Perhaps it is my field of work or area of interest, but it seems like nearly every day I hear someone proclaim – it’s important to have hope.

Now, as much as the contrarian in me may revel in flippantly calling myself anti-hope, the truth is, I have no qualms with, nor judgements of, people who embrace hope as a core need.

It strikes me as a deeply personal matter: some people have faith, some people don’t. Some people have hope, some people don’t. Some people need that something – whether they call it faith, or hope, or use some other word – some people need that. Many people need that.

But some people don’t.

It’s okay to be hopeless.

I mean, it’s okay to be hopeless if you’re okay with being hopeless. Many people aren’t okay with being hopeless, but find themselves hopeless nonetheless. That is a problem indeed.

But do we need to force hope on everyone? To consider hope a core requirement for whatever moves you as the Good Life?

I don’t think so.

It’s okay to be hopeless.

Of course, a key question here is what it means to have hope.

I often hear the term applied to collective action – to social change. It’s important to have hope that we can make a difference. That we can make the world better.

That sounds a reasonable claim, and yet – this is where I find hopelessness most noble.

Faced with overwhelming injustice and so many wrongs in the world, I select two kinds of battles to fight: those I can win and those worth fighting.

I’ll admit to having a bias for practicality, so I’ve certainly been known to evaluate efforts in terms of probable impacts – to favor a strategy or approach that will work.

But pursuing the fights you can win is not enough. Sometimes it is just as important – perhaps more important – to fight the battles you’ll never win.

Of course, one may hedge here, arguing that even a statement of hopelessness is bolstered by a deeper sense of hope. It’s like the argument that that all altruism is ultimately self-interest.

And yet – is there not something compellingly beautiful in the image of someone fighting for justice, fighting for what’s right, but knowing they’ll never win? Knowing they’ll never move the needle, nor make any difference, nor even be remembered for their efforts? Fighting only because it’s the right thing to do.

There’s something remarkable in passion without hope.

Hope can also be seen at a much more personal level. Hope that your life will have meaning. Hope that you’ll make it through the day.

Questioning the universal need for such individual hope is much less socially acceptable.

And the demand for hope here is reasonable. Terrible things happen to people without hope. They feel terrible things, experience terrible things, perhaps even do terrible things.

Hope should not be denied. No life should be lost to hopelessness.

And yet -

Does a widespread need for hope translate to a universal need for hope? Is hope so essential that hopelessness should be removed as an option? That no person should be welcome to stand up and proudly declare their hopelessness?

It’s the pursuit of that universal hope which worries me.

Hopelessness should always be an option.

Perhaps not the right option for the vast majority of people, but an option nonetheless. There is nothing wrong with people who need hope, and there is nothing wrong with people who need to be without it.

There is, after all, something dangerous in hope. It doesn’t help to proclaim that it gets better if, indeed, it never gets better. Shattered dreams can be worse than no dreams at all.

But I digress. For, really, the conversation about individual hope comes down to one question – imagine that person laying in bed. Staring blankly at the ceiling. Too broken to move and swallowed by that dark cavern of despair. Hopeless.

The real question is what gets that person out of bed. What heals them.

Hope, perhaps.

But, I think, not necessarily. There is power in hopelessness. Not just the power to destroy, but the power to repair. Embracing hopelessness can ease that despair.

Perhaps not for everyone. Perhaps not for the vast majority of people. But, perhaps, for some.

Hopelessness should always be an option.

I recently ran across MentalFloss’ list of 6 Angry Letters Kids Sent Neil deGrasse Tyson About Pluto.

The content for this 2013 article came from a 2010 PBS slideshow, which in turn came from deGrasse Tyson’s 2009 book “The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America’s Favorite Planet.”

This, of course, all came after the International Astronomical Union (IAU) revised it’s definition of a planet in 2006.

The revised definition notably excluded Pluto.

Eight years later and people are still upset.

Numerous books and articles have been written on the topic – exploring the history of Pluto’s 1930 discovery, the more recent discovery of numerous “Trans-Neptunian Objects,” Pluto’s eventual declassification, and, of course, the uproar that followed. And that continues.

Alan Boyle, author of “The Case for Pluto: How a Little Planet Made a Big Difference,” explained in a 2009 Wired article:

Throughout most of the history of that little world, we’ve thought of it as a poor little oddball that didn’t fit in with the rest of the kids in the solar system and really needed to be protected. So to my mind it’s really not so much about [love of Disney's dog Pluto], but it’s about the underdog.

