A twist in the new unprecedented Texas abortion law: "There's no one to sue" •
On Tuesday, Governor Gretchen Whitmer called on the Michigan legislature to pass legislation repealing Michigan’s 1930s law criminalizing abortion.
The law is currently not in effect because of the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade. Repealing the law would ensure a woman’s right to choose.
In a statement, Whitmer said:
“Recently, Texas passed a new, extreme anti-choice law that puts people’s lives at risk, and threatens healthcare workers. The insidious law essentially bans abortions, even in cases of rape or incest, and allows strangers to sue medical professionals or anyone who helps women get the comprehensive healthcare they need. It is a gross violation of the constitutional right to choose, and the Court’s decision to allow it to stay in place sets the United States on a dangerous path towards overturning Roe v. Wade.
“Unfortunately, there are more cases based on equally extreme state laws awaiting action in the Supreme Court that would completely overturn Roe v. Wade. If the court’s decision in the Texas case is any indication, a majority of justices are willing to throw out the constitutional right to choose that has been in place for 48 years and repeatedly upheld for decades.
“In Michigan today, abortion is safe and legal, but we have an arcane law on the books from the 1930s banning abortion and criminalizing healthcare providers who offer comprehensive care and essential reproductive services. Thankfully, that dangerous, outdated law is superseded by Roe v. Wade, but, if the U.S. Supreme Court overturns Roe, that Michigan law and others like it may go back into effect in dozens of states, disproportionately impacting Black and brown communities.
“I call on the legislature to send Senator Erika Geiss’ bill that repeals our nearly-century-old ban on abortion to my desk. I have always stood with those fighting for their right to choose, and I will not stop now. I will stand in the way of any bills that seek to strip away fundamental rights from women or get in the way of doctors’ ability to do their jobs
I had an abortion in 1996, and I’m not going to explain why I needed one. All I will tell you is that I was in the Air Force, and though the military isn’t allowed to perform abortions, it was still easy enough. I made the appointment for a Saturday, spent the weekend eating junk food and Tylenol, and I was back at work on Monday. I’ll tell you I was damn grateful, even in 1996, that I was stationed in California, not Texas. I’m not going to tell you I wasn’t a slut. I’m not going to tell you I was careful. I’m not telling you because it doesn’t matter.
Every year, every time another draconian law restricting abortion is passed, we perform the same charade. We all know our roles. We tell traumatic stories of rape and incest and those babies we wanted but were formed in the wombs without vital organs. We tell of abusive husbands and boyfriends and fathers. We talk about poverty, and minimum wages, and impossible distances, and lack of sick leave, and forgoing food to afford a medical procedure. Our mothers and grandmothers talk about the old days of back alleys and infection and knife slips.
We march and hold signs. We carry coat hangers. We chant and sing and scream into megaphones. We threaten strikes. We stage sit-ins. We hashtag and tweet and share memes. We write essays.
We do this in a desperate attempt to evoke empathy, express anger, show our numbers, and hope this one time, they’ll hear us.
Those we elect to represent us have their scripts. They say: “No one is for abortion.” It’s a private, no, scratch that, heart-wrenching decision between a woman and her doctor. They use euphemisms like “choice.” They say abortion should be safe, and rare. Don’t forget rare. They say they’re personally against it. No, they’ve never had one, surely never paid for one. What about the life of the mother? What about rape and incest? What about privacy?
The forced-birth enthusiasts have their roles too. They call themselves pro-life. They name these laws “heartbeat” bills, though at six weeks, their heart is not yet fully developed. They say, of course they care about women; they’re just against murdering babies. They call it “murdering babies.” They want women to be more responsible. They claim, falsely, that women regret their abortions. They’re protecting women. They’re protecting innocent lives. No, they didn’t pay for that abortion. They’re sorry they did. That was another time, before they were saved.
In the end, another law is passed. Another clinic closed. Another justice added to the bench.
I’m not telling my story again. I won’t rip myself open and spill my guts hoping I’ll reach someone, hoping they’ll see a human being. They don’t. Because they’re full of sh*t.
