The Geneva-Copenhagen Survey of Sun-like Stars in the Milky Way

The journal Nature, noting that “[b]asic information about our solar neighbourhood is still surprisingly incomplete,” points to recent results which lift part of that gloom of ignorance about our own stellar backyard, as a result of the Geneva-Copenhagen survey of Sun-like stars in the Milky Way. ¹

B. Nordstrom et al. have catalogued the precise three-dimensional motions, ages, temperatures and compositions of more than 14,000 stars.  The research required roughly 63,000 individual velocity observations spread over 15 years, and includes almost all the Sun-like stars within 150 light years of Earth.

The survey reveals that about one third of the stars exist in binary systems, and that current models describing the dynamical heating of disk stars seem unable to match data that relate the ages and velocities of the stars.  The team concludes that the history of our galaxy is much more turbulent than previously thought.

¹ Nature, Vol. 428, Issue No. 6985 (Issue dated 2004-04-22), p. 817.  Requires subscription or pay-per-view.

Labels: astronomy, Sun-like stars

Copernicus Dethroned

Stimulated by NASA's Gravity B probe which went up the other day, designed to further test Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, Impearls continues its recent series which began with a piece on competing theories of gravity to general relativity, followed by consideration of what scientific theories more generally are.

People often recall from undergraduate physics that Einstein's special theory of relativity (promulgated 1905) provides for the “relativity” or equivalence of motion between “inertial reference frames,” which is to say, between unaccelerated or “free falling” platforms or moving points of view in space.  Not included in typical undergraduate curricula — and thus gradually forgotten about by most, however — is Einstein's later general theory of relativity (1915), which removes the limitation of “inertial” on allowed viewpoints or reference frames, in order to permit relativity-equivalence of motion between accelerated as well as inertial points of view.  As Einstein put it: ¹

We arrive at a very satisfactory interpretation of this law of experience, if we assume that the systems K and K′ are physically exactly equivalent, that is, if we assume that we may just as well regard the system K as being in a space free from gravitational fields, if we then regard K as uniformly accelerated.  This assumption of exact physical equivalence makes it impossible for us to speak of the absolute acceleration of the system of reference, just as the usual theory of relativity forbids us to talk of the absolute velocity of a system; and it makes the equal falling of all bodies in a gravitational field seem a matter of course.

All viewpoints, accelerated or not, are encompassed within Einstein's general theory, and since rotating points of view or reference frames are in actuality just another kind of accelerated viewpoint, rotating frames are fully instantiated under general relativity.  Thus, though it's frequently noted that Einstein's general relativity has displaced Newton's gravitation, a consequence less noticed by many, however, is that Copernicus has also been likewise dethroned.

Under general relativity, it's just as valid and “true” to consider the universe as rotating once a day about a fixed and stationary Earth (i.e., the Ptolemaic universe), as it is to regard a rotating Earth revolving about a Sun within a more or less stationary universe (the Copernican system).  When it is Earth that is considered motionless, it's gravitational fields induced by the universe spinning round it, rather than the inertia of a rotating Earth, that raises up the Earth's equatorial “bulge,” and so forth.  As Einstein pointed out in an illuminating 1913 letter to Ernst Mach, Foucault pendulums, hitherto regarded as nearly perfect and unassailable proof of the Earth's rotation, are swung about by such forces, known as “frame dragging,” thus neutering Foucault's perfect proof!  Einstein wrote: ²

[To Ernst Mach, concerning confirmation at an upcoming eclipse]
… If so, then your happy investigations on the foundations of mechanics, Planck's unjustified criticism notwithstanding, will receive brilliant confirmation.  For it necessarily turns out that inertia originates in a kind of interaction between bodies, quite in the sense of your considerations on Newton's pail experiment.  The first consequence is on p. 6 of my paper.  The following additional points emerge:  (1) If one accelerates a heavy shell of matter S, then a mass enclosed by that shell experiences an accelerative force.  (2) If one rotates the shell relative to the fixed stars about an axis going through its center, a Coriolis force arises in the interior of the shell; that is, the plane of a Foucault pendulum is dragged around (with a practically unmeasurably small angular velocity).

It's just this kind of general relativistic “frame dragging” that the new Gravity B experiment is designed to investigate.

Moreover, it's this sort of close uniting of seemingly contradictory, polar-opposite concepts (e.g., rotating universe vis-a-vis spinning Earth, matter = energy, light is both particles and waves, etc.) that is part and parcel of the basic process and progress of science, and what physicist Niels Bohr was talking about in the last century when he said, “A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a great truth.”

¹ A. Einstein, 1911, “Über den Einfluss der Schwerkraft auf die Ausbreitung des Lichtes,” Ann. Phys. (Germany) 35, 898-908.  English translation in H. A. Lorentz, A. Einstein, H. Minkowski, and H. Weyl, 1923, The Principle of Relativity: A Collection of Original Memoirs, Methuen, London; paperback reprint, Dover, New York.

