of thousands of grassroots protestors in the streets and occupying the capital, but nary a peep from the national media, because pro-union narratives do not fit into the american landscape.

It is this theatricality that really keeps me hooked on American politics. While Canadian politics (and all the associated media coverage) is about politics, American politics is more of a slow motion car crash being endlessly dissected by a content-hungry media. That media, which reaches countless millions of Americans, distorts their understanding of the issues and leads to shameful polls indicating that 1 in 5 Americans incorrectly identify the religion of the sitting president.  In fact, there are strong pluralities of Americans who wouldn’t mind raising taxes for millionaires, cutting off the billions of dollars in subsidies for oil companies that pollute global waterways, and preserving the rights of unions to exist.

In that particular poll, 36% self identified as conservative and most likely voted Republican, but when asked in plain English about policy issues, majorities actually disagree with the Republican’s current actions in the legislature.  Faux News, and other widely viewed cable news programs are playing defense for these con(servative) artists, and are very successful at continuing to distract voters from the actions of legislature so that they keep voting in lobbyists for big buisness. The reality is, Republicans exist to service the needs of a small group of individuals who hold the majority of the money and the power in America, and they use that leverage to dictate the media narrative and win elections. I agree that it sounds like a bad movie plot, but that’s exactly my point.

It reminds me of that joke that’s been going around lately:

 

A union worker,a non-union worker and their boss are sitting at a table with a dozen cookies on a plate. The boss gets up, takes 11 of the cookies with him and says to the non-union guy: “She wants your cookie”.

 

Still Kickin’

I’ve been busy this new year- so busy that I’ve apparently left my little corner of internet alone for a long time.  I’ve started up grad school, which has a much more rigorous demand for my time than I’m used to. In addition to that, and perhaps the biggest reason why posts have virtually dried up here at Prenerk is my column for my student newspaper, the McGill Daily. It’s a science and technology column that contains all of my regular musings, but with a bit more of a journalistic bend to it.

I’ve gotten permission to republish those works here on my own blog, but with additional “value-added” hyperlinking in case you find the stuff interesting. There’s been so much going on in the last couple of months, I have a ‘to do’ blog pile that is huge, but I’ll do my best to get through it for my 4 loyal readers.

 

Love,

 

Andrew

The Giffords shooting: Climate and Weather

The inevitable has happened: Gabrielle Giffords, a serving member of Congress, was the victim of an attempted assassination  yesterday. While she survived the attack, a 9 year old girl (!) , a federal judge who stood against Arizona’s racist ‘profiling’ law and four other people were murdered at Representative Giffords public townhouse meeting. I’m at a bit of a loss of how to address this, as a violent outburst was painfully predictable given the charged political climate, but having it actually happen is outrageous.

In the wake of this kind of tragedy, the media will do what they always do: offer platitudes and calls for the ‘toning down’ of rhetoric. They will dismiss any possible motivations of the shooter besides being ‘crazy’ and will thus absolve themselves of any associated blame. To an extent, I agree. If you have a constitutionally enshrined right to bear arms in a free society, ‘the crazies’  will have guns that they will use to their own twisted ends, (JFK, John Lennon, Reagan). Effectively predicting the actions of unpredictable people is by definition impossible, which is why I think speculating on the motives of the shooter with regards to motivation is misguided. In this way the shooting can be looked at as a weather event- unpredictable without all data, chaotic and unexpected.

As an aside, it should be stressed that not all ‘crazy people’ are violent, just like not all atheists, Christians, democrats, liberals, anarchists, republicans, left-handed people and dog lovers (to name a few) are violent. Whatever the shooters motivation, the fact that he chose to act out his philosophy with violence is terrorism, and should be called out as such.

I think that the relationship here is similar to the relationship between weather and climate- climate describes long term trends whereas weather is concerned with the short term. It’s impossible to overlook the rhetorical climate in which this chaotic event took place. I won’t say here that there is any direct causal link between the Giffords shooter and faux news, because that would be a speculation based on my personal prejudice against violent, eliminationist rhetoric. But if you look at the ‘media narrative’, especially leading up to the 2010 elections, you find no intelligent discourse about policy and more charged imagery of targets, and ‘second amendment remedies’.

