In lieu of a regular blog post, I figured I’d leave a sample of the illustrated guide to crimlaw I’m doing on Tumblr (a link to the full series is over there on the right). Regular writing will resume shortly. Enjoy.

We haven’t gone anywhere.

Well, actually we did. We spent a couple of weeks visiting family for Christmas and New Year’s. And then took a week getting back on top of work. In the meantime, a dozen great post topics have come to mind only to be forgotten (or, if we happened to have a pencil handy, rapidly jotted down for later rejection).

Still, we’ve managed to put out some more installments in our illustrated guide to criminal law. Part 8 on actus reus just went up, and you can click the link at the right to see the whole series. Next up is attempt, then we’ll cover strict liability, liability for the acts of others, defenses, where the law comes from, examples of crimes, the rule of law, terrorism… and then we’ll get to the procedural, constitutional and policy stuff. Enjoy!

But we’re not neglecting the blog. We’ll be back shortly.

Any SEO guru worth his fee will tell you that, once your blog gets some mention or award or whatnot, you need to pump out a lot of content right away. Otherwise, people who come to visit out of curiosity will stop coming back when they don’t see updates. And I have no reason to doubt that they’re right.

Nevertheless, we don’t write this for the hits. So after the ABA Journal very kindly put us on their blawg list a couple of weeks ago, we didn’t start churning out more posts — on the contrary, we’ve only had one substantive post since then. There has been plenty to write about, but we just haven’t gotten to it.

The reason, of course, is that we started doing our illustrated guide to criminal law about the same time, and the response has been so unexpected and overwhelming that we’ve felt obligated to get at least the introductory sections finished before the holidays. Starting off with first principles, we’ve covered what crime and punishment are, and the various purposes of punishment, and now we’re working on a sixth installment on mens rea and culpability. With any luck, we’ll have that out this week.

And then we’re taking a break with the family, which usually means even less time to write than usual, so there might not be another update here until after New Year’s.

So if we don’t get a chance to rap at ya before then, here’s wishing you a merry Christmas, happy Hannukah, cool Kwanzaa, super Solstice, and a very happy New Year!

Best wishes,

Nathan

Harry Morgan died this week. When we were in grade school, we knew him as Col. Potter on M*A*S*H and as the Sheriff in “The Apple Dumpling Gang,” two characters that seemed to our young eyes to be the most “real” on either show. But of course he did a lot more than that. Plenty of excellent eulogies have been written elsewhere, but we thought we’d share a clip from his old “Dragnet” days that seems as appropriate now as it did then.

So now we have a Tumblr.

It was bound to happen, really. There are plenty of questions, issues and misconceptions about criminal law; we like explaining things; we like drawing things (poorly); people like learning stuff with pictures… So doing a webcomic sort of guide to criminal law just seemed natural.

And making a Tumblr out of it makes more sense than posting them here on the blog. The voices are just too different to put them both in the same place. And Tumblr’s more of a visual medium.

We’re calling it “The Criminal Lawyer’s Guide to Criminal Law (with pictures!)” We are very creative with titles, as you probably are aware.

We’ve got several posts already planned out, and the first one is up here. They’re going to be very rudimentary at first, but soon we expect to have worked through to some tougher concepts.

It’s silly, sure… but it’s fun. We’ll get a kick out of it, even if nobody else does.

The Criminal Lawyer made the ABA Journal Blawg 100 today, much to our surprise. We are quietly proud.

Be sure to check out the list, there are a lot of excellent blogs there that might be new to you. And weren’t you just saying to yourself how you need some fresh stuff in your RSS reader?

During the month of December, the ABA Journal is having people vote for their favorites in each category. If you’re so inclined, you can give us an upvote in the “Criminal Justice” category here.

More importantly, we’d like to thank those who nominated us (whoever you are), and especially thank all of our sexy sexy readers. You guys are awesome, and not just because you have excellent taste in blogs.

Thanks!

