Yesterday morning, I spent 45 minutes hunting high and low for my monthly travel pass…. It was not in any of the usual places…. but it was a long weekend, and I went out to do social things, so maybe the routine of where I put things got out of sync….. Nope. Could not find it. Odd, I’m usually so good at keeping track of things like that. Then it hit me…. I went out to the back garden, and there was a tiny bit of paper under the washing line just where I hung all those shirts out to dry on the weekend. I unfolded the sorry mess (about the size of a quarter, amazingly) carefully to reveal.. a shrivelled-up travel pass. Sigh. Not a good start to the week. (Although given my weird (?) psychological makeup, it was a huge relief to know that I had not really misplaced it outside the home somewhere. I hate losing things.)

I’ve since been preparing to sheepishly explain to bus drivers about the “embarrassing laundry incident”, but it seems that it is quite common as they don’t give my taped-together-barely-readable pass a second look. I might not have to buy a new one if I can make it last just another week. On the down side, my collection of old passes is ruined now….

-cvj

Chad Orzel’s competition to choose the Greatest Physics Experiment — via the magic of the ballot box — is almost coming to close, so go vote soon. Nominees include Galileo, Roemer, Newton, Cavendish, Faraday, Michelson and Morley, Hertz, Rutherford, Hubble, Mössbauer, and Aspect. I totally think Galileo should win, for discovering the moons of Jupiter — it’s not every day you simultaneously demonstrate the value of perhaps the single most useful instrument in the physical sciences (the telescope), but also show that the Earth is not the center of the universe.

Meanwhile, coturnix of Science and Politics, guest-blogging at Majikthise, points to his growing list of science blogs. Who knew there were so many? Remember, if you have a physics- or astronomy-oriented blog that is not manifestly crazy, we’re happy to put it on the “Physics and Astronomy Blogs” list here at CV.

The day after President’s Day, the Harvard University Gazette announced the resignation of Harvard University President Larry Summers. He will return to the professorial ranks on 1 July, 2007. Perhaps it was something he said…

I’ve been locked in a windowless room full of physicists all day, and yet we still heard the news. None of us were surprised, and I think we all secretly wondered how he managed to stay in his position for a full year after the infamous speech. A confidence vote on Mr. Summers was to be held by the Harvard faculty later this week. Of course, a no confidence vote did not deter him in the past, but perhaps he decided not to face a secound round. In my mind, this is a clear-cut example of the importance of keeping a significant issue alive in the news. It also signals that people take the issue of representation of women in the sciences, and heck, the fact that women can do science, as being important.

If you don’t already know about this, click here, and just type names of your favourite musicians into the search engine. Tons of video of various sorts… bits of musicians on lost TV show appearances, amatuer video, etc. Just random video clips that have been submitted by random people. Wonderful resource…..

(It is old news for some, but I heard about it last week on NPR, being well on the other side of hip these days.)

Random finds in my first minutes of visiting:

Thelonius Monk, with Charlie Rouse, Ben Riley and Larry Gales playing “Blue Monk”. Oslo, 1966. (Link here.) I always love watching his tapping foot, and his wonderful fingering choices which are pure genius…. as do several cameramen who’ve filmed his performances. This unfortunately isn’t one of those times when Monk gets up and does a little dance… I love it when he does that!

Bizarrely camp and ridiculously cutesy (but beautifully sung) version of “Rocket Man”, by Kate Bush and her band, on MTV. (Link here.) Just excellent, despite being amusingly 80s in style (but actually early 90s).

[Update: Oh.. and one of my favourite recordings of "So What", with John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Paul Chambers (bass), Jimmy Cobb (drums) and I'm guessing Wynton Kelly on piano (from the style, the back of his head, and the time, '58 or '59) ....(Link here.)]

[Update: I forgot to mention that I was hoping that I might find a video clip of Strings 98's perfomance of "The Maldacena", by 400 string theorists in unison (to the tune of "The Macarena"), but that seems to be lost forever... see here, and here, for more on that, by the way.]

-cvj

Good news: U.S. launches charm offensive to bridge new ties with some of our traditional rivals! Bad news: our new point of agreement is the need to squelch gay rights. From Human Rights News, via Sadly, No!

