We shall soon see. Tonight in the State of the Union address, our new “Science President” announced a doubling of the Federal budget for programs in basic research in the physical sciences during the next 10 years. Here’s the quote:

I propose to double the Federal commitment to the most critical basic research programs in the physical sciences over the next ten years. This funding will support the work of America’s most creative minds as they explore promising areas such as nanotechnology, supercomputing, and alternative energy sources.

Given this President’s track record on science, one could be a bit dubious about his sincerity or his choice of programs to highlight. In fact, I’m a bit suspicious of the words ‘critical programs.’ Nanotechnology, supercomputing, and energy alternative research are valid, useful research programs, but the entire rest of the physical sciences are in dire straits too. Nonetheless, I must admit there was something heartening about just hearing the “Science President” say the budget doubling words. Better yet if it’s backed up by actual dollars.

Will the “Science President” make good on his words? We won’t have to wait long to find out. The Federal budget for Fiscal Year 2007 (1 October 2006 - 30 September 2007) is released this coming Monday. CV readers will be some of the first to know…

If Chris Mooney didn’t seem so serious, I would think this was a joke. He’s predicting that George W. Bush will use the State of the Union Speech to stake his claim as “the Science President.”

A while back I blogged about an idea floated by Morton Kondracke: That George W. Bush should try to become the “science” president by emphasizing, in his State of the Union speech, themes of global scientific competitiveness and the need to ensure that the good old USA is leading the pack. Well, it now seems official: According to the Boston Globe, in his speech tonight Bush plans to highlight Norman Augustine, a former Lockheed Martin CEO who “last year led a congressionally mandated National Academies team that issued a report warning that America is ‘on a losing path’ in the global marketplace.” Why are we falling behind? If you believe the NAS, it’s because of inadequate scientific and mathematical training for our high school students, not enough funding of basic scientific research, etc etc.

That’s right. George “Let’s teach intelligent design” Bush. George “Let’s censor climate scientists” Bush. George “Let’s watch while particle physics withers away” Bush. George “Let’s slash funding for basic research” Bush. George “Let’s politicize the scientific decision-making process and suppress results we don’t like” Bush. George “Let’s divert research funding to my Moon-Mars boondoggle” Bush. George “Most anti-science President ever” Bush.

I understand that, after staking his claim as the Science President, Bush will present himself with a coffee mug that says “World’s Greatest Leader, Ever.” And a pony.

I’ve been a little slack about posting recently because I’ve been traveling quite a lot.

Two weeks ago I left to go to the University of Wisconsin, Madison, to deliver the Physics Department colloquium on “Connecting the Dark Side and Fundamental Physics“. Traveling there was a bit of a nightmare because I got stuck overnight in O’Hare and had to take a ridiculously early flight into Madison the next morning. On top of the regularly tiring aspects of traveling, this led to me being quite exhausted. Nevertheless, I enjoyed my time in Madison greatly, seeing old friends like Dan Chung, Gary Shiu, Peter Timbie and Hooman Davoudiasl.

Dan and Gary aren’t just friends, they’re also collaborators, the three of us having written a paper a couple of years back on the hurdles involved in constructing an inflationary model with a significantly running (changing with scale) spectral index. Peter I’ve known since he was a Professor at Brown and I was a graduate student, and Hooman I’ve known for a couple of years through our common interest in extra dimensional models.

Then, last Thursday evening I left to head to Storrs, Connecticut to give the departmental colloquium at the University of Connecticut. Since Sara happened to be on vacation, she decided at the last minute to join me and that we would continue on to New York City on Saturday and spend a day there. Unfortunately, the day before I came down with a pretty bad cold and started to lose my voice. By Friday it was pretty bad and after spending the day meeting with the U. Conn. faculty, graduate students and physics majors, all of whom were fascinating and asked me lots and lots of questions, my voice was essentially gone. I used what was left of it to belt out my colloquium, which seemed to work out, and then it had truly vanished altogether.

For the rest of the evening, through a lovely dinner and delightful drinks back at Gerald Dunne and his wife Elise’s house I was essentially unable to talk, occasionally whispering or rasping out something half-intelligible.

This all led to a Saturday in the City with me essentially silent. We arrived later than anticipated due to a car accident on the highway, and so didn’t manage to see the Darwin exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History as we had hoped. But we did get some fun clothes shopping done and ate a great dinner. Sara enjoyed the day all the more because I couldn’t really speak, which I got the impression she could get used to.

