Today’s New York Times* has an article by Laurie Goodstein on the results of surveys conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life and the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. The title of the article is “Teaching of Creationism Endorsed in New Survey”, although there are several components to the survey (which are also reported in the article), including correlations of the reported beliefs with political party support, etc, religion and politics, gays and lesbians in the military, Intelligent Design, and lots of other good stuff.

My immediate impression is: Yes, we have our work cut out for us in this Science Education quest to which I referred in a recent post.

You should read the article in full, but here are a few extracts which speak to the science education issue that is the subject of this post:

42 percent of respondents held strict creationist views, agreeing that “living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time”

48 percent said that they believed that humans had evolved over time….

But don’t get cocky, folks, because:

of those, 18 percent said that evolution was “guided by a supreme being”, and 26 percent said that evolution occured through natural selection.

…and to cap it all:

In all, 64 percent said they were open to the idea of teaching creationism in addition to evolution, while 38 percent favored replacing evolution with creationism.

(The sample size was 2000 people, and the margin of error is quoted as 2.5%)

John C. Green, who is a senior fellow at the Pew Forum, is reported as calling the willingness to teach both creationism and natural selection in the classroom as a reflection of “American pragmatism”.

“It’s like they’re saying, `some people see it this way, some see it that way, so just teach it all and let the kids figure it out’…..

Which puts me in mind of an earlier post on this blog.

So there you have it. Whatever are we to do?

Well, there are several ideas to consider. My own favourites for immediate action are along the lines of focussing on the places where people get most of their education in this country. So (sadly) I don’t mean schools, I mean the popular media. So (as I’ve talked about before) this can include more portrayal of science, scientists, and the scientific method in TV drama and the movies. Yes, that means working with the folks who create those shows we all watch. I’ll talk about that more at a later point. (Note that the Sloan Foundation has taken this approach to heart, and has a number of programs in that area of endeavour.)

Here’s an idea that was suggested by a colleague of mine here at USC, Samantha Butler, in the form of a letter to the Gates Foundation:

From: Samantha Butler
Date: August 31, 2005 1:07:22 PM PDT
To: info@gatesfoundation.org
Subject: Public Education

Dear Sir/Madam,

I am an assistant professor at the University of Southern California in Biological Sciences. I am very troubled by the recent survey announced by the Pew Centre (covered in the NY Times this morning, see reference below) suggesting that the level of general science education is still worrying low in this country. As a scientist, I feel a responsibility to reverse this trend. One solution might be a series of “public service” advertisements on television during commercial breaks - short entertaining spots that would explain key scientific concepts. Nothing controversial - they would just be informative, for example, What is a cell? What is DNA? What is gravity? etc etc. They would have to be snappy and well produced and would aim to give people some facts that would allow them to think about the critical scientific issues of our day (stem cell research for example) and perhaps spur them into further reading. Would the Gates Foundation have any interest in such an idea?

Yours faithfully,

Samantha Butler

Actually, I think that is a good and potentially effective idea that I’d not thought of before. Let’s hope that the Gates Foundation -or any such organisation interested in education and the future science base of this country- is supportive.

Lastly, I’d like to point out that this is not just an American problem. I think that science education is rather poor in other places too, such as the UK. So don’t get complacent over there. We’re all in this together!

-cvj

*Thanks, Samantha

[Update: JoAnne was writing a post about this at the same time I was! So you can find hers here.]

It’s hard to resist a little Onion article titled:

Genie Grants Scalia Strict Constructionist Interpretation Of Wish

The folks at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life and the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press conducted a poll on what is apparently one of our nation’s most pressing issues. The result: 64 percent of respondents said they were open to creationism being taught alongside evolution in public schools, while 38 percent favored replacing evolution with creationism altogether. Wow.

42% held strict creationist views, while 48% said they believed that humans had evolved over time (18% of these folks thought that evolution was guided by a supreme being).

The poll surveyed 2,000 people, giving a margin of error of 2.5%.

You can read about it here.

It’s not just Kansas anymore.

A few days ago I promised I’d report on my second week in China, so here goes.

On Saturday the 21st, we flew to Beijing and checked into the Jade Palace Hotel, near the Institute for Theoretical Physics, at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The same evening, my good friend Teri Weaver arrived from Seoul. I’ve written about Teri before over on Orange Quark. She is a journalist, working for Stars and Stripes, the military newspaper, and she has recently returned from a two-month tour in Iraq.

