What is Magna Carta worth? Exactly $21,321,000. We know because that’s what it fetched in a fair public auction at Sotheby’s in New York just before Christmas. Twenty-one million is, by far, the most ever paid for a page of text, and therein lies a paradox: Information is now cheaper than ever and also more expensive.
Mostly, of course, information is practically free, easier to store and faster to spread than our parents imagined possible. In one way, Magna Carta is already yours for the asking: you can read it any time, at the touch of a button. It has been preserved, photographically and digitally, in countless copies with no evident physical reality, which will nonetheless last as long as our civilization. In another way, Magna Carta is a 15-by-17-inch piece of parchment, fragile and scarce and practically unreadable. Why should that version be so valuable?
Magna Carta itself is a nice reminder of how costly it once was to store and spread information. Its very purpose was to get the king’s word down in tangible form, safeguard it, enshrine it and then get it out to the countryside. In 13th-century England this required the soaking, stretching, scraping and drying of sheepskin to make vellum, the preparation of ink from oak galls and painstaking penmanship by professional quill-wielding scribes. Then copies had to be made the same way — there was no other — for dispatch to county seats and churches, where they were read aloud.
At that point the value of Magna Carta resided in its words: their meaning and their very real political force, beginning with King John’s greetings in 1215 to “his archbishops, bishops, abbots, earls, barons, justices, foresters, sheriffs, stewards, servants and to all his officials and loyal subjects” and continuing with a message never before heard — a setting of limits on the power of the state. It made a grant of rights and liberties to all free men, irrevocably and forever, at least in theory. The document didn’t just express that grant or represent it or certify it. The document was the grant — “given by our hand in the meadow that is called Runnymede.”
The value of the particular item sold at Sotheby’s eight centuries later is entirely different. It’s a kind of illusion. We can call it magical value as opposed to meaningful value. It’s like the value acquired by one baseball when Bobby Thomson batted it out of the Polo Grounds. A physical object becomes desirable, precious, almost holy, by common consensus, on account of a history — a story — that is attached to it. (If it turns out you’ve got the wrong baseball, the value vanishes just as magically.)
The $21 million Magna Carta is actually a copy, made in 1297. In fact, it is surely a copy of a copy, with errors and emendations introduced along the way. And yet it is also an original: issued officially and afresh in the name of King Edward I. Sotheby’s reckons that 17 “original exemplars” from the 13th century survive today, most preserved in England’s libraries and cathedrals. Hundreds more have been lost — to rats, fire and reuse as scrap paper.
Even as a copy, it’s one of a kind. “It was like someone said ‘Mona Lisa,’ ” explained the previous purchaser (Ross Perot, 1984, $1.5 million). In advance of the sale, Sotheby’s called Magna Carta “a lamp in the darkness, a glowing talisman of our human condition, a sacred icon of our human history.” Just so. It’s magic. Religious relics, like the Shroud of Turin, gleam invisibly with the same magic. On a smaller scale so do autographs, coins, rare photographs, Stradivari violins (unless you think you can recognize the tonal quality of 300-year-old wood) and clothing off the backs of celebrities, like the spare wedding dress (ivory silk taffeta) that Diana might have worn but didn’t (2005, $175,000).
All these artifacts share the quality that Philip K. Dick, in his 1962 novel “The Man in the High Castle,” calls historicity, which is “when a thing has history in it.” In the book, a dealer in antiquities holds up two identical Zippo lighters, one of which supposedly belonged to Franklin D. Roosevelt, and says: “One has historicity, a hell of a lot of it. As much as any object has ever had. And one has nothing. Can you feel it? … You can’t. You can’t tell which is which. There’s no ‘mystical plasmic presence,’ no ‘aura’ around it.”
Back in the real world, in 1996, Sotheby’s sold a humidor that had belonged to John F. Kennedy for $574,500. It had historicity.
Of course, more people can afford rarities — rarities are a bigger business than ever — now that being a billionaire doesn’t even guarantee a spot in the Forbes 400. Magna Carta’s buyer, David M. Rubenstein, a founder of the Carlyle Group, was No. 165 last year with a reported fortune of $2.5 billion. He plans to return the document to public view at the National Archives, which has had it on display, along with other iconic texts like the Emancipation Proclamation, the Marshall Plan and the Apollo 11 flight plan.
But the growth in the ranks of the superrich does not explain the hypertrophy in magical value. Just when digital reproduction makes it possible to create a “Rembrandt” good enough to fool the eye, the “real” Rembrandt becomes more expensive than ever. Why? Because the same free flow that makes information cheap and reproducible helps us treasure the sight of information that is not. A story gains power from its attachment, however tenuous, to a physical object. The object gains power from the story. The abstract version may flash by on a screen, but the worn parchment and the fading ink make us pause. The extreme of scarcity is intensified by the extreme of ubiquity.
James Gleick, the author, most recently, of “Isaac Newton,” is working on a book about the history of information.
Stock markets plunged on Thursday as investors confronted a troubling manufacturing report and new indications of the depth of subprime losses and housing woes. The Dow Jones industrial average lost more than 300 points.
The Standard and Poor’s 500-stock index, a broad measure of the financial markets, tumbled below its low for last year, set in March. At the close, it was down 2.9 percent after giving up early morning gains, bringing its decline since Jan. 1 to 9.2 percent.
The Dow Jones industrial average ended down 306.95 points, or 2.5 percent, at 12,159.21, and the technology-heavy Nasdaq composite index was off 2 percent.
A dismal report on manufacturing activity caught investors by surprise on Thursday morning, sending the main indexes into the red after an early stint in positive territory.
The Federal Reserve reported that a survey of Philadelphia-area manufacturers contracted much more than expected. A similar drop in the index occurred in early 2001, just before the onset of the last recession.
“Basically every day now, you have more and more investors leaning toward the camp that yes, this is going to be a recession, and it could be a severe one,” said David Kovacs, a quantitative investment strategist at Turner Investment Partners in Berwyn, Pa.
Recession fears have been roiling the market of late, sending the S.& P. down 8 percent since the beginning of the year.
In testimony in Washington on Thursday, Ben S. Bernanke, the Fed chairman, reiterated recent warnings about an imminent drop-off in consumer spending. Mr. Bernanke also hinted that the Fed would lower interest rates, perhaps by half a point, at its meeting later this month, saying that the central bank would “stand ready to take substantive additional action as needed to support growth.”
Investors usually react favorably to evidence of a rate cut, but they appeared unimpressed by Mr. Bernanke’s promise to support a fiscal stimulus package to prop up the ailing economy.
“By the time they actually pass anything, it will be past the time we need it,” said James Paulsen, a strategist at Wells Capital Management, who echoed some of the skepticism on Wall Street about the plan.
Other analysts said the chairman was leaning on the government in lieu of aggressively cutting rates. “The market is frustrated with Bernanke,” Mr. Kovacs said. “Bernanke said it would be nice to have an economic stimulus package to help him with his fight. You didn’t see Greenspan asking for help.”
Regardless of where that help comes from, investors agree that the economy could use a shot of adrenaline. Anxieties were stoked again on Thursday by the release of yet another round of bad data on the housing industry. Groundbreakings for new homes fell last month to their slowest pace in 16 years, the government said, and economists expect the market to soften well into the middle of this year.
Meanwhile, traders were reminded that the fallout from last year’s subprime collapse is still spreading. Merrill Lynch, which ousted its chief executive in the wake of substantial losses from the troubled mortgage market, reported a $9.8 billion loss for the fourth quarter, the worst performance in company history.
