(Guest Post) Letter from America
Synchronicity can be a wonderful thing. Yesterday I mentioned the meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society that took place on January 10th 1930. The importance of this event was that it prompted Lemaître to write to Eddington pointing out that he had already (in 1927) worked out a solution of Einstein’s equations describing an expanding space-time; eventually this led to the widespread acceptance of the idea that Hubble‘s observational measurements of redshifts and distances of extragalactic nebulae were evidence that the Universe was expanding.
Meanwhile, triggered by a recent article in Physics World, I have been having an entertaining electronic exchange with Bob Kirshner concerning a much more recent development about the expanding universe, namely that its expansion is accelerating. Since he’s one of the top experts on this, I thought “What better time to have my first ever guest post?” and asked Bob if he would like to write something about that. He accepted the invitation, and here is his piece.
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Twenty-first century astrophysicists (like Telescoper) are the wrong people to ask to cast your horoscope or maximize your feng-shui. But even people who spend time in warm, well-lighted buildings staring at computer screens notice the changing seasons. (This refers to conditions before the recent budget exercise.)
For me, the pivot of the year comes right after the solstice, while the Christmas wrapping paper is still in the trash can. Our house in Maine has a window facing south of east. When the winter sun rises as far south as it ever does, a clear morning lets a blast of light come in one side, straight down the hallway and out the bathroom window. Househenge! What does it mean?
It means it is time for the American Astronomical Society’s big meeting. This rotates its location from Washington DC, this year’s site, to other more-or-less tolerable climates. Our tribe can mark the passage of the seasons and of the decades by this rhythm. Never mind all that highfalutin’ stuff about the earth going around the Sun. Remember that AAS in Austin? What year was that?
In January of 1998, the cycle of the seasons and of available convention centers of suitable size put the AAS in Washington. It was an exciting time for me, because we were hot on the trail of the accelerating universe. We had some great new data from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), a paper in the press, and Peter Garnavich, my postdoc, was going to give a talk and be part of a press briefing. This was a big deal and we prepared carefully.
Adam Riess, who had been my graduate student, was then a Miller Fellow at Berkeley doing the calibration and analysis on our data. Adam’s notebooks were beginning to show troubling hints of cosmic acceleration. I thought it would go away. Brian Schmidt, who had also been my student, was then in Australia, calling the shots on this project. He didn’t want to get out on a limb over unpublished hints. The idea of a cosmological constant was already making him sick to his stomach. We agreed that in January of 1998, Peter got to say that the supernova data showed the universe was not decelerating very much and would expand forever. That’s it. Nothing about acceleration.
Saul Perlmutter’s Supernova Cosmology Project also prepared a careful press release that reported a low density and predicted eternal cosmic expansion. A report the next day in the New York Times was pretty tame, except for Ruth Daly speculating on the possibility of a low-density universe coming out of inflation models. Saul was quoted as saying, “I never underestimate the power of a theorist to come up with a new model.” I have gathered up all the clippings I could find about who said what in Washington. (We used to call them “clippings”.)
While a few reporters sniffed out the hints of cosmic acceleration in the raw data, in January 1998 nobody was claiming this was a solid result. The paper from our team with the title Observational Evidence from Supernovae for an Accelerating Universe and a Cosmological Constant didn’t get submitted until March 13, 1998. The comparable paper from the SCP was submitted September 8, 1998. These are fine dates in the history of cosmology, but they are not in January. It’s not for me to say when savants like the Telescoper were convinced we live in an accelerating universe, but I am pretty sure it wasn’t in January 1998.
In January 2009, the sun was once again shining right through our house. It illuminated the American Physical Society newsletter kept in the upstairs bathroom. One of the features is This Month in Physics History. If you want to find out about Bubble Chamber progress in January 1955, this is the place. Flipping through the January 2009 issue I was gobsmacked (American slang for “blown away”) to learn we were supposed to celebrate the anniversary of the discovery of cosmic acceleration. Say what? In January? Because of the press releases that said the universe was not going to turn around?
