Can you construct a machine with free will? Will the universe accelerate forever? And how will the universe end? These were the questions that David Gross, winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics, addressed during his lecture at McGill on Thursday.

Born in Washington, D.C., Gross completed his undergraduate and master’s degrees at Hebrew University in Jerusalem before earning his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley in 1966. Gross received his Nobel Prize for his discovery of asymptotic freedom, a key contribution to quantum field theory. He is currently the director of the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

In his lecture on Thursday, Gross briefly summarized what physics has accomplished over the last 50 years, highlighting physicists’ attempts to map out the history of the universe.

“The most important product of knowledge is ignorance,” said Gross, setting the stage for his discussion of current inquiries in theoretical physics and its related fields.

The question of what precisely happened in the moments after the Big Bang is a subject of particular interest to Gross, though he admitted that “nobody has the vaguest idea” of the answer.

“It is not just an interesting question of why, of curiosity, although that is enough motivation,” said Gross, who acknowledged that all previous attempts to answer the question have been either religious or philosophical. “But it’s a question that I, as a particle or string theorist, would like to know to tell my friends, the cosmologists, what happened at the Big Bang. They need to know in order to explain those variations in temperature that occurred a few hundred thousand years later that led to all of these galaxies that form a billion years later.”

In his lecture, Gross leaped between issues surrounding vacuums, quantum mechanics, string theory, space, time, and gravity, among various other topics, before segueing into an extended discussion of consciousness and biology.

“Is there a theory of biology?” Gross asked. “And even if there is a theory of biology, can theoretical physics have one? The answer to that is probably yes.”

For Gross, a theory of biology would only be a first step from which scientists could approach other questions, such as, “What are the mechanism and the principles that underline consciousness or memory?”

Those in attendance seemed to find Gross’s references to biology – specifically regarding scientists’ ability to measure the onset of consciousness in an infant, particularly – intriguing.

“His connection with biology was very interesting,” said Mahammed Myi, a PhD candidate in physics at McGill. “The notion that you can ask questions about consciousness the way you ask questions about physics is an extremely curious topic by itself.”

Martin Grant, dean of the Faculty of Science, who also specializes in theoretical physics, echoed Myi’s comments on the lecture.

“I thought it was great the way he played up the importance of interdisciplinary study, and the idea of biology and physics working together,” Grant said. “The tricks that we have in physics for understanding theories and developing models may be applicable to other areas as far as how the brain works, how evolution takes place, or how consciousness takes place.

After the lecture, Gross reflected on the issues he had brought up, saying that choosing his favourite question was like “choosing your favourite kid.”

“What I hope is that there were young people in the audience who think that physics is still interesting, that physics is alive and well,” Gross said. “I think the questions we ask today are interesting – more interesting than when I started out.”

Montreal is still a long way from racial equality, according to a recent study conducted by several professors at McGill’s School of Social Work. The comprehensive survey of the city’s black demographics found that black Montrealers make less money and are less likely to be employed than non-blacks.

On average, the unemployment rate for black Montrealers is 10.9 per cent, as opposed to 4 per cent for non-blacks. The poverty rate for blacks, at 39.2 per cent, is nearly twice as high as the rate for non-blacks, at 20.2 per cent.

The study also found that black Montrealers who have earned graduate degrees earn significantly less than non-blacks with similar qualifications. The average income for all black Montrealers is one-third less that the city’s average.

Though the study doesn’t draw explicit connections between inequality and racism, James Torczyner, a McGill professor of social work who is the study’s lead author, said that it was possible to read such links into the data.

“The census data doesn’t ask questions about attitudes, so I can’t say it’s because of racism in Canada,” Torczyner said. “But members of the black community are saying that.  They’re the ones who have experienced the data in their daily lives.”

Clarence Bayne, a professor of business at Concordia University who has also conducted research on the subject, said that both Torczyner’s numbers and those of other researchers tell a story of “clear, persistent, and almost brutal discrimination by the market against blacks and visible minorities.”

Other factors may contribute to the city’s racial inequality, however. About 60 per cent of black Montrealers are immigrants. In addition, the black community is more fragmented in Montreal, because members often have different heritages or speak different languages. 

“Because of the way Montreal is, you live in a neighbourhood where your language is spoken,” Torczyner said. “You’ll find French-speaking blacks in the east end and English-speaking blacks on the west end, so it divides it by geography as well as by language.”