Take Giffords opponent in the last election-Republican Jesse Kelly literally raised money by promising to ‘remove Gabrielle Giffords from office’ by ‘shoot[ing] a fully automatic M16′ . In the wake of her actually being shot, we have the luxury of shame about these actions. I wonder what Mr Kelly would tell the parents of the 9 year old girl who was murdered because of the ‘unintentional’ implications of his fundraising. In a society populated by both rational and irrational people, we must all come to terms with the fact that what we say and how we say it matter. Charged rhetoric may make you money from the base, but it also feeds the dangerous delusions of unstable people. These unintentional consequences are still real consequences. I predict much hand-wringing to come, but no real admissions of responsibility from those who contributed to this climate.

For a more chilling example of this rhetorical violence, look no further than the Killa from Wasilla’s fundraising site, where she posted this:

Yes, one of the targeted names is Gabrielle Giffords. No, there has been no apology for running such a deliberately ‘targeted’ fundraising ad now that one of the 20 has literally been shot at. What has happened is that the website has been scrubbed of any references to this ad, which suggests an element of understanding of their responsibility. Her infamous tweet advising conservatives in defeat:”Don’t retreat, RELOAD” is also mysteriously missing. As Roger Ebert said on Twitter “ Sarah Palin rummages online frantically erasing her rabble-rousing Tweets like a Stalinist trimming non-persons out of photos.”

I wish I could believe that this is a wake-up call, a time for us to move beyond violent partisan hackery, but that’s obviously not the case. To move beyond this rhetoric is to admit that the rhetoric was a cause of this violence in the first place, which is not going to happen.  How many extreme weather events will it take before we can accept the reality of the new climate? If the actual acceptance of climate change is any indication, we’re all royally screwed.  Months before any of this happened, the ladies on the view nailed it.

I’ll leave the last words to Whoopi

I want to put something out there to those talking heads who are still busy inciting this: Whatever comes down from this, it’s on your hands. When you say ‘wipe ‘em out’ and when you sort of gently suggest that people do stuff, let me tell you about people that tell you to do stuff- you notice that they are not doing it. The people who tell you to go and do stuff- they’re at home! They’re not going to jail. If you get caught throwing a brick, shooting someone- you’re going to jail. Your family is going to suffer…Watch yourself, talking heads, because this is dangerous.

2010 in Review

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

The average container ship can carry about 4,500 containers. This blog was viewed about 15,000 times in 2010. If each view were a shipping container, your blog would have filled about 3 fully loaded ships.

 

In 2010, there were 60 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 132 posts. There were 97 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 14mb. That’s about 2 pictures per week.

The busiest day of the year was February 3rd with 685 views. The most popular post that day was NASA Wakes Up.

 

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were facebook.com, wordpress.com, gamepod.hu, twitter.com, and blogs.discovermagazine.com.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

NASA Wakes Up February 2010
12 comments

2

Attack of the Killer Tomatoes October 2009
3 comments

3

Why Twilight is Terrible November 2009
18 comments and 2 Likes on WordPress.com

4

Hubble Ultra-Deep Field September 2009
2 comments

5

Ottawa: How Not to do Free Speech March 2010
5 comments

Nerdgasm to the Power of Infinity

Truly my friends, I can never hope to attain the pure, refined nerdery that has been put together with this. Behold, and tremble at a full half hour of Dr Who meets star trek

There are no words.

 

 

The Cosmic Ballet Goes On

A once-in-several-lifetime event is happening tonight- The full moon will pass into the shadow of the earth on the shortest day of the year, resulting in a total lunar eclipse  that will be visible to all of North America. The last time this particular arrangement occurred was 456 years ago, so tonight is a night to party like it’s 1554! The action will start around 11:30 tonight (mountain standard time), with the glorious red totality occurring by 1:30 AM.

For the curious, there is lots of cool stuff that’s associated with both eclipses  and solstices. The planets all rotate on the same plane, because they all formed from the same rotating disc of baby planet stuff. The moon came later, resulting from the collision of a Mars sized planetoid bashing into the earth, so the orbit of the moon isn’t on the same plane as the ecliptic.

The solstice is when the sun is at it’s lowest in the sky, which occurs because our planet rotates at a tilt with respect to the ecliptic plane. In addition to this tilty business, the shape of the earth’s path around the sun is slightly oval, so on December 21st, the earth is actually closer to the sun around this time of the year, where it is about 5 million kilometers closer than at the peak of summer. It’s counterintuitive that we’re closer to the sun when it’s so damn cold in the northern hemisphere, but it just heightens the importance of the axial tilt in determining our seasons.

