RETRO, ACTIVE: The Return of Von Doom
by Chris Conti

It's hard not to dig Von Doom's sound for someone like myself, who went a bit apeshit for the lovelorn, melodic, and melancholy noise of early '90s indie rock, from stalwarts Buffalo Tom and Dinosaur Jr. to obscure stuff like St. Johnny and Seaweed. Listening to a rough mix of the forthcoming Von Doom album, The Descender, it's not a stretch to hear all of the above here and there wrapped up in a tight 10-song package of two- and three-minute gems. The Replacements meets Wilco? Eh, whatever, but The Descender, the follow-up to the '07 debut The Universe due by year's end on 75orLess Records, could be a breakthrough album for the thirtysomethings that comprise Von Doom. Drummer Mike O'Rourke (the only non-Rhody native) and bassist Jack McKenna clamp onto the dual guitar bursts and sludgy chords courtesy of Ray Memery and Bill Gorman, who alternate vocal duties throughout The Descender.

"I think 'indie pop' would be a fine way to describe us, only because it's such a vague term," Gorman noted. "But at this point you could say that Hüsker Dü and Belle and Sebastian are both indie pop, so I guess we're somewhere in between."

Gorman clearly is stoked about the upcoming sophomore release and ready to premiere the new stuff at Jake's Bar and Grille on Halloween. Von Doom has only played about 30 shows over the last two years while noting the "lack of places for local bands to play nowadays.

"If we are even a part of any scene around here, it's just our friends in Hope Anchor, Six Star General, Blizzard of '78 and the 75orLess crowd — bands like us that were singed by the '70s and cooked in the '80s." Gorman said.

Gorman says Von Doom's primary goal after The Descender remains "making more records. Recording is where it's at for us," he said. "We started The Descender with the idea that this would be our 'rock album,' but it ended up being more eclectic than The Universe, and I think that's a good thing." More eclectic? Maybe. The ideal barroom rock album? Definitely.

"We have no delusions of grandeur, no need for a big tour outside of our region," Gorman said. "We just really enjoy getting together and having some drinks, throwing some darts, and playing some music."

And Gorman and Memery aren't cracking the lexicon lyrically, which is more than fine when considering the straight-ahead crunch of pedal-stomping numbers such as "Hopeless Motherfuckers," "Get Away," and the uber-catchy opening number "Black Light," any of which could peel the fresh coat of paint at the revamped Jake's on Friday.

Their fiery cover of Devo's "Freedom of Choice" (with O'Rourke's rumbling drums throughout) is another standout track, but why Devo? Is this Von Doom's idea of a timely political statement? Gorman offered a simpler rationale.

"Because Devo is awesome," he said. "Plus, beneath those shiny synths, Devo shares the same bleak world outlook that we do, and I think both Ray and I are pretty paranoid songwriters."

As for the band name, I was always under the assumption the moniker was derived from the Fantastic Four's metal-masked villain.

"Actually, we named it after our friend Jesse Von Doom,' Gorman clarified. "When we were trying to come up with a name he persisted in giving us ridiculous suggestions, so we decided to name the band after him just to stop the onslaught."

ef·fete
–adjective
1. lacking in wholesome vigor; degenerate; decadent: (e.g. an effete, overrefined society).
2. exhausted of vigor or energy; worn out: (e.g. an effete political force.)
3. unable to produce; sterile.
[Origin: 1615–25; < L efféta exhausted from bearing, equiv. to ef- ef- + féta having brought forth, fem. ptp. of lost v.; see fetus]