And everybody loves an underdog.

I’ve always been a big fan of Pluto myself. Just like me, Pluto has an eccentric orbit. All the planets travel in ellipses – as stated in Kepler’s first law of planetary motion – but Pluto’s orbit is an elongated ellipse, while other orbits are relatively circular. Furthermore, Pluto’s orbit is inclined at a 17 degree angle relative to the essentially flat plane the other planets travel.

The best part of this crazy orbit is that Pluto is sometimes 9th from the sun and sometimes 8th. Sometimes Pluto is closer to the Sun than Neptune.

Pluto breaks all the rules.

Not to mention that it’s a Terran body beyond the Jovian bodies. Madness.

So, I guess I always did think of Pluto as an oddball. As an object that didn’t fit in with all the so-called normal planets traversing their orderly paths, sitting all neat and pretty, always doing what they’re told.

But an underdog? Something that needs to be protected?

Never.

Pluto does Pluto. Pluto doesn’t care what the other planets do.

The scientist and astronomer in me appreciates the IAU’s revision. I might quibble with some of their language – the qualification that a planet must have “cleared its orbit,” for example, is startlingly imprecise. But at the end of the day, I agree that we need clear, formal definitions and classifications.

A classification which included Pluto as a planet would doubtless be too broad. The other Dwarf Planets – for that is what Pluto now is – would be planets as well. Eris would be a planet, and that would be chaos. Pluto’s moon, Charon, might end up as a planet, and who knows what other Kuiper Belt objects or extra-solar objects might end up as planets.

No, that would surely be too much.

But Pluto will always be a planet to me.

Or perhaps, more accurately, I don’t think Pluto will ever care about the classifications of some carbon-based organic matter on the third planet from the Sun.

Haters gonna hate, but Pluto doesn’t care.

Pluto just keeps doing Pluto.

Because just like the Incredible Hulk, I’m always angry.

It seems the storm has passed in Ferguson, MO. As the Washington Post reported this morning, “hugs and kisses [have replaced] tear gas.” And that is truly great. The worst of this crisis, it seems, is behind us.

But there’s so much more to be done. So much to still be angry about.

For example, Mother Jones today examined the data on how often police shoot unarmed black men.

I was particularly stuck by the data from my hometown of Oakland, California:

In Oakland, California, the NAACP reported that out of 45 officer-involved shootings in the city between 2004 and 2008, 37 of those shot were black. None were white. One-third of the shootings resulted in fatalities.

(For those unfamiliar with Oakland, it may also be helpful to know that during that same time period, there were a total of 582 homicides in the city.)

Mother Jones attributes the discrepancy to racial bias in police officers. That’s something to be angry about.

Of course, I get a little persnickety about data interpretation, and I’m not quite ready to accept Mother Jone’s explanation.

Oakland isn’t nearly as segregated as some cities, but it’s still fairly segregated. The wealthy (well, wealthier, I really mean middle class) people live in the hills and the poor people live in the flats. Most of the wealthy people are white and most of the poor people are black and Latino. Most of the crime happens in the flats.

I don’t have the data to map where police shootings in Oakland take place, but if I were to venture a guess, I’d bet most of them take place in the flats.

So if the crime happens in the black part of town, and the police shootings take place in the black part of town, then it doesn’t necessarily follow that more shootings of black people is the result of racial bias.

Of course, the fact that “weapons were not found in 40 percent of cases,” does seem to indicate a level of racial bias. But then again, perhaps it’s equally possible that there is more police activity in the neighborhoods with more crime – thereby generally increasing police/civilian interaction, and police in those areas, knowing there is more crime, are more swiftly moved to action. Biased not by race, but by the higher crime rate.

While I personally believe that racial bias is an important factor, not only in Oakland but in cities around the country, let’s just go with this for a moment and assume that the Oakland PD is nothing but perfect in this regard.

But wait.

I’m still angry.

Even if you can attribute that disparity not to the racial bias of police officers but to the demographics of the area -

Isn’t that essentially saying: the problem isn’t with a hundred guys on the police force, the problem is with deeply ingrained, shamefully historic biases and disparities which have continually privileged everything white and degraded everything black to the point where all social, emotional, educational, and health outcomes are noticeable tipped in white people’s favor.

How is that argument supposed to make anything seem better?

Oh no, no, no. There is much to be done.

And I, for one, will stay angry.

Sir Robert Peel is widely credited with the creation of modern policing. As the British Home Secretary, Peel passed the Metropolitan Police Act (MPA) of 1829, which created the first cohesive police force for London’s metropolitan area.

