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Information Loss

A quick exercise:

Think of an area of knowledge where you have acknowledged, real-world expertise.
Think of the last journalism piece you encountered that touched on that area of knowledge.
How accurate was that piece?

I don't know about you, but more often than not, I dread reading mainstream articles on fields that I know a little something about. Take physics. Okay, yes, I expect to read piles of dreck in my old field of nanomechanics, what with the active campaign to spread dreck and all. But even discounting nanomechanics, there's no shortage of the dreck in other areas of physics.

Case in point: Brad DeLong recently picked apart a picks apart an article by TNR columnist Gregg Easterbrook on the Stephen Hawking black hole information loss bet. Easterbrook not only attacks physicists as mumbo-jumbo-spouting medieval priests, but also manages to make an appalling number of scientific errors. I've actually liked reading Easterbrook in the past, but now I'm wishing I had taken his writing with a much larger grain of salt. If you think modern physics is worth snarking over because The Physics of the Very Large and The Physics of the Very Small does not match our common-sense intuitions about The Physics of Tables and Chairs -- well, as DeLong points out, you're about 300 years too late to that party.

No doubt one of the main reasons The New Republic published Easterbrook's article is because it behooves them to take a generally contrarian view. And let's face it, the mainstream take on the Hawking story was pretty darn boring. Cute, gnomish High Priest of Physics pronounces to his fellow white-haired, gnomish physicists that he has lost an old bet about -- something wacky, something to do with black holes. Gnomish men scurry off to check their leader's calculations, muttering that they don't quite understand what he's talking about. Cricket and baseball are somehow involved. Those darned physicists! The End.

The sad part is that there really was a non-boring version of the story; namely Jacques's take, where we learn that A) mainstream theoretical physics solved this problem quite some time ago, and B) Hawking's concession argument is rather strange and incomplete to say the least! Unfortunately, Jacques wrote his article for people who have at least a passing acquaintance with Anti de Sitter / Conformal Field Theory, a group that probably excludes you and definitely excludes me. Still, there is in fact a real story there.¹

If only The New Republic had thought to hire a geniune physicist to write about physics, the way Slate has thought to hire a genuine Wall Street scoundrel to write about Wall Street shenanigans. Oh, well.

1. And the good news is, it can't possibly be lost! We think.

Posted by Evan Goer on Aug. 04, 2004 at 11:37 PM | Comments (2)

Comments

<abbr title="The New Republic">TNR</abbr> is a journal of opinion. For them, it is important that Easterbrook have an opinion (no matter how ill-informed, if not downright delusional) on the matter at hand.

Most science reporting is notoriously devoid of opinion, probably because most science reporters are smart enough to realize that it's a bit foolhardy to voice a strong opinion on a subject in which they are far from experts.

To get real opinion pieces on physics, you either hand things off to clowns like Easterbrook, or (like The New York Review of Books) you hire real top-drawer physicists, like Steven Weinberg and Freeman Dyson to write for you.

As to my <a href="http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/~distler/blog/archives/000404.html">blog entry</a>, yeah it was somewhat abbreviated, and geared to the cognoscenti. A real article on the subject would start with a short précis of AdS/CFT and why it "answers" the question about blackhole information loss. It would then explain why many people still pine for a physical "explanation" of that answer (ie, an understanding of the detailed mechanism). Finally, it would go on to discuss whether Hawking has, in fact, provided such an explanation (I don't think he has).

But such an article would be much longer than mine, and probably less fun to read.

Posted by Jacques Distler on Aug. 05, 2004 at 10:49 PM
That just points out the problem with nearly all punditry. Do the people who write about tax policy all have top-drawer backgrounds in economics? Do the people who write about foreign affairs all come straight from high-level positions in the diplomatic corps? Well, okay, a few do. But not enough.

As for your proposed article, I think it would be lots of fun to read. I'll grant that you can find excellent science reporting if you look hard enough. But it's just frustrating that whenever a physics story comes around, most of the mainstream articles throw up their hands, "Darned if we can understand what these crazy coots are talking about." Even setting the op-ed part aside, we can do better than that.

Posted by Evan on Aug. 06, 2004 at 8:43 AM

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This entry was posted on August 4, 2004 by Evan Goer.

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