Being a dutiful type, a Fellow of the APS, and the oldest of the High-Z Team, I thought it was my job to help improve the accuracy of this journal. I wrote them a cheerful (on the third draft) letter explaining that this wasn’t precisely right, and, if they liked real publications as evidence for scientific progress, they might want to wait until March. A volley of letters ensued, but not at internet speed. The editor of APS News decided he had had enough education and closed the discussion in July. The letters column moved on to less controversial matters concerning science and religion and nuclear reactors.
The rising point of the sun came north, and then marched south again. Just after the solstice, a beam of light flashed right though our happy home. 2010! Google alerts flashed the news. More brouhahah about the discovery of cosmic acceleration. Now in Physics World. I am depicted as a surly bull terrier in a crimson tenured chair, clinging desperately to self-aggrandizing notions that actual publications in real journals are a way to see the order of events. The philosopher, Robert P. Crease, who wrote this meditation, says he loves priority disputes. He is making a serious point, that “Eureka!” is not exactly at one moment when you have an international collaboration, improving data sets, and the powerful tools of Bayesian inference at your command.
But, even in the world of preprint servers, press releases, and blogs without restraint (I am talking about other blogs!), a higher standard of evidence is demanded for a real paper in a real journal. A page in a notebook, an email, a group meeting, a comment after a colloquium or even an abstract in the AAS Bulletin (whipped up an hour before the deadline and months before the actual talk) is not quite what we mean by “having a result”. I’m not saying that referees are always helpful, but they make the author anticipate a skeptical reader, so you really want to present a well-crafted case.
If that’s not so, I would like to have my lifetime’s page charges refunded forthwith: that’s 250 papers x 10 pages/paper/ x $100/ApJ page = $250 000. Send the check to my office.
So, Telescoper, how is your house aligned? And why do the Brits put the drains on the outside when you live in such a cold climate?
In the Dark 
January 10, 2010 at 8:49 pm
Bob,
To answer your question, my house faces roughly south-south-east. No chance of the sun shining out of my back passage then.
My house is also terraced, which means it is joined to those either side in the hope that will stop it falling down. Like the vast majority of British houses, it is made of bricks and mortar rather than the timber frame style that typifies American houses. It was built in 1902 and, like most modest dwellings of the time, did not originally have an inside lavatory. In fact, I still have a small brick outbuilding at the end of the garden that was used for this purpose, now used for storage. When the house was modified to have a bathroom fitted the drains were put on the outside, as the original construction had left no alternative.
I realise this makes Britain sound like a stone age country, but the house I was brought up in didn’t have an inside toilet either, and that was in the late 60s/early 70s!
Peter
January 11, 2010 at 1:53 am
Bob,
When the rising sun shines through the house as you demonstrate in the photo does it change the feng-shui? It seems like it would clear all the bad spirits out for at least another year.
January 11, 2010 at 10:05 am
Phillip,
Some reptiles, specifically snakes, can breathe while swallowing. Indeed they have to, because it can take them hours to consume their prey whole. They are able to project their breathing tube forward of their prey.
Anton
January 11, 2010 at 2:02 pm
I’m chuckling because the comments have already covered such diverse topics as British plumbing and snake respiration, as well as cosmology. Don’t you love the blogosphere?
January 12, 2010 at 10:17 am
Why do Brits put the plumbing on the outside where it is liable to freeze? I can think of two possible reasons:
1. The Industrial Revolution started here so we made all the mistakes first, and this is a feature of older and/or cheaper houses.
2. If something freezes and bursts then it is better to have easy access to it in order to replace it than to have to remove bricks and mortar to get at it.
I’m open to further suggestions. And how about a discussion contrasting the design of toilet basins and flushes in Britain, North America, Germany and France?
Anton
January 12, 2010 at 10:25 am
Anton,
The thing that most visitors to the UK from abroad seem to find strangest is the fact that we tend to have separate taps (fawcets?) for hot and cold water rather than mixers. It’s always seemed quite sensible to me, since the hot and cold water systems are separate, but for some reason people from elsewhere think it’s funny.
Of course Poland is where the real experts in plumbing all seem to come from….