² “Albert Einstein's appreciation of Mach, written to Ernst Mach June 25, 1913, while Einstein was working hard at arriving at the final November 1915 formulation of standard general relativity.”  Quoted in Charles W. Misner, Kip S. Thorne, John Archibald Wheeler, Gravitation, 1973, W. H. Freeman and Co., San Francisco; pp. 544-545.

Labels: Albert Einstein, astronomy, Copernican Universe, Copernicus, Ernst Mach, general relativity, gravity, Niels Bohr, physics science, Ptolemaic Universe, Ptolemy, reference frames, scientific theories

Scientific Laws and Theories

Reader Mike Zorn writes in reply to Impearls' recent piece “Battle-tested General Relativity”:

“Query:  Why then bother to examine alternative theories of gravity?
Reply:  To have foils against which to test Einstein's theory.”

Exactly.  That's what makes a theory: it has to be capable of being disproved.

I think that one of the problems the public has with science is that the public's definition of “theory” is completely different from the scientist's.  […]  [T]he public [has a] perception of “theory” as “a really good guess,” vs. science's definition as “the best explanation we have so far that fits all the facts we have so far.”  (As in, “evolution?  It's just a theory — why should we pay so much attention to it?”)

Mike makes good points here.  Many people think of science as little more than a gathering or encyclopedia of facts and, as Zorn notes, there's a perception that a scientific “theory” is merely a vague hypothesis or guess, as good (or bad) as any other.

These common perceptions are actually quite far from science.  Looking back on the requirements for a “viable” theory of gravity as described in the previous posting (see the link above), it should now be clear that a good theory is vastly more robust than than a mere guess.  It must be internally self-consistent, incorporate all of physics (and chemistry, etc.) beneath its theoretical umbrella, agree with every experiment ever performed, and predict a vast spectrum of observable phenomena for the future.

As Mike says, it must be disprovable.  The public has this funny idea that science proves things.  Rather, science is only capable of disproving laws or theories.  The “best man” left standing after each candidate has been tested by “trial by combat” against all the criteria — including, last but not least, the searing fires of experiment, past and present — is (provisionally) considered to be the victor.

Nor does evolution in particular belong on a qualitatively different and lower plane than, say, physics.  The fact that evolution to an extent draws its information from out of the distant past is not important in this regard.  Geology and astronomy similarly derive much of their data from the far past, yet these are quite decidedly “true,” reliable sciences.  Every fossil dug up out of the ground is a newly-detected signal from the past, readily able to disprove evolution if new results show that the painfully built up pattern of relationships within the organisms of the past is but an illusion.  (I'll not hold me breath waiting for that to happen!)  Every science, in fact, deals with (and only with) signals from the past.  A physics or chemical experiment on a lab bench — any physical measurement — observes the past, as it takes time for light or whatever the medium to propagate from the site of the reaction or event into the measuring apparatus.

Physicist and philosopher of science Jacob Bronowski put it this way, in his book The Common Sense of Science: ¹

We are not merely observing and predicting facts; and that is why any philosophy which builds up science only from facts is mistaken.  We know, that is we find laws, and every human action uses these laws, and at the same time tests them and feels towards new laws.  It is not the form of these laws which matters.  The laws of science, like those which we use in our private behaviour, remain helpful and truthful whether they contain words like “always,” or only “more often than not.”  What matters is the recognition of the law in the facts.  It is the law which we verify: the pattern, the order, the structure of events.  This is why science is so full of the symbolism of numbers and geometry, which are the most familiar expressions of structural relations.

There is no sense at all in which science can be called a mere description of facts.  It is in no sense, as humanists sometimes pretend, a neutral record of what happens in an endless mechanical encyclopaedia.  This mistaken view goes back to the eighteenth century.  It pictures scientists as utilitarians still crying Let be! and still believing that the world runs best with no other regulating principles than natural gravitation and human self-interest.

But this picture of the world of Mandeville and Bentham and Dickens's Hard Times was never science.  For science is not the blank record of facts, but the search for order within the facts.  And the truth of science is not truth to fact, which can never be more than approximate, but the truth of the laws which we see within the facts.  And this kind of truth is as difficult and as human as the sense of truth in a painting which is not a photograph, or the feeling of emotional truth in a movement in music.  When we speak of truth, we make a judgment between what matters and what does not, and we feel the unity of its different parts.  We do this as much in science as in the arts or in daily life.