The news came on the back of similar write-downs at Citigroup, which was also badly hurt by bad bets on soured mortgage-backed securities. Investors are worried that Wall Street write-downs will make banks less willing to lend, a trend that would cut off a primary source of lifeblood for the economy.
“It’s compounding investors’ fears about how widespread the losses really are,” said Hayes Miller, an analyst at Baring Asset Management in Boston.
Still, some analysts said that jaded investors may have been unfazed by Merrill’s loss, which reiterated much of what market watchers already know about problems at the big Wall Street banks. The poor housing report may have been met by a similarly sleepy reaction, analysts said, who noted that too much bad news can sometimes leave investors numb.
Crude oil slipped 71 cents, settling at $90.13 a barrel, in trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note, which moves opposite to its price, ticked down slightly.
The euro was up slightly against the dollar, and the price of gold fell after several days of gains.
Imagine a World Without Apple, Bloggers, Google or Dell
January 17, 2008
From the Desk of David Pogue
Imagine a World Without Apple, Bloggers, Google or Dell
By DAVID POGUE
As long-time “From the Desk…” readers are no doubt aware, I spent the first ten years out of college working on Broadway as an arranger and conductor, killing time while trying to make my way as a composer/lyricist. Those days are long gone now, but from time to time, I still scratch my songwriting itch by writing new words to old melodies.
This week, I’m at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco. At a gathering of user-group members on Monday, I tried out a new song parody. It was inspired by a comment somebody made about how electronics and the Internet are now completely meshed into the fabric of our society. What would it be like if it all went away?
Grab your piano and sing along!
Imagine (sung to the tune of John Lennon’s “Imagine”)
Imagine there’s no Apple, No products that begin with “i,” No monthly iPod models, No Apple stores to get you high. Imagine all the people Finding other things to do!
Imagine there’s no bloggers… It isn’t hard to do! No viruses or spyware, No weekly Windows patches, too Imagine all the people Learning to get a life…
(You-hoo-hoo!)
You may say it’d be a nightmare Without Google, Mac or Dell We might have real conversations– But the world would be dull as hell!
Imagine no new cellphones; Kiss console games goodbye. No David Pogue or Mossberg To tell us what to buy. Imagine all the people Getting some exercise!
(You-hoo-hoo!)
You may say that I’m a loony But rest assured I’m almost done. I’m pretty sure it’ll never happen So we nerds can live as one!
Crisis? Maybe He’s a Narcissistic Jerk
Ruth Gwily
January 15, 2008
Mind
Crisis? Maybe He’s a Narcissistic Jerk
By RICHARD A. FRIEDMAN, M.D.
With the possible exception of “the dog ate my homework,” there is no handier excuse for human misbehavior than the midlife crisis.
Popularly viewed as a unique developmental birthright of the human species, it supposedly strikes when most of us have finally figured ourselves out — only to discover that we have lost our youth and mortality is on the horizon.
No doubt about it, life in the middle ages can be challenging. (Full disclosure: I’m 51.) What with the first signs of physical decline and the questions and doubts about one’s personal and professional accomplishments, it is a wonder that most of us survive.
Not everyone is so lucky; some find themselves seized by a seemingly irresistible impulse to do something dramatic, even foolish. Everything, it appears, is fair game for a midlife crisis: one’s job, spouse, lover — you name it.
I recently heard about a severe case from a patient whose husband of nearly 30 years abruptly told her that he “felt stalled and not self-actualized” and began his search for self-knowledge in the arms of another woman.
It was not that her husband no longer loved her, she said he told her; he just did not find the relationship exciting anymore.
“Maybe it’s a midlife crisis,” she said, then added derisively, “Whatever that is.”
Outraged and curious, she followed him one afternoon and was shocked to discover that her husband’s girlfriend was essentially a younger clone of herself, right down to her haircut and her taste in clothes.
It doesn’t take a psychoanalyst to see that her husband wanted to turn back the clock and start over. But this hardly deserves the dignity of a label like “midlife crisis.” It sounds more like a search for novelty and thrill than for self-knowledge.
In fact, the more I learned about her husband, it became clear that he had always been a self-centered guy who fretted about his lost vigor and was acutely sensitive to disappointment. This was a garden-variety case of a middle-aged narcissist grappling with the biggest insult he had ever faced: getting older.
But you have to admit that “I’m having a midlife crisis” sounds a lot better than “I’m a narcissistic jerk having a meltdown.”
Another patient, a 49-year-old man at the pinnacle of his legal career, started an affair with an office colleague. “I love my wife,” he said, “and I don’t know what possessed me.”
It didn’t take long to find out. The first five years of his marriage were exciting. “It was like we were dating all the time,” he recalled wistfully. But once they had a child, he felt an unwelcome sense of drudgery and responsibility creep into his life.
Being middle-aged had nothing to do with his predicament; it was just that it took him 49 years to reach a situation where he had to seriously take account of someone else’s needs, namely those of his baby son. In all likelihood, the same thing would have happened if he had become a father at 25.
Why do we have to label a common reaction of the male species to one of life’s challenges — the boredom of the routine — as a crisis? True, men are generally more novelty-seeking than women, but they certainly can decide what they do with their impulses.
But surely someone has had a genuine midlife crisis. After all, don’t people routinely struggle with questions like “What can I expect from the rest of my life?” or “Is this all there is?”
Of course. But it turns out that only a distinct minority think it constitutes a crisis. In 1999, the MacArthur Foundation study on midlife development surveyed 8,000 Americans ages 25 to 74. While everyone recognized the term “midlife crisis,” only 23 percent of subjects reported having one. And only 8 percent viewed their crisis as something tied to the realization that they were aging; the remaining 15 percent felt the crisis resulted from specific life events. Strikingly, most people also reported an increased sense of well-being and contentment in middle age.
So what keeps the myth of the midlife crisis alive?
The main culprit, I think, is our youth-obsessed culture, which makes a virtue of the relentless pursuit of self-renewal. The news media abound with stories of people who seek to recapture their youth simply by shedding their spouses, quitting their jobs or leaving their families. Who can resist?
Most middle-aged people, it turns out, if we are to believe the definitive survey.
Except, of course, for the few — mainly men, it seems — who find the midlife crisis a socially acceptable shorthand for what you do when you suddenly wake up and discover that you’re not 20 anymore.
Richard A. Friedman is a professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College.
IN each of the following pairs, respondents are asked to choose the statement with which they agree more:
a) “I have a natural talent for influencing people”
b) “I am not good at influencing people”
a) “I can read people like a book”
b) “People are sometimes hard to understand”
a) “I am going to be a great person”
b) “I hope I am going to be successful”
These are some of the 40 questions on a popular version of the Narcissistic Personality Inventory. It may seem like a just-for-kicks quiz on par with “Which Superhero Are You?” but the test is commonly used by social scientists to measure narcissistic personality traits. (Choosing the first statement in any of the above pairings would be scored as narcissistic.)
Conventional wisdom, supported by academic studies using the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, maintains that today’s young people — schooled in the church of self-esteem, vying for spots on reality television, promoting themselves on YouTube — are more narcissistic than their predecessors. Heck, they join Facebook groups like the Association for Justified Narcissism. A study released last year by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press dubbed Americans age 18 to 25 as the “Look at Me” generation and reported that this group said that their top goals were fortune and fame.
“Anything we do that’s political always falls flat,” said Ricky Van Veen, 27, a founder and the editor in chief of CollegeHumor.com, a popular and successful Web site. “It doesn’t seem like young people now are into politics as much, especially compared to their parents’ generation. I think that could lend itself to the argument that there is more narcissism and they’re more concerned about themselves, not things going on around them.”