On Sunday, Teri and I spent some time wandering around, shopping in Beijing (OK, we also had mojitos at the Hyatt), and then went to see Tiananmen Square. In one sense, Tiananmen really isn’t much to see - it’s just a very large square, full of vendors trying to sell people the tackiest possible souvenirs of the square and of the upcoming 2008 Olympic games, which are to be held in Beijing. Obviously, though, one doesn’t go to Tiananmen to marvel at either its geometry or its tackiness. Standing on one of the most famous spots in modern political history is a fascinating experience - the 1989 image of that lone student facing down a tank is inked into most of our memories.

Afterwards, Teri went off to see the Forbidden City, and I went to a dinner arranged for us by the symposium organizers.

On Monday the International Symposium on Particle Physics, Astrophysics and Cosmology began. The format was that there were to be talks each morning and afternoon. The invited international participants gave 45-minute talks, and a collection of local physicists gave talks that were around 30 minutes long. My talk was the final one, so I got to thank the organizers on behalf of the international participants before getting down to business. I spoke on Connecting Cosmology and Fundamental Physics. The point I wanted to get across concerns the synergy between cosmological measures of the universe, which provide us with a precision accounting of the sources of energy density in the universe, and microphysical experiments performed here on Earth, with which we hope to identify how these sources fit into our greater understanding of particle physics.

The connections are many, with the tightest one being to the search for dark matter, as I’ve discussed before. There is overwhelming evidence that the universe contains matter of a type other than that which we see forming galaxies, stars, planets and us (called baryons). In fact, the evidence shows that there is five times more of this so-called dark matter in the universe than there are baryons. It is observed indirectly through many different cosmological methods and, indeed, is the reason that galaxies are able to form the way they do. However, so far we have not been able to determine what the particles that make up the dark matter are. There is a good reason for this. The reason the dark matter is not seen glowing along with much of the rest of the material in galaxies is that it does not experience electromagnetism, the force of nature that leads to light. We think that dark matter particles must be only weakly interacting (electromagnetism is quite a strong force) and a consequence of this is that it is hard to get them to do anything measurable to material on Earth in order to betray their presence.

There are two ways to get around this. One is to build very sensitive detectors to measure even the smallest effects of dark matter on normal matter, since there should be lots passing through the Earth all the time as our solar system orbits the galaxy. There are many people devoted to these efforts and there are reasons to think that success is lurking in the not too distant future. The second way is, rather than waiting for cosmological dark matter to hit something in your detector, to smash particles together hard enough to create some of it all for yourself. If one can do this, then one would be able to measure its properties (its mass and the strengths of its interactions) and study how it fits into the overall structure of particle physics. This is where our colliders are indispensable.

There are other important connections of course, notably to attempts to identify the mechanism responsible for generating the asymmetry between the amount of matter in the universe and the amount of antimatter, as I’ve written about before. I talked about these also, but in a little less details.

Every evening our hosts had some elaborate banquet, or a wonderful outing, or both planned for us. Last Tuesday we were treated to a visit to two small private performances of Chinese opera. The first performance was of the 600-year old Kunqu Opera, which we were told is one of the oldest operatic forms in China. This really was fantastic, as much for the remarkable acrobatic dance and fight scenes as for the vocals themselves. I took a lot of photos (we were told this was allowed) but it was hard to get one that did justice to the show.

The second form was Beijing opera and was not acrobatic at all, but featured delicate and subtle vocals, entirely unlike those encountered in western opera.

Thursday was very different from the other days. In the morning, rather than having talks, there were two panel discussions - one by theorists and one by experimentalists. The purpose was to speak simultaneously to the students and faculty in the audience and also to one of the funding officials who joined us for the discussion and who I assume is responsible for some of the growth in cosmology that China is planning. I sat on the theory panel (obviously), with Alan Guth, Andrei Linde, Ira Wasserman, Henry Tye and Bing-Lin Young. We gave five-minute presentations of our views of the future of cosmology and areas in which China might get involved and make a difference, and then discussed among ourselves and took questions from the audience. I spoke about the connections between particle physics and cosmology and for the need for students to get plenty of exposure to experimentalists and observers as well as theorists if they are to learn and understand what the important questions are.