We probably shouldn’t have titled our last post “Free Time.” Apparently that was too hubristic for the gods, who have denied us any more for the writing of a post this week. At least one that’s more wheat than chaff. (The blogosphere has more than enough chaff as it is.) But we did have sufficient time to spot some other folks’ posts that are insightful, thoughtful and remarkably chaff-free. In case you missed them, here are a couple from the past day or so really worth the read:

First, Radley Balko’s piece “Driven by Drug War Incentives, Cops Target Pot Smokers, Brush Off Victims of Violent Crime.” In it, he describes even more of the perverse incentives our well-meaning politicos have given the police, incentives not only to devote disproportionate resources to drug enforcement, but also to make bad arrests, plant evidence, seize whatever they can get their hands on as forfeiture, and otherwise do the exact opposite of what we pay them to do.

Next, Scott Greenfield’s “Those Who Can’t, Teach Law.” One of the more thoughtful responses we’ve seen to the less-than-awesome NYT piece on law school failing to teach the practice of law.

We’ve got some pretty strong views on both of those topics, and maybe if we get a chance we’ll impose them on you share them with you later. But in the meantime, or if we never get around to it, you could do a lot worse than to read these.

We love reading the advances of real scientists doing real research. It puts us in our place when we’re feeling all smart — here are people actually advancing knowledge and doing stuff for real! — and at the same time we get to learn some really cool stuff.

For example: It was January of 2000, and we were sitting in a Hell’s Kitchen Dunkin’ Donuts, just looking out the window, thinking about this and that, when suddenly we had an epiphany: What if the wave function was a real thing, and we just saw the sliver of it that coincided with our own dimension?

You have to understand, this was back before we got married and had kids, and so we occasionally had what was called “free time.” (We’re not sure what it’s called these days, it’s been so long since we had any.) How it worked was, we had “free time,” which we spent pursuing various hobbies like motorcycling, playing in bar bands, and the like. We had gone to the Dunkin’ Donuts after a lackluster rehearsal with an acting company we were with at the time (another hobby), and our mind must have turned to quantum physics — which had been a mild hobby of ours ever since John Crowley showed us that Omni article on string theory back in our freshman year of high school. The more we learned about it, and all the spooky nonsensical impossible stuff that apparently was really being observed, the more we dove into it. By 2000, we’d written off string theory as hopeless, and were waiting for some brilliant scientist to come up with something like Garrett Lisi did some years later. We weren’t contributing anything, of course; just trying to understand the current state of knowledge.

So anyway, what our epiphany was, was that it seemed you could explain a lot of that spooky nonsensical impossible stuff if you thought of things like photons and electron as not being particles or waves or whatever, and instead thought of them as wavelike things rippling or oscillating in a higher dimension, and what we saw was nothing more than the points where they intersected our 4-dimensional reality. You need more dimensions for the math, but you only need 5 to explain it.

Take the standard 2-slit experiment. You shine a beam of photons at a screen with two slits on it, and on the far wall you’re going to get an interference pattern as the two sets of waves from each slit interact with each other (as in the hastily-photoshopped image at the top). If you shoot individual photons through a single slit, you get just a single patch of light on the far wall. If you shoot individual photons at the two-slit screen, the same interference pattern builds up as if each photon had interfered with itself, and found a spot on the far wall in that interference pattern. It makes no sense if the photon only exists in our 4-dimensional world, and yet it happens.

But if you think of the photon as something one dimension higher, it’s easy to contemplate.

(Note: what follows is not science, but only what occurred to us as we sipped our hot chocolate that day.)

Think of a 3-dimensional sphere. If you only experienced 2 dimensions, you’d only see it as a circle, because the circle is what would intersect your plane. If the ball entered your plane, moved across it, and exited the other side, then you’d see a tiny circle appear out of nowhere, grow to its largest circumference, and then shrink back to nothingness. You’d have no explanation for where it came from or why it did what it did, but someone in a 3-D world would see it clearly.

So you and I are in a 4-D world (length, width, height and time). Imagine the photon as a wave in the 5th dimension. Imagine a circular wave, much like at the bottom of the picture above, with the source of the photon at its center. We are not seeing the whole wave, though, because our universe is only a 4-D plane intersecting that 5-D world. What we see is not the wave, but the point at which it intersects our plane. The point we actually experience is like a little dot of energy moving along the wave’s path.

That 5-D photon acts like a circular wave (well, not quite, more in a second) that hits the two slits, coming out as two more waves that interact. But the photon that we see in our 4-D world is a single particle that travels a path through one of the holes, then veers back and forth along the interfered-with path, until hitting the far wall. It looks as though it interfered with itself because it really did, just not in our dimension.