According to Torczyner, this fragmentation may prevent the black community from addressing its pressing unemployment and income problems. 

“You take [the fragmentation], and you take a community that is growing so rapidly and the resources aren’t, [and] you end up with a proliferation of community groups in the black community with diminished funds,” Torczyner said.

In the short term, Torczyner said that he hopes he can help keep the city focussed on the issue.

“I would be very pleased if we could create a small organization led by members of the black community to be able to do what I’ve done now, and to be able to bring data to the community and to galvanize an agenda and to organize a strategy,” he said.

Tolu Adeniyi, one of Torczyner’s master’s students, called the study’s findings “shocking.” Although she might face an uphill battle as a black person with a graduate degree, Adeniyi said she remains optimistic. 

“It is discouraging, but at the same time, I’m not going to let it stop me,” she said.

The Daily Publications Society, which publishes The McGill Daily and Le Délit, passed its $1 fee increase on Thursday, with 51.3 per cent of students voting to increase the DPS’s non-opt-outable fee to $6 per semester.

Approximately 2,500 students, or 12.8 per cent of the undergraduate student body, voted in the election. According to Mike Vallo, the chief electoral officer of Elections McGill, the turnout was higher than that of the general elections in Fall 2008.

“Both [the Yes and the No] committees were really passionate,” Vallo said. “Everyone who voted was clearly on one side or the other, so I’m not surprised it was that close.”

Though the fee hike passed, the DPS’s slim margin of victory has focussed attention on students’ attitudes toward the Daily.

“I’m happy that the DPS is going to be financially sustainable for the future,” said Stephen Davis, the Daily’s coordinating editor. “But, at the same time, this brought to our attention a lot of work that needs to be done, and a lot of things we need to address in our coverage.”

Stéphanie Dufresne, the coordinating editor of Le Délit, echoed Davis’s comments on the DPS’s future.

“Of course, the DPS will have to take [the narrow margin] into consideration and find ways to address the criticisms that were voiced by the No committee,” Dufresne said. “[Now], we’re going to be able to use these resources to make the Daily and Le Délit more responsive to students, more open, and also to develop our web component.”

Allan Cyril, the No committee chairman, said that the committee raised several issues that the Daily needs to address, such as the lack of engineering- and science-related stories in the paper.

“I think we did inform people about what going on,” said Cyril, who was recently elected as next year’s vice-president internal of the Engineering Undergraduate Society. “I hope that the Daily takes this as a sign that some stuff that they’re doing doesn’t make the campus happy, and we’d like to see them reform.”

Max Halparin, the chairman of the DPS’s Board of Directors, expressed concern with the narrow margin of victory and the issues raised by the No committee. He argued that the No committee had inflamed an intolerant “anti-Daily sentiment” on campus.

“I think the No committee raised a lot of legitimate concerns, and then, unfortunately, raised a lot of offensive sentiment that was anti-Daily for not the greatest reasons,” Halparin said.

During the campaign, slogans such as “Say NO to Daily propaganda” appeared scrawled in chalk across campus walkways. Cyril maintained, however, that the No committee harboured no “anti-Daily” feelings.

“We aren’t trying to be oppositional to the Daily; we’re stakeholders in it as well,” Cyril said. “We’re part owners of the DPS. We just want to see a good campus newspaper. [But] for any type of fee increase, I think there should always be a No committee formed.”

For his part, Davis said that the Daily is already taking steps to address the concerns of the 48.5 per cent of students who voted against the fee increase.

“Truthfully, I don’t think we cover enough stories relating to engineers or science students,” he said. “We’ve already got four or five pitches that are going out on some of our listservs for writers to pick up that are stories specifically related to the Faculty of Engineering and the Faculty of Science.”

The Bachelor of Arts & Science Integrative Council hosted the second annual Ampersand Conference last week, which focussed on creativity in the digital age.

The four-day event featured addresses by Christian Lander, the founder of the popular blog Stuff White People Like, and Ben Huh, the internet entrepreneur who popularized Lolcats, as well as workshops on digitial innovation.

“We felt the theme of creativity in the digital age was relevant and interesting to students,” said Metz, who helped to organize the conference and also serves as the president of BASiC. “You just need to go a class in Leacock 132 and see people on their laptops to see how much digital media affects us.”