We make a judgment when we prefer one theory to another even in science, since there is always an endless number of theories which can account for all the known facts.  And the principles of this judgment have some deep appeal which is more than merely factual.  William of Ockham first suggested to scientists that they should prefer that theory which uses in its explanation the smallest number of unknown agents.  Science has held to this principle now for six hundred years.  But is there indeed any ground for it other than a kind of aesthetic satisfaction, much like that of sacrificing your queen at chess in order to mate with a knight?

We cannot define truth in science until we move from fact to law.  And within the body of laws in turn, what impresses us as truth is the orderly coherence of the pieces.  They fit together like the characters in a great novel, or like the words in a poem.  Indeed, we should keep that last analogy by us always.  For science is a language, and like a language, it defines its parts by the way they make up a meaning.  Every word in the sentence has some uncertainty of definition, and yet the sentence defines its own meaning and that of its words conclusively.

It is the internal unity and coherence of science which gives it truth, and which makes it a better system of prediction than any less orderly language.

¹ J. Bronowski, The Common Sense of Science, 1951, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.; pp. 130-131.

UPDATE:  2004-04-29 23:50 UT:  A follow-up “Copernicus Dethroned” has been posted.

Labels: evolution, general relativity, gravity, Jacob Bronowski, philosophy of science, physics science, scientific theories

Battle-tested General Relativity

There's been an interesting conversation in National Review Online's blog The Corner between commentators Peter Robinson and John Derbyshire with regard to the testing of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity.  (A satellite will soon launch carrying what is called a “Gravity B” experiment designed to further test general relativity.)  You can read the pieces of the discussion here: R1, R2, D3, R4, D5, R6, R7.

While quite enjoyable, I was a little concerned by a tendency to overlook, as I perceive it, the degree to which General Relativity has been tested and has prevailed against its competitors.  An excerpt from Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler's classic tome Gravitation (1973) on the subject of competing theories of gravity is illuminating in this regard: ¹  (Ellipses in the text refer to omitted section cross-reference numbers where each topic is gone over in detail.)

§ 39.1.  Other theories

Among all bodies of physical law none has ever been found that is simpler or more beautiful than Einstein's geometric theory of gravity {…}; nor has any theory of gravity ever been discovered that is more compelling.

As experiment after experiment has been performed, and one theory after another has fallen by the wayside a victim of the observations, Einstein's theory has stood firm.  No purported inconsistency between experiment and Einstein's laws of gravity has ever surmounted the test of time.

Query:  Why then bother to examine alternative theories of gravity?  Reply:  To have “foils” against which to test Einstein's theory.

To say that Einstein's geometrodynamics is “battle-tested” is to say it has won every time it has been tried against a theory that makes a different prediction.  How then does one select new antagonists for decisive new trials by combat?

Not all theories of gravity are created equal.  Very few, among the multitude in the literature, are sufficiently viable to be worth comparison with general relativity or with future experiments.  The “worthy” theories are those which satisfy three criteria for viability: self-consistency, completeness, and agreement with past experiment.

Self-consistency is best illustrated by describing several theories that fail this test.  The classic example of an internally inconsistent theory is the spin-two field theory of gravity [Fierz and Pauli (1939) {…}], which is equivalent to linearized general relativity {…}.  The field equations of the spin-two theory imply that all gravitating bodies move along straight lines in global Lorentz reference frames, whereas the equations of motion of the theory insist that gravity deflects bodies away from straight-line motion.  (When one tries to remedy this inconsistency, one finds oneself being “bootstrapped” up to general relativity {…}.)  Another self-inconsistent theory is that of Kustaanheimo (1966).  It predicts zero gravitational redshift when the wave version of light (Maxwell theory) is used, and nonzero redshift when the particle version (photon) is used.

Completeness:  To be complete a theory of gravity must be capable of analyzing from “first principles” the outcome of every experiment of interest.  It must therefore mesh with and incorporate a consistent set of laws for electromagnetism, quantum mechanics, and all other physics.  No theory is complete if it postulates that atomic clocks measure the “interval”  dτ = (− g_αβ dx^α dx^β)^½  constructed from a particular metric.  Atomic clocks are complex systems whose behavior must be calculated from the fundamental laws of quantum theory and electromagnetism.  No theory is complete if it postulates that planets move on geodesics.  Planets are complex systems whose motion must be calculated from fundamental laws for the response of stressed matter to gravity.  {…}

Agreement with past experiment:  The necessity that a theory agree, to within several standard deviations, with the “four standard tests” (gravitational redshift, perihelion shift, electromagnetic-wave deflection, and radar time-delay) is obvious.  Equally obvious but often forgotten is the need to agree with the expansion of the universe (historically the ace among all aces of general relativity) and with observations at the more everyday, Newtonian level.  Example: Birkhoff's (1943) theory predicts the same redshift, perihelion shift, deflection, and time-delay as general relativity.  But it requires that the pressure inside gravitating bodies equal the total density of mass-energy, p = ρ; and, as a consequence, it demands that sound waves travel with the speed of light.  Of course, this prediction disagrees violently with experiment.  Therefore, Birkhoff's theory is not viable.  Another example:  Whitehead's (1922) theory of gravity was long considered a viable alternative to Einstein's theory, because it makes exactly the same prediction as Einstein for the “four standard tests.”  Not until the work of Will (1971b) was it realized that Whitehead's theory predicts a time-dependence for the ebb and flow of ocean tides that is completely contradicted by everyday experience {…}.