run in stocking; nuclear annihilation of planet; phone system down; balloon floats away; glass eye falls out during speech; condom breaks; hairdresser quits; wolverine attacks child; lose 60 dollars at bus stop; fatal heart attack; meat goes bad; floor collapses; tsunami; train wreck kills hundreds; computer crashes during lengthy download; Statue of Liberty falls over; grain elevator explodes; comet hits earth; ammo runs out; gored by moose; fan belt breaks on interstate; sour cream runs out; gassy; mother in law hates you; hamburger tastes charred; ignored by waiter; check gets lost in mail; $2 winning scratch ticket washed with pants; get caught in middle of knife fight; humididy makes hair frizzy; cola explodes all over you; UPS package isn't for you; gas grill explodes all over you; neck breaks while clowning around; Livestrong bracelet gets caught in revolving door; everyone finds out you're a fraud; leg cramps up in middle of game; strike out with bases loaded; boss catches you masturbating in office; earth gets thrown off axis; plane gets hijacked; girlfriend's new friend cuter, funnier; pen dries out in middle of class; laptop battery loses charge; favorite bill gets vetoed; asshole paints swastika on Hillel center; oversleep on first day of work; neighborhood goes to seed; double-dutch jump rope; meeting with ambassador postponed; water doesn't taste like water at all; attempt to help poor perceived as racist; suffer second degree burns trying to set toppled candle in jack-o-lantern upright; rescue operation fails when helicopter blade tips strike water tower; die of exposure after unknowingly take more arduous path to summit; leg gets amputated by dredger chain; wrong backing vocals tape played; real mother appears out of nowhere; lycanthropy turns out to be real; friends, family learn the truth

The End of the Universe
John Baez
October 19, 2004

It's interesting to ponder the end of the universe. And I'm not talking the short run, like how the Earth's continents will collide in 250 million years, or how the Andromeda galaxy will collide with the Milky Way in 3 billion years, shaking loose many planets in many solar systems, or how the Sun will become a white dwarf in 7.8 billion years. I'm talking about the long term future!

In short: the end of everything.

For a long time, the big question was whether there was enough matter in the universe to make it recollapse, or whether it would expand forever. But in the late 1990's, astronomical observations began to suggest that the expansion of the universe is actually speeding up!

Let's suppose this is true, and let's assume the most popular explanation for it: namely, that there is a nonzero cosmological constant. A cosmological constant with the right sign makes the energy density of the vacuum positive, but makes its pressure negative - and 3 times as big. This makes the universe tend to expand. Normal matter makes the universe tend to recollapse. If the effect of the cosmological constant ever beats out the effect of normal matter, the universe will keep expanding, making the density of normal matter less... so the cosmological constant will ultimately win hands down, and the universe will eventually expand at an almost exponential rate.

Let's suppose this happens. What will be the ultimate fate of the universe?

First let me set the stage. What happens in the short run, i.e. the first 10 ²³ years or so?

First, galaxies will keep colliding. These collisions seem to destroy spiral galaxies - they fuse into bigger elliptical galaxies. We can already see this happening here and there, and our own Milky Way may collide with Andromeda in only 3 billion years or so. If this happens, a bunch of new stars will be born from the shock waves due to colliding interstellar gas, but eventually we will inhabit a large elliptical galaxy. Unfortunately, elliptical galaxies lack spiral arms, which seem to be a crucial part of the star formation process, so star formation may cease even before the raw materials run out.

Of course, even if this doesn't happen, the birth of new stars must eventually cease, since there's a limited amount of hydrogen, helium, and other stuff that can undergo fusion.

This means that all the stars will eventually burn out. They'll either become either black dwarfs, neutron stars, or black holes. Stars become white dwarfs - and eventually black dwarfs when they cool - if they have mass less than 1.4 solar masses. In this case they can be held up by the degeneracy pressure caused by the Pauli exclusion principle, which works even at zero temperature. If they are heavier than this, they collapse: they become neutron stars if they are between 1.4 and 2 solar masses, and they become black holes if they are more massive.

The black holes will suck up some of the other stars they encounter. This is especially true for the big black holes at the galactic centers, which power radio galaxies if they swallow stars at a sufficiently rapid rate. But most of the stars, as well as interstellar gas and dust, will eventually be hurled into intergalactic space. This happens to a star whenever it accidentally reaches escape velocity through its random encounters with other stars. It's a slow process, but computer simulations show that about 90% of the mass of the galaxies will eventually "boil off" this way - while the rest becomes a big black hole.

(It may seem odd that first the galaxies form by gravitational attraction of matter and then fall apart again by "boiling off", but the point is, intergalactic matter is less dense now than it was when galaxies first formed, thanks to the expansion of the universe. When the galaxies first formed, there was lots of gas around. Now the galaxies are essentially isolated - intergalactic space is almost a vacuum. And you can show in the really long run, any isolated system consisting of sufficiently many point particles interacting gravitationally - even an apparently "gravitationally bound" system - will "boil off" as individual particles randomly happen to acquire enough kinetic energy to reach escape velocity. Computer calculations already suggest that the solar system will fall apart this way, barring other interventions. With the galaxies it's even more certain to happen, since there are more particles involved, so things are more chaotic.)