Peter
January 12, 2010 at 10:28 am
PS My comment #2 was about drainpipes. With domestic water supply plumbing on the inside then you have to drain the system when you go away in winter (although people seldom did, historically) which is a hassle, or risk returning to a flooded house. Auto-controlled central heating came much later.
Anton
January 12, 2010 at 10:47 am
Anton,
Many older houses, especially in cheaper areas, were built before proper sewerage systems were put in place. Typically these would have had outside toilets with a septic tank, rather than a system flushing into a main sewer. They would have had no central heating or hot water supply. Baths would sometimes be taken in a tin bath with water heated on a stove or fire, but many poor people used public baths and wash-houses.
Public bath-houses came into vogue in cities during the Victorian era because industrialisation and pollution had made it dangerous for working people to wash where they had done previously, in the river. The “Northumberland Baths” in my home town Newcastle, a fine civic building in the city centre designed by John Dobson and now used as a swimming pool, actually began life as a public bath house. The rise of Newcastle as a port was accompanied by development of the river banks into quays which made it impossible to bathe.
Peter
January 12, 2010 at 10:52 am
Peter: noted, thanks. The Romans knew a thing or two about communal bath-houses. Their dry treatment for sewage was not such a bad idea either – Anton
January 12, 2010 at 11:00 am
Anton,
I think civic authorities also liked the idea of public baths as a way of keeping people off the streets and out of pubs!
Another thing worth noting is that, although the public baths were quite popular, they weren’t exactly cheap. A basic bath in the Northumberland Baths would cost you sixpence (in old money) at a time when the cost of a loaf of bread was around a farthing or a halfpenny, a full meal might cost tuppence or threepence, and the average daily wage for working people was just a couple of shillings. Having a bath wasn’t something you could afford to do very often if you were working class.
Peter
January 12, 2010 at 11:22 am
Yes, the working class had it rough. It is worth bearing in mind when you see country bumpkins in Jane Austen adaptations that these people *preferred* to quit the land for the factories; life on the land was harsher still. But there was reasonable security of job and food on the land, whereas there was none in the factories. A factory could go bust in weeks if someone in another town invented a better process; also you could be arbitrarily sacked.
Anton
January 13, 2010 at 12:25 am
Phillip,
I failed to find a mutual friend in your post at that URL, but I’d lilke to comment on your statement there that “it’s not such a big deal, since in Germany (and probably in most countries in Europe) everyone has to carry a photo-ID at all times and the police can always ask you to identify yourself. Strange that this causes such a big problem in other countries. I recently saw a map of the world with different colours with regard to how much government surveillance there is. The US was at the top of the list, Germany somewhere in the middle. (There is a lot of vocal opposition to increasing surveillance, but this is basically a loud minority; most folks don’t have a problem with it.)”
1. I do not believe that there is more government surveillance in the USA than in states such as North Korea. With globalisation of knowledge all dictators now know how to set up a network of clandestine informers whose very existence causes people to self-censor. You have presumably seen “Das Leben der Anderen”; what went on in the DDR is mild compared to North Korea today, whereas in the USA plenty of people openly and virulently criticise their politicians and nothing happens to them. The map you are quoting is obviously propaganda.
2. In England we believe that the State exists to serve the people, not vice-versa. That is why we have a problem with the police asking us to justify ourselves on the street when we are behaving peaceably. We accepted that this freedom from officiousness had to be lost for security reasons during World War 2, but that was a temporary measure (although Whitehall did not like returning this freedom back to the British people, which took an inordinate length of time). The present Labour government has vastly increased State surveillance but thankfully it is hated for that. We have not been brainwashed.
Anton
January 13, 2010 at 4:56 pm
Phillip,
It doesn’t seem to me that the caveats you are now putting up are relevant to any point you were making when you quoted that map.
If police in England recognise somebody they think is a murderer then they have grounds for detaining them even if they are sitting quietly at a cafe. The Karadzic scenario you quote could not happen here even though we do not, thankfully, have ID cards. (Moreover do you think Karadzic would not have had a forged ID card if necessary?)