§ 39.2.  Metric theories of gravity

Two lines of argument narrow attention to a restricted class of gravitation theories, called metric theories.

The first line of argument constitutes the theme of the preceding chapter.  It examined experiment after experiment, and reached two conclusions:  (1) spacetime possesses a metric; and  (2) that metric satisfies the equivalence principle (the standard special relativistic laws of physics are valid in each local Lorentz frame).  Theories of gravity that incorporate these two principles are called metric theories.  In brief, Chapter 38 says, “For any adequate description of gravity, look to a metric theory.”  Exception:  Cartan's (1922b, 1923) theory [“general relativity plus torsion”; see Trautman (1972)] is nonmetric, but agrees with experiment and is experimentally indistinguishable from general relativity with the technology of the 1970's.

The second line of argument pointing to metric theories begins with the issue of completeness (preceding section).  To be complete, a theory must incorporate a self-consistent version of all the nongravitational laws of physics.  No one has found a way to incorporate the rest of physics with ease except to introduce a metric, and then invoke the principle of equivalence.  Other approaches lead to dismaying complexity, and usually to failure of the theory on one of the three counts of self-consistency, completeness, and agreement with past experiment.  All the theories known to be viable in 1973 are metric, except Cartan's.  [See Ni(1972b); Will (1972).]

In only one significant way do metric theories of gravity differ from each other: their laws for the generation of the metric.  In general relativity theory, the metric is generated directly by the stress-energy of matter and of nongravitational fields.  In Dicke-Brans-Jordan theory {…}, matter and nongravitational fields generate a scalar field φ; then φ acts together with the matter and other fields to generate the metric.  Expressed in the language of {…}, φ is a “new long-range field” that couples indirectly to matter.  As another example, a theory devised by Ni (1970, 1972) {…} possesses a flat-space metric η and a universal time coordinate t (“prior geometry” {…}); η acts together with matter and nongravitational fields to generate a scalar field φ; and then η, t, and φ combine to create the physical metric g that enters into the equivalence principle.

All three of the above theories — Einstein, Dicke-Brans-Jordan, Ni — were viable in the summer of 1971, when this section was written.  But in autumn 1971 Ni's theory, and many other theories that had been regarded as viable, were proved by Nordtvedt and Will (1972) to disagree with experiment.  This is an example of the rapidity of current progress in experimental tests of gravitational theory!

Notice that in all of these “trials by combat” against the searing fires of experiment, it is Einstein's general relativity that has consistently withstood the tests, like Daniel walking through the fiery furnace!

Quoting further from Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler's Gravitation (§44.2): ² 

No theory more resembles Maxwell's electrodynamics in its simplicity, beauty, and scope than Einstein's geometrodynamics.  Few principles in physics are more firmly established than those on which it rests: the local validity of special relativity {…}, the equivalence principle {…}, the conservation of momentum and energy {…}, and the prevalence of second-order field equations throughout physics {…}.  Those principles and the demand for no “extraneous fields” (e.g., Dicke's scalar field) and “no prior geometry” {…} lead to the conclusion that the geometry of spacetime must be Riemannian and the geometrodynamic law must be Einstein's.

To say that the geometry is Riemannian is to say that the interval between any two nearby events C and D, anywhere in spacetime, stated in terms of the interval AB between two nearby fiducial events, at quite another point in spacetime, has a value CD/AB independent of the route of intercomparison {…}.  There are a thousand routes.  By this hydraheaded prediction, Einstein's theory thus exposes itself to destruction in a thousand ways {…}.

Geometrodynamics lends itself to being disproven in other ways as well.  The geometry has no option about the control it exerts on the dynamics of particles and fields {…}.  The theory makes predictions about the equilibrium configurations and pulsations of compact stars {…}.  It gives formulas {…} for the deceleration of the expansion of the universe, for the density of mass-energy, and for the magnifying power of the curvature of space, the tests of which are not far off.  It predicts gravitational collapse, and the existence of black holes, and a wealth of physics associated with these objects {…}.  It predicts gravitational waves {…}.  In the appropriate approximation, it encompasses all the well-tested predictions of the Newtonian theory of gravity for the dynamics of the solar system, and predicts testable post-Newtonian corrections besides, including several already verified effects {…}.