Lander, a McGill alumnus and former Tribune editor, opened the conference by speaking about the surprising success of Stuff White People Like. He started the humour blog using WordPress, an open-source publishing site, after he and a friend spent a night discussing how they didn’t trust any white people who didn’t watch HBO’s critically acclaimed crime drama The Wire.

“I was going after these upper-middle-class boomers, trying so desperately to believe they’re progressive,” Lander said. “I really wanted to make fun of that. I wanted to go after the pretentiousness of it.”

Some of his blog posts were inspired from his time at McGill, such as white people’s love of “Arts Degrees” and being able to “Study Abroad.” Other posts deal with issues of multiculturalism, including “Having Black Friends”.

“White people were trying to collect ethnic friends like they were Pokémon – unfortunately you couldn’t trade them,” Lander joked.

Since he started the blog in January 2008, Lander has published two books and has been a featured guest on The Early Show and Late Night with Conan O’Brien. Lander attributed the blog’s popularity to the accessibility of applications like WordPress.

“Most of the traffic hits were due to people sharing the blog through their own blog links, Facebook statuses, and IM away messages,” Lander said. “It was really interesting to see the blog grow without having to go through a journalism gatekeeper, such as needing a plug from a show or magazine. If you do something that really connects with people, all of this can happen really quickly because the barriers are gone.”

Huh closed the conference by discussing his experiences as the CEO of the Cheezburger Network, a group of 45 meme humour websites, some of which Huh purchased from their original owners. He stressed the importance of simplicity when running websites that centre on user interaction.

“Too often businesses try to make things more complicated,” Huh said. “You need to connect with your fan base. Apple released a phone that was five years behind in terms of features, but 10 years ahead in terms of usability.”

Two of the most famous Cheezburger Network sites are failblog.org, which features embarrassing “epic fail” moments, and icanhascheezburger.com, which combines captions with awkward photos and videos of cats – a concept known as Lolcats.

Huh acknowledged that purchasing a humour website that revolved around cats and fast food was an unprecedented move that carried financial risks.

“I had a well-paying job in Seattle I didn’t like, so I was looking to start up a company,” Huh said. “I realized this could be career suicide, but I wanted to do consumer related things. Our goal is to make people happy for five minutes a day.”

The Cheezburger Network depends on user interaction to make Huh’s goal a success. The sites depends on users who upload their own comedy pieces, re-caption others’ uploads, and provide immediate feedback. Huh believes that today’s internet celebrities benefit greatly from the rapid growth of the online humour industry.

“It’s almost like the business found us,” he said. “WordPress wasn’t available five years ago. But today, internet humour as a vehicle for cultural change is inevitable. One thing’s clear: there’s more untapped potential in the internet user base than in the professional writers, and we need to tap into this user base.”

A speaking tour of Canada by Mustafa Barghouti, a well-known peace activist and member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, was cancelled last week due to delays in the Canadian visa application process.

Barghouti, who finished second to Mahmoud Abbas in the 2005 Palestinian presidential election, had been set to visit Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal – where he was scheduled to speak at the University of Montreal on March 21 – in a tour organized by Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East. In Ottawa, Barghouti was scheduled to meet with members of the three Canadian opposition parties, some of whom called the offices of the foreign minister and the Department of Citizenship and Immigration in an effort to expedite the visa process.

According to a press release, CJPME attributed the delays to “a broader strategy to muzzle or obstruct any voice critical of the policies of the Israeli government.”

According to Grace Batchoun, a spokesperson for CJPME, the trip to Canada from Barghouti’s residence in Ramallah in the West Bank required that he cross into Jordan before flying overseas, as Palestinians cannot enter Tel Aviv to depart from Israel. When the visa was issued Friday, the night before Barghouti was scheduled to speak at the University of Toronto, Batchoun said, the Jordanian border and the Canadian mission were both closed for Shabbat.

“They decided to sort of trash our plan,” Batchoun said. “They didn’t want his message to come out.”

While Melanie Carkner, a spokesperson for the Department of Citizenship and Immigration, would not comment on this specific case, she explained some of the possible reasons for delays in visa application processes.

“Canadian officials do their utmost to complete visa applications in a timely manner when urgent situations arise, but in some cases, such as when information is incomplete or arrives at the last minute, this is not possible,” Carkner said. “A visa can be issued only when the complete application is received – and I’m giving you a hint here.”