How long will all this take? Well, the white dwarfs will cool to black dwarfs with a temperature of at most 5 Kelvin in about 100 quadrillion years, and the galaxies will boil away by about 10 quintillion years. Most planets will have already been knocked off their orbits by then, but any that are still orbiting stars will spiral in thanks to gravitational radiation in about 100 quintillion years.

Then what? Well, in about 100 sextillion years the dead stars will actually boil off from the galactic clusters, not just the galaxies, so the clusters will disintegrate. At this point the cosmic background radiation will have cooled to about 10-13 Kelvin, and most things will be at about that temperature unless proton decay or some other such process keeps them warmer.

Okay, so now we have a bunch of isolated black dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes together with atoms and molecules of gas, dust particles, and of course planets and other crud, all very close to absolute zero.

As the universe expands these things eventually spread out to the point where each one is completely alone in the vastness of space.

So what happens next?

Well, everybody loves to talk about how all matter eventually turns to iron thanks to quantum tunnelling, since iron is the nucleus with the least binding energy, but unlike the processes I've described so far, this one actually takes quite a while. About a googolplex years, to be precise. (Well, not too precise!) So it's quite likely that proton decay or something else will happen long before this gets a chance to occur.

For example, everything except the black holes will have a tendency to "sublimate" or "ionize", gradually losing atoms or even electrons and protons, despite the low temperature. Just to be specific, let's consider the ionization of hydrogen gas - although the argument is much more general. If you take a box of hydrogen and keep making the box bigger while keeping its temperature fixed, it will eventually ionize. This happens no matter how low the temperature is, as long as it's not exactly absolute zero - which is forbidden by the 3rd law of thermodynamics, anyway.

This may seem odd, but the reason is simple: in thermal equilibrium any sort of stuff minimizes its free energy, E - TS: the energy minus the temperature times the entropy. This means there is a competition between wanting to minimize its energy and wanting to maximize its entropy. Maximizing entropy becomes more important at higher temperatures; minimizing energy becomes more important at lower temperatures - but both effects matter as long as the temperature isn't zero or infinite.

Think about what this means for our box of hydrogen. On the one hand, ionized hydrogen has more energy than hydrogen atoms or molecules. This makes hydrogen want to stick together in atoms and molecules, especially at low temperatures. But on the other hand, ionized hydrogen has more entropy, since the electrons and protons are more free to roam. And this entropy difference gets bigger and bigger as we make the box bigger. So no matter how low the temperature is, as long as it's above zero, the hydrogen will eventually ionize as we keep expanding the box.

(In fact, this is related to the "boiling off" process that I mentioned already: we can use thermodynamics to see that the stars will boil off the galaxies as they approach thermal equilibrium, as long as the density of galaxies is low enough.)

However, there's a complication: in the expanding universe, the temperature is not constant - it decreases!

So the question is, which effect wins as the universe expands: the decreasing density (which makes matter want to ionize) or the decreasing temperature (which makes it want to stick together)?

In the short run this is a fairly complicated question, but in the long run, things may simplify: if the universe is expanding exponentially thanks to a nonzero cosmological constant, the density of matter obviously goes to zero. But the temperature does not go to zero. It approaches a particular nonzero value! So all forms of matter made from protons, neutrons and electrons will eventually ionize!

Why does the temperature approach a particular nonzero value, and what is this value? Well, in a universe whose expansion keeps accelerating, each pair of freely falling observers will eventually no longer be able to see each other, because they get redshifted out of sight. This effect is very much like the horizon of a black hole - it's called a "cosmological horizon". And, like the horizon of a black hole, a cosmological horizon emits thermal radiation at a specific temperature. This radiation is called Hawking radiation. Its temperature depends on the value of the cosmological constant. If we make a rough guess at the cosmological constant, the temperature we get is about 10-30 Kelvin.

This is very cold, but given a low enough density of matter, this temperature is enough to eventually ionize all forms of matter made of protons, neutrons and electrons! Even something big like a neutron star should slowly, slowly dissipate. (The crust of a neutron star is not made of neutronium: it's mainly made of iron.)

But what about the black holes?