No inconsistency of principle has ever been found in Einstein's geometric theory of gravity.  No purported observational evidence against the theory has ever stood the test of time.  No other acceptable account of physics of comparable simplicity and scope has ever been put forward.

¹ Charles W. Misner, Kip S. Thorne, John Archibald Wheeler, Gravitation, 1973, W. H. Freeman and Co., San Francisco; pp. 1066-1068.

² Ibid., p. 1199.

UPDATE:  2004-04-19 00:51 UT:  A follow-up on the nature of scientific theories has been posted.

UPDATE:  2004-04-29 23:50 UT:  A follow-up “Copernicus Dethroned” has been posted.

UPDATE:  2004-04-18 16:30 UT:  Fred Kiesche at the stimulating The Eternal Golden Braid blog has linked to this piece, noting, ”To follow up on my recently posted news item about the Gravity B probe (launch still on track for Monday), Michael McNeil's Impearls (a great site, by the way; I'm still in debt for his help with J.D. Bernal's The World, the Flesh and the Devil) talks about Battle-Tested General Relativity.”

Additional articles on the Gravity B probe may be found here in the New York Times, and here in the journal Science (requires subscription or pay-per-view).

UPDATE:  2009-09-08 14:20 UT:  The foregoing excerpt from Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler's Gravitation was written three and a half decades ago, and thus one might imagine that things might well have changed in the meantime.  A while back, however, in 2007, I had an exchange of personal correspondence with well-known general relativist Sean Carroll of Caltech — author of the graduate-level text Spacetime and Geometry: An Introduction to General Relativity (2003), who blogs at Cosmic Variance (now sponsored by Discover Magazine) — and I had occasion to ask him if the lofty status that Gravitation ascribes to Einstein's geometrodynamics has held up over all those decades.  Here's Carroll's reply, which he's granted me permission to publicly quote:

Hi Michael —

All of that is still completely true, yes.

These days we actually have better reasons to consider alternatives to GR — namely, the apparent existence of dark matter and dark energy.  They are only “detected” through their gravitational fields, so it's natural to wonder whether the evidence in their favor is actually evidence for a modification of gravity.  Sadly, the attempts so far to modify gravity in the right ways have fallen a bit short; see these posts:

http://preposterousuniverse.blogspot.com/2004/05/was-einstein-wrong.html
http://preposterousuniverse.blogspot.com/2004/05/was-friedmann-wrong.html
http://cosmicvariance.com/2006/11/08/out-einsteining-einstein/

So we still think that Einstein's theory has passed all of its tests, as the tests themselves keep getting better and better.  But who knows?  Tomorrow we might get a surprise.

Sean

Labels: Albert Einstein, Charles W. Misner, general relativity, gravity, John Archibald Wheeler, Kip S. Thorne, physics science, scientific theories, Sean Carroll

20,000 Visitors

Today we pass 20,000 visitors to this site since Sitemeter was installed, soon after Impearls was founded, on 2002-11-21.  Many thanks to all who've stopped by.

Labels: visitors

Canada and the Anti-Terrorist Perimeter of America

Dave Trowbridge posted a piece in Redwood Dragon two months ago called “Costly Grace,” referring to this posting by Jeff Taylor in Reason magazine's Hit and Run blog.  (Redwood Dragon seems not to have permalinks for its postings, so the above link points to the archive page for that post.)

Dave and Jeff highlight the recent situation wherein a Maine resident living next to the Canadian border was saddled with a massive fine by U.S. Customs for the sin of driving round a barrier, while the international border crossing was closed, so he could attend church services in Canada.  The source news articles the pair point to have apparently expired, but Trowbridge provides a sufficient quote so one can review the case, as he says:

Somehow, I don't think this is what Bonhoeffer [referring presumably to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Lutheran pastor who resisted the Nazis during World War II and paid with his life – Ed.] had in mind.

Crossing the U.S.-Canada border to go to church on a Sunday cost a U.S. citizen $10,000 for breaching Washington's tough new security rules.

The expensive trip to church was a surprise for Richard Albert, a resident of rural Maine who lives so close to the Canadian border the U.S. customs office is right next door to his house.

Like the other half-dozen residents of Township 15 Range 15, crossing the border is a daily ritual for Albert.  The nearby Quebec village of St. Pamphile is where they shop, eat and pray.

There are many such situations in rural areas along the largely unguarded 8,900-km (5,530-mile) border between Canada and the United States — which in some cases actually runs down the middle of streets or through buildings.

As a result, Albert says did not expect any problems three weeks ago when he returned home to the United States after attending mass in Canada, as usual.

The local U.S. customs station is closed on Sundays, so he just drove around the locked gate, as he had done every weekend since the gate appeared last May, following a tightening of border security.

