COPENHAGEN FOLLOWUP: Jeremy Olson of We Are Full Of Shit. points out this Slate article by Jim Holt on what people get wrong about Heisenberg and his famous uncertainty principle. And some other things about him:

Heisenberg, one of the inventors of quantum mechanics, was the leader of Hitler's atomic bomb project during World War II. After the war, he claimed that he had deliberately sabotaged the Nazi bomb effort. Many believed him. But last month, his protestations of innocence (indeed, valor) were revealed to have been almost certainly a lie. Letters written by the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, released to the public for the first time, make it pretty clear that Heisenberg was doing everything he could to produce a nuclear weapon for the Third Reich. His failure was due not to covert heroism but to incompetence.

Apparently Heisenberg was one of these genius-klutzes who knew what he knew but probably couldn't open a bottle of wine without hurting somebody. (I exaggerate.) Holt has a larger ax to grind though:

Those who, prior to last month's revelation about Heisenberg, wished to stress the supposed murkiness of his wartime motives often reached for a metaphor from his physics: the uncertainty principle. Michael Frayn did it in Copenhagen, his play about a mysterious 1941 encounter between Heisenberg and Bohr. Thomas Powers did it in Heisenberg's War, the 1993 book that defended Heisenberg's claim to have destroyed the Nazi bomb project from within. David C. Cassidy did it in the very title of his 1991 biography of Heisenberg, Uncertainty. They should all have known better.

And they're hardly alone. No scientific idea from the last century is more fetishized, abused, and misunderstood—by the vulgar and the learned alike—than Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. The principle doesn't say anything about how precisely any particular thing can be known. It does say that some pairs of properties are linked in such a way that they cannot both be measured precisely at the same time. In physics, these pairs are called "canonically conjugate variables." One such pair is position and momentum: The more precisely you locate the position of a particle, the less you know about its momentum (and vice versa). Another is time and energy: The more precisely you know the time span in which something occurred, the less you know about the energy involved (and vice versa).

How could this principle of physics be applied to Heisenberg the man? In the postscript to Copenhagen, Frayn writes, "There is not one single thought or intention of any sort that can ever be precisely established." Well, maybe; but the uncertainty principle applies to pairs of properties. In Heisenberg's case, the relevant pair is motivation and competence. How willing was he to help Hitler? How competent was he to produce an atomic bomb? But notice that there is a positive relationship between our knowledge of one and of the other: The more certain we become that Heisenberg was willing to serve the Third Reich, the more certain we become that he was incompetent to produce a bomb. This is not the uncertainty principle, but its exact opposite. Evidently, knavishness and incompetence are not canonically conjugate variables.

Neat little read. I still want to see Copenhagen, tho'.

AND NOW THE WRAPUP FROM THE ECONOMICS-SPORTS NEXUS: Lessee here, the final medal count for the US of A was 34. They predicted us getting somewhere around twenty. So here's the box score: America 1, Harvard Economists O. U-S-A! U-S-A!

Insult to injury: Penn won the Ivy. They're the only Big Five team in the tourney this year.

UPDATE: Matt Welch has more Harvard hate on a completely unrelated subject.

DISORDER INSIDE AND OUT: The New Scientist has the story that some people can somehow read the structure of chaotic systems, and explains, if you were ever wondering, the difference between random action and chaotic action:

Richard Heath, who has now moved to the UK's University of Sunderland tried to identify people who can do this by showing volunteers a list of eight numbers and asking them to predict the next four. The volunteers were told that the numbers were maximum temperatures for the previous eight days. In fact the numbers were computer-generated: some sets were part of a chaotic series while the rest were random.

Random sequences are by their nature unpredictable, whereas chaotic sequences follow specific rules. Despite this, chaotic sequences are very hard to predict in practice because of the "butterfly effect" - even an unmeasurably small change in initial conditions can have a dramatic impact on their future state.

Nonetheless, Heath found that a quarter of the people he tested could predict the temperature for at least the next two days if the sequence was chaotic, rather than random, even though there is no obvious pattern to the figures.

"The $64,000 question is what is going on in their heads," says Heath. He is now planning studies to find out whether the skill is related to specific personality types, or to aspects of intelligence such as mathematical ability.

He thinks this is why some people are so good at playing the market --they have chaos decryptors as part of the architecture of their minds. Cool. I love these reports from the economics-physical sciences nexus.

GET YOUR GIANT ROBO ON: Mark Bowden in today's Inquirer is on the flying-under-the-radar cold fusion in a bottle of acetone story. Says he:

We can no more easily imagine a world of limitless low-cost energy today than a 19th-century person could imagine the Concorde. But cheap fusion would have a much more fundamental and far-reaching effect on civilization than the invention of the airplane and jet engine. It would shatter one basic, seemingly immutable law of economics - that energy is rare and, hence, valuable. Energy could become more plentiful than rain. Think of all the worldwide disaster scenarios that would ruin!