Well, they probably evaporate due to Hawking radiation: a solar-mass black hole should do so in unvigintillion years, and a really big one, comparable to the mass of a galaxy, should take about duotrigintillion years.

Actually, a black hole only shrinks by evaporation when it's in an enviroment cooler than the temperature of its Hawking radiation - otherwise, it grows by swallowing thermal radiation. The Hawking temperature of a solar-mass black hole is about 6 x 10-8 Kelvin, and in general, it's inversely proportional to the black hole's mass. The universe should cool down below 10-8 Kelvin very soon compared to the over novemdecillion years it takes for a solar-mass black holes to evaporate. However, before that time, such a black hole would grow by absorbing background radiation - which makes its temperature decrease and help it grow more!

If a black hole ever grew to about 10 sextillion solar masses, its Hawking temperature would go below 10-30 Kelvin, which would allow it to keep growing even when the universe has cooled to its minimum temperature. Of course, 10 sextillion solar masses is huge - about the mass of the currently observable universe! But it would take a nontrivial calculation to show that reasonable-sized black holes have no chance of getting this big. I think it's true, but I haven't done the calculation.

For now, let's assume it's true: all black holes will eventually shrink away and disappear - none of them grow big enough to stick around when it gets really cold.

As black holes evaporate, they will emit photons and other particles in the process, so for a while there will be a bit of radiation like this running around. That livens things up a little bit - but this process will eventually cease.

What about the neutron stars? Well, if they don't ionize first, ultimately they should quantum-tunnel into becoming black holes, which then Hawking-radiate away.

Similarly, if the black dwarfs and planets and the like don't evaporate and their protons don't decay, they may quantum-tunnel into becoming solid iron - as I already mentioned, this takes about 15 googol years. And then, if this iron doesn't evaporate and nothing else happens, these balls of iron will eventually quantum-tunnel into becoming black holes, which then Hawking-radiate away. This would take about 10 to the 100000000000000000000000000th power of years - that's 26 zeros.

This is a much longer time than any I've mentioned so far, so I wouldn't be surprised if some other effect we haven't thought about happens first. Indeed, this whole discussion should be taken with a grain of salt: future discoveries in physics could drastically change the end of this story. It's also possible that the intervention of intelligent life could change things - I've avoided discussing that here. Cosmology has been full of surprises lately, and there will probably be more to come.

But the overall picture seems to lean heavily towards a far future where everything consists of isolated stable particles: electrons, neutrinos, and protons (unless protons decay). If the scenario I'm describing is correct, the density of these particles will go to zero, and eventually each one will be cut off from all the rest by a cosmological horizon, making them unable to interact. Of course there will be photons as well, but these will eventually come into thermal equilibrium forming blackbody radiation at the temperature of the cosmological horizon - perhaps about 10-30 Kelvin or so.

This is why it's really a bad idea to keep putting things off for tomorrow.

However, Leonard Susskind has recently pointed out that in thermal equilibrium at any nonzero temperature, any system exhibits random fluctuations. The lower the temperature they smaller these are, but they are always there. These fluctuations randomly explore the space of all possible states of your system. So eventually, if you wait long enough, these random fluctuations will carry the system to whatever state you like. Well, that's a bit of an exaggeration: these fluctuations can't violate conservation laws. But conservation of energy doesn't count here, since at a nonzero temperature, a system is really in a state of all possible energies. So it's possible, for example, that a ice cube at the freezing point of water will melt or even boil due to random fluctuations. The reason we never see this happen is that such big fluctuations are incredibly rare.

Carrying this thought to a ridiculous extreme, what this means is that even if the universe consists of more or less empty space at a temperature of 10-30 kelvin, random fluctuations will occaisionally create atoms, molecules... and even solar systems and galaxies! The bigger the fluctuation, the more rarely it happens - but eternity is a long time. So eventually there will arise, sheerly by chance, a person just like you, with memories just like yours, reading a webpage just like this.

In short: maybe the universe has already ended!

by Noam Chomsky


President George W. Bush favours teaching both evolution and "Intelligent Design" in schools, "so people can know what the debate is about." To proponents, Intelligent Design is the notion that the universe is too complex to have developed without a nudge from a higher power than evolution or natural selection.

To detractors, Intelligent Design is creationism — the literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis — in a thin guise, or simply vacuous, about as interesting as "I don't understand," as has always been true in the sciences before understanding is reached. Accordingly, there cannot be a "debate."

