Sad to hear that Raoul Bott passed away this week (via Peter Woit; see also Jaques and Luboš). Bott was one of the leading mathematicians of his time, but he was also an inspirational teacher and a warm human being. When we were grad students at Harvard, Ted Pyne and I would try to attend whatever class he was giving, even though they were invariably at 8:30 in the morning, a time that was probably chosen intentionally since they were always so popular. He had a joyful sense of humor, and was kind enough to help me out with some geometry questions relevant to a paper I was writing. A truly great man.

Update: Perhaps one story will give a flavor for Bott’s personality. In class one morning he was in the midst of explaining the Atiyah-Singer index theorem (one of the most important results in modern topology), when he paused and looked reflective. Then he said something like, “The first I heard of this kind of thing was at a party at Princeton. Just talking with one of those physicists, it may have been Wigner. He was explaining this idea, saying that something like this ought to be true. Unfortunately, I had had a few drinks, and I didn’t follow him so well. But Atiyah was standing next to me, and he was perfectly sober!” And he laughed at his own story with a sense of open delight.

PZ has a great article about what remains to be done amidst the morning-after hangover of the Dover decision. (I’ll even forgive him for calling us nerds; backstory at Majikthise.) Upshot: scientists need to be outspoken, convincing, and relentless in simultaneously persuading and educating the public. We can’t take our own success for granted; there are anti-scientific forces out there who are highly paid and highly skilled, and a large segment of the public who want to know the truth but are receiving mixed signals.

But, if you just want to have a laugh, you could do worse than checking up on Michael Behe’s predictions.

If you are familiar with what is, at least to me, the comic genius of Ricky Gervais (The Office; Extras), then I strongly encourage you to listen to the weekly free podcasts he’s doing, with his usual partner, Steve Merchant, and their producer Karl Pilkington.

I’ve listened to the first three now and each time have been laughing out loud - twice on planes, and then yesterday so hard in my car that I had to pull over.

Gervais’ humor is quite British, and my suspicion is that, if you don’t already know him, you’ll either find it ridiculously funny or, well, just ridiculous. An extra reason to like it is the strong reason-versus-nonsense streak that pervades a lot of Gervais’ comedy. In this regard, Pilkington is the perfect partner. The partial discussion of some aspects of evolution in the third episode is a particularly wonderful example.

Each episode will be available for download for four weeks, so you still have almost two weeks to get the first one, before it vanishes.

Via Marginal Revolution, a link to the Girl Power campaign of the Swedish Ministry of Health and Social Affairs. Click here and wait for it to load; it’s a Flash demonstration of how you turn a photo of an (already attractive) young woman into magazine-cover material.

The campaign is supposed to draw attention and criticism to the overly sexualized nature of advertising and the media more generally. It suffers a bit from the self-undermining impulse of many such campaigns, by itself relying on overly sexual imagery to get attention. But it’s nice to help people distinguish media fantasy from reality.

Update: the site was also linked at Feministe, who point to a couple of other examples — Greg’s Digital Archive and Glenn Feron.

The verdict in the Dover intelligent-design trial is in! To nobody’s surprise, it’s a rout.

HARRISBURG, Pa. - “Intelligent design” is “a religious alternative masquerading as a scientific theory” and cannot be mentioned in biology classes in a Pennsylvania public school district, a federal judge said Tuesday, ruling in one of the biggest courtroom clashes on evolution since the 1925 Scopes trial.

Dover Area School Board members violated the Constitution when they ordered that its biology curriculum must include the notion that life on Earth was produced by an unidentified intelligent cause, U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III said.

“We find that the secular purposes claimed by the Board amount to a pretext for the Board’s real purpose, which was to promote religion in the public school classroom,” he wrote in his 139-page opinion. “The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy,” Jones wrote, adding that several members repeatedly lied to cover their motives even while professing religious beliefs.

Judge Jones’s opinion is online (pdf); commentary from PZ and Ed Brayton. Overall, a huge, unambiguous win: not only were the creationists shot down, but their religious and anti-science agenda was made perfectly clear.

Not that the battles are over just yet. DarkSyde has an interview with Chris Mooney about his book The Republican War on Science. We have a long way to go, but it’s nice to win one decisively once in a while.

Your humble bloggers here at Cosmic Variance have spent quite a bit of accumulated time in academic and research settings — in fact, my guess is that none of us have spent an entire year away from such a setting since the age of about six or so. That’s a lot of accumulated wisdom right there, and it’s about time we started sharing it. Since it’s that time of year when applications are being sent off to graduate schools, I thought I would start off by letting everyone in on the secret to how to get accepted everywhere you apply. Of course I can only speak for physics/astronomy departments, but the basic lessons should be widely applicable.

