Physicist’s Wall Street Journal op-ed engages movies
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.8086
The Wall Street Journal’s opinion editors have a complicated relationship with physics and physicists.
They regularly publish attacks on physicists’ and other scientists’ climate consensus, of course. In the April 2014 WSJ opinion video “The arrogance of the sciences,” David Berlinski—known, among other things, for contributing science commentary to an evolution-denying Web site—even went so far as to call most climate researchers “intellectual mediocrities and pious charlatans.” In September, the WSJ opinion editors gave plenty of op-ed acreage to physicist Steven Koonin for his long commentary “Climate science is not settled.”
But just this year they’ve also published physicist Michio Kaku’s op-ed “The golden age of neuroscience has arrived,” preceded by a related WSJ web video months earlier. In October a WSJ op-ed disputed the provenance of this year’s physics Nobel achievement, charging that the prize committee “overlooked fundamental discoveries made at RCA four decades ago.” For a November “Weekend Interview” opinion feature, the WSJ published “Finding our place in the stars ,” with this subheadline about the interviewee, physicist Kip Thorne: “The physicist who kept the Interstellar science sharp talks about black holes, space travel and his optimistic vision of human possibility.” Earlier this month “A triumph of European science : CERN’s astonishing discoveries are a reminder of what Europe gets right” appeared from Sohrab Ahmari, the opinion editor who interviewed Thorne.
Now, from Carnegie-Mellon physicist Ira Rothstein, it’s the 9 December op-ed “The perils of romanticizing physics: Bravo for Interstellar and The Theory of Everything, but let’s not get carried away.” Here’s the opening:
It is good to see movies such as Interstellar and The Theory of Everything achieving critical and box-office success—the latest evidence that the ideas involved in relativity and quantum mechanics can capture the imagination.
Physicists, such as myself, who work on these abstract subjects are funded predominantly by dwindling government grants and have an obligation to communicate these ideas to the public. But relating abstract mathematical ideas to those with less training is difficult, and it requires some pedagogical shortcuts that by necessity are oversimplifications. Quite often one must rely on metaphorical tools that, while vaguely capturing the idea, can often lead to false conclusions.
The classic example of this comes from Albert Einstein. When trying to explain the concept of time dilation predicted in the theory of relativity, he said, “When you are courting a nice girl, an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder, a second seems like an hour. That’s relativity.”
The “maestro’s explanation,” Rothstein says, “is romantic, but it is also misleading.” A psychological phenomenon isn’t physical time dilation, which Rothstein says is “wonderfully depicted in Interstellar when the protagonist, Cooper, is forced to spend time in the proximity of a black-hole horizon, where his clock slows down relative to the Earth’s clock.”
Rothstein also discusses some “lovely” but misleading prose about quantum entanglement, explains what quantum entanglement actually is, then writes, “I find it remarkable and inspiring that some of the discipline’s esoteric ideas have percolated into public consciousness, but we should be wary of applying them to matters that are better left to philosophers and theologians.”
We “don’t need science to illuminate how we are interconnected,” Rothstein declares at the end. It “is our humanity and our shared experiences, our joys and sorrows, not quantum mechanics and relativity, that bind us.”
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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.