Right now, oil helps define the world's politics and economy. One deep cause of our current troubles in the Middle East is our need for an uninterrupted, low-cost supply of it. It's a finite source, so someday it is going to run out. As it dwindles, we can expect the price of oil to go up and up (both in monetary and political terms). Among other things, this would be likely to aggravate the existing, alarming, and growing gap between "have" and "have-not" nations. One might foresee more dark days ahead.

I will leave the question of what free limitless energy would mean to those better versed in economics, but Bowden does make a Romeresque point:

Just a hundred years ago, the primary means of transportation worldwide was the horse. An ambitious pessimist, charting the steady increase in horse ownership, might have projected a future horse overpopulation crisis and foreseen problems, say, in breeding that many healthy animals, or disposing of that much horse manure.

That is a silly example, but my point is that a vision of the future based on existing trends is almost always wrong. There are things we cannot foresee, both bad and good. And throughout human history one of the most consistent positive variables has been technology.

Science fiction has come up with the free limitless energy thing before; the two I'm most familiar with are the anime series Giant Robo and the Nancy Kress Beggars novels. In Giant Robo --well, it was more of a stylistic throwback to old Japanese adventure cartoons that happened to use limitless free energy as a plot mover. The Beggars novels depicted a world where, yes, everybody lived without want but there were class divisions between the vast unwashed masses and those who maintained the free energy. Both are worth your time and effort to seek out.

And speaking of the predictive value of science fiction, Blogatelle reports that puzzling X-rays are coming from Jupiter every 45 minutes and not from where X-ray pulses should be coming from. Get Your Space Odyssey On indeed.

DRUNKEN BASTARD AT ONE IN THE MORNING POST: I love you all, my fellow bloggers. TTHPT --as Bill The Cat used to say.

TARIFFS: Thomas Nephew has the posting equivalent of a monster dunk over a seven-foot-two center on the whole Nick Denton-inspired tariff non-issue issue.

GIANT ROBOT TEST RESULTS: I am completely jealous of Monkey's results. And Damian Penny has his up. This is my favorite test yet, every result appeals to my dorkish fannishness and my childhood identification with giant robots, and I wouldn't be surprised if this was true of a lot of us out here in warblogspace, thus the robot test (like the gun test) is something we all can enjoy without shame --unlike say the Muppet test. Though Emily Jones has no problem publishing her results for both. Giant Robot, by the way, is a fine fine magazine that's not about giant robots.

ROY: Peter Briffa has more. And he makes the counter-intuitive argument for Russ Meyer, Conservative Filmmaker.

BARKLEY: Oliver on Sportsfilter started a thread on that Sir Charles interview. I think the weirder thing about that story is that Jack McCallum (who wrote it) claims that the Ernie-Kenny-Charles TNT show is the best studio-produced sports show ever and I find it hard to disagree with him. He compares it favorably to the Fox NFL show, saying it comes off as forced sometimes and I completely agree; those guys are forcing themselves into laughing at their own jokes and being all buddy-buddy all the time. No four grown men can possibly enjoy each other the way those guys do, but I guess Fox puts some kind of premium on attitude. Whereas the TNT show you get what you get and It Is Good.

Jack McCallum needs a blog.

I KEEP FORGETTING TO MENTION THIS: But the DVDVR Playaz have the road report up of last Saturday's ECWA Super 8 up. The Super 8 is an annual tournament held in a church meeting hall in Newport, Delaware that showcases some of the best talent on the indy wrestling scene; it was as great this year as ever. Even the battle royal was good --won by Prince Nana, who has a pompous African prince gimmick and was totally funny throughout in the cowardly heel role, he spent most of the match avoiding the other competitors and won by having his manager distract the last guy in the ring, last year's Super 8 champ Low-Ki, while Nana came around and dumped him out of the ring-- though the Scoot Andrews-Billy Fives ladder match for the title was laughable. Low-Ki sure beat the crap out of idiot-gimmick king Japanese Pool Boy though. The Xavier-A.J. Styles match was top of the line. People say jazz is the only native American artform but professional wrestling is surely another one.

MOVIES: What if you made a movie and nobody came? Would said movie still be said to exist? Gawd this looks stinky:

Running late to meet his wife and young son at a downtown high-rise, he witnesses a catastrophic bomb blast kill his family before his eyes. The explosion is credited to "The Wolf," an infamous rebel leader in Colombia's decades-long civil war. The intended targets were members of the Colombian consulate and American intelligence agents. Gordy's wife and child are considered "collateral damage," innocent people who lost their lives for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Gordy's only consolation is the hope that justice will prevail for the loss of his family.