“It’s easy to find otherwise intelligent people who think that the government is severely restricting their freedom by not allowing them to enter an airplane armed with handguns, arguing if more passengers were armed, terrorists would have a harder time.” I don’t know any such people – do you? The deeper point is: Does the State exist to serve the people, or vice-versa? In England we believe the former, whereas the EU and the traditions out of which it has been forged seem to believe the latter, which is one reason why I do not wish to be in the EU.
Anton
January 14, 2010 at 10:53 am
There’s a big difference between detaining someone as a result of evidence that they have committed, or are about to commit, a crime and the police having the right to demand identification from any individual for no particular reason. The proposed UK ID card scheme is likely to be scrapped for financial reasons anyway, although I’d prefer it was scrapped because it’s abhorrent.
Britain is indeed part of the EU but if the British population ever gets a chance to vote on the matter there would probably be a strong majority in favour of leaving.
January 14, 2010 at 11:30 am
Phillip,
I live in Shropshire, an English county adjacent to the Welsh border about 2/3 of the way ‘up’ (ie, north) along that line. It’s not near universities but you are welcome to some (warm) English beer here if you are passing through.
There is no realtime protection here from a policeman saying “You look like John Smith, wanted for murder of Alan Jones, you must come with me to the police station”. But if you don’t look like John Smith then the policeman would be seriously disciplined because he has to give a reason which can subsequently be tested. The police know that and they have to act with restraint. Where they don’t have to give a reason for detaining you, there will be abuses. Remember – the police answer to the State. They serve the public only to the extent that the State serves the public. The State always claims to serve the public, of course, but the extent to which that is empty rhetoric is alarming.
The carrying of ID cards which must be shown on demand is a good practical demonstration of the relation between State and individual in any land. After World War 2 it took an inordinate length of time to get rid of ID cards here, during which time people grew resentful of low-rank pompous officials demanding to see ID of people they often knew personally for minor business. Don’t tell me that such abuses have historically been confined to postwar England.
The doctrine of political liberty was, to a large extent, developed in England in the century following the Civil War and restoration of the monarchy. During that period Voltaire famously commented on how free the English were when he was in exile here from France. A generation later many people were shocked when Burke, who was in favour of freedom, turned against the French Revolution – because he saw that “Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite” was empty rhetoric in the hands of the leaders of that revolution. (Margaret Thatcher reminding the French President of that fact at the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution was her finest hour.) Since that time we have had domestic peace in England except when invaded once by the Scots, and we have had ID cards only when we were fighting wars against countries with no remotely comparable track record of domestic peace, and which regard ID cards as the norm.
Please note that I am *not* saying England was or is perfect. We had tensions in the first half of the 19th century, but they were resolved peacefully whereas most of continental Europe had bloody revolution.
“I’m not sure where you live, but if in the UK then, of course, you are in the EU. If so, are you considering leaving, or is the EU still better than the alternatives?” For Britain EU was never better than the alternatives, and NB we did not join the EU, we joined the EEC which has since morphed into something far more ambitious and totalitarian. I think you know that I cannot, unfortunately, declare myself out of the EU; but if the present trend of the EU treating the results of various referenda about its treaties with contempt continues then we shall hopefully elect a political party with the guts to pull us out.
As for Socialism (National or otherwise): its origins in the 19th century show it to have exactly the same ends as communism, merely different means to them (ie, universal suffrage and a permanent working-class majority, rather than violent revolution). Only in the 1990s did the British Labour party ditch “clause 4” about the government nationalising the means of production, which is straight out of the communist manifesto. It has however achieved much the same thing by taxing us till the pips squeak. High tax empowers politicians and disempowers the people, because you lose the option of what to do with your money and they gain it.
Anton
January 14, 2010 at 12:26 pm
Phillip,
You wrote: “The same goes for the single currency. However, Germany was not allowed to vote on such issues, primarily because other countries feared that the people would not vote for the single currency, or EU membership, or whatever.”