So, here goes: have great grades, perfect GRE scores, significant research experience, and off-scale letters of recommendation. Any questions?

If, perhaps, it’s a bit too late to put that plan into action, here are some personal answers to questions that come up during the process. Co-bloggers (and anyone else) are free to chime in with their own take on these complicated issues. Keep in mind that every person is different, as is every grad school — in fact, specific schools might behave quite differently from year to year as different people serve on the admissions committee. Don’t sink your sense of self-worth into how you do on these applications; there’s a strong random component in the decisions, and there are a very large number of good schools where you can have a fun and successful graduate career.

• What do graduate school admissions committees look at?
  Everything. Keep in mind that, unlike being admitted to college (undergrad), at the grad school level the admissions are done by individual departments, with committees comprised of faculty members with different kinds of expertise, and often students as well. They’ll look at your whole application, and in my experience they really take the responsibility seriously, poring over a huge number of applications to make some hard decisions. Still, it’s well-known that careful examination of a thick file of papers is no substitute for five minutes of talking to someone, which schools usually don’t have the luxury of doing, so decisions are always somewhat fickle.
• Even my personal essay?
  Well, okay. I wouldn’t sweat the personal essay; in my experience it doesn’t have too much impact. Let’s put it this way: an incredibly good essay could help you, but a bad essay won’t do too much harm (unless it’s really bad). To a good approximation, all these essays sound alike after a while; it’s quite difficult to be original and inspiring in that format.
• Are GRE scores important?
  Yes. At least, in the following sense: while bad GRE’s won’t kill your chances, good GRE’s make it much easier to admit you. (We’re speaking of the Physics GRE, of course; the general tests are completely irrelevant.) It stands to reason: given two applicants from similar schools with similar grades and interests, there’s no reason for a department to choose the student with lower GRE scores. At the same time, you can certainly overcome sub-par GRE’s by being outstanding in other areas; this is particularly true for students who want to do experiment. I know at Chicago that we let in students with quite a range of scores.
• What about research experience?
  Research can be a big help, although it’s by no means absolutely necessary. These days it seems that more and more undergrads are doing research, to the point where it begins to look unusual when people haven’t done any. There is some danger that people think you must want to keep on doing the kind of research that you did as an undergrad, although I wouldn’t worry too much about that. Mostly it shows some initiative and passion for the field. It can be very difficult to do theoretical research as an undergrad, but that’s okay; even if you eventually want to be a string theorist, it’s still great experience to do some experimental work as an undergrad (in fact, perhaps it’s especially useful).
• How do I get good letters of recommendation?
  It’s more important to have letters from people who know you well than from people who are well-known themselves. One of the best side benefits of doing research is that you can get your supervisor (who hopefully has interacted with you quite a bit) to write letters for you. It’s really hard to write a good letter for a student who you only know because they took one class from you a year or two ago. Over the course of your undergrad career, you should find some way to strike up a personal relationship with one or more faculty members, if only to sit in their office now and then and ask some physics questions. Then they can write a much more personal and effective letter. Of course, if you are just a bad person who annoys everyone, it would be just as well to stay hidden. (Kidding!)
• Is it true that the standards are different for theorists and experimenters?
  Typically, yes, although it might be different from place to place. Because a lot of undergrads haven’t been exposed to a wide range of physics research, a large number of them want to be Richard Feynman or Stephen Hawking or Ed Witten. Which is great, since we need more people like that. But even more, we need really good experimenters. Generally the ratio of applicants to available slots is appreciably larger for theorists than for experimenters, and schools do take this into account. Also, of course, the standards are a little different: GRE’s count more for prospective theorists, and research experience counts more for prospective experimenters. And let’s be honest: many schools will accept more prospective theorists than they can possible find advisors for, in the hopes of steering them into experiment once they arrive.
• So should I claim to be interested in experiment, even if I’m not?
  No. Think about it: given that schools already tend to accept more students who want to do theory than they can take care of, what are your chances of getting a good advisor if you sneak into a department under false pretenses and have to compete with others who came in with better preparation? It makes much more sense to go someplace where they really want you for who you are, and work hard to flourish once you get there.
• Do I need to know exactly what I will specialize in?
  Not really, although in certain circumstances it can help. Professors like to know that someone is interested in their own area of research, and might push a little harder to accept someone whose interest overlaps with their work; on the other hand, most people understand that you don’t know everything after three and a half years of being an undergraduate, and it can take time to choose a specialization. In particular, at most American physics departments (unlike other countries and some other disciplines), it is generally not expected that you need to know ahead of time who your advisor will be when you arrive, or which “group” you will work in.
• Should I contact faculty members individually if I’m interested in their research?
  That depends, mostly on whether the person you are contemplating contacting is desperate for more grad students, or is overwhelmed with too many requests as it is. In popular areas (ahem, like theoretical particle physics, string theory, and cosmology), there are generally more applicants than departments have advisors for. In that case, most people who receive random emails from undergraduates will just urge them to wait for the admissions process to take its course; remember that it’s a zero-sum game, and for everyone who gets in there’s someone else who doesn’t, and it would be a little unfair to penalize those applicants who didn’t contact faculty members personally. On the other hand, if you have reason to believe that someone you’re interested in working with is trying to get more students, or if you think your case is somehow unique and requires a bit of attention, feel free to email the appropriate faculty member with a polite inquiry. The worst that can happen is that you get a brush-off; I can’t imagine it would actually hurt your chances.
• Is my life over if I don’t get into my top grad school?
  Yes. Well, only if you let it be. The truth is, how you do in grad school and beyond (including how you do on the postdoc and faculty job market) depends much more on you than it does on where you go to school. In the next episode of “unsolicited advice,” we’ll think about how to actually choose where to go, including how to get the most out of visiting different schools.

