How Many Quarks in a Sociology Textbook?

I've been watching a lot of YouTube lately, particularly some maths and physics channels. One of those is Sixty Symbols. Here is a screencap of regular contributor, Phil Moriarty. (Horns up, Phil!)

Notice the sociology textbook* on the shelf in the upper left of the frame? I'm not sure whether I should be buoyed or rankled by the presence of a sociology textbook in a physics professor's office. While I do not have a physics textbook on my office bookshelf, I could conceive of a sociologist having one at arm's reach if s/he were researching the culture of the discipline of physics or physics as an institution (e.g. the depiction of women in physics texts). I'm having a much harder time thinking of a reason for a physicist to have a sociology text. Maybe Phil is just interested in sociology, as I am interested in physics.

More on this later.

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* - I can't read the authors' names on the binding. If anyone can identify the specific text, I'd love to hear from you.

(Epi)Phenomenal Surfers

I'm watching Brian Greene's Fabric of the Cosmos on PBS. It's an amazing series. I initially got interested in science--and, yes, sociology is "science"--through physics. I read Einstein's Theory of Relativity when I was in middle school. (In all honesty, it was a statement of identity and status more than an actually attempt at understanding. The maths were utterly incomprehensible to me. I read the words, but more importantly, carried the book cover around.)

So far, I'm most interested by this idea of the "forward" movement of time. It seems to physicists that the tendency toward entropy, that is the ever increasing disorder of everything, dictates the direction of the arrow of time, without which time could theoretically tick in either direction. Knowing this, one physicist said that we are essentially "surfers riding the wave" of an epiphenomenon within a larger movement toward chaos.

As a scholar of religion, this leads me to an even larger conclusion about those who hold an anti-evolutionary perspective. Ironically, physics makes us more sympathetic to these fundamentalists. If we exist as cosmic quirk, residing in an isolated exception within the universe, programmed to understand only that which is in front of our faces, people's reactions against the theory of evolution are utterly understandable. What is exceptional is that some among us have figured out that we are the fluke. The irony is that science leads us to a greater appreciation for our exceptionalism.

Hunting (Only) the Edge: This Is "Hard" Science?

I've recently re-watched Hunting the Edge of Space: The Ever-Expanding Universe on PBS's Nova. Curiously, at the very end of the episode, the narrator reveals that only 5% of the universe is explained by physics. (More accurately, only 5% of the universe is explainable by physics as it currently stands.) The other 95% is "dark" matter and energy. (The "dark" phenomena are essentially the error term of the Standard Model.) The worst quantitative models in sociology (i.e. the typical minimum needed to get through peer review) explain about 45% of the social world; the best models can predict more than 85%. If I submitted a manuscript to a journal with an R² of .05, the editor would likely laugh at me. (Yes, I know I'm grossly oversimplifying the coefficient of determination.) It seems that sociology is actually doing comparatively well.

Now, I fully understand that this smacks of disciplinary insecurity. Let me be clear that I have immense respect for physics and physicists. In fact, I wanted to be a physicist as a child. Sociology and the other social sciences, however, do a laudable job of explaining what is a very messy world. I wish I could track down the original quote (which I think might be attributable to Stephen Jay Gould or Karl Popper), but someone once said something to the effect of "The stars can't choose to break the rules." Indeed.

The Inch-Long Equation: A Sociology of Science

[I originally posted this blog on Tuesday 19 August 2008 on MySpace. I'm reposting it here as part of "Brad's Greatest Hits."]

Among contemporary physicists, theories are judged not only by how well they represent empirical observations of reality but ultimately by how "elegant" or "beautiful" they are. Arguments for the existence of a grand unified theory (GUT), which would explain the three principle quantum-level forces as one overarching force, and of a theory of everything (TOE), which would combine the three quantum-level forces with gravity, also rely heavily—if not solely—on the insistence of an ultimate beauty. Sociologically, we know that beauty is not absolute but socially constructed. One classic example of this understanding can be seen in the varying standards of feminine beauty over time and across cultures. For instance, viewing Cabanel's The Birth of Venus next to a photograph of Jessica Biel demonstrates two very different definitions of femininity. If definitions of beauty are culturally specific and, more radically, that beauty itself is socially constructed, then physics is judging itself on something less than scientific. This causes several problems. First, there simply may not be a GUT or a TOE, and physicists the world over are wasting their time, chasing a philosophical abstraction. Second, even if there is a GUT or a TOE, it may turn out to be complex and ugly, albeit correct. (Indeed, it is entirely possible that one such theory has already been dismissed based on this superficial criterion despite its being right!) My point is that physics has gone astray. On the margins of the discipline, in a valiant effort to expand the state of the art, scientists have been forced to reach outside of science for direction. Instead of explaining the fundamental nature of the universe, physics is on track to instead explain the consequential nature of humanity.