Waves Passing in the Night

In the history of astronomy, there was a conjecture in the 1760s that the planets orbit the sun in distances that can be described by a simple rule: 

Raise 2 to the power of the planet in sequence:

Multiply that by 3.

To that product add 4.

Divide that sum by 10. 

You get a measurement in “astronomical units” i.e., Earth-distances. And it is almost correct. After Mars, before Jupiter, there needs to be a planet Number 5. Then Jupiter is 6 and Saturn 7. Seeking Planet 5 led to the discovery first of Ceres in 1801, then Pallas (1802), Vesta (1807), and so on; and we are still finding asteroids in that gap. 

Today, the “Titius-Bode Conjecture” is ignored by serious astronomers. It is accepted as an accident of algebra that any small distribution can be described by some formula of arbitrary simplicity. 

Waves Passing in the Night:
Walter Murch in the Land of the
Astrophysicists; Bloomsbury, 2017.

Walter Murch found it compelling. Murch is a musician. He was born in 1943; his family was literate, artistic, and economically comfortable. Young Murch was fascinated by sound and by age 12 he had his own tape recorder. Decades later, he received Academy Awards for working on Apocalypse Now, The Godfather, American Graffiti, and other films. Murch found a deep truth in the Titius-Bode Conjecture. To him, it is evidence of the Music of the Spheres: something that we perceive caused by something deeper, more subtle, that we do not. 

Murch’s biographer, Lawrence Weschler, loves his subject. Weschler is more than fair to Murch’s detractors. No serious astronomer agrees with him. They will not even read his papers to refute them. This is not about medieval geometry: Murch has extended his theory to include wave mechanics as applied to gravity. That led one scientist to ask: “Why do our interplanetary spacecraft not detect such disturbances?” It is a cogent question. 

I snagged this book from my city library’s “De-acquisitioning Bookcase.” (25 cents each, all with their library call numbers on them. What would Eratosthenes say to that?) I took it down because of the title, but it fell open to Ernst Chladni and his waves in sand on a vibrating steel plate. When I worked at the Hands-On Museum in Ann Arbor, this was a learning station in the gallery. I referred to it often when explaining fireworks in the kitchen to mixed audiences. I would say, “We can imagine electrons as little balls with minus-signs orbiting a nucleus, but it is more helpful to think of them like those standing waves of sand, as probability distributions.” 

So, the book seemed complex, over-arching, challenging, and probably wrong, but certainly interesting. And it is all of that. 

Weschler lets Murch do his own advocating. Aside from the necessary explanations, Weschler just points the reader to Murch’s website and other works. For a thin book (150 pages), it stands on eight pages of references. It seemed like a good way to get lost and if I had more time, I might follow that path. 

For now, I am happy to have reinforced my belief that the universe is not merely knowable, it is comfortable. And there is sound in space.

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

G. H. Hardy’s “Apology”

Elisha Loomis and the Pythagorean Proposition 

Imaginary Numbers are Real. Pegasus is not. 

The Man Who Loved Only Numbers 

Parking Enforcement at the University of Texas at Austin

From 11 September 2023 until 16 January 2026, I was employed as a parking enforcement officer at the University of Texas (Austin). 

The absolute best part of the job was the occasional postings to the Pickle Research Center because the food was excellent; I worked alone; and the population there was even a little smarter than the community at the main campus. They made it easy to be lenient, helpful, and informative; and I could still issue ten citations on any day. 

On the main campus, I enjoyed the outreach tables
to give insulated drink mugs along with other merch and swag
to anyone who came up and asked a question.

This was my longest run of W-2 employment since 1991-1993 at Kawasaki Robotics USA, following 1973-1975 with Montgomery Ward & Co; both of those lasting 1 year and 50 weeks. My theory of labor value was informed by Harry Browne’s How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World (1973) and John Brunner’s The Shockwave Rider (1975). My time at Kawasaki, where I taught robot operations and programming, derived from having read (in 1989) William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Count Zero.