Yet despite exhibiting some signs of self-obsession, young Americans are not more self-absorbed than earlier generations, according to new research challenging the prevailing wisdom.
Some scholars point out that bemoaning the self-involvement of young people is a perennial adult activity. (“The children now love luxury,” Plato wrote 2,400 years ago. “They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.”) Others warn that if young people continue to be labeled selfish and narcissistic, they just might live up to that reputation.
“There’s a self-fulfilling prophecy,” said Kali H. Trzesniewski, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Western Ontario. Ms. Trzesniewski, along with colleagues at the University of California, Davis, and Michigan State University, will publish research in the journal Psychological Science next month showing there have been very few changes in the thoughts, feelings and behaviors of youth over the last 30 years. In other words, the minute-by-minute Twitter broadcasts of today are the navel-gazing est seminars of 1978.
Ms. Trzesniewski said her study is a response to widely publicized research by Jean Twenge, an associate professor of psychology at San Diego State University, who along with colleagues has found that narcissism is much more prevalent among people born in the 1980s than in earlier generations. Ms. Twenge’s book title summarizes the research: “Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled — and More Miserable Than Ever Before” (2006, Free Press).
Ms. Twenge attributed her findings in part to a change in core cultural beliefs that arose when baby-boom parents and educators fixated on instilling self-esteem in children beginning in the ’70s. “We think feeling good about yourself is very, very important,” she said in an interview. “Well, that never used to be the case back in the ’50s and ’60s, when people thought about ‘What do we need to teach young people?’ ” She points to cultural sayings as well — “believe in yourself and anything is possible” and “do what’s right for you.” “All of them are narcissistic,” she said.
“Generation Me” inspired a slew of articles in the popular press with headlines like “It’s all about me,” “Superflagilistic, Extra Egotistic” and “Big Babies: Think the Boomers are self-absorbed? Wait until you meet their kids.”
Ms. Twenge is working on another book with W. Keith Campbell of the University of Georgia, this one tentatively called “The Narcissism Epidemic.”
However, some scholars argue that a spike in selfishness among young people is, like the story of Narcissus, a myth.
“It’s like a cottage industry of putting them down and complaining about them and whining about why they don’t grow up,” said Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, a developmental psychologist, referring to young Americans. Mr. Arnett, the author of “Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road From the Late Teens through the Twenties” (2004, Oxford University Press), has written a critique of Ms. Twenge’s book, which is to be published in the American Journal of Psychology.
Scholars including Mr. Arnett suggest several reasons why the young may be perceived as having increased narcissistic traits. These include the personal biases of older adults, the lack of nuance in the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, changing social norms, the news media’s emphasis on celebrity, and the rise of social networking sites that encourage egocentricity.
Richard P. Eibach, an assistant professor of psychology at Yale, has found that exaggerated beliefs in social decline are widespread — largely because people tend to mistake changes in themselves for changes in the external world. “Our automatic assumption is something real has changed,” Mr. Eibach said. “It takes extra thought to realize that something about your own perspective or the information you’re receiving may have changed.”
Ms. Trzesniewski gave as an example of this bias a scene from the film “Knocked Up,” in which new parents drive their baby home from the hospital at a snail’s pace. The road, of course, is no more or less dangerous than before the couple became mother and father. But once they make that life transition, they perceive the journey as perilous.
Indeed, the transition to parenthood, increased responsibility and physical aging are examples of changes in individuals that tend to be the real sources of people’s perceptions of the moral decline of others, write Mr. Eibach and Lisa K. Libby of Ohio State University in a psychology book chapter exploring the “ideology of the Good Old Days,” to be published by Oxford University Press later this year. (They also report that perceptions of social decline tend to be associated with conservative attitudes.)
Ms. Twenge and Ms. Trzesniewski used the inventory in their studies, though they chose different data sets and had opposite conclusions. Each said their data sets were better than the other’s for a host of reasons — all good, but far too long to list here. Ms. Twenge, who has read Ms. Trzesniewski’s critique, said she stands by her own nationwide analysis and has a comprehensive response, along with another paper, forthcoming in the Journal of Personality. It reads in part, “their critique ultimately strengthens our case that narcissism has risen over the generations among college students.”
Mr. Arnett dismisses tests like the inventory. “They have very limited validity,” he said. “They don’t really get at the complexity of peoples’ personality.” Some of the test choices (“I see myself as a good leader”) “sound like pretty normal personality features,” he said.
Ms. Twenge said she understands that sentiment but that the inventory has consistently proved to be an accurate measure. (She calls it “the boyfriend test.”) “There’s a fair number of personality tests that when you look at them they may seem odd, but what’s important is what they predict,” she said.
Test or no test, Mr. Arnett worries that “youth bashing” has become so common that accomplishments tend to be forgotten, like the fact that young people today have a closer relationship with their parents than existed between children and their parents in the 1960s (“They really understand things from their parents’ perspective,” Mr. Arnett said), or that they popularized the alternative spring break in which a student opts to spend a vacation helping people in a third world country instead of chugging 40s in Cancún.
“It’s the development of a new life stage between adolescence and adulthood,” Mr. Arnett said. “It’s a temporary condition of being self-focused, not a permanent generational characteristic.”
As a Saudi soldier with a gold sword high-stepped in front of him, President Bush walked slowly beside King Abdullah through the shivery gray mist enveloping the kingdom, following the red carpet leading from Air Force One to the airport terminal.
When the two stepped onto the escalator, the president tenderly reached for the king’s hand, in case the older man needed help. He certainly does need help, but not the kind he is prepared to accept.
It took Mr. Bush almost his entire presidency to embrace diplomacy, but now that he’s in the thick of it, or perhaps the thin of it — given his speed-dating approach to statesmanship — he is kissing and holding hands with kings, princes, emirs, sheiks and presidents all over the Arab world and is trying to persuade them that he is not in a monogamous relationship with the Jews.
His message boiled down to: Iran bad, Israel good, Iraq doing better.
Blessed is the peacemaker who comes bearing a $30 billion package of military aid for Israel and a $20 billion package of Humvees and guided bombs for the Arabs.
Like the slick Hollywood guy in “Annie Hall” who has a notion that he wants to turn into a concept and then develop into an idea, W. has resumed his mantra of having a vision that turns into freedom that could develop into global democracy.
W.’s peace train quickly gave way to the warpath, however, with Mr. Bush devoting a good chunk of time to the unfinished war in Iraq and the possibility of a war with Iran.
In meetings with leaders, he privately pooh-poohed the National Intelligence Estimate asserting that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003. On Fox News, he openly broke with intelligence analysts, telling Greta Van Susteren about Iran: “I believe they want a weapon, and I believe that they’re trying to gain the know-how as to how to make a weapon under the guise of a civilian nuclear program.”
Less than a week after the president arrived in the Middle East, three violent eruptions — an Israeli raid killing at least 18 Palestinians, 13 of whom were militants; an American Embassy car bombing in Beirut; and a luxury hotel suicide-bombing in Kabul — underscored how Sisyphean a task he has set for himself.
“This is one of the results of the Bush visit,” said Mahmoud Zahar, a Hamas leader, as he went to a Gaza hospital to see the body of his son, a militant killed in the battle. “He encouraged the Israelis to kill our people.”
Arab TV offered an uncomfortable juxtaposition: Al Arabiya running the wretched saga of Gaza children suffering from a lack of food and medicine during the Israeli blockade, blending into the wretched excess scenes of W. being festooned with rapper-level bling from royal hosts flush with gazillions from gouging us on oil.