The Act was intended to diminish crime in this rapidly growing, urban city. But the effort to create a police force was a delicate one, which had to be careful of public opinion. As the U.K.’s National Archives explains:

The government was anxious to avoid any suggestion that the police was a military force, so they were not armed. Nor was their uniform anything like military uniform.

Every new police officer was issued “General Instructions,” outlining the ethical expectations of their post. These “Peelian Principals,” which may not have been developed by Peel himself, were as follows:

1. To prevent crime and disorder, as an alternative to their repression by military force and severity of legal punishment.
2. To recognise always that the power of the police to fulfil their functions and duties is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions and behaviour and on their ability to secure and maintain public respect.
3. To recognise always that to secure and maintain the respect and approval of the public means also the securing of the willing co-operation of the public in the task of securing observance of laws.
4. To recognise always that the extent to which the co-operation of the public can be secured diminishes proportionately the necessity of the use of physical force and compulsion for achieving police objectives.
5. To seek and preserve public favour, not by pandering to public opinion; but by constantly demonstrating absolutely impartial service to law, in complete independence of policy, and without regard to the justice or injustice of the substance of individual laws, by ready offering of individual service and friendship to all members of the public without regard to their wealth or social standing, by ready exercise of courtesy and friendly good humour; and by ready offering of individual sacrifice in protecting and preserving life.
6. To use physical force only when the exercise of persuasion, advice and warning is found to be insufficient to obtain public co-operation to an extent necessary to secure observance of law or to restore order, and to use only the minimum degree of physical force which is necessary on any particular occasion for achieving a police objective.
7. To maintain at all times a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and that the public are the police, the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.
8. To recognise always the need for strict adherence to police-executive functions, and to refrain from even seeming to usurp the powers of the judiciary of avenging individuals or the State, and of authoritatively judging guilt and punishing the guilty.
9. To recognise always that the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, and not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them.

To be fair, there will still issues with this inaugural police force. As the Metropolitan Police Historical Collection describes, “there was a high turnover of men, with many dismissals and resignations. Dishonesty, indiscipline, drunkenness were not tolerated.”

Which is to say, police officers were constantly being fired for being drunk, dishonest, or undisciplined.

So things were not perfect.

But in the nearly 100 years since these guidelines were published, I’d like to think we’ve advanced a little as a society. Improved ourselves and our methods. Built upon what seems like a good foundation to find even better solutions and more just approaches.

But clearly we have not.

In 1892 the National Guard was called to Homestead, Pennsylvania.

8,500 National Guard forces came to town because 300 Pinkertons had already failed.

Workers in the steel mills were trying to unionize, you see. Henry Frick, chairman of Carnegie Steel Co., couldn’t let that happen. So, he had hired the Pinkertons – a move which left seven workers and three Pinkertons dead. Then he called in the National Guard.

The National Guard forcibly removed the strikers. The town did not unionize.

Two years later, railroad workers in Pullman, Chicago, led by Gene Debs, initiated the first national strike. Rail service across the country came to a standstill.

With support from then-President Grover Cleveland, thousands of U.S. Marshals and 12,000 United States Army troops were called in to break the strike.

As many as 30 strikers died. U.S. citizens killed on U.S. soil by U.S. troops.

The strike was successfully crushed.

These are the stories I grew up with.

So, when I see stories of SWAT teams on the streets of Missouri, called in to “deal with” protestors…I am saddened, but not surprised.

This is how we – the people in power – have always dealt with those who would dare call us out on injustice, who would dare challenge the norm, who would dare question our might and right. We control the armed services and we put the rabble-rousers down.

In Ferguson, Missouri an unarmed black man was shot and killed for walking down the street.

It’s happened in countless other cities, too.

To call that an outrage, to recognize that this happens again and again and again, to fight against such tremendous injustice, is to question the power dynamics in this country, to question the status quo. And those in power can’t tolerate that.

A working-class Irish girl, I’ve been raised to identify with the striking workers from the turn of the last century. Taught to admire the men and women who gave their lives fighting for justice, who were continually crushed by the machine of power, wealth, and industry.

Perhaps now I am the elite. I am those in power. I may not have the power alone to stop what is happening, but I have the power to walk down the street unharmed by police. I have the power to speak up.

And above all, I have a responsibility to stand with those who demand justice. Who demand change. Who fight every day to ensure that tomorrow is better. Who do everything in their power to stop the cycle of violence and who insist that a government of the people should serve all the people.