Job Description Summary

• Provides university parking services by enforcing University rules and regulations. 
• Ensures that parking regulations are enforced and assists the public with information, such as directions to buildings and offices. 
• Provides assistance to the public by giving parking directions and checking parking permits on vehicles entering the parking lots. 
• Directs flow of traffic and parking of cars. 
• Issues pass-through or visitor's permits when needed. Issues traffic and parking violation citations. 
• Acts as Relief Guard to perform a combination of kiosk guard duties and parking enforcement assistant (PEA) or ticket writer functions. 
• Performs preventative maintenance checks on vehicles. 
• Installs and removes immobilization devices. 
• Controls parking access to surface lots during special events and other university sponsored activities. 
• Resolves or refers parking issues as appropriate. 
• May provide security functions at Pickle Research Center (PRC) to include patrolling buildings and grounds on foot or in vehicles to check for prowlers, fires, water leaks, and general building security.  
• May report all irregularities, emergencies, or suspicious activity to the University Police Office. 
• May be required to rotate locations across campus, including satellite locations.  Other duties as assigned.
• WORKING CONDITIONS: Exposure to variable weather conditions and shift work with varying days off, occasional weekend and overtime.

Despite claiming to be a major research university and even after then-UT president Jay Hatzell declared academic year 2024-25 to be “The Year of AI” the societal dominance of the UT sports cartel is one of the reasons that I left. In our department, we wore UT blood orange tops on Fridays. It was allowed on other days but basic blue was always encouraged. During the football season, we were allowed to wear team jerseys and other UT-branded tops. I wore a “Texas Economics” t-shirt and was told that it did not meet standards because it had no collar. On a following Friday, I put a “Texas Science” t-shirt over a collared blood orange top and was told flat out by the manager who encouraged the football jerseys that this was not within the guidelines for dress. I replied, “It’s spirit day. We can wear UT gear.” His reply: “There are no spirit days.” The diminution of spirit was a constant problem for me.

I found people with a good sense of life at UT, for example at the Texas Science and Natural History Museum and the College of Fine Arts. I enjoyed interacting with them, even when writing citations for the students at the Sarah and Ernest Butler School of Music. When I volunteered at the Museum of Science everyone on the staff was enthusiastic, even when acknowledging the existence of unsolved problems at their desk. However, in the parking department eudaimonia was scarce.

This is how student athletes, especially football players, spend their NIL money. 

See recent college athlete valuations at Fox Sports here. 

Parking is like any other game: there are rules and penalties and everyone knows

what they are. The athletes enjoy being able to scoff at the fines 

so that in a community of 55,000 students and 22,000 staff and faculty

served by 13,000 parking spaces they can park wherever they want.

Athletes are given garage parking spaces as part of their scholarship payments. 

As one coach told me, "We don't have a parking problem. We have a walking problem." 

Contract buses take the football players from their lockers

at Moncrief Neuhaus to the Denius practice field less than a mile away and bring them back. 

I believe that it is why they have a hard time winning: they lack a competitive edge.

In 1982, Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg moved from Harvard to UT. In 2005, when Weinberg was reputed to be the highest paid professor at $400,000 football coach Mack Brown was paid $2.1 million. [In 2023], coach Steve Sarkisian was paid $10.6 million and quarterback Arch Manning earned $1.6 million from Name Image and Likeness (NIL) under NCAA rules in place since 2021. Weinberg was awarded a $3 million Breakthrough Prize in 2020 just one of several such honors over the years. (NecessaryFacts; January 21, 2025.) 

Ahead of the 2025 playing seaon, Arch Manning’s NIL payments were tallied at $6.8 million. (https://www.foxsports.com/stories/college-football/top-25-college-athletes-highest-nil-valuations) That being as it is, the fact remains that an undergraduate playing football earns three times more than the best paid professors and eight times more than the average professor’s salary. (See: https://texascollegesalaries.com/institution/17)

[I believe that Stanford science and Harvard economics put into proper context their very successful footballers. See “Stanford Alumni in the NFL Playoffs” here and football at Harvard here.  

See also Harvard Players Health Study ]

These performing arts students called in a complaint
on a professor who parked in the wrong space.
The citation is on the windshield.

The Human Resources department sent me a questionnaire about my separation. “On a scale of 1 to 10…” Most of it was for academics and managers. Some was for me and mine. At the end were two short essay questions. 

On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely am I to recommend UT as a place to work. I gave it a 3. 

• About a decade before I came to the University of Texas, I was earning my degrees while working part time for a multinational corporation headquartered in Europe. I knew that no one there knew who I was or cared. What mattered most was my boss, my co-workers, and our clients and their customers. The University of Texas is like that: 55,000 students; 22,000 staff and faculty; deep in the Heart of Texas. All that mattered was the supervisors I could talk to on a first name basis, my team, and the community which we served. 

Is there anything else you would like to share about your experience at the University?