Everything went fine, but I liked one exchange in particular. I don’t quite remember the question, but it was by a student and was along the lines of how best to go about connecting string theory and cosmology. Renata Kallosh, who wasn’t on the panel because she’d chosen to give her time to Andrei Linde, was in the audience and, since this had been partly the topic of her talk earlier in the week, we asked her to give a response. One could imagine a long and complicated answer to this question, but Renata simply said (as best I can recall, anyway)

“Learn field theory. Learn General Relativity. Learn some string theory. And follow the data.”

which was a lovely answer which earned a round of applause.

Thursday afternoon we went to the Great Wall (the section at Badaling). Once we got past the amazingly tacky parking lot, in which there are huge stalls set out with people trying to sell you every conceivable type of souvenir, we climbed one part of the wall. It was spectacular, both in the scope of the project itself, and the views one gets from it.

Friday, after my talk and the concluding remarks by Henry Tye, we were taken to the airport and left on a twelve-hour flight over the North Pole to Chicago and back to Syracuse.

My China trip was great. I saw part of a country I’d never traveled to before, saw Tiananmen, the Great Wall, Chinese opera and the thousand Island Lake, and was treated graciously and generously by wonderful hosts. Most importantly, I met a bunch of new people, who are fascinated by cosmology and who want to invest in it. Given the pace of change in China, if this initiative moves forward there is no reason the country could not become a major contributor in cosmology within the next decade. I certainly feel privileged to have been part of the attempt to get such an initiative off the ground, and expect I’ll be going back to China multiple times in coming years.

In my opening post, I spoke of a dream of mine:

I dream of a day when, basic scientifically educated conversation will be heard at any dinner table alongside conversations about politics, entertainment, music, literature and all of those other wonderful things.

I have this dream for several reasons, but one main practical concern about the prevailing (and seemingly growing) science-illiteracy of our culture is that fact that we live in a world which is dominated by things scientific. So many of the tools we use everyday, and -more importantly perhaps- the air we breathe, food we eat, water we drink, and several other inevitable aspects of our lives, are connected to science in some way - these things are all altered in some way by society’s actions, and controlled by its science and technology. But yet people are happy to leave to others those decisions about the science that dominates so much of our lives. In even the most “educated” circles, it is ok to giggle at the dinner party about the fact that we don’t know the first thing about F=ma, don’t have the faintest idea of how electricity works, or what DNA does, but everyone would be appalled at someone who at the same party admitted to not knowing who Michael Jackson was (I don’t mean the author of the excellent guide to Scottish Single Malts), or would be a bit embarrassed to admit that they had not read some novel from the standard canon.

Anyway, I could rant on at this at length, but you get the idea. I was rather pleased to have it reaffirmed that my views and concerns (which constitute the lion’s share of my motivation for taking part in this blogging endeavour) are shared by some, upon reading today’s Science Times article by Cornelia Dean. It was a profile of Jon Miller, a political scientist at Northwestern. I recommend that you have a read of it, as it is quite interesting.

It’s encouraging to read in the article that:

science literacy has doubled over the past two decades

(how is this measured though, and with what margin of error, I wonder…) although, we should not get too excited yet, since apparently:

only 20 to 25 percent of Americans are “scientifically savvy and alert”

Further, that point which is dear to my heart is mentioned:

people’s inability to understand basic scientific concepts undermines their ability to take part in the democratic process

Yes! Yes! Yes!

Here’s another extract:

…in the era of nuclear tests he asked people whether they knew about strontium 90, a component of fallout. Today, he asks about topics like the workings of DNA in the cell because, “if you don’t know what a cell is, you can’t make sense of stem cell research”

He’s also done some studies on on what socio-economic factors are correlated with adherence to creationism and rejection of Darwinian theories, the results of which would be interesting to see, I’d say.

-cvj

The Science Times today had a nice article by Dennis Overbye about the ongoing project to build the Giant Magellan Telescope, expected to be built in Chile in 2016. Among the things it is going to study are extra-solar planets (i.e. planets in other star-systems), which is rather exciting. There’s also an excellent discussion of the sorts of challenges involved in grinding and polishing mirrors of that huge size, and a good sense of the sort of scientific, financial, and sociological issues involved with such a huge project.