Tomorrow I am supposed to leave again to give a High Energy Physics/Astrophysics seminar at The Ohio State University, but whether I actually go will depend on my voice. It is a little improved this evening, but I teach tomorrow afternoon so we’ll see how that goes. If I still sound awful I may not be able to give a talk on Wednesday, which would really piss me off, since there are many people I’m looking forward to chatting with at OSU. Well, I’ll keep my fingers crossed and see how it works out.

I’ve actually never lost my voice before, as far as I can remember. It is intensely frustrating (for me that is), although I’ve been getting lots of compliments on the new Brando-like husky tones that emerge when I really do have to speak.

Is it just me, or are you as amazed and disgusted as I am by the recent item in the news about Exxon-Mobil’s profits? In the last quarter, their profits were up almost 75% to almost $10 billion dollars! As summarized in a recent USA today article by Matt Krantz, Exxon has reported:

* Net income up 75% to $9.92 billion. That is the most a U.S. company has earned from operations in a three-month period [...]

*Revenue up 32% to $100.7 billion. That is greater than the annual GDP of all but just 38 of the world’s economies.

Note also that Royal Dutch Shell reported $9 billion, BP $6.5 billion…. etc.

The reason this all makes me a bit sick to the stomach is that as a civilization, we are spending such a relatively tiny amount of money on research into alternative fuel sources to oil. We are knowingly essentially ignoring all of the things that informed commenters (see here) have told us to prepare for. How are we ever going to stop this craziness, this gluttony, and look to the future? Why are we not looking out for our children’s future, and the future of their children? It’s all so depressing.

So I repeat (and invite you to read my earlier post on just how crazy this is): Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid.

-cvj

We’re all brothers and sisters under the skin — or at least distant cousins. According to the popular Single-Origin Hypothesis (the “Out of Africa” theory), the human race originated in eastern Africa something like 100,000-200,000 years ago. The alternative Multiregional Hypothesis (which seems less likely to me, but what do I know) says that Homo sapiens evolved independently in several places, but even then there were Homo habilis ancestors that evolved in Africa — the question is really which populations should and should not count as Homo sapiens.

That means that we share common ancestors. And no, you needn’t be one of the three million Irish descended from Niall of the Nine Hostages, or the sixteen million people worldwide descended from Genghis Khan. If you go back far enough, you’ll eventually hit the human race’s most recent common ancestor, some lucky breeder with billions of living descendants — possibly as late as the first or second millenium BCE. We can also imagine tracing back to Mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam — our most recent common ancestors through purely matrilineal and patrilineal lines, respectively. (Adam and Eve didn’t know each other; he lived 60,000-90,000 years ago, while she was perhaps 150,000 years ago.) The point is, if you follow your family tree backwards, it keeps branching into more and more ancestors, and eventually all of our individual trees get mixed together. So, for example, Bill O’Reilly and Michael Moore are distantly related, although the family reunions are likely a bit awkward.

An obvious question is: how did we get from there to here? How did human DNA mix and match, spread out through various locales and ethnicities, and focus together to create that pinnacle of biological achievement: you? Well, a new project from National Geographic, IBM, Spencer Wells, and the Waitt Foundation aims to find out: the Genographic Project (hat tip to Maria). They are collecting DNA samples from all over the world, and using genetic markers characteristic of certain populations to infer how humans migrated across the globe, cheerfully (or not so cheerfully, often enough) reproducing along the way.

Best of all: you can participate! Sadly, you have to pay ($100) to join the project, rather than receiving recompense for your services; but it’s pretty cool. You get a kit that allows you to take a sample of your own DNA and send it in for analysis. The results won’t tell you about your immediate family, but they’ll reveal the geographical origins of your deeper ancestry. C’mon, you want to know where your haplogroup originated, don’t you? And we need to hurry, before the intimate (as it were) interconnectivity of the global village scrambles our genetic markers once and for all.

Well, you might not have noticed, but today is the anniversary of a day with considerable symbolic significance.

On January 29th 1931, Edwin Hubble took Einstein up Mount Wilson to see the famous 100 inch telescope where Hubble had done at least two revolutionary things (with the aid of Henrietta Leavitt’s remarkable work on variable stars): (1) He demonstrated that the Milky Way Galaxy, where we live, is not the entire universe, but just one of many galaxies, and (2) He confirmed (ahem, not discovered) that the universe was expanding and (with Humason…who started out as the janitor at the observatory) quantified it in what we now call “Hubble’s Law”.

This photo, which I borrowed from a Carnegie Institution site, shows: From left to right: Milton Humason, Edwin Hubble, Charles St. John, Albert Michelson, Albert Einstein, W. W. Campbell, and Walter Adams. Quite a group! This was taken during the visit, and I imagine it was back at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, in Pasadena. (Worth a visit on their next annual open day, by the way! I went last year.)