W.’s 11th-hour bid to save his legacy from being a shattered Iraq — even as the Iraqi defense minister admitted that American troops would be needed to help with internal security until at least 2012 and border defense until at least 2018 — recalled MTV’s “Cribs.”
At a dinner last night in the king’s tentlike retreat, where the 8-foot flat-screen TV in the middle of the room flashed Arab news, the president and his advisers Elliott Abrams and Josh Bolten went native, lounging in floor-length, fur-lined robes, as if they were Peter O’Toole and Omar Sharif.
In Abu Dhabi, Sheik Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahyan gave the president — dubbed “the Wolf of the Desert” by a Kuwaiti poet — a gigantic necklace made of gold, diamonds, rubies and emeralds, so gaudy and cumbersome that even the Secret Service agent carrying it seemed nonplussed. Here in Saudi Arabia, the king draped W. with an emerald-and-ruby necklace that could have come from Ali Baba’s cave.
Time’s Massimo Calabresi described the Kuwaiti emir’s residence where W. dined Friday as “crass class”: “Loud paintings of harems and the ruling Sabah clan hang near Louis XVI enameled clocks and candlesticks in the long hallways.”
In Abu Dhabi, the president made a less-than-rousing speech about democracy while staying in the less-than-democratic Emirates Palace hotel’s basketball-court-size Ruler’s Suite — an honor reserved for royalty and W. and denied to Elton John, who is coming later this month to play the Palace.
The president’s grandiose room included a ballroom, in case Mr. Bush wanted to practice the tribal sword dancing he has been rather sheepishly doing with some of his hosts, something between Zorba and Zorro. The $3 billion, seven-star, 84,114-square-foot pink marble hotel — said to be the most expensive ever built — would make Trump blush. It glistens with 64,000 square feet of 22-carat gold leaf, 1,000 chandeliers, 20,000 roses changed every day, 200 fountains, a dome higher than St. Peter’s, an archway larger than the Arc de Triomphe, a beach with white sand shipped in from Algeria and a private heliport. The rooms, scattered with rose petals, range from $1,598 to $12,251.
Puddle jumping through Arabia, the president saw his share of falcons in little leather hoods — presumably not a Gitmo reference — and Arabian stallions, including one retired stud from Texas — presumably not a W. reference. But there was a distinct dearth of wives and dissidents.
It does not bode well for the president’s ability to push the Israelis and Palestinians that he has done so little to push Musharraf on catching Osama, despite our $10 billion endowment, or the Saudis on women’s rights and human rights, even with the $20 billion arms package.
At a press conference last night, the Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, was asked what the president and king had discussed about human rights.
“About what?” the prince repeated flatly.
“Human rights,” Condi prompted.
“Human rights?” the stately prince pondered, before shimmying out of the question.
Though W. has made the issue of the progress of women in the Middle East a central part of “the freedom agenda” — he had a roundtable over the weekend with Kuwaiti women on democracy and development — he doesn’t seem bothered that 17 years after his father protected the Saudis when Saddam invaded Kuwait, Saudi women still can’t drive or publicly display hair or skin and still get beheaded and lashed because of archaic laws. Neither does the female secretary of state of the United States.
“It’s not allowed for ladies to use the gym,” the Marriott desk clerk told me, an American woman in an American franchise traveling with an American president.
W. was strangely upbeat throughout the trip — “Dates put you in a good mood, right?” he joked to reporters yesterday, specifying that he meant the fruit — even though back home the Republican candidates were running from him and clinging to Reagan.
The Saudi big shots I talked to were intrigued that W. is now more in the sway of Condi than Bombs Away Cheney. They admire his intention about making peace, even though they’re skeptical that he has the time or competence to do it; and they’re sure that the Israelis need more of a shove than a nudge.
They are also dubious about his attempts to demonize and isolate Iran.
“We don’t need America to dictate our enemies to us, especially when it’s our neighbor,” said an insider at the Saudi royal court. The Saudis invited the Iranian president, I’m-a-Dinner-Jacket, to their hajj pilgrimage last month.
Saudis and Palestinians grumbled that they find it hard to listen to the president’s high-flown paeans to democracy when he only acknowledges his brand of democracy. When Hamas, Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood won elections, W. sought to undermine them. The results of the elections were certainly troubling, but is democratization supposed to be about outcomes?
They also think W.’s plan cancels itself out. The Israelis don’t have to stop settlements if rockets are coming in from Gaza, and Abbas, the Palestinian president, can’t stop rockets from going out of an area he does not control.
The president who described himself at Galilee as “a pilgrim” makes peace sound as easy as three faiths sharing, when history has shown that the hardest thing on earth is three faiths sharing.
Asked by ABC’s Terry Moran what he was thinking when he stood on the site where Jesus performed miracles at the Sea of Galilee, W. replied: “I reflected on the story in the New Testament about the calm and the rough seas, because it was on those very seas that the Lord was in the boat with the disciples, and they were worried about the waves and the wind, and the sea calmed. That’s what I reflected on: the calm you can find in putting your faith in a higher power.”
Clearly, the man believes in miracles.
$300 to Learn Risk of Prostate Cancer
Today’s Papers
Stimulating Problems
By Daniel Politi Posted Thursday, Jan. 17, 2008, at 6:03 A.M. E.T.
The New York Timesleads, and the rest of the papers mention, word that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is expected to throw his support behind the idea of an economic stimulus package when he goes before Congress today. He’s not going to say which plan he likes best, but has told lawmakers that even if it boosts the federal deficit, a stimulus package could be useful if it quickly increases spending and is temporary. But the Washington Post‘s leadnotes that actually reaching a bipartisan agreement on a stimulus package will be anything but easy, particularly since presidential politics is now added to the usual mix of lobbyist pressure and ideological disagreements. The Los Angeles Timessees things a little differently and is somewhat more optimistic that party leaders will be able to put differences aside to reach an agreement.
USA Todayleads with a look at how a federal law that prohibits states from regulating employee benefits is providing an obstacle to measures that seek to provide universal health care. Many of the plans being pushed by states and communities have been met by lawsuits because they force employers to either provide health coverage or pay a fee. Courts are reaching different conclusions and some think the issue will eventually have to be resolved by the Supreme Court. The Wall Street Journal leads its world-wide newsbox with a look at how Sen. John McCain is counting on the military vote to win South Carolina’s primary.
Even though lawmakers don’t need Bernanke’s permission to pass any kind of stimulus package, the NYT makes clear that many would be reluctant to act “without the chairman’s blessing.” Bernanke’s approval also means that lawmakers can work with the Fed to figure out the right balance of stimulus and lower interest rates. Yesterday, the Fed released its “beige book,” a compilation of anecdotal reports from the 12 regional banks, which said holiday sales were “generally disappointing.”
Meanwhile, there is no shortage of ideas on what should be included in the stimulus package, and lobbyists from a vast array of industries are flooding Capitol Hill to make sure they get a little piece of the action. The Post reports that the staffer in charge of keeping track of lobbyist requests currently has a growing list that “exceeds two dozen significant ideas.” Meanwhile, as the presidential candidates keep discussing their plans on the campaign trail, Democratic lawmakers are increasingly concerned that whichever plan gets approved could end up helping one candidate over another. With the wide-ranging mix of opinions, it’s no surprise that some Democratic leaders fear the whole exercise could quickly become a “runaway train,” says the Post.