Can you give the detail of this please? Usually when a people is denied a referendum it is because their *own* leaders fear the result – democracy being so precious that it must be rationed…
Anton
January 14, 2010 at 12:34 pm
True, but the people of the UK were never asked…
January 14, 2010 at 12:36 pm
Phillip,
In response to my comment,
“There is no realtime protection here from a policeman saying “You look like John Smith, wanted for murder of Alan Jones, you must come with me to the police station”.”
you wrote
“There is with an ID card. I pull it out, show it to the policeman, and it says I am not John Smith.”
True, but I could also show my driving licence or any other piece of photo ID. it should be up to ME, not the State, whether I carry photo ID and if not then run the small risk of being pulled in for being misidentified as a murderer. I also wrote,
“we have had ID cards only when we were fighting wars against countries with no remotely comparable track record of domestic peace, and which regard ID cards as the norm.”
to which you responded,
“True, but the implied correlation is bogus.”
Can you prove that?
Anton
January 14, 2010 at 12:49 pm
Phillip,
Suppose the leaders of Germany had told France, Britain, USA and Russia that Germany was going to hold a referendum on the single currency whether they liked it or not. What do you think they would have done? Their choice was ultimately to start a war against Germany or put up with it, and war would of course have been have been inconceivable. In other words, Germany’s leaders were free to hold a referendum on the single currency. That they didn’t do so shows that they didn’t want one because they feared the result. In other words, they were not representing faithfully the views of their populace. Bad. (It goes on here too.) You can’t blame foreigners for that decision.
BTW the main anti-EU party here is called UK Independence Party and it is not extremist, racist etc. You don’t have to be BNP to be anti-EU.
Anton
PS High tax also enervates a people – why bother to work hard if government takes so much of your reward?
January 14, 2010 at 1:01 pm
On more important matters: perhaps Britain does not have mixer taps because these make it more likely that people will drink at least some water from the hot source, which has been seen as unsuitable for drinking – more likely to be polluted with traces of metal from the hot water storage tank, and bugs.
January 14, 2010 at 1:29 pm
Anton,
That’s always the explanation I was given about taps. Generally the cold tap produces your drinking water, so you don’t want it mixed with water that isn’t likely to be so clean. On mainlaind Europe people perhaps consider domestic cold water to be unsuitable for drinking from the tap and so this issue doesn’t arise.
I don’t in any case see why it is a problem to mix hot and cold water in the sink before washing and/or shaving.
Peter
January 14, 2010 at 3:19 pm
Phillip,
In paraphrase, I pointed to an observed correlation, whereas you asserted that there was no underlying causation. The burden of proof is on you.
The point is whether it is compulsory to carry State-recognised ID, not whether this comprises a driving license or a formal ID card. Here, thankfully, it is not compulsory, and that makes Britain less of a police State than places where it is compulsory. Although our government is doing its totalitarian best to play catch-up.
The Four Powers could have grumbled all they wanted, but what counts is whether the German people recognise German reunification (eg by freely crossing the old boundary both ways) – not whether the Russian, American, British and French people recognise it. To teach his courtiers a lesson in reality, King Cnut once declared that he would not recognise the sea coming in, but it came in anyway just as he knew it would.
The verdict of history is not yet in on hi-tax social democracies: they have existed for less than one lifetime and already secular Europe looks to be in terminal demographic decline, with its successors in view among us. Don’t blame them (you know who I mean); we are committing cultural suicide, and the resulting vacuum would always be filled by somebody.
Anton
January 14, 2010 at 4:15 pm
Phillip,
Re Hypothesis testing: give it time. The notion of ID cards is rather new and history takes quite a long time to deliver a verdict.
You wrote: “Equating “mandatory ID cards” with “police state” is stretching the rhetorical envelope somewhat. Note that in the US, Obama is being criticised as a communist due to his desire to implement a health-care reform.” Compulsory carrying of ID cards is a VERY big step toward a police state, because at that point the police can hassle you in public for no reason. And that has nothing to do with Obama.
“What is the correlation between social democracy and declining birth rates?” Strong. If you ask for *causative* steps, that would be tougher, but I reckon they are there if a few sociologists not blinded by their own ideology chose to look. Social democracy might well be strongER in Scandinavia than Germany, but it is very strong in both compared to a century ago. Think on historical timescales.