So I stand with the people of Ferguson, as I stand with the people of far too many other cities.

But I’m taking suggestions on what more I can do. Speaking out is not enough.

Richard Cory was perfection.

As Edwin Arlington Robinson wrote in 1897, Richard Cory was richer than a king. Schooled in every grace. And he was always human when he talked.

In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

Yes, Richard Cory was perfection.

And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.

What are we to think of Richard Cory now?

Perfect people don’t commit suicide.

The story is an old and tragic one. Just as shocking now as it was then. We wished that we were in his place -

Richard Cory was perfection.

It doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t add up. How could we not have known? How could that happen?

We wished that we were in his place -

We might still be a little jealous.

Richard Cory was perfection.

We never knew Richard Cory.

What pain he must have felt. What horror. What unbearable emptiness that calm summer night -

How could we not have known?

Afterwards there are always discussions and debates. Memories and memorials. Sighs for prevention and scorns over cause.

But nothing changes that calm summer night -

Nothing can explain it or undo it or change it.

But perhaps – perhaps the world will be different. Not only absent a soul, but with added awareness:

This is normal.

This happens all of the time.

This happens to people we know – and we rarely know its happening.

We don’t know, but we imagine perfection. We imagine perfection and we don’t make the effort to know.

We just imagine perfection and wish that we were in his place.

A few weeks ago – during this year’s Summer Institute of Civic Studies, in fact – I was able to join an afternoon session where we were asked to draw an ideal civic community.

We weren’t supposed to use text – which I totally cheated and did any way. It was an interesting exercise for a group of non-artists to express themselves through art.

Some people found drawing easier than talking or writing. Some people found it harder. Everyone was bashful about their artistic skills.

Words are my medium, so I found it a struggle. But it was an interesting exercise nonetheless.

Here is quick sketch of my ideal civic community:

I found myself overwhelmed at all the things I wanted to include. People debating. Open space. People building. People using different modes of transportation. There are a number of things I left out.

But as we went around the room and shared our creations, there’s one thing I included which I didn’t see elsewhere:

People protesting.

We didn’t have a lot of time for our drawings, so that’s not to say no one else thought protesters were ideal, but presumably they weren’t top-of-mind.

I drew people debating first, but somehow, that didn’t seem sufficient. It was too…easy.

As I’ve said, I struggle with Utopia. The image of everyone happy and agreeing seems somehow horrific. Nightmarish, perhaps. On the surface it seems good, but underneath it is all wrong.

I’d take dissent and conflict over easy consensus any day. The latter may be easier – I may even yearn for it some days. But I like to imagine I’d always opt for the former. Disagreement and challenge make us each better. Make our work better.

We can still be civil, of course. But somehow, healthy debate didn’t seem like enough.

So, the protesters stay. At least in my ideal society.

That’s right, I say. Give ‘em hell.

There’s a scene in Harold and Maude where Maude, having just described how every daisy is unique and different, comments that much of the world’s sorrow comes from people who are this – unique like the flower – yet allow themselves be treated as that. She gestures to the wider scene around her – a military graveyard full of perfectly identical tombstones.

I was reminded of that scene recently as I reflected on Walter Lippmann and his frustration with the assumption of a discrete public, a singular entity with a mind, a soul and a purpose.

Walter Lippmann doesn’t believe in The Public. Despite what Tyler Durden says, Lippmann thinks you are a beautiful or unique snowflake.

In many ways, this is a fundamental struggle of social science. Yes, every person is unique and we should celebrate diversity and yay, isn’t all that great, but at the end of the day, you can’t do science with 7 billion unique variables.

You have to put people in boxes to make sense of them. You need some groupings to make the process manageable.

So we break people down into general categories. Put people in boxes based on their gender, race, or sexual orientation. As if everyone in each of those boxes is the same. As if its sufficient that they are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else.

And people wonder why there is no predictive social science.

In the natural sciences, you start with a simple system and add more complexity as you learn and understand more. We’re a long way off from being able to treat each person uniquely, but I’m interested in efforts which move in this direction.

Cluster analysis helps identify naturally forming clusters – groups that share common characteristics without presupposing what types of people are similar. Network analysis shows connections – and with those connections can show clusters, flows, central nodes, and isolated nodes.

These promising approaches just begin to scratch the surface of understanding society not as a unitary blob, but as a complex array of individuals.

In physics, the “observer effect” is a well known principle – the very act of measuring changes what you’re observing.

Generally, the change is negligible, but it’s important to recognize nonetheless.