I know they’re full of sh*t because if they were really interested in preventing abortion, they’d fund a Planned Parenthood truck on every corner, next to the taco truck. Liquor stores would sell Plan B. They’d fund sex education in schools. Sex education taught by someone other than Coach Kemp, who told us, “Y’all know condoms fail. The only way to make sure you aren’t catching AIDS is marriage.”
If you want to end abortion, you don’t make it easier to get pregnant. If the specter of dead babies haunted them, they wouldn’t push sadistic laws punishing women who miscarry. If they were so horrified by the idea of abortion—truly wanted to save those babies—they’d make sure every baby had enough to eat and a safe place to sleep; every mother and father had a year of paid leave; no family went bankrupt with medical bills from a complicated pregnancy.
They’ve been telling us for years, decades, by their actions that they do not want to end abortion. Why would they? No matter the law passed, the wealthy will still have access to it. But if you can force a woman to give birth, you’ve trapped her in a cycle of poverty. They don’t want to save babies. They want to punish women for having sex. They want to punish women who step out of line. They want to punish women.
For too long, we’ve accepted their terms, and played our roles, trying to beg and bargain—plead the case of the good victim, the good girl, the one with a future, the one who wanted to be a mother. We’ve been trying to reach people who would never reach out to us. All we’ve done is provide them cover to continue their crusade against women.
The truth of the matter is, abortion will always be a reality, no matter which laws they pass. We don’t have to depict it as a heart-wrenching decision a woman regrets down the road. Because we know that’s not true. Abortion isn’t a controversial topic that we should be scared to discuss or even name. It is and has remained popular, even in Texas. One in four women, at least, have had an abortion. It’s 14 times safer than giving birth. It doesn’t even require a doctor. It never has.
The days of coat hangers were never the rule, and all we’ve done by waving them around is perpetuate the lie that abortions are terrifying and potentially life-threatening…despite the fact abortion is as old as pregnancy itself. Its practitioners were usually women with a knowledge of herbs. Today, abortion pills such as Mifepristone are easily accessible online, and just across the border.
Yet now, in Texas, I can be sued for typing that last sentence. Because they don’t want to end abortion. They want to punish women. And they’ve now deputized every Texan to do their dirty work.
Lauren Hough is the essayist and best-selling author of Leaving isn’t the Hardest Thing. She was born in Berlin, Germany, and raised in several countries, and Amarillo, Texas. She’s been an Airforce Airman, a bouncer, barista, bartender, and, for a time, a cable guy.
PRACTICAL PHYSICS
Walking with coffee is something most of us do every day without considering the balancing act it requires. In fact, there's a lot of physics preventing the coffee from spilling over.
The coffee, a thermally agitated fluid contained in a cup, has internal degrees of freedom that interact with the cup which, in turn, interacts with the human carrier.
"While humans possess a natural, or gifted, ability to interact with complex objects, our understanding of those interactions—especially at a quantitative level, is next to zero," said ASU Professor Ying-Cheng Lai, an Arizona State University electrical engineering professor. "We have no conscious ability to analyze the influences of external factors, like noise or climate, on our interactions."
Yet, understanding these external factors is a fundamental issue in applied fields such as soft robotics.
"For example, in design of smart prosthetics, it is becoming increasingly important to build in natural modes of flexibility that mimic the natural motion of human limbs," said Brent Wallace, a former undergraduate student of Lai's and now a doctoral student in ASU's Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering. "Such improvements make the prosthetic feel more comfortable and natural to the user."
According to Lai, it is conceivable that, in the not-too-distant future, robots will be deployed in various applications of complex object handing or control which require the kind of coordination and movement control that humans do quite well.
If a robot is designed to walk with a relatively short stride length, then relatively large variations in the frequency of walking are allowed. However, if a longer stride is desired, then the walking frequency should be selected carefully.