Two days later, Albert was summoned to the customs office, where an officer told him he had been caught on camera crossing the border illegally.

Ottawa has granted special passes to some 300 U.S. citizens in that region so they can enter the country when Canadian customs posts are closed, but the United States canceled a similar program last May.

That forces local residents to make a 200-mile detour along treacherous logging roads to get home via the nearest staffed border checkpoint.

Responding to Trowbridge's allusion to what Dietrich Bonhoeffer would have made of the situation (I'll be just as speculative as Dave, but there you are), I agree Bonhoeffer could not have liked the prospect of people being punished for exercising their choice to worship where and however they wish.  However, as a person with intimate knowledge of and who gave his life fighting the Nazis, surely he would appreciate the steely-eyed moral necessity of not naively letting organized human predators like the Nazis come scourging in through unbarred and unguarded gates.  Undoubtedly, a similar sort of naive liberal credulity (that it's “democratic,” for example, rather than stupid for democracies to allow undemocratic, totalitarian parties to participate in the political process, i.e.: “one man, one vote, one time”) unleashed the Nazis to burst into the pinnacles of power in Germany, thence out to ravage through Europe, in the first place.

In the admittedly distressing case of Richard Albert, who's suffering from continuing to regard the international border as it famously used to be: a mostly imaginary line between friends and neighbors — I sympatize with him and others like him.  I'm from Montana myself, close by the Canadian province of Alberta, where we always felt (growing up in the northern part of the state) that Montana faced its neighbor Alberta even more closely than it did the nearby American states.  Tamara and I even once contemplated acquiring land near fabulous Glacier National Park in Montana, jam up against Canada, of course anticipating untroubled, transparent access to the magnificent Canadian Rockies right across the frontier.

Nonetheless, all this started to change, more or less quickly, after a day I need not name a bit over 2½ years ago.  As the news piece Dave related makes plain, Richard Albert ”just drove around the locked gate, as he had done every weekend since the gate appeared last May, following a tightening of border security.”  Thus, Albert had months of notice — not least of which a new gate barring the way, but even, I'll bet, signs posted at the border — indicating that things were toughening up and the sort of impromptu border transits he'd been accustomed to were now a no-no.  Nonetheless, Albert went on anyway, and got socked with a hefty fine.  And we're supposed to be terribly sad or upset or even very surprised at his fate?

No, what's sad is the necessity to put in place a real border between Canada and the United States for the first time, really, in nearly 200 years.  That's sad, but necessary.  As Canadian Mark Steyn — who resides in the same American borderland neck of the woods beside the Canadian province of Quebec as Richard Albert does — put it on in a piece in the 2003-01-20 National Post (which unfortunately appears not available online):

If the Prof. [Michael Bliss, who wrote of a Canadian-U.S. “confederation” – Ed.] really believes the border is “not so much a fence as a lawn-marker,” he should try living in a Quebec mill town on the hitherto informally monitored Maine line.  This coming Sunday, eight timber-road crossings will be permanently closed and the four bigger border crossings will be open only until 2 p.m. and shut all weekend.  Quebecers who work in the Maine woods will either have to make a hundred-mile detour or look for other employment.  On the Canadian side of the line, there's talk of mill closures.  The lawn-marker just got replaced with razor wire.

Within 48 hours of 9/11, it was clear that Canada had a choice:  It could be inside a North American perimeter or outside a U.S. perimeter.  Given that the trucks were mostly backed up on the northern side of the border, the answer seemed obvious.  But the siren song of “Canadian values” — i.e., Liberal Party values — was too powerful, and, as we know from Kyoto to the gun registry, whenever the national interest conflicts with Liberal platitudes the Grits go with the latter.  Last fall, when the U.S. announced that Canadians born in selected Middle Eastern countries would be required to submit to “special registration” procedures, Ottawa's privacy commissioner responded by demanding that “place of birth” be removed from all Canadian passports and The Toronto Star huffed and puffed about “Muslim-focused racial profiling” full of “contempt for due process.”

They have a point.  Effectively, the commissioner invited the U.S. to treat all Canadians as Syrian, and increasingly they do.  No more profiling!  That's great, isn't it?  Unless you're a Quebec logger.

As Mark Steyn suggests, after 9−11 Canada faced the choice of either positioning itself inside a North American perimeter or outside a U.S. perimeter.  Canada steadfastly refused to cooperate with the United States and form such a common anti-terrorist envelope to include all of North America, even though, as Mark marvels, such is so eminently in both countries' fundamental interest.  Just after 9−11, France (or at least Le Monde) was sympathetically willing to proclaim “we are all Americans” — a statement Canada and Canadians could never find it within themselves to entertain.  On the contrary, as Steyn points out, in response to America's subsequent attempt to intercept terrorists at the U.S.-Canadian frontier, rather than cooperating even with this, Canada basically declared “we are all Syrians!”