It was rather nice then, to have on the same day an article about astronomy and construction of telescopes, in the LA Times, which was in their “Outdoors” section. Given that the people at the LA Times can’t bring themselves to have a science section -a fact that should be to their great shame- and given that it was not really about science itself, I suppose the Outdoors section is in fact appropriate. The rather nice article, by Hugo Martin, was mostly about John Dobson, who is quite a character. He is well-known for championing the cause of amateur astronomy, and runs workshops to show people how to contruct their own telescopes, right down to techniques for grinding mirrors. Now 90 years old and still very active (and with quite a fan base) been known to show up at grocery store parking lots with a telescope and try to get people to look at the heavens for a little while before heading on their way. There’s apparently a newly released film about him, and the San Francisco Sidewalk Astronomers club he co-founded. (See their page for telescope-building resources of information, for example, the DIY course entitled: “You Silly Goose!” Building a Telescope with John Dobson” . Fellow Profs, don’t you sometimes wish you could name your courses like that?! )

He also has some, how shall I put it?….. theories…. of his own about cosmology, which I’m glad to say are not discussed. I do recommend reading the piece.

One fly in the ointment: According to the article, “Physicians and Cosmologists dismiss his theory” . Physicians!? Is the LA Times editorial team really as science-ignorant as all that (which would fit with the lack of a science section), or did they really mean that the medical community has weighed in on a cosmological debate? Heaven help us…..!

-cvj

So here’s some satisfyingly juvenile humour, for which I make little or no apology, since a little every now and again is ok.

One of the things I love about driving cross country in the USA is the sometimes amusing (or just downright strange) names you find that some towns have. My favourite is still Peculiar, in Missouri. I’ve driven past it three times now and every time I’ve been meaning to stop and go and see what it is like. I’ve been secretly hoping that the laws of Physics would not be quite right….not weirdly so…. just peculiar. But I have never stopped there, so I don’t know. (I just checked one of the city’s official websites. There’s a FAQ section with nothing in it, so far….You would think that would be the number one question. Anyway, here is a Wikipedia entry.)

Anyway, I’m still not entirely sure that this is not an early, or late, April Fool joke, but there are several stories in several newspapers about a town in Austria, called F***ing. (There are impressionable young people reading, so I’ve replaced three letters….) As you might imagine -if you know our sort- this is to the delight of the British tourists, who have been annoying the residents with their sign-stealing, questions, and general snorting and giggling. Here’s a link, and here’s another*. (Strangely I can’t find a link to an article in my old standby, the Guardian, so just to be bold, I’ll give you a link from the Telegraph.)

Some extracts, so that you get the idea of the tone of the discussion and reporting:

“It may be very amusing for you British, but F—ing is simply F—ing to us. What is this big F—ing joke? It is puerile.”

…also…

Local guide Andreas Behmueller said it was only the British that had a fixation with F—ing. “The Germans all want to see the Mozart house in Salzburg,” he explained. “Every American seems to care only about ‘The Sound of Music’ (the 1965 film shot around Salzburg). The occasional Japanese wants to see Hitler’s birthplace in Braunau. “But for the British, it’s all about F—ing.”

…and…

“Just this morning I had to tell an English lady who stopped by that there were no F—ing postcards.”

I really can’t think of anything else to say….

-cvj

*Thanks Cathy!

I’m writing a review for American Scientist magazine of two recent physics books for general audiences: Lisa Randall’s Warped Passages and Michio Kaku’s Parallel Worlds. Lisa’s book is a great look at the details of how we come up with crazy ideas like brane worlds by working through attempts to understand particle physics — extremely rewarding for an interested reader, and I hope to say more about it later. I have mixed feelings about Kaku’s book, but one undeniable feature is the large number of interesting stories he relates.

One of the stories is about Vera Rubin, one of the discoverers of dark matter.