I was actually thinking of going on a hike today, after my weekly visit to the market. I considered going up Mount Wilson in view of the above. Instead, I’m still here around the house [playing with] working on various projects with the new power drill I bought yesterday.

So instead I’ll point you to a long post I did the last time my mind went to Hubble and Mount Wilson. I went up there and showed you some of the sights along the way. I bet you never read it, did you? Well, you can find it at this link, and it says more about the physics I mentioned above…. and there are pictures of telescopes.

The other pictures on this page? I took them when I did the hike up the mountain described in the post. The first, big onem is a picture of the commemorative picture that is posted on the bridge leading to the telescope. You can see Einstein, his assistant Walther Meyer (peeking over his shoulder), and the Observatory director Walter Adams (center), and astronomer (and then U of California president) William Wallace Campbell (right). (Where was Hubble, we wonder? Holding the camera? …and there is a fifth face that is not named in the picture, I wonder who that is?) The other photograph, the small one, is of the bridge itself, as it is today, with the telescope in the background. I’m standing near the commemorative picture while taking this one.

-cvj

I learned (from the blog Leaves on the Line) that the group Jupiter Scientific has published their latest survey of scientists’ salaries in the USA, broken down by discipline. It is interesting reading. The good news is that at a median salary of $106,716 for “Experienced Senior Physicists”, (who knew!?), Physicists are the best paid. The full data are here.

Let’s all remember to add this bit of data to our list of plus points that we can use when we’re trying to help convince young people and especially people from traditionally under-represented groups (see discussion here) that this is a good career choice, ok?

… and I’m off to set up a meeting with my Dean of Faculty!

-cvj

Political humor is always a tricky business; taking a strong stand tends to annoy more than half of your potential audience rather than make them laugh, while wishy-washy moderation just isn’t that funny. This post at Joe’s Dartblog pops open the hood on an editorial cartoon and looks inside, showing something we don’t usually get to see: three cartoons about a single topic, by the same artist, taking three different ideological perspectives (left, moderate, right). Even though I love political humor when it’s insightful and agrees with my predelictions, this exercise actually highlights the rhetorical limitations of the medium. A joke isn’t an argument, and the techniques of humor can be much more directly employed to bolster opinions that people already have than to make them see things in a new way. (Via the Volokh Conspiracy.)

[Warning! This is an unusually technical post.]

So it is an interesting fact that in 1992, after my phd advisor Tim Morris wrote his last paper with me, he never wrote a string theory paper again….until last week. (No, I don’t think it was because of the horror of working with me…. so stop thinking that right now!)

I always considered it a great loss to the field, over the years, as he is quite a remarkable fellow (hey - he seems to have been lauded at a national piano competition again!), and several things happened in the field after he left that I always thought that he would enjoy, and moreover bring an interesting and valuable approach to. On the other hand, he was not lost to physics or high energy physics as a whole, and started a series of really creative and singular work in another area, as I’ll mention below. (Ironically, the scope of some of what we did in that last paper we wrote, with Simon Dalley and Anders Watterstam, has only been fully appreciated in some recent work of mine (with Durham Phd. student James Carlisle and USC undergraduate student Jeff Pennington), described in an earlier post. We knew in 1991-2 that we had something that would now be called “open-closed duality”, but it is part of an even nicer story, as partially uncovered by Klebanov, Maldacena and Seiberg….. read that post for more, and I should do the next part of that story one day.)

So whenever I ran into Tim over the years (sadly, only a very few times since I left) I would rekindle that hope that maybe he’d return to the fold again. I actually had already decided (in my mind) that the best place for him to re-enter the field again might be via what he went off to do. You see, he’s been developing a remarkable scheme for computing in gauge theory, based on the Wilsonian description of RG flow. The scheme allows you to compute using methods completely different from the usual (Feynman diagrammatic). One of the problems that Tim solved was how to make this scheme work for gauge theories. How to do the “Exact Renormalisation Group” (ERG) as it is called scheme in a manifestly gauge invariant way? The whole concept of a cutoff in a gauge theory is plagued by difficulties of definition, at least in the usual approaches we teach our graduate students. Well, it turned out that it is possible, but it required the embedding of the SU(N) gauge group into a supergroup, SU(N|N). (See here and here.) Hmmmm? you might ask… but it works. Well, I kept thinking that surely, this had to make contact with this other way we know from string theory of doing manifestly (non-Feynmann diagrammtic) computations in SU(N) gauge theory, the AdS/CFT correspondence. Further, we know that radial direction in the AdS part of the spacetime is some sort of gauge invariant definition of a cutoff. Clearly, there is “some money to be made” (ho ho ho) in connecting these two approaches. They cannot be unconnected, at least in my mind.