But while the Post sees the presidential candidates weighing in on the economy as a potential obstacle, the LAT says that since the issue is being constantly mentioned by White House hopefuls in both parties, a compromise seems likely. Many lawmakers seem to agree that failing to do anything would be bad for both parties. “Not having an agreement is a lose-lose,” House Minority Leader John Boehner said. Both the LAT and WSJ say that in order to reach an agreement, Republicans are likely to give up hopes of making President Bush’s tax cuts permanent and Democrats will be open to the idea of cutting social spending as well as drop the rule that requires new spending to be offset with revenue increases or cuts in the budget.
So all this talk about a stimulus package means everyone agrees that something has to be done to avoid a recession, right? Not so fast, says the LATin the second part of its double-story lead on the economy. Some analysts are convinced that the problems in Wall Street won’t translate to the wider economy and worry that the federal government will pass measures that are too expensive and ultimately unnecessary. At least part of the disagreement seems to be due to the fact that while the economic downturn is definitely real for some industries and areas of the country, it’s hardly all-encompassing, says the Post. The Fed’s “beige book” reported that some industries are doing rather well and while a group of analysts see signs that the economic woes will soon spread, others aren’t so sure. There’s particular concern that continued cuts in interest rates coupled with a stimulus package could lead to increased inflation by, as the LAT so eloquently puts it, “providing too much juice for the economy.”
The NYT fronts, and everyone mentions, that McCain is facing personal attacks in South Carolina, including one from a group that claims the senator cooperated with the enemy during his POW days. But as opposed to eight years ago, when the failure of his campaign to answer these kinds of attacks is widely believed to have cost him a victory in the state, he has now launched a “truth squad” to aggressively fire back. In a separate story inside, the NYT points out that while the attacks against McCain may be particularly harsh and well-organized, he’s hardly the only candidate who has to deal with dirty politics in South Carolina.
Everyone notes that Rep. Pete Hoekstra, the top Republican on the House intelligence committee, said that it seems the CIA official who authorized the destruction of the interrogation tapes “got direction to make sure the tapes were not destroyed.” Hoekstra’s comments came after a closed session where the committee heard testimony from the CIA’s top lawyer.
The NYT reefers, and the WSJ goes high with, a new report that says the makers of the most popular antidepressants misled doctors and patients about the effectiveness of their drugs because they failed to publish about a third of their trials and selectively published the favorable results.
The Post reports that Tribune employees received a new handbook outlining policies for the workplace now that real estate mogul Sam Zell has taken over the company. “Rule 1: Use your best judgment,” which the handbook calls “the one hard and fast rule” that applies to all others. For example, rule 5.1: “Under Rule 1, you may want to think twice before you enter into an intimate relationship with a co-worker. When you start, it might seem like a good idea. It’s when you stop, or the wrong people find out (and they will) that you could discover that perhaps it wasn’t.”
Daniel Politi writes “Today’s Papers” for Slate. He can be reached at todayspapers@slate.com.
Spears’ Spree Sends Paparazzi to Pokey by Gina Serpe
A swarm of Britney Spears’ omnipresent shutterbugs has just been swatted by the cops.
Four paparazzi were arrested Wednesday and booked for reckless driving after Los Angeles police witnessed firsthand the dangerous lengths lensmen go to to chronicle the singer’s every move.
At roughly 11:20 p.m. in Mission Hills, California, police pulled over a fleet of paparazzi-powered vehicles, all of which were hot on Spears’ trail, after spotting the pack driving evasively at high speeds, following the singer’s car too closely and making a series of unsafe lane changes. A quartet of her pursuers was arrested on the spot and booked into Van Nuys jail.
Which, apparently, was not quite the desired result.
LAPD officers also pulled over Spears, who was behind the wheel of her white Mercedes-Benz at the time. She was briefly interviewed and released after the police verified her hard-earned California driver’s license.
However, Spears’ constant sidekick Sam Lutfi told E! News‘ Ryan Seacrest Thursday morning that the singer, who has a well-documented affinity for certain members of the paparazzi, did not want to see the four photographers carted away.
Lutfi said that while speaking with cops, Spears tried to prevent the paparazzi from getting arrested, though the officers didn’t take to the celebrity intervention.
But while the night was over for four of Spears’ shutterbugs, it was still young for the “Gimme More” warbler herself.
Spears and Lutfi continued on with their late-night excursion, making a pit stop at a Studio City grocery store, which she left at roughly 1 a.m. with a cartful of bagged goods.
After switching rides from the Benz to a black Escalade, sources tell E! News that at roughly 2 a.m. (a timeline since disputed by Lutfi), the duo headed over to the trendy Beverly Hills boutique Kitson.
The store, which closed hours earlier, opened solely for Spears and her burgeoning entourage: Lutfi, security man Mark Chinapen, who orchestrated the late-night logistics, new hanger-on Chad Hardcastle and Danish fashion executive Claus Hjemblak, who owns the Scandinavian Style Mansion where Spears celebrated her birthday last month. Curiously absent from the mix was paparazzo pal Adnan Ghalib.
What happened between the arrival of the Spears crew at the boutique for some retail therapy and the time she left an hour later is still up for debate.
Sources told E! News that the singer, who was shielded throughout her excursion by Chinapen, walked around the store naked save for a pair of fishnet stockings, before making off with $30,000 worth of comped designer goods. But Lutfi said in his on-air chat with Seacrest Thursday that the singer never went native during her spree.
“No, that never happened,” he told Seacrest via phone call from Spears’ home.
“We all went shopping, I think we went a little crazy. We all got something,” he said, adding that the trip came about out of “mostly boredom.”
Hardcastle, the newest addition to Spears’ fleet of rotating pals, was also present at Spears’ home Thursday morning. As for his role in the high-profile entourage, Hardcastle told Seacrest he was “still trying to figure it out myself…we’re all in love here…No, just a friend of Sam’s.”
Spears also made a cameo during the phone call—briefly speaking to Seacrest from her bedroom shower.
“Get out, I’m naked, get out!” the suddenly modest celeb yelled. “I stink, ’cause I’m a human being. Shut the door, I’m nasty.”
Lutfi then addressed the most recent round of rumors to plague Spears, starting with the paparazzi snaps of her and Ghalib perusing pregnancy tests at a Los Angeles Rite Aid this week.
“I don’t know what the hell that was,” he said. “I don’t know if they even bought one. I think they were just f—king around.”
Asked if Spears actually thought she was pregnant: “No, no, no, no, no, no.”
Lutfi also denied ramped-up tabloid reports that the pop star was looking to settle down with Ghalib, saying she does “not at all” want more kids right now and that it’s “not true” she had plans to tie the knot with her paparazzo suitor.
As for the kids she has with Kevin Federline, Lutfi said she will see them “hopefully very soon” despite court orders to the contrary.
“She’s just got some appointments and doctor meetings, you know, that she’s got to handle…Everything’s fine. She’s back on track. She’s handling it.”
—Additional reporting by Ken Baker
Inside the Giants: There’s Cold and Then There Is Green Bay
January 17, 2008, 1:59 pm
Inside the Giants: There’s Cold and Then There Is Green Bay
The Giants better hurry and get to Green Bay, because the temperature forecast for Sunday night’s game keeps falling. They are practicing outside at Giants Stadium, where the temperature is 38 degrees. It feels kind of cold. Now, just take that and subtract, oh, about 35 degrees and add a few snow flurries. That is what conditions are expected to be at Lambeau Field.
Some of the Giants were talking on Wednesday about playing the Packers in short sleeves. That led to some obvious questions, mainly: “Why?” And, “Are you out of your mind?” Funny, most of the Giants at practice today – remember, 38 degrees – are wearing long sleeves. Some are wearing those ski-mask hoods under their helmets.