A new paper published in Physical Review Applied, "Synchronous Transition in Complex Object Control," originated with Wallace as part of his senior design project in electrical engineering, supervised by Lai. Wallace has received an NSF Graduate Fellowship and now is a doctoral student in ASU's School of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering.
The ASU team's research expands on a ground-breaking, virtual experimental study recently conducted by researchers at Northeastern University, using the coffee-cup-holding paradigm and adding a rolling ball, to examine how humans manipulate a complex object. Participants deliberately rotated the cup in a rhythmic manner with the ability to vary force and frequency to ensure the ball stayed contained.
The Northeastern study showed that the participants tend to select either a low-frequency or a high-frequency strategy—rhythmic motion of the cup—to handle a complex object.
A remarkable finding was that when a low-frequency strategy was used, the oscillations exhibit in-phase synchronization, but antiphase synchronization arises when a high-frequency strategy was employed.
"Since both the low- and high-frequencies are effective, it's conceivable that some participants in the virtual experiment switched strategies," said Wallace. "This raises questions.
"How does a transition occur from in-phase synchronization associated with a low-frequency strategy to antiphase synchronization associated with a high-frequency strategy, or vice versa," asked Wallace. "In the parameter space, is the boundary between the in-phase and antiphase synchronization regimes sharp, gradual, or sophisticated?"
The ASU team's research, prompted by Wallace's curiosity, studied the transition between the in-phase and antiphase synchronization using a nonlinear dynamical model of a pendulum attached to a moving cart subject to external periodic forcing.
The researchers found that, in the weakly forcing regime, as the external driving frequency is varied, the transition is abrupt and occurs at the frequency of resonance, which can be fully understood using the linear systems control theory.
Beyond this regime, a transitional region emerges in between the in-phase and antiphase synchronization, where the motions of the cart and the pendulum are not synchronized. It was also found that there is bistability in and near the transitional region on the low-frequency side.
Overall, the results indicate that humans are able to switch abruptly and efficiently from one synchronous attractor to another, a mechanism that can be exploited for designing smart robots to adaptively handle complex objects in a changing environment.
"It is possible that humans are able to use both in-phase and antiphase strategies skillfully and to switch from one strategy to another smoothly, perhaps without even realizing it. The findings from this study can be used to implement these human skills into soft robots with applications in other fields, such as rehabilitation and brain-machine interface," Lai said.
Additionally, tasks as trivial as running wires in a car body on an assembly line—which humans carry out with ease—still elude the most advanced machines.
"A systematic quantitative understanding of how humans interact dynamically with their environment will forever change how we engineer our world, and may revolutionize the design of smart prosthetics and usher in new age of manufacturing and automation," said Wallace. "By mimicking the dynamically-favorable behaviors adopted by humans in handling complex objects, we will be able to automate processes previously thought to be impossible."Transients and synchronization are unified in ecological networks
More information: Brent Wallace et al, Synchronous Transition in Complex Object Control, Physical Review Applied (2021). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevApplied.16.034012
Provided by Arizona State University
Exploring quantum gravity and entanglement using pendulums
THE PENDULUM IS USED FOR SCRYING
ANOTHER FORM OF QUANTUM PHENOMENA
When it comes to a marriage with quantum theory, gravity is the lone holdout among the four fundamental forces in nature. The three others—the electromagnetic force, the weak force, which is responsible for radioactive decay, and the strong force, which binds neutrons and protons together within the atomic nucleus—have all merged with quantum theory to successfully describe the universe on the tiniest of scales, where the laws of quantum mechanics must play a leading role.
Although Einstein's theory of general relativity, which describes gravity as a curvature of space-time, explains a multitude of gravitational phenomena, it fails within the tiniest of volumes—the center of a black hole or the universe at its explosive birth, when it was less than an atomic diameter in size. That's where quantum mechanics ought to dominate.
Yet over the past eight decades, expert after expert, including Einstein, have been unable to unite quantum theory with gravity. So, is gravity truly a quantum force?
Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and their colleagues have now proposed an experiment that may help settle the question.