I have never been married and I have no children. But I can do more good by converting a dozen people to my own viewpoint of what has gone wrong in EUtopia than by having three or four children.
Anton
January 14, 2010 at 5:16 pm
Phillip,
There is absolutely no reason why I should have to justify my existence to a lackey of the State if we make eye contact in a public place. He should have to justify himself to me, in fact, because my taxes pay his wages.
You can’t win. If I’d had lots of children then I’d have the Greens on my case moaning about overpopulation and social irresponsibility. I am unmarried because I haven’t met any woman I wanted to marry who wanted to marry me, and I have no children because I believe that children should be brought up having the security of parents who’ve made a commitment to each other. This has nothing to do with my views on demography, of course.
Anton
January 14, 2010 at 6:00 pm
Phillip,
In what proportion of countries where the carrying of State-recognised ID is mandatory are there NOT laws allowing the police to demand ID at random? The two are generally part of the totalitarian package by which the individual is seen as subservient to the State rather than a component of it.
If I want to carry my driving license when on foot, to show to policemen who think I look like an identikit murderer, than I am free to do so. If I prefer not to carry it and take the risk, that too is up to me. But to be told that I MUST carry EU-recognised ID in Britain (as I suspect is coming in the next decade) would make me wonder why we bothered to go to war.
Anton
January 15, 2010 at 11:58 am
Phillip,
I am not considering leaving Britain. Even if there were somewhere better for me, that is the coward’s way out. I intend to stay here and work for my point of view. I expect to be punished for it in a decade or so – perhaps by people who think it is right that I should carry an ID card at all times, if I am caught in public without one. Would you support my punishment if I broke such a law?
Electricity was not invented in Soviet Union; innovation generally came from capitalist countries. You presumably had the good fortune to be brought up in the Bundesrepublik rather than the DDR? Take a good look at the EU’s unaccountable constitutional setup, its ruthlessness and deviousness in ramming its program through regardless of referendum results in varous European countries, then extrapolate by a decade or so, and ask yourself whether EUtopia is heading toward the DDR or the BRD.
You wrote: “If you really think that the main goal of WWII (which I presume you are referring to) was to keep ID cards out of Britain, then I think you need to read up on your history.” Actually I stand by that statement. Here is a quote from CS Lewis (it is an aside in a book of Christian apologetics):
“It is easy to think that the Church has a lot of different objects—education, building, missions, holding services. Just as it is easy to think the State has a lot of different objects—military, political, economic, and what not. But in a way things are much simpler than that. The State exists simply to promote and to protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life. A husband and wife chatting over a fire, a couple of friends having a game of darts in a pub, a man reading a book in his own room or digging in his own garden—that is what the State is there fore. And unless they are helping to increase and prolong and protect such moments, all the laws, parliaments, armies, courts, police, econhomics etc are simply a waste of time…”
Hear, hear!
Anton
January 15, 2010 at 9:40 pm
Phillip,
Behind my question, about whether you think I should be punished if I was asked for ID and didn’t have it on me when the law required me to, was this. In England a traditional way for the people to signal to government a law they disagree with is for juries to refuse to convict people who are blatantly guilty under that law. Juries often retire to decide their verdict with the admonishment of the judge ringing in their ears, “Remember, members of the jury, if you think the defendant is guilty then you MUST convict” and thankfully they often ignore this statement. If I were on a jury about a case of simply ID-non-carrying then I would certainly behave like this. How about you?
I like your five rules of referendum. As for the EU votes in various European countries in the last few years, the EU totalitaricrats have played the game of optional stopping: keep demanding a referendum in a particular country, applying a mix of carrot and the stick between each one, until that country gives the answer the EU wants. Then stop. So a sixth rule is needed: no repeat of the issue for several years.