Rubin observed the rotation curves of spiral galaxies — the rate at which stars moved around the galactic center, considered as a function of the distance from that center. You would think that the velocity would diminish as you got farther away from the massive galaxy, but in fact it doesn’t — Rubin found that rotation curves were flat, implying a greater gravitational field than can be explained by the visible matter. From Kaku’s book, a story that originally appeared in Ken Croswell’s The Universe at Midnight:

Vera Rubin was ignored, in part because she was a woman. With a certain amount of pain, she recalls that, when she applied to Swarthmore College as a science major and casually told the admissions officer that she liked to paint, the interviewer said, “Have you ever considered a career in which you paint pictures of astronomical objects?” She recalled, “That became a tag line in my family: for many years, whenever anything went wrong for anyone, we said, ‘Have you ever considered a career in which you paint pictures of astronomical objects?’” When she told her high school physics teacher that she got accepted to Vassar, he replied, “You should do okay as long as you stay away from science.” She would later recall, “It takes an enormous amount of self-esteem to listen to things like that and not be demolished.”

Vera Rubin, with DTM image tube spectrograph attached to the Kitt Peak 84-inch telescope, 1970. Images from Department of Terrestrial Magnetism of the Carnegie Institution of Washington.

On American Public Media’s business and finance program, Marketplace earlier today, Lawrence Krauss gave a short commentary on how the results of esoteric and irrelevant-seeming research can show up in the technology we use in our everyday lives. It’s been said before, but it is so important (in this climate of deep cuts into the funding for basic research) that it should be said again, several times. Find the audio for the story here.

Some of his main points:

Cutting funding for fundamental research is like cutting off your nose to spite your face. But that’s what we’re doing. This fiscal year, the President’s budget continues to cut funding for fundamental research at places like the National Science Foundation, and NASA…

and further…

The technological side effects of asking fundamental questions about Nature aren’t the prime reasons to ask those questions in the first place, but they sure are a good reason not to stop…..

He mentions, for example, the fact that while the results of Einstein’s Special and General Relativity might seem irrelevant to our everyday lives, he would not have been able to get around LA without them, since the GPS system in his car relies on accurately synchronized clocks on the GPS satellites in orbit*. These clocks run differently than they would on the surface of the earth since they are moving rapidly, and are at different places in the earth’s gravitational field. The relativistic corrections are small, but important enough to get your GPS positioning wrong if you don’t take it into account. (See a nice page -by Richard Pogge of Ohio State University- about this issue here, and for a more technical discussion, see the Living Review by Neil Ashby.)

So who knows what else we’re working on that might well be in everybody’s back pocket one day? This puts me in mind of one of my favourite quotes from the great Michael Faraday, one of the giants that helped shape our modern understanding of electricity and magnetism (see a nice BBC History website about him here). He was asked by the British Chancellor (Gladstone at the time) about what was the use of this electricity he was working on. His reply was “I do not know sir, but I wager that one day you will put a tax on it”.

I use that quote quite often, when giving public lectures on contemporary research.

So come and tell us here at Cosmicvariance about your favourite examples of everyday benefits of “blue sky” research. I can think of several straightforward ones (in medicine, communications, - this very meduim in fact!), but I bet you can think of more interesting and possibly unexpected ones than I can!

-cvj

(*Ok, so LA is not as complicated to get around as all that, especially if you have a Thomas guide, but you get the idea….)

There is a lot of urgent chatter in the media about Intelligent Design. (I will try not to call it a debate, for reasons already pointed out here, among myriad other places.) Well, if you have not been following the discussion at several places on the blogosphere (such as here and here), concerning the role of the latest Deity, the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM), there is a nice New York Times article by Sarah Boxer, (better late than never), summarizing it today*. Have a read, it’s worth it - and important. Here’s one of the key points Bobby Henderson (to whom the FSM allegedly revealed its nature, and who I note is a physicist) made in a letter to the Kansas State Board of Education, as related in the article:

… he wrote that although he agreed that science students should “hear multiple viewpoints” of how the universe came to be, he was worried that they would be hearing only one theory of intelligent design. After all, he noted, there are many such theories, including his own fervent belief that “the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster.” He demanded equal time in the classroom and threatened a lawsuit.

and further….

Lawyers contacted him inquiring how serious he was about a lawsuit against the Kansas board. His answer: “Very.”

There’s more about the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster here, a Wikipedia entry here, and don’t forget to claim your $1 million prize, offered by Xeni at Boing Boing, if you do stumble on empirical evidence that proves that Jesus is not the son of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

-cvj

(*Thanks for the heads-up, Nick!)