The experiment takes advantage of two of the weirdest properties of quantum theory. One is the superposition principle, which holds that an undisturbed atomic particle can be described as a wave, with some probability of being in two places at once. For instance, an undisturbed atom traveling through a region with two slits, passes through not one or the other of the slits but both.
And because the atom is described by a wave, the portion that passes through one slit will interfere with the part that passes through the other, producing a well-known pattern of bright and dark fringes. The bright fringes correspond to regions where the hills and valleys of the two waves align so that they add together, creating constructive interference and the dark regions correspond to regions where the hills and valleys of the waves cancel each out, creating destructive interference.
The second strange quantum property is known as entanglement, a phenomenon in which two particles can be so strongly correlated that they behave as a single entity. Measuring a property of one of the particles automatically forces the other to have a complementary property, even if the two particles reside galaxies apart.
In a quantum theory of gravity, the gravitational attraction between two massive objects would be communicated by a hypothetical subatomic particle, the graviton, in the same way that the electromagnetic interaction between two charged particles is communicated by a photon (the fundamental particle of light). So, if a graviton truly exists, it should be able to connect, or entangle, the properties of two massive bodies, just as a photon can entangle the properties of two charged particles
The proposed experiment by Jake Taylor of NIST's Joint Quantum Institute at the University of Maryland, along with Daniel Carney, now at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Holger Müller of the University of California, Berkeley, provides a clever way to test if two massive bodies can indeed become entangled by gravity. They described their work in an article published online in Physical Review X Quantum on August 18, 2021.
The experiment would use a cold cloud of atoms, trapped inside an atomic interferometer. The interferometer has two arms—a left arm and a right. According to the superposition principle, if each atom in the cloud is in a pure, undisturbed quantum state, it can be described as a wave occupying both arms simultaneously. When the two portions of the wave, one from each arm, recombine, they will produce an interference pattern that reveals any changes to their paths due to forces like gravity.
A small, initially stationary mass suspended as a pendulum is introduced just outside the interferometer. The suspended mass and the atom are gravitationally attracted. If that gravitational tug also produces entanglement, what would that look like?
The suspended mass will become correlated with a specific location for the atom—either the right arm of the interferometer or the left. As a result, the mass will start swinging to the left or the right. If the atom is located on the left, the pendulum will start swinging to the left; if the atom is located on the right, the pendulum will start swinging to the right. Gravity has entangled the position of the atom in the interferometer with the direction in which the pendulum begins swinging.
The position entanglement means that the pendulum has effectively measured the location of the atom, pinpointing it to a particular site within the interferometer. Because the atom is no longer in a superposition of being in both arms at the same time, the interference pattern vanishes or diminishes.
Half a period later, when the swinging mass returns to its starting point, it loses all "memory" of the gravitational entanglement it had created. That's because regardless of what path the pendulum took—initially swinging to the right, which picks out a location for the atom in the right interferometer arm, or initially swinging to the left, which picks out a location for the atom in the left arm—it returns to the same starting position, much like a child on a swing.
And when it returns to the starting position, it's equally likely that the pendulum will pick out a location for the atom in the left or right arm. At that moment, entanglement between the mass and the atom has been erased and the atomic interference pattern reappears.
Half a period after that, as the pendulum swings to one side or the other, entanglement is re-established and the interference pattern diminishes once again. As the pendulum swings back and forth the pattern repeats—interference, diminished interference, interference. This collapse and revival of interference, the scientists say, would be a "smoking gun" for entanglement.
"It is difficult for any phenomenon other than gravitational entanglement to produce such a cycle," said Carney.
Although the ideal experiment may be a decade or more from being built, a preliminary version could be ready in just a few years. A variety of shortcuts could be exploited to make things easier to observe, Taylor said. The biggest shortcut is to embrace the assumption, similar to Einstein's theory of general relativity, that it doesn't matter when you start the experiment—you should always get the same result.
Taylor noted that non-gravitational sources of quantum entanglement must be considered, which will require careful design and measurements to preclude.