• I loved the museums and I really will miss the libraries. The semester-long checkouts made both research and casual reading very easy, whether writing about the history of physical science and its intersection with the fine arts or catching up on nineteenth century essayists. Occasionally, my daily work let me chat with students and faculty in the performing arts; they are always so interesting. All of that can be hard to find in one place in the private sector. But in the free market, I can make my own opportunities. Here, the paths were fewer and somewhat tangled with undergrowth.

Signage often provided an opportunity
to discuss semantics and sociology. 

I applied for eight other openings on campus, three of them in my own department, and I never got an interview. I adhere to Maslow's Hierarchy. I work for (1) transcendence and (2) self-actualization, (3) my team and (4) our clients, and then I consider (5) the money. This was not the best environment for me and there is more money elsewhere.

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

The Lightbulb Does Not Need to be Changed

AFK: Parking Enforcement 

Minimizing the Likelihood of Bad Cops 

Shifting the Paradigm of Private Security 

Physics for Astronomers: The Works of Steven Weinberg 

The Legacy of Vannevar Bush (Part 3: Conclusion)

The response to Pres. Roosevelt’s request closes with Appendix 5: “Report to the Committee of Publication of Scientific Information.” It is short and to the point: except for considerations of military necessity, all scientific publications must return to their culture of sharing and openness. Appendix 4: “Report of the Committee on Discovery and Development of Scientific Talent” addressed the immediate shortage of scientists and projected that demand into the future. Moreover, science exists within a wider culture  so the committee insisted that nothing recommended here should interfere with the recruitment and development of talented people in the social sciences, arts, and humanities. 

“Table 8 shows that for every four able boys in the upper quarter, there were six able girls. Table 11 shows that the ratio of able boys to able girls in the upper quarter enrolled in college was 6 to 4.5. Thus, it is clear that the greatest social and personal loss of human resources comes in the ranks of able girls in the upper quarter” (Page 198) 

Persons who receive benefits under the plan should be selected solely on the basis of merit, without regard to sex, race, color, or creed. -- Page 170.

“Likewise proposals for recruiting more college students into the physical and biological sciences and enlisting more graduate students for training in research in the physical and biological sciences should be viewed in the light of the over-all needs of the country and of the requirements in other fields of research and in the several professions. If too many of the limited number of high quality students are absorbed by fields of scientific research, research in the social sciences and in the arts and humanities may be jeopardized with probably unfavorable reactions upon scientific research.”  — Page 204

“As said in the general preamble to this report, we think that plans for the discovery and development of scientific talent should have a limit related to the needs of the Nation as a whole for trained talent in all activities that are necessary for the national welfare. We think, also as stated, that while we have no fears that too much top ability can be found and developed there is some danger that too many scientists of less than top ability may be trained, thereby debasing the currency of scientific training to the point where scientific careers may not look attractive either to the best or to the second best.”  — page 168

“The findings of this study, in harmony with the findings of other studies, show that approximately as many of the ablest high school graduates are out of college as are in college. 

“On the basis of the sample (of 1,754 cases), the upper quarter of the State’s 16,000 high school graduates would contain a minimum of 4,000 of the ablest individuals, the type of students who really do well in college. Forty-nine percent of 4,000 is 1,960 individuals with high potential college ability, who for some reason or reasons, did not enroll in college. From the point of view of the colleges, as well as of the individuals and of society, the loss in human resources indicated in these data is highly significant.”  Page 197-198

[Citations above are from —“The Utilization of Potential College Ability Found in June 1940, Graduates of Kentucky High Schools,” by Horace Leonard Davis. Bulletin of the Bureau of School Service, College of Education, University of Kentucky. Vol. XV. No. 1. Sept. 1942. — given on page 198]

Total probable deficit due to war 1941 through 1955. Chemistry, Engineering, Geology, Mathematics, Physics, Psychology, and Biological Sciences: 16,870.

“… it takes at least 6 years from college entry to achieve a doctor’s degree or its equivalent in science or engineering.”— page 3, and the fact is repeated on 27, 156, 166, 177-9, and 182.

"No matter how capable and gifted boys and girls may be, if they do not have opportunities to complete elementary and high school, they cannot go on to college and thence to graduate school for research training." -- Page 192 

“All economic groups, except the highest salaried group, are represented in the highest one percentile class.” — (Page 198)

“Brightest seniors are not going to college." (Page 199)

An Indiana study published in 1922 showed:

If we compare the records made on our tests by the group of seniors representing the richest and the poorest homes, we find that there are proportionally more children possessing the highest grades of mental ability among the poorest class than among the wealthiest class, and more individuals with high average grades of intelligence among the wealthier than among the poorer group. The wealthiest group ranks high on central tendency. The poorest salaried group ranks low on central tendency and also has a larger percentage of individuals possessing the lower grades of mental ability.