Barghouti could not be reached for comment on the specifics of his case, but CJPME and the McGill University chapter of Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights both noted that he had received prompt responses to visa applications in previous years, in one case receiving a visa less than 24 hours after applying to enter Canada from the United States. This year, however, he applied March 5 and was not granted a visa until two weeks later, on March 19. In a recent interview with The Toronto Star, Barghouti noted that this was odd, but refrained from blaming Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government.

Jamal Daoud, a PhD candidate in biomedical engineering at McGill and a member of SPHR, which helped promote Barghouti’s visit to Montreal, said that while the reasons for the delay were unclear, he is worried about opportunities for open discussion in Canada.

“In the past year and a half, there has been a sort of limitation on free speech regarding the Middle East conflict,” Daoud said. “I’m worried. Canada has no problem bringing pro-conservative speakers like Ann Coulter.”

Bob Rae, a Liberal MP representing Toronto Centre who was scheduled to meet with Barghouti, confirmed that his office had made enquiries on Barghouti’s behalf.

“My understanding is that a visa was issued, but came too late to allow him to leave, which is unfortunate,” Rae wrote in an email to the Tribune.

Barghouti has now been issued a three-month visa, which will allow CJPME to reschedule Barghouti’s tour for sometime in May.

Nathan Glazer, the prominent sociologist and professor emeritus at Harvard, delivered two lectures at McGill last week. Glazer is perhaps best known for Beyond the Melting Pot, a pioneering study of different ethnic groups in New York City that he co-authored with Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1963. His first lecture last week dealt with the state of American race relations during Barack Obama’s presidency, while the second focussed on the role of public intellectuals in the modern era. The Tribune caught up with Glazer between his lectures to discuss America’s contemporary urban dilemmas.You were born to immigrant parents and grew up in working-class neighbourhoods in East Harlem and the Bronx. How did that experience shaped your academic views?I suppose it’s shaped my academic outlook in one respect. I do believe that the ordinary public schools, which I attended, provided opportunities for upward mobility and still do. In fact, they do so more than they used to because there are many more foundation-supported programs. I do feel that America provides opportunities, and in some ways, one needs the sort of reform within the black community that would make it possible to take more advantage of opportunities.

Can you tell me a bit about your experiences at City College in New York in the 1940s?City College was almost entirely populated by immigrant children. It had many virtues – one virtue was that it was free. Another virtue was that it was not a residential institution, so one could live at home. It was a ferment of political activity on the one hand with perfectly adequate academic standards on the other. It was a unique moment.

One of the interesting things you mentioned in your lecture was that, in many ways, the position of young black males in the U.S. has declined since the 1970s. Can you elaborate on that?Well, that’s what the figures seem to show. We’re talking about the non-college-going group, which is by far the large majority – particularly those who have not even gotten high school degrees, which may be one half of the young black male population. Their situation has declined and it has declined in particular, because the kind of jobs that were once available are just not there. The manufacturing jobs, which those without particular education or skills can take, [are being] replaced by service jobs.The figures do show that for blacks without high school diplomas, and even with high school diplomas, the percentage working is relatively small. It used to be close to two thirds with a job, and now it’s more like one third. In other words, certain elements of the black population are worse off than they were.

Is there a clear role for public policy in turning this around?It is clear what could help: better schooling and better outcomes in schooling for blacks. But despite many, many efforts at improving educational outcomes for blacks, overall progress has been very slow. We do have various kinds of small programs like charter schools and foundation-supported efforts. Intensive efforts have been made to bring blacks, and particularly black males, up to the level where they can go to college, and these programs have worked well. But they do require a lot of money, a lot of effort, [and]dedicated individuals, and we have not really found ways of multiplying them sufficiently [vis-à-vis the] public school, which for urban blacks has just not been successful.There’s also the remarkably high rate at which these young black males fall afoul of the law and serve prison terms or are put on probation. The percentages are phenomenal. Now, one answer is that we need alternatives to standard punishments in the form of imprisonment. There are alternatives, particularly for those who get involved in drug dealing in the inner cities … maybe the reform of American drug policy. On the whole, I think American drug policy has been unenlightened and overly punitive.

Much of your career has been devoted, in one form or another, to the study of American cities. What’s the greatest challenge facing American cities today?The greatest challenge is the problem of concentrated inner-city poverty and areas of mixed problems – primarily minority, and more significantly black than even Latino – that have been with us for a long time. We can do more to improve the American city by making progress in that area, difficult as it is, than by any other means.

– Compiled by Theo Meyer