Actually this episode was not completely unsolicited; thanks to Philip Tanedo for suggesting we share some of our invaluable insight. See, sometimes we really do listen.

One thing I wanted to add to Mark’s post about the New Views conference. The conference as a whole was dedicated to the memory of David Schramm, whose 60th birthday would have been this year; he died while piloting his own airplane in 1997. Schramm was an enormously influential figure in contemporary cosmology, one of the prime movers in bringing together particle physics and astrophysics in the study of the early universe. In particular, he was a pioneer in the use of Big-Bang Nucleosynthesis as a way to understand both particle physics and cosmology.

Between a few seconds and a few minutes after the Big Bang, the universe was a nuclear reactor, converting nucleons (neutrons and protons) into nuclei of helium, lithium, and deuterium. At very high temperatures the nucleons can’t bind together without being knocked apart; at low temperatures they would like to be bound into their lowest-energy state, which would be iron nuclei. But the universe is rapidly expanding, so we get a competition: as the temperature declines and it’s possible to form nuclei, the density is also falling, making reactions less frequent. We end up with several light nuclei, but don’t have enough time to make anything heavier.

The relic abundances of these nuclei depend on everything about physics when the universe was one minute old: particle physics parameters that govern the reaction rates, the number of species that governs the energy density, and the laws of general relativity that govern the expansion of the universe. (For example, if the universe were expanding a little bit faster, the reactions would happen a little bit earlier, implying that fewer neutrons would have decayed, allowing for the production of more helium.) Miraculously, the observed abundances fit precisely onto the predictions that come from extrapolating what we know about physics here and now all the way back to a minute after the Big Bang. The helium abundance provided the first empirical evidence that there were only three families of matter particles, long before Earth-based particle accelerators verified the result. And BBN assures us that Einstein’s general relativity works without modification in the very early universe; in particular, we know that Newton’s constant of gravitation had the same value then as it does now to within about twenty percent.

Personally, I find the success of BBN to be one of the most impressive feats in all of modern science. Here we are, 7,000,000,000,000,000 minutes after the Big Bang, making quantitative statements about what was going on 1 minute after the Big Bang — and it’s a perfect fit. I’ll never cease to be amazed that we know exactly what the universe was doing when it was one minute old.

A week ago I was at the New Views of the Universe symposium in Chicago. I promised to give a more complete report, and so here goes.

This meeting was held to inaugurate the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago. The institute itself has really been around for four years now, as one of the first Physics Frontier Centers funded by the National Science Foundation. In fact, I went to another symposium back in 2001 to inaugurate that. The latest incarnation is due to new funding from the Kavli Foundation (specifically, from Fred Kavli), which will help make this a permanent institute.

I arrived on Saturday morning, checked in to the Hyatt Regency, where the whole conference was held, and headed down to the plenary sessions, which had already started. I was surprised to walk into the conference room at the beginning of Sean’s talk on “Dark Energy, or Worse?“. As it turned out, Lisa Randall, who was supposed to speak on the first day, had been delayed and so Sean’s talk had been moved up by one day. Sean did a great job, as usual, laying out the primary approaches to the enigma of cosmic acceleration and discussing their implications. He spent quite a bit of time on modifications to gravity, on which we have worked quite a bit, and reported, among other things, on some recent work that he’s been doing in part with me, with his graduate student Iggy Sawicki, and my graduate student, Alessandra Silvestri. I won’t go into this here, but promise a full report when the paper is completed, in about a month (hopefully).