It’s quiet here today - a little too quiet. The perky smiling young face that greets me at work in the morning isn’t here. Today there are no jokes, no burning questions, not even a form to sign. Though I have a pile of things to attend to, I am finding myself at a loss for what to do. You see, my senior graduate student left over the weekend for the big city of Chicago to make his fame and fortune as a post-doc.

Being a thesis advisor can be uncannily similar to being a parent. Or, at least it’s as close to being a parent as I’ve gotten so far. Responsibility is involved as the thesis advisor is in charge of the student’s career (well, the student has to hold up their share too), and that can be a large fraction of their future well-being. A parental-like care seems to naturally develop over the course of working closely together for a few years. How bad can it get? I asked my student to email me when he arrived in Chi-town, and I admit to having checked the weather for his driving route. Man, I would have killed my Mother if she had done that to me!

Just like kids, each student is different and you to learn to interact with and care for each one in their way. You watch over them and worry about them and sometimes get upset with them and are proud of them when they do well. And this doesn’t stop after they leave. My first student graduated two years ago and I’ve since watched the arXiv for his papers, am happy to see him invited for talks, etc. He starts a tenure-track faculty position at the University of Wisconsin-Madison this Fall and I couldn’t be prouder!

So, Ben, good luck to you! I will miss you, but I’ll be watching from a distance, and will smile from ear to ear when you do well, as I know you will do.

Retired general (and once-and-future Democratic presidential hopeful) Wesley Clark is doing a guest-blogging stint at TPM Cafe. I am cautiously optimistic about Clark, keeping in mind the uncertainty principle that guarantees that a candidate’s viability is in inverse proportion to how much I like them.

His first post concerns our options in Iraq, given the mess in which we are currently mired.

Not only do I disagree with the premise by which this Administration started the war in Iraq, I also disagree with their current strategy of urging American “resolve” and fighting in Iraq in an open-ended manner. Simply “staying the course” is not an option, and neither is cutting and running. Too much is at stake. There is still time succeed, but the President needs to stand up and admit his mistakes and be willing to do the hard work that is needed to build a stable and peaceful Iraq. He needs to implement to exhaustion a three pronged strategy — I outlined it in my op-ed, so I won’t do it again here — and work the regional politics to bring about a sustainable solution before the armed and political opposition to our presence in the region crystallizes, and finally justifies, a demand for the return of our troops.

A sensible strategy, obviously with serious questions about how realistic it really is. At least Clark seems to be welcoming criticism and commentary, which by itself would be a refreshing change from the status quo.

Hurricane Katrina has weakened slightly, but is still extremely powerful as it heads towards New Orleans. (Current forecast here.) The city is extremely vulnerable to this kind of storm, as Chris Mooney pointed out a few months ago. See also Roger Pielke.

Our wishes are with everyone on the Gulf Coast affected by this storm. Consider donating to the Red Cross to help.

Reporting on a new exhibit at the Science Museum in London, The Guardian has a fun article about the question of extraterrestrial life, its probabilities, its possible forms, and its role in books, film and television.

Amid the historical data, the popular speculations and the observations on Captain Kirk and his penchant for big-haired babes from beyond, are plenty of reasonable comments and a little physics. For example

We don’t know for sure because aliens continue not to visit. One in 100 Americans may believe they have been abducted (cue for a short lecture on sleep paralysis, which manifests itself in pressure on the chest and the experience of being taken away) but if the laws of physics extend beyond Alpha Centauri, then they have not. The distances to the nearest stars are awesome, and the energy costs literally astronomical.

The article ends with a summary of recent work done by people like Clive Trotman, a biologist at the University of Otago in New Zealand.

You can’t just broadcast a message saying, “Is anybody out there?” The signal dissipates as the square of the distance. By the time you get to Pluto, it’s already vanishingly faint.

So you send an ultra-powerful signal as a focused laser beam. How much energy would that take? How long could you afford to transmit? How many directions must you point the transmitter to cover the whole sky? (The answer to that one is 100,000 trillion). And what chance a citizen of an alien civilisation is tuned in when your one-second message whistles by at the speed of light? The arithmetic, says Trotman, predicts one-way communication with both antennae pointing at each other will happen for one second every 10 billion billion years. Assuming, that is, both civilisations are using the same wavelength.