Of course justice isn't happening and Arnold has to track down The Wolf, who I doubt will replace the Harvey Keitel version from Pulp Fiction in the public consciousness. Give it up Arnold clap clap clapclapclap. If this movie was popular we'd see endless criticisms as it probably plays fast and loose with the facts in Columbia and our presence there and the War on Drugs and all, but it isn't so we have nothing of that nature to read. This probably qualifies as a conservative movie too, just not any you'd want to watch on purpose. But I proably shouldn't pan it just because Eraser was terrible so no more.

OBLIGATORY SIMPSONS POST OF THE DAY: Greatest emoticon ever right here.

MARK CUBAN WATCH: Little post from Alice this time linking to an actual free Wall Street Journal article about how Mark made his fortune and how he's keeping the fortune afloat now. Pro lacrosse on high definition TV? Sign me up.

IN A PARALLEL BLOGGERVERSE: Two science fiction writers who happen to be bloggers debate "The Death Of Scarcity" at a tech festival. In our bloggerverse Glenn Reynolds and Mickey Kaus talk about "My Life As A Blog" at a public university. This isn't a parallel universe in a Crime Syndicate kind of way, it's more of a Justice League versus The Avengers kind of thing where fans of both can endlessly debate their respective merits. This is a good thing --it's good to have more than one frame of reference. And apparently I can only argue metaphorically and never with an airtight logical argument. So be it, Jedi.

RUN RUN AWAY: Jubal Harshaw, Robert Heinlein's alter ego, refers me to this Chicago Tribune story about William Heirens, who may or may not be a serial killer. Harshaw says:

William Heirens, then a bright high school student, and since the first prisoner in Illinois to get a college degree behind bars, was charged with triple murder in 1946. He was injected with sodium pentothal, and, WHILE UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF THE PENTOTHAL made a “confession” that eventually led to his conviction. There were “inconsistencies” in the physical evidence presented, and prosecutors admitted that they would have had a hard time convicting him without the “confessions.” Though another man had already confessed to the murders, Heirens is still in prison, now 78 years old.

For those of you who haven’t seen someone injected with sodium pentothal, let me try to explain the problem here. Sodium pentothal, aka “truth serum” makes people tell the truth only in the comic book world. Here in the real world, it does NOT make people tell the truth. In low doses, sodium pentothal can make people babble incoherently, and frequently repeat whatever they are told (an event called "echolalia"). Imagine being bone-tired, drunk, and stoned, all at once. What someone says under the influence of sodium pentothal has as much relation to the truth as what you would expect to come out of the mouth of someone who’s been awake for 48 hours, just finished with a fifth of scotch, and on his tenth doobie.

There does seem to be a real divergence of opinion regarding this guy though, about whether he did it or not. But Harshaw's point about a sodium pentathol confession being evidence is obviously right. There's a point here about the limits of science, and about a bygone era where people could believe there was a clear test, like an injection or the polygraph, that would prove if people meant what they were saying beyond a shadow of a doubt. But that never happened and we still have to make up our own minds about what people are really thinking based on their words and actions until we all evolve giant brains and vestigial legs and have super-monkeys build us wheelchairs. So it goes.

WAR STORY: That Don't Be A Shamed fella provides the link to this story about a soldier (from New Jersey) who risked life and limb to get the right position on a bunch of Al Qaeda types who kept jumping out of their cave and taunting him and his troops. It's a neat little story, reminding me of the kind of thing I might have read in G.I. Combat when DC was still publishing an honet-to-god war comic. Or some of those EC Frontline Combat reprints, or the Wayne Vansant stuff I read during the eighties black and white comics craze. Something where it took actual wit and ingenuity to solve a problem, like Batman in his Sherlock Holmes mode but at war. Those G.I. Combats were great because they were cheap, they were 80 pages, and they involved a tank in World War II that was haunted by the ghost of Jeb Stuart. Very great, if I remember it all right.

TINY NUKE IN NYC FOLLOWUP: CNN says the guy who was talking about a missing Russian nuke is "a fabricator" and a charlatan too, no doubt. Via Dave Tepper.

BLOGIC OF THE SPHERES: Or Music Of The Blogs, whichever bad joke you prefer. Stacy suggested I get the Rate Your Music comment service and so I have. And so now you can rate my music, since music is an artform and Steve den Beste in his manifesto says his blog is a work of art so maybe mine is too or at least it's blurring the line between art and criticism. Or whatever; it's called Rate Your Music and it makes comments for my posts. Fin.

TESTING TESTING: Here's Jacob Sullum on those dern tariffs.

TESTING AGAIN: Linking to the latest Jim Treacher.