In a reversal of policy, the United States on Monday backed an Iranian initiative to deny United Nations consultative status to organizations working to protect the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people. In a letter to Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, a coalition of 40 organizations, led by the Human Rights Campaign, Human Rights Watch, the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, called for an explanation of the vote which aligned the United States with governments that have long repressed the rights of sexual minorities. [...]

In voting against the applications to the NGO committee, the U.S. was joined by Cameroon, China, Cuba, Iran, Pakistan, the Russian Federation, Senegal, Sudan, and Zimbabwe.

I miss the days when we were the good guys.

Perhaps to show solidarity with our newfound friends, ballot measures for the 2006 elections are springing up around the country, concentrating on denying homosexual couples the right to adopt children. (USA Today, via Balloon Juice.) Do you think these efforts arise from a sincere desire to protect children, perhaps bolstered by studies showing that it’s better to be raised in an orphanage than by loving same-sex adoptive parents? Of course you don’t.

Election-year politics. Republicans battered by questions over ethics and Iraq “might well” use the adoption issue to deflect attention and draw out conservatives in close Senate and governor races in states such as Missouri and Ohio, says Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, University of Southern California political scientist.

The aim is to replicate 2004, says Julie Brueggemann of the gay rights group PROMO: Personal Rights of Missourians. She says marriage initiatives mobilized conservative voters in 2004 and helped President Bush win in closely contested states such as Ohio. Republicans “see this as a get-out-the-vote tactic.”

You can look back through history and see people arguing passionately in favor of all sorts of positions that today we would characterize as absolutely beyond the pale: slavery, denying women the right to vote, the divine right of kings, and so on. I used to wonder, what is it that we are doing now that will seem most embarassingly backward a hundred years from today? Major contenders, off the top of my head:

• Denial of civil liberties to gays and lesbians.
• Erosion of privacy and the right to a fair trial in the name of homeland security.
• Attacks on science and on intellectuals and experts more generally.
• Arrogant and uninformed unilateralism in foreign policy.
• A startling lack of urgency on issues such as nuclear proliferation and alternative energy sources.

Okay, that’s depressing, I’ll stop now. Happy day-after-President’s Day!

Over at Bad Astronomy Blog, Phil Plait reports on his role on a panel at the AAAS meeting, discussing the attack on science. Almost at the last minute, Phil abandoned his original topic and discussed, among other things, the Deutsch affair, finishing up with what sounds like an impassioned plea for scientists, journalists and educators to beat back the assault on reason. You can read more details on his blog, but I particularly liked his advice to journalists

To the media, please, don’t simply take what people say and repeat it. Don’t feel the need to get “balance” in your reporting by talking to “both sides”. Sometimes there aren’t two sides! If someone builds a Holocaust museum, would you interview a white supremacist who says the Holocaust never happened to achieve “balance”? When a new vaccine comes out for a virus, would you interview a homeopath so that “both sides are heard”? This administration has put a jack-booted heel to the throat of science for years, and it’s the media’s responsibility to shine a light on it. I’ll admit to not pulling my weight in this issue, but, obviously, that stops today.

Having sat on a panel with Phil, I can testify to his eloquence and passion and guarantee you that this was well worth seeing.

Here I am in DC to fight for the future of physics. It’s interesting to be here on President’s Day (naturally, everybody else had the day off!). I arrived early yesterday, it was a bright and sunny (albeit COLD) day, and my spiffy brand new camera was burning a hole in my backpack. What better to do than take my camera to the Mall? The National Mall, that is. And contemplate the vision that these honored Presidents had for our country. Here they are:

I wandered about, attempting to master the complicated array of buttons on my camera, and I couldn’t help but wonder (i) where the great leaders are now - we are certainly in need of them, and (ii) whether these guys are turning over in their graves. Surely they must be wondering what the heck has happened to the principles they founded this country upon.

And, the new camera works quite well, doesn’t it….

Over the last few months (and this will certainly continue over the next few years) I have been spending some time boning up on particle physics phenomenology and the associated model-building issues. Part of my research involves investigating the cosmological implications of such models, while at other times I am interested in how certain outstanding cosmological questions might be addressed by new particle physics beyond the standard model. These, plus the upcoming turn-on of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), are some of the reasons that I have been spending time on phenomenology.