While I appreciate and acknowledge Canada's sacrifices and service in the ongoing war on terror (in Afghanistan, for example), notice that the above not merely tepid but actively negative cooperation by Canada was taken not in some kind of moralistic recoil from last year's Iraq war (which at the time of these events was still half a year off), but in contemptuous response to America's basic desire in the aftermath of 9−11 to defend itself by screening out terrorists before they enter the country.

Democrats and the antiwar left and have raked the Bush administration over the coals for supposedly neglecting “homeland security” — by not, e.g., inspecting every single shipping container arriving in America's ports — instead of, as they see it, embarking on foreign adventures.  Yet, according to the tenor of both Dave Trowbridge's and Jeff Taylor's pieces, together with numerous commenters to Jeff's post (for example: “It's silly that our post-9/11 paranoia is interrupting peaceful people's lives in order to stop a terrorist attack that will in all probability never come”), it seems that toughening up security on America's northern frontier is mere bureaucratic folderol.  In the continuing cold new light of the 21st century, I'm afraid it all rings in my ears as so “September 10th.”  It almost boggles the mind, in fact, recounting statements such as the foregoing, written by supposedly thoughtful, aware people.

As intimated before, September 11, 2001 (Earthdate 2001-09-11) now lies a mere 2½ years in the past — an instant when (everyone needs to recall) 3,000 innocent office workers and heroic firefighters were crushed, torn apart, and immolated alive, together with the downtown business district of America's biggest city, in “guided missile” attacks perpetrated by foreign agents using a pair of seized, hijacked airplanes, full of hundreds of additional passenger victims, in what were basically human-occupied guided bombs.  Hundreds more Americans fell in a similar simultaneous strike on the central headquarters of America's defense establishment in Washington, the Pentagon.  A fourth terrorist attack, aimed at destroying most probably the U.S. Capitol or White House (!), was barely averted by a passenger revolt on the hijacked airliner, which nonetheless ended with all passengers dead in a hole in the ground in Pennsylvania.  To instigate such a conflagration of death and destruction, the score of 9−11 Jihadist terrorists needed no agencies beyond their handful of numbers, pocket knives and mace dispensers.  Recent Jihadist attacks on Shi'ites in Iraq have involved merely a number of overcoated, explosives-belted suicide bombers walking amongst a crowd; while in the case of the “3−11” Madrid bombings, a dozen or so backpackers with set watches slipped off bomb-laden backpacks and departed trains in unison — and thereby didn't even need to commit suicide in order to wreak slaughter.

To perpetrate such carnage within the United States or any other country, terrorists — typically not natives of the (Western) nation being attacked — must necessarily cross international frontiers to get there.  Improving “homeland security” at airports accomplishes nothing if foreign agents can simply stroll across the Canadian (or other) border at any number of unguarded, unwatched crossing points.  Don't forget the “Millennium bomber,” Ahmed Ressam, by luck apprehended late in 1999 actually trying to enter Washington state from Canada, carrying a bomb intended for Los Angeles airport. 

Meanwhile, the recent defection of Libya from the concerted ‘axis of evil nations’ has vividly demonstrated the existence of that alignment of authoritarian dictators, determined to assist each other in more or less simultaneously breaking out from international WMD control regimes, in order to achieve their destinies of unfettered megalomania.  The remaining despots in this far-reaching international conspiracy obviously figure that once they individually or collectively possess nuclear arms, effective restraint and overslight on their activities by the international community, at least within their own neighborhoods, will cease.  “Deterrence” will work… for them.

The risk of such evil regimes (I won't pussyfoot over employing accurate terminology) forming alliances with terrorist groups — insofar as they haven't already — is extraordinary.  The danger that a “mushroom cloud” (to evoke an image of a possible future rightly brought up, in my view, during the run-up to the Iraq war) might raise up its demonic head at some point in consequence of this worldwide terrorist/despot conspiratorial scramble is not negligible!  Arguments that the risk of such an eventually might be “gathering” but isn't yet “imminent” — which is to say, the danger could be as much as, oh, five years off — are not reassuring.

After reviewing the appalling recent historical record of terror, how anyone can predict with a straight face that further attacks “in all probability [will] never come” is beyond me.  Unbelievable that anybody could still think that after the experiences of the last few years — as I say, so “September 10th.”  It shows that the tendency, and desire, of a portion of the population to nod back into the kind of numbing, 1990s-style cultural somnolence, in midst of this dangerous 21st-century world (war) of ours, is pervasive.  Unfortunately for such a yearning for the “normalcy” of the 90s, there are still hordes of people out there who want to kill us — if they can find the means, and get both them and it over here to employ it.