To be clear, this effect should not be confused with the uncertainty principle, which limits the precision with which related pairs of physical properties can be known. (Position and momentum, for example.)

The observer effect isn’t about uncertainty. It’s about measurement actually causing change. That is to say – the only way to measure something is to change it.

Imagine, for example, a thermometer. A thermometer starts at room temperature. Stick it in a pot of boiling water, and the temperature of both objects equalizes. The thermometer heats up while the boiling water cools down.

This effect seems obvious if you think of equally sized objects – pour a gallon of room temperature water into a gallon of boiling water, and the two waters together end up with a joint temperature in between the two starting temperatures.

In the case of a thermometer, that object is so small compared to the pot of boiling water that that the change in temperature is negligible.

But there is still a change.

The temperature of the thermometer – the temperature of the changed pot of water – is different from the temperature you were trying to measure. You now know the new temperature, but you don’t know the original temperature.

The measurement changed it.

This may seem like an issue of semantics. If the pot of water is still hot enough to be boiling, who cares if it’s not quite the same temperature as it was before you measured it?

And that’s a reasonable point. I’d certainly concede that day to day living doesn’t require a level of precision which would make the change significant.

But it’s still important to understand that there is a change.

Classical physics deals with the every day world. Quantum physics deals with the true world. The complex world. The impossible to measure world.

Objects traveling close to the speed of light don’t behave like your run-of-the-mill, every day objects. That may not matter for every day living, but it still matters.

The beauty of quantum dynamic equations comes when you use them to consider an everyday object. Suddenly, all the complications drop out and you’re left when the familiar, classical equation that explains the life you observe.

But the quantum equation is still more accurate. The quantum equation is still more True.

And so it is with measurement. As long as your thermometer isn’t the same size as the object you’re measuring, the effect of observation won’t effect day to day living.

But it still matters.

The only way to measure something is to change it.

As a general rule I don’t compare tragedies.

Some truly brutal things have occurred in the history of mankind, and to try to rank-order them by terribleness seems to demean them all. And misses the point. We should all do better. Be better.

In 1945, Kurt Vonnegut, then a prisoner of war, witnessed the firebombing of Dresden firsthand. He considered it the worst atrocity ever committed. He saw the corpses. He saw the destruction. He saw the agony, the brutality. He saw the senselessness of it all.

He couldn’t conceive of anything more terrible.

So he considered Dresden the worst atrocity of all.

And so it goes for all of us. Of all the terrible, brutal, dark, and destructive things mankind has done, some strike us individually more poignantly than others. Perhaps we were there or knew somebody there. Perhaps we relate to the victims. Or to the perpetrators. Perhaps some other reason moves us to feel a connection to that tragedy over others.

And that becomes, for us, the worst tragedy of all.

69 years ago, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Three days later we dropped another on Nagasaki.

It’s hard to say exactly how many people were killed. Some were vaporized on impact, their shadows permanently branded on walls like a scene from some B-rate horror movie. Others died in the days that followed, wounded too severely to ever recover. And, of course, with the unleashed radiation of a nuclear explosion, many died in the months, years and decades since.

The trees in Hiroshima are still deformed.

I have seen that horror. As an American and as a physicist, that is my tragedy.

Many still make good-sense arguments about how resorting to nuclear weapons was the wise course of action. It ended the war, saving American lives. Arguably it saved Japanese lives as well – they are a proud people, they would never surrender in a land war, I’ve been told.

And what do I know? I am not a military strategist. I am not prepared to argue mathematical calculations of lives lost or lives saved. I don’t know how to do that.

All I know is – the horror.

The horror which has been part of human history since its dawn. The horror which we try to ignore. Which we try to make someone else’s problem, rationalizing it away until our own actions appear blameless. The horror we put in boxes and compare – as if a million and one lives lost is worse than a million lives lost.

As if all human darkness can be boiled down to a mathematical conclusion and a clean ranking of atrocities.

The atomic bombing of Hiroshima is probably not the worst thing that’s ever happened. It’s probably not even the worst thing that happened during the War.

And yet it haunts me.

A group of scientists, not entirely unlike myself, thrilled by discovery and moved by patriotism, pursued their work. And unleashed hell.

When we look back at humanity’s long, dark road of abuses, we question how these horrors happened. What evil corrupted the perpetrators? What apathy or self-interest dissuaded the bystanders? How did the mass of Good men allow such a horror to unfold?

We look back with a critical eye and a shake our heads in superiority.

And yet the horrors continue.