Ah, the inverse square law; cornerstone of physics and astronomy classes everywhere, and a perfect beginning to the first week of my Fall semester.

I arrived back in Syracuse at 9:45 on Friday night, after a twelve-hour flight from Beijing and a hop from Chicago. As you might expect, my weekend has been pretty busy with such exciting post-trip necessities as laundry, mail, shopping and intermittent sleep at times that are only slowly becoming normal.

The last two weeks have been a remarkably busy, fascinating and exhausting experience. As promised, I intend to write in some detail about them here, but I don’t really want to do it in one huge post, so it may take a few.

The Summer Institute, at Zhejiang University, in Hangzhou, continued in much the same fashion as the first day, on which I already reported. I thought all my co-lecturers did great jobs, and the students were really quite impressive. (Can you spot which of the figures in the photo below isn’t a lecturer?)

My talks at the Institute were on Thursday and Friday, titled The Baryon Asymmetry of the Universe, and Connecting Cosmology and Colliders, respectively. Those of us who work in universities in the U.S. often encounter graduate students from China. Usually, these students are clearly talented and score very impressively on written tests. However, it is often the case that, early in their graduate careers, Chinese graduate students are quiet in class, and do not speak up in discussions, or ask questions about crucial points. Obviously, this is not true of all Chinese graduate students, but it is a trend that I, and many of my colleagues, have noticed. I went to Hangzhou fully expecting that, if anything, this trend would be even more pronounced there. However, it was a delightful surprise that this did not turn out to be the case. The students at the Summer Institute were extremely lively and asked multiple questions, many of them quite sophisticated, of each of the lecturers.

I expect that the pressures of moving to an unfamiliar country, far away from family, play a role in the attitudes of some of the students we see in our universities. But perhaps the behavior of the students I saw in Hangzhou represents something of the changes that China is going through. Whatever the reason, the students were a major reason that I enjoyed my time at Zhejiang University so much.

And it wasn’t just the students. On further exploration, Hangzhou really is a beautiful place. Even with temperatures in the high nineties (as they were for us), it was lush and green, with tree-lined roads, extensive walking and cycling paths, elegant, manicured parks and, as I mentioned before, the lovely West Lake.

The Institute ended on the morning of Thursday, August 18th. That afternoon, we boarded a small bus for a three-hour trip to Qiandaohu (Thousand Islands Lake), a famous tourist spot in the Zhejiang region. The lake is a huge reservoir, created in 1959 when a valley was deliberately flooded as part of an early hydroelectric project. At the bottom of this lake are two intact villages that were flooded when the reservoir was created. One can even dive down to see them, although we didn’t. The islands are the places where the hills that were previously in this place still stick up above the lake, and in recent years, there have been attempts to exploit them for tourism.

We arrived in the area on Thursday evening and checked into our hotel. Unfortunately, the hotel was pretty bad (an error of the tour company, not our hosts). We had dinner, went for a long walk, and then I got a fitful night’s sleep. The next morning, after a quick breakfast, we then set off on a boat tour of the lake, which turned out to be both interesting and amusing.

We visited four islands in all. The first was called “Snake Island”, and consisted of many different enclosures and displays, containing a wide variety of snakes. Quite odd really. The weirdness didn’t end there though, because the second island was called “Ostrich Island”, with both Asian and Australian ostriches to see. Again, pretty odd. I was completely at a loss to understand why one would choose to populate a couple of islands with snakes and ostriches until Henry Tye explained to me that they were meant to represent the dragon and the phoenix, respectively.

The third island was the real find. It wasn’t really the island that was impressive, rather it was the view. We took a chair-lift up to the top of the island, from which one got a breathtaking view of a large part of the lake and many of the other islands that dot its surface. In the photo below, taken atop this island, you can see Bing-Lin Young, me, Henry Tye, Ira Wasserman and Joe Silk, all wearing the same ridiculous hat that we bought on the shore just before the trip.

After lunch on our boat, we visited a fourth island, exhibiting a collection of interesting stone formations, then traveled back to Hangzhou and checked into a hotel for the evening, to rest before our flight to Beijing the next afternoon.

I’ll write more about my second week in China in a future post. I have a lot to tell you about Beijing, both about the science I was involved in there and about the city and its surroundings.