Well, the good news is that last week, Tim returned to the fold, and this is precisely the way he chose to take back home to the world of string theory with a new paper (with Evans and Rosten) showing the connection explicitly. (Welcome back Tim!) I believe that my former fellow Southampton graudate student, my sometime collaborator, and faculty colleague of Tim’s, Nick Evans, had a lot to do with his return (well done Nick!) since in the past he and I have sat and speculated about the content of the above paragraph’s expected connections, and whether we could interest Tim in it or not. I never really understood enough of the ERG approach to know how to proceed, but I did promise myself to look out for a natural appearance of SU(N|N) gauge groups in the context of strings. That was to be my hook….

Continue reading ‘Return to the Fold’

This month’s provocative results on the acceleration of the universe raise an interesting issue: what can we say about our universe’s ultimate fate? In the old days (like, when I was in grad school) we were told a story that was simple, compelling, and wrong. It went like this: matter acts to slow down the expansion of the universe, and also to give it spatial curvature. If there is enough matter, space will be positively curved (like a sphere) and will eventually collapse into a Big Crunch. If there is little matter, space will be negatively curved (like a saddle) and expand forever. And if the matter content is just right, space will be flat and will just barely expand forever, slowing down all the while.

This story is wrong in a couple of important ways. First and foremost, the assumption that the only important component of the universe is “matter” (or radiation, for that matter) is unduly restrictive. Now that we think that there is dark energy, the simple relation between spatial curvature and the ultimate fate of the universe is completely out the window. We can have positively curved universes that expand forever, negatively curved ones that recollapse, or what have you. (See my little article on the cosmological constant.) To determine the ultimate fate of the universe, you need to know both how much dark energy there is, and how it changes with time. (Mark has also written about this with Dragan Huterer and Glenn Starkman.)

If we take current observations at face value, and make the economical assumption that the dark energy is strictly constant in density, all indications are that the universe is going to expand forever, never to recollapse. If any of your friends go on a trip that extends beyond the Hubble radius (about ten billion light-years), kiss them goodbye, because they won’t ever be able to return — the space in between you and them will expand so quickly that they couldn’t get back to you, even if they were moving at the speed of light. Meanwhile, stars will die out and eventually collapse to black holes. The black holes will ultimately evaporate, leaving nothing in the universe but an increasingly dilute and cold gas of particles. A desolate, quiet, and lonely universe.

However, if the dark energy density actually increases with time, as it does with phantom energy, a completely new possibility presents itself: not a Big Crunch, but a Big Rip. Explored by McInnes and by Robert Caldwell, Marc Kamionkowski, and Nevin Weinberg, the Big Rip happens when the universe isn’t just accelerating, but super-accelerating — i.e., the rate of acceleration is perpetually increasing. If that happens, all hell breaks loose. The super-accelerated expansion of spacetime exerts a stretching force on all the galaxies, stars, and atoms in the universe. As it increases in strength, every bound structure in the universe is ultimately ripped apart. Eventually we hit a singularity, but a very different one than in the Big Crunch picture: rather than being squashed together, matter is torn to bits and scattered to infinity in a finite amount of time. Some observations, including the new gamma-ray-burst results, show a tiny preference for an increasing dark energy density; but given the implications of such a result, they are far from meeting the standard for convincing anyone that we’ve confidently measured any evolution of the dark energy at all.

So, it sounds like we’d like to know whether this Big Rip thing is going to happen, right? Yes, but there’s bad news: we don’t know if we’re headed for a Big Rip, and no set of cosmological observations will ever tell us. The point is, observations of the past and present are never by themselves sufficient to predict the future. That can only be done within the framework of a theory in which we have confidence. We can say that the universe will hit a Big Rip in so-and-so many years if the dark energy is increasing in density at a certain rate and we are sure that it will continue to increase at that rate. But how can we ever be sure of what the dark energy will do twenty trillion years from now? Only by actually understanding the nature of the dark energy can we extrapolate from present behavior to the distant future. In fact, it’s perfectly straightforward (and arguably more natural) for a phase of super-accelerated expansion to last for a while, before settling down to a more gently accerated phase, avoiding the Big Rip entirely. Truth is, we just don’t know. This is one of those problems that ineluctably depends on progress in both observation and theory.

Continue reading ‘The future of the universe’