The Giants have named honorary captains for Sunday’s game. The first is Tiki Barber.
Just kidding! We’ve heard a lot of people ask about Barber, the retired running back who has been battered by his former legions of fans for being some sort of traitor or something. There might be some truth to the fact that this team has better chemistry this year, but that has more to do with an underdog, “all-Joes” sensibility (one made even stronger with the loss of Jeremy Shockey) that has propelled this team.
It is a bit of revisionist history to suggest that Barber’s teammates were against him last year; many, actually, loved the fact that he was willing to stand up to Tom Coughlin, who was not nearly as popular in 2006 as he is today.
New England Patriots Coach Bill Belichick was watching just like everyone else Sunday when the game of the year went up in smoke, when the team regarded as the Patriots’ biggest roadblock to another Super Bowl title was eliminated.
As a bonus for him, on the San Diego sideline in Indianapolis was a most welcome sight for any coach about to face the San Diego Chargers: LaDainian Tomlinson standing there, his knee injured enough to keep him out of the second half of the Chargers’ 28-24 victory over the Colts in an American Football Conference divisional playoff game.
With the defending Super Bowl champion Colts, whose rivalry with the Patriots has colored more than a few postseason games this decade, out of the playoffs, the Patriots will play host to the Chargers next Sunday in the A.F.C. championship game. It figures to be a much less heated game than if the Colts had advanced.
The Patriots found their run defense Saturday night in their divisional game against the Jacksonville Jaguars, holding Fred Taylor and Maurice Jones-Drew to 66 yards combined.
Now the team that least needs a break could receive a gift, a conference championship game against Tomlinson, the N.F.L.’s premier running back, who may be at less than full strength, and against quarterback Philip Rivers, whose knee was banged up enough that he did not play in the Chargers’ final two drives Sunday. There is a chance neither will play.
“Going out on the road and winning in Indianapolis shows what kind of mental toughness they have,” Belichick said Sunday in a conference call. “We know we’re going to have to play our best game of the year. We’ll prepare for everybody. As we saw today, any number of players could be in the game.”
The Chargers and the Patriots have their own checkered history. They played in the divisional round in San Diego last season, and it was the Patriots’ victory that ushered Marty Schottenheimer into unemployment. But that game was also notable for the sour reaction of several Chargers, including Tomlinson, to the Patriots’ celebration on the field. Tomlinson said the Patriots showed no class and indicated he thought they took their cues from their coach.
After the Patriots’ spying scandal early this season, Tomlinson said that they lived by the credo, “If you’re not cheating, you’re not trying.”
Poking Superman in the chest is never a good idea, and the Patriots quieted Tomlinson in the second week of the season, only days after Belichick and the Patriots were sanctioned for the videotaping incident. The question then was whether the Patriots would be distracted. They have been answering ever since, constructing a 17-0 record as they try to become the second N.F.L. team to complete a perfect season with a Super Bowl title.
The Patriots, playing emotionally in support of Belichick, crushed the Chargers that night, 38-14, but plenty has changed since then. The Chargers’ defense has found itself — just ask the Colts — and San Diego has run off eight consecutive victories to get to the conference championship round.
“We’ll start all over on our preparations with them, almost like it’s a new team,” Belichick said. “That was such a long time ago. I think the most important thing for us to focus on is what the Chargers have done in the last couple of months.”
What they did against the Colts may draw particular attention. The Chargers were able to pass for 312 yards, with Rivers and Billy Volek under center. Toward the end of the season, the Patriots’ secondary had some trouble stopping the best passing games — the Giants‘ Eli Manning had the game of his life in the regular-season finale — and the Patriots struggled to stop David Garrard on Saturday night, allowing him to complete 22 of 33 passes for 278 yards and 2 touchdowns. Garrard’s lone mistake, which was turned into an interception by safety Rodney Harrison, secured the victory for the Patriots.
The Patriots were in the A.F.C. championship game last year, too, which for most franchises would mean a very good season. For the Patriots, though, the loss to the Colts was the impetus for a furious remake of the receiving corps that has lifted the Patriots’ offense into the stratosphere. Now it is the Chargers, mocked in the first half of the season and stunning in the second, who will have to grapple with what the Colts wrought with a shot at the Super Bowl on the line.
“The thing about it now is none of it matters,” Patriots quarterback Tom Brady said Saturday night. “For 17 games, it all comes down to this. We were here last year. I hope we perform better.”
It could be the weirdest and most embarrassing prediction in the history of cosmology, if not science.
If true, it would mean that you yourself reading this article are more likely to be some momentary fluctuation in a field of matter and energy out in space than a person with a real past born through billions of years of evolution in an orderly star-spangled cosmos. Your memories and the world you think you see around you are illusions.
This bizarre picture is the outcome of a recent series of calculations that take some of the bedrock theories and discoveries of modern cosmology to the limit. Nobody in the field believes that this is the way things really work, however. And so in the last couple of years there has been a growing stream of debate and dueling papers, replete with references to such esoteric subjects as reincarnation, multiple universes and even the death of spacetime, as cosmologists try to square the predictions of their cherished theories with their convictions that we and the universe are real. The basic problem is that across the eons of time, the standard theories suggest, the universe can recur over and over again in an endless cycle of big bangs, but it’s hard for nature to make a whole universe. It’s much easier to make fragments of one, like planets, yourself maybe in a spacesuit or even — in the most absurd and troubling example — a naked brain floating in space. Nature tends to do what is easiest, from the standpoint of energy and probability. And so these fragments — in particular the brains — would appear far more frequently than real full-fledged universes, or than us. Or they might be us.
Alan Guth, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who agrees this overabundance is absurd, pointed out that some calculations result in an infinite number of free-floating brains for every normal brain, making it “infinitely unlikely for us to be normal brains.” Welcome to what physicists call the Boltzmann brain problem, named after the 19th-century Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, who suggested the mechanism by which such fluctuations could happen in a gas or in the universe. Cosmologists also refer to them as “freaky observers,” in contrast to regular or “ordered” observers of the cosmos like ourselves. Cosmologists are desperate to eliminate these freaks from their theories, but so far they can’t even agree on how or even on whether they are making any progress.
If you are inclined to skepticism this debate might seem like further evidence that cosmologists, who gave us dark matter, dark energy and speak with apparent aplomb about gazillions of parallel universes, have finally lost their minds. But the cosmologists say the brain problem serves as a valuable reality check as they contemplate the far, far future and zillions of bubble universes popping off from one another in an ever-increasing rush through eternity. What, for example is a “typical” observer in such a setup? If some atoms in another universe stick together briefly to look, talk and think exactly like you, is it really you?
“It is part of a much bigger set of questions about how to think about probabilities in an infinite universe in which everything that can occur, does occur, infinitely many times,” said Leonard Susskind of Stanford, a co-author of a paper in 2002 that helped set off the debate. Or as Andrei Linde, another Stanford theorist given to colorful language, loosely characterized the possibility of a replica of your own brain forming out in space sometime, “How do you compute the probability to be reincarnated to the probability of being born?”
The Boltzmann brain problem arises from a string of logical conclusions that all spring from another deep and old question, namely why time seems to go in only one direction. Why can’t you unscramble an egg? The fundamental laws governing the atoms bouncing off one another in the egg look the same whether time goes forward or backward. In this universe, at least, the future and the past are different and you can’t remember who is going to win the Super Bowl next week.
“When you break an egg and scramble it you are doing cosmology,” said Sean Carroll, a cosmologist at the California Institute of Technology.