 

 

The Solstice is also the date of another cosmic alignment- between the earth, sun and the centre of the milky way. This is a pure coincidence, although those disingenuous conspiracy mongers behind the 2012 fallacy, along with any astrologers, will claim that this has ‘special significance’. For the record, the galactic alignment happens every year without anything particularly interesting happening, so those guys are obviously full of shit. Still, this year will have the sun, earth, moon and galactic center in a straight line, which is pretty cool, but meaningless.

As for why the moon will be red during totality, this is because the suns light diffracts through the atmosphere- think the redness in sunsets and sunrise. If you were standing on the moon during the eclipse, you would be seeing every sunrise and sunset on the entire planet simultaneously , which is also awesome.

Events like the eclipse today always remind me of the insanely awesomeness of reality. We’re little specks on a bigger speck, hurtling at thousands of kilometers a second endlessly around a thermonuclear furnace that sustains all life, which itself is one of hundreds of billions of similar stars in one mind-boggingly massive  galaxy, which is just one of countless other galaxies. We are made from the dust of exploded stars, but uniquely (as far as we know), these particular arrangements of stardust can look up at the endless cosmic dance and understand. Cultures all about the world have celebrated both the eclipse and the solstice in their own way for millennia, creating traditions and stories that define us. I find this resonance of astronomical events with the fabric of human experience to be deeply satisfying, which is why I’ll be watching the eclipse and celebrating the connection between myself, humanity, and the cosmos that we all share.

 

F***ing Strings, How Do They Work?

In the last 100 years, our understanding of the universe has increased more than at any previous point in human history. Einstein gave us relativity, which describes the nature of the universe at its largest scales. He described precisely the way in which the universe warps and bends at high speeds or around lots of stuff, by understanding that time itself is another dimension of reality (the 4th). Around the same time, physicists developed quantum mechanics: the  characterization of the bizarre and ‘swervy’ behavior of the universe at the atomic level. Both of these theories have passed the most stringent experimental tests ever devised. However, there is a glaring problem staring physicists in the face: quantum mechanics and relativity are mutually incompatible.

The quest for a ‘unified theory’ has been taken up by the best and the brightest, including Einstein, who spend the last 20 years of his life unsuccessfully attempting to reconcile the two theories. The seeds of a new theory were planted by following Einstein’s example of rethinking the nature of reality. Just as Einstein came to understand gravity by mathematically including the 4th dimension, Kazula and Klein realized that they could understand gravity AND electromagnetism by modifying Einstein’s equations to include a 5th dimension. Unfortunately, the Kazula-Klein theory ultimately proved unsuccessful, but it was this radical notion of adding extra spatial dimensions beyond the familiar three dimensions (plus the fourth dimension of time) that allows us to understand a modern day contender for the unified theory: String theory.

The basic idea behind string theory is straightforward: the most fundamental thing in the universe is a string. These strings are so small that you could fit a billion billion strings into the width of one atom. The strings can be open or closed loops, but the important thing to know is that they vibrate, just like a guitar string. The specific ‘notes’ at which the string is vibrating correspond to more familiar bits: quarks, electrons, and the whole menagerie of the subatomic world. If the theory is correct, than that means that everything that exists is the product of the harmony of universal strings.

This idyllic view is a bit oversimplified though, because the math tells us that we have to do the same thing that Einstein did for everything to make sense. We have to add more dimensions. The bad news is that if string theory is correct, than our universe actually has 10 dimensions, not 3. To understand this idea, picture a cube. The corner of the cube has 3 lines (length, width and height) that make up the corner. A 10 dimensional universe would have 10 lines, all perpendicular to each other,  making up the same corner! So, you might ask, where the hell are these 7 extra dimensions? String theory gets around this by making the other 7 dimensions really, really small (around the same size as the strings themselves) and curls them up in fiendishly complicated ways. You can picture these extra dimensions by imagining an ant walking on a cable. From far away, the cable looks like a line, and the ant can only go forward or backwards on the line. But if you ‘zoom in’ really close, you can see the cable has a thickness, so the ant can walk ‘around’ the cable without going forward or back. The extra 7 dimensions of string theory are so small and so curled up that we don’t even notice they are there!

There is more bad news: the specific way that those extra dimensions are curled up affects how the strings vibrate (and therefore the properties of the entire universe), but our mathematical understanding doesn’t tell us which exact configuration our universe has. In fact, string theory has five different kinds of over 10^500 possible solutions to this particular problem, with no way for us to tell which one uniquely describes our own universe. Unfortunately, due to the smallness of the strings and extra dimensions, there isn’t really any way we could possibly experimentally investigate them. For experimental physicists, this effectively means there is no way to directly investigate string theory, either to confirm or reject it.