There were some other very nice plenary talks that day, but to be honest, I either couldn’t concentrate enough to appreciate them, or skipped them to get a little sleep. I had been coming down with a cold for a few days and just hadn’t had enough sleep because of this, coupled with a very early flight.

I managed to catch up on sufficient sleep that afternoon that I was livelier in the evening, when I went to a wonderful dinner with Sean, Amber Miller and Sean’s friend Gretchen Helfrich (the link is from before her excellent show was cancelled), and then on to Andy’s Jazz Club to listen to Von Freeman play.

This turned out to be a great night. We were joined at Andy’s by our very own Risa, Lisa Randall, Alice Shapley, Julianne Dalcanton and Chris Cardall. It seemed worth trying out the camera on my phone to capture such a fun evening, but the results were less than encouraging, except for this rather atmospheric shot of Lisa, with Amber Miller blurred-out on the left, and Von Freeman on stage in the background.

The man himself was in great form, even scatting with a friend of his for about twenty minutes at one point. He came over and held court at our table for a while - telling some stories and generally being charming and hilarious.

The parallel talks the next morning were fun. I particularly enjoyed Janet Conrad’s talk, as I usually do, in which she discussed the current status and future prospects of neutrino experiments. In the afternoon I split my time between the parallel session on Dark Matter and the one on the CMB.

In the CMB session, Dragan Huterer gave a nice summary of work with Dominik Schwarz, Glenn Starkman and Craig Copi on some puzzling features of the CMB power spectrum at large angles. The fact that there is a lack of power on large scales (although entirely consistent with cosmic variance) is well known. What is perhaps not so widely discussed is that two of the lowest multipoles - the quadrupole and octopole - are tightly correlated in the sense that the quadrupole plane and the three octopole planes are aligned. That the alignments correlate with either the ecliptic or the cosmological dipole may ultimately turn out to be particularly telling. Dragan discussed how they extract this from the WMAP data and commented on possible explanations. I have questions about whether one can take seriously results obtained from the full-sky WMAP maps, since one should worry about contamination from the galactic plane. However, these are smart guys and they claim to have worried about this.

In the Dark Matter session, Anne Green (who I discovered is the puppet master behind Ed Copeland’s recent post suggestions) gave a very nice talk on how the detailed microphysics of dark matter can affect the way in which the first dark matter halos form and, in turn, influence the distribution of dark matter on subgalactic scales.

Sunday night we had the conference banquet, held at the Adler Planetarium. It was a perfectly nice time and, for the first time, I got to hear Fred Kavli speak. For me though, the highlight was a short speech by Don Randel, the outgoing President of the University of Chicago, who gave an eloquent, spirited and heartfelt rallying call for people to help defend against the attacks on science that have occurred over the last few years and about which we have posted often.

The first talk on Monday was by Julianne Dalcanton. I was very glad that I got up to see this talk. Julianne described her talk as “Galaxy Formation 101″. This might have been true, but it was a great level for me and I actually learned a great deal. Plus, she had some hilarious slides in which puppets were doing twisted things. I’d love to have a picture of them here, but I couldn’t find them. Maybe Julianne will read this and provide an example.

I took some time on Monday to have lunch with Sean and Iggy to make some progress on our joint project, and then later had a nice dinner and some drinks with Sean, Dan Holz (who I’ve mentioned before), Isobel Hook (who I met for the first time at this conference), Ruth Gregory and Ed Copeland. I don’t get to see Ruth and Ed very often, so it was particularly nice to spend some time with them.

I learned a lot during the New Views conference. It provided a useful summary of the current status of most of the major subfields within cosmology, and the talks were excellent. Some people have reputations for giving great talks, and those people lived up to their reputations. More importantly, some people have reputations for giving not particularly great talks, but at this conference I thought even those people gave very good talks (obviously I won’t be naming names here).

One thing I like to point out when I report on conferences is how collegial they are. I think many people think of scientists as a dry bunch, who occasionally get together, stiffly shake hands and rub tweed jackets for a while in front of the blackboard. It is important for people to realize that one makes good friends from all over the world in this business. Conferences are great opportunities to learn new results, develop new collaborations and exchange ideas. But they are also wonderful fun and a chance to spend time with friends. This is one of the great perks of being a physicist.