I’m not sure that CS Lewis’ Space Trilogy should be classified as SF, but like you I didn’t think very much of it. He was a literary critic by profession and in my view was at his best in “The Allegory of Love” (the book which made his academic reputation, about courtly love and the troubadour tradition), “The Discarded Image” (about the mediaeval worldview and its outworkings in literature), “The Four Loves” (about the four classical Greek words all, unfortunately, translated as ‘love’ in English), and some of his apologetics, such as “The Abolition of Man” and “Mere Christianity”. I intend to read his critique of Milton too, but it would help if I read “Paradise Lost” first…
Anton
January 18, 2010 at 10:33 am
Phillip,
Your faith in the political process is touching. Trial by jury is better than an inquisitorial system where the separation between judiciary and executive exists more on paper than in practice.
Do you believe in capital punishment? If not, would you as a juror argue with other jurors to convict a man whom you thought was guilty if the law had mandatory capital punishment for what he did?
Anton
January 18, 2010 at 12:31 pm
Phillip,
Most people haven’t had a practical choice of what jurisdiction to live under; you have been privileged. You were brought up in a country which had the death penalty and you might be living there still had circumstances been only slightly different, eg meeting your wife before the age at which you left. You didn’t move for the specific purpose of quitting a capital punishment regime. And you surely understand the notion of a hypothetical question; so, once again: If (as I presume), you do not believe in capital punishment, would you as a juror argue with other jurors to convict a man whom you thought was guilty if the law had mandatory capital punishment for what he did?
Anton
January 18, 2010 at 2:59 pm
Phillip,
I am grateful to you for answering my question. We draw lines in different places. If a judge thinks a jury has got it wrong then he has *some* discretion in the sentencing, although of course he cannot say that that is why he is going easy.
“If we allow people’s own conscience to trump the laws, then we allow anything.” I don’t agree – conscience is not arbitrary. If it were then we would not even have the concept of the conscience. Of course you can train your conscience to be noisier or quieter by the way you live and the choices you make, but it exists in all persons. Also it doesn’t matter whether you think the conscience reflects the image of God or natural selection involving sociobiological mechanisms – it points in the same direction for all people.
Anton
January 18, 2010 at 3:18 pm
Anton,
I’m no legal expert, but my understanding is that in England & Wales the verdict of a jury is binding in a criminal court. So if the judge directs the jury to return a particular verdict and they refuse to comply, it is the jury’s decision that holds sway. In other jurisdictions, however, including the USA, the judge has the power to set aside a jury verdict.
Peter
January 18, 2010 at 4:18 pm
Peter: If a judge told a jury I was on to return a particular verdict then I would probably comply. I’m talking about a slightly different scenario, where the judge merely says, “Remember, members of the jury, if you think the defendant is guilty then you MUST convict”. My attitude is that he *has* to say that. I would not go against it lightly, but I am a human being not a machine for reasoning.
Phillip: I stated where and why conscience might differ in different people, yet is not arbitrary. I repeat that if conscience were totally arbitrary then we would not even have a word for the concept.
Anton
January 18, 2010 at 4:21 pm
I’ve just remembered the famous example of the Clive Ponting trial. The jury in that case was directed to find him guilty as the defence case of whistle-blowing had no legal basis. The jury acquitted him.
January 18, 2010 at 4:50 pm
What about Ricky Ponting?
I must say that I’m looking forward to the Pakistan vs Australia Test at Lords this coming summer (Pakistan are playing their home fixtures in England for security reasons.) It will be a lot more relaxing than watching England.
January 18, 2010 at 4:55 pm
I don’t think Ricky Ponting has been convicted of anything, although his ancestors probably were.
January 18, 2010 at 4:59 pm
Peter,
According to Wikipedia, Clive Ponting’s defence was that his disclosure of Ministry of Defence documents to an MP (Tam Dalyell) was protected by parliamentary privilege. His acquittal came despite the judge’s direction to the jury that “the public interest is what the government of the day says it is” – a statement which shows how nominal is the independence of the judiciary from the executive. (Ironically, I think the case for torpedoing the General Belgrano was strong even where that battlecruiser was located and was pointed.)
Anton
January 18, 2010 at 5:00 pm
PS A man of no convictions…