But there are individuals in this class who obtain the highest intelligence rating made by high school seniors. * * * (Page 161) 

"It is still more significant that so many of this most superior group of high-school seniors will not attend college, while those with the most inferior grades of intelligence are planning to attend, in ever increasing numbers. Twenty-five percent of the brightest seniors found in the entire State said they were not planning to attend college at all, while 65 to 70 percent of the dullest seniors had definitely decided to go to college, most of them having already selected the college they expected to attend."

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARYFACTS

The Legacy of Vannevar Bush (Part 1) 

Vannevar Bush’s Legacy Part 2) 

The Scientific Method (2016) 

The Scientific Method (2021) 

Vannevar Bush’s Legacy (Part 2)

Bush’s introductory essay ran 40 pages. The committee reports take 160. Of those, Part Three: Science and the Public Welfare, (beginning with its own introduction, “Appendix 3”) comprises 64 pages (70 to 134). It included seven tables of results from questionnaires sent to 315 leading colleges and universities, of which 188 replied in whole or in part. The data all were generally about staffing and funding and the counts upon which those were built. Much of the specific relevance has been lost to time. However, the broad narrative remains important: leading institutions are primaries because they invest in research. 

An interesting counterpoint came from an unidentified school devoted exclusively to teaching: “It is my opinion that the Federal Government should not undertake to establish any far-reaching program for the support of research either in public or private colleges or universities. I do not believe that such relations can be permanently established and maintained without involving political control which has proved so disastrous in Germany and other totalitarian states.”

That warning was presaged by Vannevar Bush himself in his introductory comments and other summaries: centralized political control would prevent the most fruitful research specifically because those advances cannot be predicted and controlled.

Bush says up front (page 88): “But we do not believe that any program is better than no program…” The tabulated data in Part Three reveals the many distinctions that define each of the 188 intellectual enterprises.

Science—The Endless Frontier (1945; republished 1960, 1990, 2020) was Vannevar Bush’s report to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in response to the President’s direct request that four problems be addressed:

First: What can be done, consistent with military security, and with the prior approval of the military authorities, to make known to the world as soon as possible the contributions which have been made during our war effort to scientific knowledge? The diffusion of such knowledge should help us stimulate new enterprises, provide jobs for our returning servicemen and other workers, and make possible great strides for the improvement of the national well-being.

Second: With particular reference to the war of science against disease, what can be done now to organize a program for continuing in the future the work which has been done in medicine and related sciences? The fact that the annual deaths in this country from one or two diseases alone are far in excess of the total number of lives lost by us in battle during this war should make us conscious of the duty we owe future generations.

Third: What can the Government do now and in the future to aid research activities by public and private organizations? The proper roles of public and of private research, and their interrelation, should be carefully considered.

Fourth: Can an effective program be proposed for discovering and developing scientific talent in American youth so that the continuing future of scientific research in this country may be assured on a level comparable to what has been done during the war?

Working on a federal project in 1996, I was exposed to one concrete innovation resulting from these proposals. In 1944, Civil Service was dedicated to clerical, fiscal, and custodial positions (page 112). In order to bring the best scientists to government employment, the committee headed by Isaiah Bowman (president of Johns Hopkins University), recommended requiring college degrees of all scientists employed under Civil Service. 

“The standards for entrance into scientific and professional positions in the Government should be approximately those maintained for comparable posts in universities and industries. Civil Service positions are subjected to continuous political pressure to relax entrance requirements; and recently the educational requirements for a number of scientific classifications have been removed. This opens the way to possible appointments by personal favoritism and political preference. Action should be taken immediately to re-establish the requirement of a university or college degree for entrance into all scientific and professional services. Exceptions in especially meritorious cases should be granted only upon recommendation of qualified scientists.” (Page 112. [Note that in all editions, differences in prefaces and introductions do not alter the fact that the canonic text is typeset identically].

When I was on that federal project some 50 years later, several of my coworkers had been newly hired into advanced positions because they had (1) college degrees and (2) been graduated with honors, such as dean’s list, magna cum laude, etc. 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Science versus Common Sense 

Science Fair: A National Geographic Film 

The Science of Liberty 

The Philosophical Breakfast Club