It’s the time of the year when the liberal blogosphere takes a breather from waging the War on Christmas to pause and hand itself some awards. The Koufax awards, in particular — named after one of the greatest left-handed pitchers of all time. The reason for separate awards for the liberal blogosphere is simply that, a couple of years ago when blogs became popular enough to start giving awards to each other, the sphere as a whole had a decided rightward tilt, and conservative blogs would always win all the awards. Liberals have by now caught up, and the recent Weblog Awards witnessed lefty blogs dominating in all the interesting categories. But it’s still fun to pal around with our friends here in the attractive and friendly half of the blogosphere, so the Koufax awards are continuing to go strong.

The awards are run by the selfless folks at Wampum; anyone can submit nominations, just by visiting Wampum and looking for the most recent “Koufax nominations post.” Here are my own nominations. I am too shy and self-effacing to nominate CV for anything, although in principle we would fit into various categories: Best Blog, Best Expert, Best Group Blog, Best New Blog. (Nothing to stop anyone else from nominating us, I suppose.)

• Best blog: Majikthise, Ezra Klein, Bitch, Ph.D., Michael Bérubé, Crooked Timber, Pharyngula
• Best writing: Michael Bérubé, Feministe, Shakespeare’s Sister
• Best group blog: Crooked Timber, Lawyers, Guns and Money
• Best expert: Pharyngula, Chris C. Mooney, Brad Delong, The Decembrist
• Best series: Obsidian Wings on torture.
• Most humorous: The Poor Man, Fafblog!, Girls Are Pretty, Fanatical Apathy
• Deserving wider recognition: 3 Quarks Daily, Deepen The Mystery, The American Sector, Dynamics of Cats, Caolionn O’Connell.

None of my entries for “Deserving wider recognition” have a snowball’s chance, with the possible exception of 3 Quarks; the others are just my idiosyncratic favorites. I largely agree with Ezra’s take on the whole affair; the winner is determined by who funnels in the most votes, not necessarily which blogs are actually the best. But it’s very fruitful to peruse the nominations, as you might uncover some hidden gems. The blogosphere is (happily) by now so large that there are just too many good blogs out there, and even those of us who read quite a few of them basically find some favorites and stick to them. I’m chagrined to see that I didn’t have any worthy nominations for the “Best New Blog” category. Feel free to make nominations in the comments.

Speaking of good blogging, you probably know that Daily Kos is the most popular blog on all the internets, with somewhere between 500,000 and a million hits per day. (We’re not at that level yet, but we’re young.) In addition to Kos himself, there are numerous diarists on the site, and every year a handful are chosen to be front-page posters. This year promises to see a significant uptick in the science content (!) of Daily Kos, as DarkSyde of Unscrewing the Inscrutable fame has been chosen as one of the front-pagers. He’s already instituted a “Science Friday” feature, and the first installment is a well-written tour through the powers of ten.

Finally, if you find all these blogs kind of overwhelming (and you don’t already use an RSS reader such as Bloglines), you can get a collection of physics blog content all in one place at Mixed States. I have mixed feelings about these things (although I use Bloglines myself) — on the one hand, it’s a vastly more efficient way to read multiple content sources; on the other, you lose the individual presentations of the sites themselves. It’s the wave of the future, though.

Congratulations to the people of Iraq, who held an historic vote yesterday. Regardless of the wisdom of our choice to invade the country, we can all be happy to see the first steps toward what hopefully becomes a functioning democracy, complete with campaign-finance laws and gerrymandering. I can’t imagine what it must feel like to go to a polling place and cast a meaningful ballot after a lifetime of dictatorship, but I imagine it must be a remarkable feeling.

Seems like the vote went fairly smoothly, at least by local standards, although there were some unfortunate incidents. Even the Aljazeera account was largely indistinguishable from those in the Western press, except for these short paragraphs near the end:

After casting his vote in the western city of Ramadi, 21-year-old Jamal Mahmoud said: “I’m delighted to be voting for the first time because this election will lead to the American occupation forces leaving Ramadi and Iraq,” echoing a belief common among voters across the war-torn country.

In the holy city of Najaf, stronghold of the ruling Shia Islamist Alliance’s list No. 555, 40-year-old Abdullah Abdulzahra said: “I’ll vote for 555 because they’ll kill all Baathists.”

I think that Ann Coulter might have a future in Iraqi punditry.

The best news is that the Sunnis turned out in large numbers, indicating a willingness to join the new government as full participants. How smoothly that will go remains to be seen; some prognostications at Crooked Timber by Kieran Healy and Daniel Davies. Regardless, an historic occasion, hopefully the first of many in the region.