Boltzmann ascribed this so-called arrow of time to the tendency of any collection of particles to spread out into the most random and useless configuration, in accordance with the second law of thermodynamics (sometimes paraphrased as “things get worse”), which says that entropy, which is a measure of disorder or wasted energy, can never decrease in a closed system like the universe.
If the universe was running down and entropy was increasing now, that was because the universe must have been highly ordered in the past.
In Boltzmann’s time the universe was presumed to have been around forever, in which case it would long ago have stabilized at a lukewarm temperature and died a “heat death.” It would already have maximum entropy, and so with no way to become more disorderly there would be no arrow of time. No life would be possible but that would be all right because life would be excruciatingly boring. Boltzmann said that entropy was all about odds, however, and if we waited long enough the random bumping of atoms would occasionally produce the cosmic equivalent of an egg unscrambling. A rare fluctuation would decrease the entropy in some place and start the arrow of time pointing and history flowing again. That is not what happened. Astronomers now know the universe has not lasted forever. It was born in the Big Bang, which somehow set the arrow of time, 14 billion years ago. The linchpin of the Big Bang is thought to be an explosive moment known as inflation, during which space became suffused with energy that had an antigravitational effect and ballooned violently outward, ironing the kinks and irregularities out of what is now the observable universe and endowing primordial chaos with order.
Inflation is a veritable cosmological fertility principle. Fluctuations in the field driving inflation also would have seeded the universe with the lumps that eventually grew to be galaxies, stars and people. According to the more extended version, called eternal inflation, an endless array of bubble or “pocket” universes are branching off from one another at a dizzying and exponentially increasing rate. They could have different properties and perhaps even different laws of physics, so the story goes.
A different, but perhaps related, form of antigravity, glibly dubbed dark energy, seems to be running the universe now, and that is the culprit responsible for the Boltzmann brains.
The expansion of the universe seems to be accelerating, making galaxies fly away from one another faster and faster. If the leading dark-energy suspect, a universal repulsion Einstein called the cosmological constant, is true, this runaway process will last forever, and distant galaxies will eventually be moving apart so quickly that they cannot communicate with one another. Being in such a space would be like being surrounded by a black hole.
Rather than simply going to black like “The Sopranos” conclusion, however, the cosmic horizon would glow, emitting a feeble spray of elementary particles and radiation, with a temperature of a fraction of a billionth of a degree, courtesy of quantum uncertainty. That radiation bath will be subject to random fluctuations just like Boltzmann’s eternal universe, however, and every once in a very long, long time, one of those fluctuations would be big enough to recreate the Big Bang. In the fullness of time this process could lead to the endless series of recurring universes. Our present universe could be part of that chain.
In such a recurrent setup, however, Dr. Susskind of Stanford, Lisa Dyson, now of the University of California, Berkeley, and Matthew Kleban, now at New York University, pointed out in 2002 that Boltzmann’s idea might work too well, filling the megaverse with more Boltzmann brains than universes or real people.
In the same way the odds of a real word showing up when you shake a box of Scrabble letters are greater than a whole sentence or paragraph forming, these “regular” universes would be vastly outnumbered by weird ones, including flawed variations on our own all the way down to naked brains, a result foreshadowed by Martin Rees, a cosmologist at the University of Cambridge, in his 1997 book, “Before the Beginning.”
The conclusions of Dr. Dyson and her colleagues were quickly challenged by Andreas Albrecht and Lorenzo Sorbo of the University of California, Davis, who used an alternate approach. They found that the Big Bang was actually more likely than Boltzmann’s brain.
“In the end, inflation saves us from Boltzmann’s brain,” Dr. Albrecht said, while admitting that the calculations were contentious. Indeed, the “invasion of Boltzmann brains,” as Dr. Linde once referred to it, was just beginning.
In an interview Dr. Linde described these brains as a form of reincarnation. Over the course of eternity, he said, anything is possible. After some Big Bang in the far future, he said, “it’s possible that you yourself will re-emerge. Eventually you will appear with your table and your computer.”
But it’s more likely, he went on, that you will be reincarnated as an isolated brain, without the baggage of stars and galaxies. In terms of probability, he said, “It’s cheaper.”
You might wonder what’s wrong with a few brains — or even a preponderance of them — floating around in space. For one thing, as observers these brains would see a freaky chaotic universe, unlike our own, which seems to persist in its promise and disappointment.
Another is that one of the central orthodoxies of cosmology is that humans don’t occupy a special place in the cosmos, that we and our experiences are typical of cosmic beings. If the odds of us being real instead of Boltzmann brains are one in a million, say, waking up every day would be like walking out on the street and finding everyone in the city standing on their heads. You would expect there to be some reason why you were the only one left right side up.
Some cosmologists, James Hartle and Mark Srednicki, of the University of California, Santa Barbara, have questioned that assumption. “For example,” Dr. Hartle wrote in an e-mail message, “on Earth humans are not typical animals; insects are far more numerous. No one is surprised by this.”
In an e-mail response to Dr. Hartle’s view, Don Page of the University of Alberta, who has been a prominent voice in the Boltzmann debate, argued that what counted cosmologically was not sheer numbers, but consciousness, which we have in abundance over the insects. “I would say that we have no strong evidence against the working hypothesis that we are typical and that our observations are typical,” he explained, “which is very fruitful in science for helping us believe that our observations are not just flukes but do tell us something about the universe.”
Dr. Dyson and her colleagues suggested that the solution to the Boltzmann paradox was in denying the presumption that the universe would accelerate eternally. In other words, they said, that the cosmological constant was perhaps not really constant. If the cosmological constant eventually faded away, the universe would revert to normal expansion and what was left would eventually fade to black. With no more acceleration there would be no horizon with its snap, crackle and pop, and thus no material for fluctuations and Boltzmann brains.
String theory calculations have suggested that dark energy is indeed metastable and will decay, Dr. Susskind pointed out. “The success of ordinary cosmology,” Dr. Susskind said, “speaks against the idea that the universe was created in a random fluctuation.”
But nobody knows whether dark energy — if it dies — will die soon enough to save the universe from a surplus of Boltzmann brains. In 2006, Dr. Page calculated that the dark energy would have to decay in about 20 billion years in order to prevent it from being overrun by Boltzmann brains.
The decay, if and when it comes, would rejigger the laws of physics and so would be fatal and total, spreading at almost the speed of light and destroying all matter without warning. There would be no time for pain, Dr. Page wrote: “And no grieving survivors will be left behind. So in this way it would be the most humanely possible execution.” But the object of his work, he said, was not to predict the end of the universe but to draw attention to the fact that the Boltzmann brain problem remains.
People have their own favorite measures of probability in the multiverse, said Raphael Bousso of the University of California, Berkeley. “So Boltzmann brains are just one example of how measures can predict nonsense; anytime your measure predicts that something we see has extremely small probability, you can throw it out,” he wrote in an e-mail message.
Another contentious issue is whether the cosmologists in their calculations could consider only the observable universe, which is all we can ever see or be influenced by, or whether they should take into account the vast and ever-growing assemblage of other bubbles forever out of our view predicted by eternal inflation. In the latter case, as Alex Vilenkin of Tufts University pointed out, “The numbers of regular and freak observers are both infinite.” Which kind predominate depends on how you do the counting, he said..
In eternal inflation, the number of new bubbles being hatched at any given moment is always growing, Dr. Linde said, explaining one such counting scheme he likes. So the evolution of people in new bubbles far outstrips the creation of Boltzmann brains in old ones. The main way life emerges, he said, is not by reincarnation but by the creation of new parts of the universe. “So maybe we don’t need to care too much” about the Boltzmann brains,” he said.