As a scientific theory, it may not ever gain the experimental successes of quantum theory or relativity. Critics of string theory rightly point out that this lack of experimental verification makes string theory more of a mathematical construct than a proper scientific theory. These critics fear that the current research emphasis on string theory is excluding development of other possible unified theories. But currently, string theory is the best candidate for a theory of everything. Stephen Hawking has even used the theory to demonstrate that the universe could be essentially self-caused, answering long outstanding questions like “why are we here” with the elegant vibrations of untold strings drifting through the hidden dimensions of our wonderful and strange universe.

The Shuttle in Retrospect

It’s pre-dawn, southern Florida. Distant spotlights reflect off a white craft over the water, and at once, the craft is lost in a supernatural light. Brighter than the sun, the ship silently rises up, faster and faster into the sunrise. A half minute later, you are pummeled with a wall of sound, louder than anything you’ve ever heard, deafening as the Space Shuttle shrinks to a tiny point atop a titanic column of smoke.

The drama that accompanies a shuttle launch will soon be a thing of the past, as NASA will be retiring the program soon after the next mission (STS-133). The shuttles have been in service since 1981, and have greatly contributed to our modern understanding of the universe. Discovery brought the Hubble Telescope to orbit, which has given us indescribable beauty and wonder as it allowed us to peer farther into the cosmos than we’ve ever been able to look before. The Chandra X-ray observatory, launched from Columbia, discovered  evidence for black holes among many other accomplishments. Many other satellites were launched that gave us unprecedented data about the cosmos and our own planet, including the fact that we were putting a hole in the ozone that we eventually stopped. Microgravity experiments performed aboard the shuttle eventually led to the development of the International Space Station, a symbol of peaceful international cooperation in an increasingly fractured world.

The history of the shuttle is also marred by tragic failures. Out of the five shuttles built to fly in space, only three remain intact today, as two of the 134 missions launched  were destroyed in flight. The first, Challenger, exploded seconds after launch, taking 6 astronauts and a teacher with it, due to an inadequate devotion to safety and a lax  bureaucratic climate.The second failure, Columbia, was in 2003, and it’s failure was due to the shuttle deteriorating systems combined with inadequate safety measures. These 23 year old systems were critical in resisting the extreme temperatures found during re-entry into our atmosphere, but they were compromised during launch because of some debris that fell onto the wings during launch. Seven astronauts, whose names are now commemorated on martian hills, lost their lives during this failure.
The eventual cost of the shuttle also proved to be much more expensive than its designers had ever anticipated. The shuttle program began in the aftermath of the Apollo program, to create a reusable spacecraft to shuttle people and cargo reliably to low-earth-orbit (LEO). The original shuttle program called for up to 55 launches a year, but complexity and unanticipated needs (such as the need to inspect 35,000 individual heat-resisting tiles after every landing) made that design a dream. The most complicated machine ever built would prove to be more challenging than they anticipated.The reality was a final cost of about 500 million dollars per launch, with a total failure rate of 2%. The final ability to haul cargo to LEO was also much less than it had been just a decade earlier, as NASA retired the monstrous Saturn-5 rockets that brought man to the moon.
At the end of the last flight, NASA will lose it’s capacity to shuttle people into space, relying instead on the Russian Soyuz vehicles to service the human needs of the ISS.

However, this vacuum of governmental involvement in manned space travel could be the best thing possible for the space industry, as private companies are now slated to fill in the gaps that NASA has left with the retiring shuttle. Some of the 6 billion dollars NASA has seeded into this private industry with their latest budget will go to projects like SpaceShip One, the Virgin Galactic owned craft that will soon be flinging people into LEO over the skies of New Mexico. Others, such as the Falcon 9 rocket owned by SpaceX, are slated to ferry cargo to orbit at a fraction of the cost of the shuttle with similar payloads. For reference, the cost to get a pound of anything to orbit on the shuttle was about $10,000, whereas the Falcon 9 will get the same amount into orbit for $500.
With the burden of cargo lifting transferred to the private sector, NASA will be free to do what it does best: Science. Instead of wasting half their budget on obsolete and dangerous technology, they can use their limited budget to better explore our universe, while opening up space travel to the rest of us.

Personal space travel is today is where personal air travel was a century ago, and it can only improve with the room the retired shuttle will leave us. As for the Space Shuttle, her successes and failures will be forever remembered as part of our first, tenous steps into the cosmic playground.

This was a post originally written for my school newspaper, the McGill Daily