Now it might be that certain directions of travel were more likely than others. The photon might have been aimed at the center of the screen, but it could have gone off to the side or even backwards. But because it was aimed that way, it’s a lot more likely that it went in that direction. So the wave is sort of concentrated in that direction where the probabilities are strongest, and thinner where the probabilities are weakest. (This is simply a mental image here, but it makes the point.) When our 4-D plane intersects paths that are more likely — or perhaps, when such a path is more likely to be intersected by our 4-D plane — we’re more likely to see the event.

So think of that wave of thicker and thinner probabilities as a wave function. If it’s a real thing that really exists in higher dimensions, then it would explain why we see that bizarre 2-slit behavior of single photons.

It would also explain quantum entanglement, where two particles interact and their shared relationship remains tight, no matter how far across the universe you separate them. If you affect one, the other will feel it. It makes no sense in a 4-D world, but if they’re both part of the same wave function in the higher dimensions, it’s not a problem at all. Time and distance are not obstacles to be overcome. It would explain why photons don’t experience time. It would explain a lot of things.

It’s a pretty simple idea, really.

So anyway, that was our little epiphany. Maybe we did a little math to toy with it later, but nothing too serious. We did speak of it to actual physicists, but those conversations usually ran something like “Yeah, but that would require the wave function to be a real thing.” “Right, that’s what I’m saying.” “But it isn’t. It’s just a statistical thing that explains reality. It’s not the reality itself.” “Oh, right.” And then they’d point out some of the numerous (and probably still very true) reasons why our dilettante-ish musings were not only wrong, but unoriginal and long-since discredited.

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So it was with a little extra pleasure that we just read an awesome paper just posted online by Matthew F. Pusey, Jonathan Barrett, and Terry Rudolph, entitled “The Quantum State Cannot Be Interpreted Statistically.” Suffice it to say, it is mind-blowing. Nature reports that reaction in the physical community is excited, to say the least: “I don’t like to sound hyperbolic,” the magazine quotes physicist Antony Valentini as saying, “but I think the word ‘seismic’ is likely to apply to this paper.” The paper’s conclusion?

That the wave function is a real thing, and not just a statistical construct.

They got there by process of elimination, sort of. If the wave function were only a statistical helper, then quantum states that are not entangled would be able to act just as if they were entangled. That’s not what happens at all. They have to be entangled for it to work. And that means the only remaining option is that the wave function really is a real thing.

Quantum states are the key mathematical objects in quantum theory. It is therefore surprising that physicists have been unable to agree on what a quantum state represents. There are at least two opposing schools of thought, each almost as old as quantum theory itself. One is that a pure state is a physical property of system, much like position and momentum in classical mechanics. Another is that even a pure state has only a statistical significance, akin to a probability distribution in statistical mechanics. Here we show that, given only very mild assumptions, the statistical interpretation of the quantum state is inconsistent with the predictions of quantum theory. This result holds even in the presence of small amounts of experimental noise, and is therefore amenable to experimental test using present or near-future technology. If the predictions of quantum theory are confirmed, such a test would show that distinct quantum states must correspond to physically distinct states of reality.

Our reaction to the article.

If these guys are right, it could be a very big deal in our understanding of the universe. If you just think of all the real-world things that work precisely because of spooky quantum physics (cell phones, MRI machines, Blu-ray, pretty much everything in your kid’s letter to Santa), just think of what more we can accomplish as we learn even more. Though really, the understanding alone is more than enough.

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Now, what they have concluded and what we imagined a dozen years ago are not the same thing. They did real science and careful analysis. We were a crank who had a brain fart. While we casually doodled waves and stuff on a napkin, they did actual math:

We can’t even claim to have made a heuristic proposal (academicspeak for “I haven’t done the math, but if I’m right I want the credit”).

So no, we are not comparing what we thought up and what these guys have accomplished.

We’re just really happy that they did!

We’ve just adopted a nifty little tool we’ve noticed on a few other blogs we follow — When you’re leaving a comment, if you provide the web address of your own blog, then it’ll provide a link to your latest blog post at the end of your comment. A harmless way to share the love, we think. (And you can disable it by unchecking the CommentLuv box before commenting.)

That is all.

Happy Halloween