“If you are reincarnated, why do you care about where you are reincarnated?” he asked. “It sounds crazy because here we are touching issues we are not supposed to be touching in ordinary science. Can we be reincarnated?”
“People are not prepared for this discussion,” Dr. Linde said.
Giants Make the Leap to Lambeau
Jessica Rinaldi/Reuters
Giants receiver Amani Toomer (81) scored on a 52-yard touchdown reception in the first quarter.
IRVING, Tex. — In the days before their divisional playoff game with the Cowboys, the Giants were leery of raising the ire of their highly favored opponent and undermining their own quiet, underdog status. But they could not help but point out the perceived discrepancy in talent between the teams. The Cowboys had 12 players named to next month’s Pro Bowl. The Giants had one.
“It’s like an all-Pro team versus an all-Joe team,” Giants linebacker Antonio Pierce said Thursday. And he seemed to relish the perception.
Facing a big-name, big-play offense standing 23 yards from the game-deciding touchdown, Pierce and his relatively unsung Giants teammates controlled their playoff fate. Before Pierce stood the likes of quarterback Tony Romo, receiver Terrell Owens, tight end Jason Witten and three Pro Bowl linemen. Behind him stood a secondary without its two starting cornerbacks.
And when the reserve cornerback R. W. McQuarters intercepted Romo’s fourth-down pass in the end zone with nine seconds left, the Giants showed that Dallas might have better players, but the Giants have a better team.
The Giants’ 21-17 victory against the Cowboys on Sunday was the team’s ninth consecutive road victory, and it sends them to Green Bay to play the Packers next Sunday in the National Football Conference championship game. The winner will head to Super Bowl XLII in Glendale, Ariz., on Feb. 3, to play the New England Patriots or the San Diego Chargers.
“Nobody — nobody — picked us to be in the playoffs this year,” John Mara, the Giants co-owner and president, said in the din of the winning locker room. “And certainly nobody picked us to be in the N.F.C. championship game.”
The road winning streak for the Giants, who last lost away from Giants Stadium in the season opener against Dallas, is a single-season N.F.L. record. The Packers beat the Giants at the Meadowlands, 35-13, in the second week of the season.
“They’re not going to face the same team they faced in Week 2,” receiver Amani Toomer said.
Sunday’s victory prolonged an increasingly improbable late-season run for the Giants. With a hardening shell of resiliency, they pieced together three defensive stands in the fourth quarter to quiet the 63,660 in attendance and turn away the Cowboys’ hopes of winning a playoff game for the first time in 11 years.
“What I think you’re seeing is the team concept to the nth degree,” Giants Coach Tom Coughlin said.
Quarterback Eli Manning completed 12 of 18 passes for 163 yards, with two touchdowns, both to Toomer. He did not throw an interception or lose a fumble for the second consecutive game.
“He’s done a great job of taking care of the football and really leading this team,” center Shaun O’Hara said.
The Giants arrived in Texas carrying the ease of a team with higher hopes than expectations. As a 10-6 wild-card entrant, they beat Tampa Bay for their first playoff win in seven years. Manning played with poise and pizazz, and Coughlin’s perpetually uncertain future as the coach was settled.
The vibe was far more conflicted for the Cowboys. They finished 13-3 to claim the conference’s top seed, but they had also not won a playoff game since the 1996 season. They had beaten the Giants twice in the regular season, and also defeated the Packers, their potential conference-title-game opponent. Anything short of the Super Bowl for these Cowboys was considered a disappointment.
Those emotions emptied at game’s end. Owens cried when speaking about Romo, afraid that Romo’s jaunt to Mexico with the singer and actress Jessica Simpson during a bye the week before would be blamed for the loss. In their locker room, tackle Flozell Adams yelled obscenities at a reporter, and many Cowboys declined to talk at all.
“They came out here and just whupped us,” cornerback Terence Newman said. “Thirteen-and-three doesn’t matter. I was 100 percent sure we were going to win this game.”
Last week, most of the focus in the news media and in the meeting rooms of the Giants was on Romo’s vacation and Owens’s injured ankle. In two regular-season meetings, Romo had thrown eight touchdown passes. Owens caught four of them.
But much of the playoff match was hitched to Dallas’s clock-milking running attack featuring Marion Barber III. He gained 129 yards, but only 28 of them in the second half as the Giants’ defense slowly tightened its grip on the game’s outcome.
The Cowboys held the ball for 36 minutes 30 seconds of the 60-minute game clock. From late in the first quarter until more than halfway through the third quarter, the Giants had the ball for 4:21. The Cowboys had it for 23:30.
Still, the Giants fought back to a 14-14 halftime tie, and stopped the Cowboys enough in the third quarter to trail by only 17-14 entering the fourth quarter. McQuarters had a 25-yard punt return that gave the Giants possession at the Dallas 37.
Six plays later, with 13:29 remaining, running back Brandon Jacobs scored from 1 yard out, and the Giants held a 21-17 lead that they scrambled to keep.
“It was the longest 13 minutes of my life,” Toomer said.
It seemed an appropriately tight game between two bitter rivals. The Giants and the Cowboys have met 91 times in the regular season, but Sunday’s game was the first postseason contest between the two.
The Giants scored on the game’s first drive when Manning completed a short pass to Toomer on a curl route. Toomer spun away from two would-be tacklers and ran down the sideline for a 52-yard touchdown play.
The Giants had another promising drive going until stalling at the Cowboys’ 44. Rather than attempt the first down on fourth-and-1, the Giants called for punter Jeff Feagles, who pinned Dallas at its 4.
It began a tortuous span of the first half for the Giants’ defense. On consecutive Dallas drives, sandwiching a five-plays-and-punt effort from the Giants, the Cowboys combined to gain 186 yards on 29 plays, scoring the tying and go-ahead touchdowns.
“I’ve never been that tired before,” Pierce said.
The first was a 96-yard touchdown drive, with Barber gaining 72 yards and carrying the game’s momentum with him. Romo threw a 5-yard touchdown pass to Owens on the first play of the second quarter.
After the Giants punted, the Cowboys embarked on a 20-play, 90-yard drive that exhausted the Giants’ defense and 10:28 of the second quarter. The Cowboys converted all six third downs, and Giants cornerback Corey Webster dropped a Romo pass that hit him in the hands and might have been returned for a touchdown. Instead, the drive ended with Barber’s 1-yard plunge and a 14-7 Dallas lead with 53 seconds left in the half.
The Cowboys seemed ready to steamroll the Giants. Manning, in his latest hero turn, rescued them. Back-to-back passes to Steve Smith pushed the Giants 33 yards, and a personal foul on the Cowboys added another 15. On third-and-10 at the Cowboys’ 23 with 17 seconds left, Manning found tight end Kevin Boss near the right sideline for a 19-yard gain. With seven seconds left, Manning fired a 4-yard touchdown pass to Toomer, who lunged across the goal line.
The 14-14 halftime score was reminiscent of the two regular-season games. The Cowboys led the opener, 17-16, before winning, 45-35. In November, the score was tied, 17-17, before the Cowboys won, 31-20.
Both regular-season games were decided by deep second-half touchdown passes by Romo. In the two games, Romo completed 35 of 52 for 592 yards, with eight touchdowns and two interceptions.
On Sunday, Romo completed 18 of 36 passes for 201 yards and a touchdown. The only interception he threw sent the Giants into the N.F.C. championship game.