The teaching of evolution has long been difficult in the United States. Now a national movement has emerged to promote the teaching of Intelligent Design in schools.

The issue has famously surfaced in a courtroom in Dover, Pa., where a school board is requiring students to hear a statement about Intelligent Design in a biology class — and parents mindful of the Constitution's church/state separation have sued the board.

In the interest of fairness, perhaps the president's speechwriters should take him seriously when they have him say that schools should be open-minded and teach all points of view. So far, however, the curriculum has not encompassed one obvious point of view: Malignant Design.

Unlike Intelligent Design, for which the evidence is zero, malignant design has tons of empirical evidence, much more than Darwinian evolution, by some criteria: the world's cruelty. Be that as it may, the background of the current evolution/intelligent design controversy is the widespread rejection of science, a phenomenon with deep roots in American history that has been cynically exploited for narrow political gain during the last quarter-century. Intelligent Design raises the question whether it is intelligent to disregard scientific evidence about matters of supreme importance to the nation and world — like global warming.

An old-fashioned conservative would believe in the value of Enlightenment ideals — rationality, critical analysis, freedom of speech, freedom of inquiry — and would try to adapt them to a modern society. The Founding Fathers, children of the Enlightenment, championed those ideals and took pains to create a Constitution that espoused religious freedom yet separated church and state. The United States, despite the occasional messianism of its leaders, isn't a theocracy.

In our time, the Bush administration's hostility to scientific inquiry puts the world at risk. Environmental catastrophe, whether you think the world has been developing only since Genesis or for eons, is far too serious to ignore. In preparation for the G8 summit this past summer, the scientific academies of all G8 nations (including the US National Academy of Sciences), joined by those of China, India and Brazil, called on the leaders of the rich countries to take urgent action to head off global warming.

"The scientific understanding of climate change is now sufficiently clear to justify prompt action," their statement said. "It is vital that all nations identify cost-effective steps that they can take now, to contribute to substantial and long-term reduction in net global greenhouse gas emissions."

In its lead editorial, The Financial Times endorsed this "clarion call," while observing: "There is, however, one holdout, and unfortunately it is to be found in the White House where George W. Bush insists we still do not know enough about this literally world-changing phenomenon."

Dismissal of scientific evidence on matters of survival, in keeping with Bush's scientific judgment, is routine. A few months earlier, at the 2005 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, leading US climate researchers released "the most compelling evidence yet" that human activities are responsible for global warming, according to The Financial Times. They predicted major climatic effects, including severe reductions in water supplies in regions that rely on rivers fed by melting snow and glaciers.

Other prominent researchers at the same session reported evidence that the melting of Arctic and Greenland ice sheets is causing changes in the sea's salinity balance that threaten "to shut down the Ocean Conveyor Belt, which transfers heat from the tropics toward the polar regions through currents such as the Gulf Stream." Such changes might bring significant temperature reduction to northern Europe.

Like the statement of the National Academies for the G8 summit, the release of "the most compelling evidence yet" received scant notice in the United States, despite the attention given in the same days to the implementation of the Kyoto protocols, with the most important government refusing to take part.

It is important to stress "government." The standard report that the United States stands almost alone in rejecting the Kyoto protocols is correct only if the phrase "United States" excludes its population, which strongly favours the Kyoto pact (73 per cent, according to a July poll by the Program on International Policy Attitudes).

Perhaps only the word "malignant" could describe a failure to acknowledge, much less address, the all-too-scientific issue of climate change. Thus the "moral clarity" of the Bush administration extends to its cavalier attitude toward the fate of our grandchildren.

Struggling in vain, impatient of her load,
And lab'ring underneath the pond'rous god,
The more she strove to shake him from her breast,
With more and far superior force he press'd;
Commands his entrance, and, without control,
Usurps her organs and inspires her soul.
Now, with a furious blast, the hundred doors
Ope of themselves; a rushing whirlwind roars
Within the cave, and Sibyl's voice restores:
"Escap'd the dangers of the wat'ry reign,
Yet more and greater ills by land remain.
The coast, so long desir'd (nor doubt th' event),
Thy troops shall reach, but, having reach'd, repent.
Wars, horrid wars, I view- a field of blood,
And Tiber rolling with a purple flood."