Once unscrupulous murderers such as perpetuaters of recent terrorist events arrive in America, it's indisputable that it's basically impossible to protect all the myriad of vulnerable sites (full of people within and about them) throughout the country.  Focus on that: once such killers are in America….  Beyond aggressively defeating foreign enemies in their places of origin and staging areas, a major element in conducting a defense must be keeping such people out of this country in the first place.  For this, adequate border security is a necessity, not some kind of bureaucratic foolishness.

Many of Jeff's commenters titter at the present inadequacy of security at border crossings like the one described in the news piece; and yes, clearly security is inadequate.  However — rather like the antiwar left's contention that since the U.S. supposedly “supported” Saddam Hussein in the past, therefore any later reversal of policy is somehow both hypocritical and (even more questionably) wrong — the apparent conclusion of Jeff's commenters, that one must therefore (continue to) do nothing, is not viable as a solution.  As the quoted news article makes quite plain, security is in the process of being enhanced.  Now there's a gate.  Now there's a camera watching the crossings, border crossing by border crossing, so experience can be garnered as to who's using the crossings and any suspicious behavior focused in on.

Much more obviously needs to be done.  This page, for instance (by U.S. Senator Debbie Stabenow of the border state Michigan, on the subject of U.S.-Canadian border issues), discusses several things of interest in this regard.  According to Sen. Stabenow, a number of bills have been passed by Congress since September 11 affecting northern border security issues, including the Northern Border Hiring Initiative, the Uniting and Strengthening America Act (USA Act), and appropriations bills, which authorize hiring and training hundreds of new customs officers for the northern frontier; as well as, Stabenow says, “improve INS and Customs technology and purchase additional equipment for monitoring the U.S./Canadian border”; and also “require the Attorney General, in consultation with appropriate agencies, to develop technical standards for an integrated automated fingerprint identification system for points of entry and overseas consular posts.”

Sen. Stabenow's “Northern Border Security” page doesn't come right out and say so, but I suspect that not only are the new gates, video cameras (such as the one tripping up Maine resident Richard Albert), together with the personnel to monitor them, a consequence of the new legislation Sen. Stabenow notes above, but it's also very likely, I suggest, that it's a requirement of the self-same legislation that violators of closed border crossings receive hefty fines.

Thus, I believe, it's not bureaucratic ineptitude that's on display here, but rather Congressional mandate.  As to whether it's therefore inept and unreasonable Congressional mandate, given the horrific events of September 11 and other bloody terrorist encounters both cited and uncited above, it would be exceedingly unwise, in my view, for the country to ignore the obvious need for improved border security.

Canadian Mark Steyn concludes his piece:

Whatever it once symbolized, the border is now a very real dividing line between the two principal manifestations of Western democracy: an American system which emphasizes the primacy of individual liberty, and a Euro-Canadian system of top-down statism.  Even without the war, the differences between the two are likely to increase rather than diminish over the coming years.  But, since the war, our flabby Dominion's position has weakened further.  Not to be alarmist but I'd say the U.S. is coming to regard Canada the way Australia regards Indonesia.  Yes, it's geographically close, an important trading partner, a cheap vacation destination and a nominal ally, but it has to be pushed and chivvied into taking even the most perfunctory action against obvious enemies, and everyone knows that all kinds of dodgy characters have the run of the joint.  Bali was a soft target for the terrorists because it exists in both worlds — a Western enclave in bandit country.  Canada also exists in both worlds:  We're the country that supports both the Princess Pats and Hezbollah.

Washington knows that now.  The big story since September 11th is that they finally see us for what we are: foreigners.

Chernobyl: a Motorcycle Tour

A motorcyclist named Elena, her 147-horsepower Kawasaki “Ninja,” and scientist's access pass provide us with a troubling and unparalleled tour of the ruined landscape about the city of Chernobyl in the Ukraine, with its doomed nuclear power plant which, in 1986, devastated the area with radiation, destroying surrounding cities and towns as living communities and leaving the whole region uninhabitable for, it's claimed, six hundred years.  Elena's pictorial diary of her visit is eerily reminiscent of films like The Omega Man and post-apocalypse science fiction wherein one navigates through a radioactive landscape as one would through a minefield, armed like a lifeline with geiger counter and dosimeter.  The heavily radioactive “magic woods” that Elena regards — from a distance — are horrifying.  Much of the rest has the melancholy of a latter day Pompeii.  Don't miss it.  (Thanks to Armed Liberal at Winds of Change.)
 

UPDATE:  2004-04-18 16:15 UT:  Joel at the fascinating Asia-Pacific oriented Far Outliers blog has linked to this piece, noting that “Impearls, a blog with footnotes and appendixes, reminds me to link to a photo essay….”

UPDATE:  2004-05-04 23:40 UT:  Corrected photograph and article links, which changed.