I’ve been thinking about this particularly today after a nice seminar by Ian Low from the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton. The content of Ian’s seminar isn’t really what I want to discuss here, but part of what he spoke about got me thinking about a question I’ve wanted to get into for a while.

Most models of physics Beyond the Standard Model (BSM) are motivated by one of the outstanding problems of particle physics - the hierarchy problem. This is the problem of reconciling two wildly disparate mass scales; the weak scale (10² GeV) and the Planck scale (10¹⁹ GeV). This hierarchy is technically unnatural in particle physics, since, in general, the effect of quantum mechanics (here known as renormalization) is to make the observable values of such scales much closer in size.

For example, one approach is to introduce a mechanism that cancels many of the quantum corrections, allowing the scales to remain widely separated even after quantum mechanics is taken into account. An example of such a mechanism (and the most popular one, for sure) is supersymmetry (SUSY) with TeV-scale SUSY breaking.

Another perspective is to view the hierarchy problem no longer as a disparity between mass scales, but rather as an issue of length scales, or volumes. The general hypothesis is that the universe as a whole is 3+1+d dimensional (so that there are d extra, spatial dimensions), with gravity propagating in all dimensions, but the standard model fields confined to a 3+1 dimensional submanifold that comprises our observable universe. This submanifold is called the brane (as in membrane). The volume of the extra dimensions can be large, and the spreading of gravitational flux into this volume allows gravity measured on our brane to be so weak, parameterized by the Planck mass, while the fundamental scale of physics is parameterized by the weak scale.

Beyond the Standard Model ideas such as these have the added bonus of a natural connection with dark matter, since the new particles and symmetries that are introduced at the TeV scale typically yield a natural Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP) candidate.

In the last couple of years, a number of authors have begun exploring models of BSM physics that are unconstrained by addressing naturalness issues, and instead are guided only by requiring gauge unification and a dark matter candidate. The motivation for such models arises from considerations of the string landscape, but I categorically do not want to get into that in this post, or in the comments thread, since it has been discussed to death in many, many other threads. Another motivation that is often mentioned is that current collider constraints are pushing even low-scale SUSY models to need some fine-tuning when addressing the hierarchy problem.

An example of this kind of model is given by Split Supersymmetry (see here and here). In these models, since naturalness is abandoned, SUSY is broken at a high scale and the scalar superparticles (and the Higgs) become extremely heavy. It is arranged, however, for the fermions to remain light, so that they help with unification and one of them can serve as a dark matter candidate.

There exists a considerable literature on the collider signatures of this model and a great deal of follow-up work exploring other consequences. Unfortunately I cannot pretend to have read more than a small fraction of these papers and so certainly can’t comment on them.

As part of my continuing phenomenology education, I thought it might be interesting to have a discussion on the various pros and cons of the two broad approaches to BSM model building. I must confess up front that, so far, I haven’t found the newer approach particularly compelling. Beyond the obvious issue of abandoning naturalness, I think I prefer to have dark matter emerge as an output of the particle physics model, rather than an input. Nevertheless, while I am obviously very close to a lot of this material, I am not one of the experts on these models, and I am sincere when I say that I would be interested in a constructive pedagogical discussion of the pros and cons of the approaches. I guarantee that there are subtleties (and perhaps big glaring issues) that I am missing.

I realize I can’t enforce this, but, as mentioned above, I’d like to suggest a ground rule for the discussion. I don’t think there is anything to gain by rehashing the string landscape issues here. It is not what I intend, and we really have gone over it again and again before.

So, with this one caveat, please have at it. What are the pros and cons of BSM models constructed with naturalness in mind and those constructed ignoring naturalness considerations?

Things have been far too busy recently for me to do any substantive posting. But I have noticed that our discussions of topics such as race and gender and interpretations of quantum mechanics are far too genteel and rational for my tastes. (Seriously, why is it that people just cannot resist the temptation to argue with people who say outrageous things, even if they know perfectly well that those people are absolutely immune to reason?)

So I’d like to broach a more controversial topic. I’m thinking of buying a new laptop. Tell me: Mac or PC? I’ve used both quite a bit, so I’m not a fundamentalist either way. The Macs are of course Linux FreeBSD-based, which is useful if you’re a scientist. And there’s the fight-the-evil-empire business. But one cannot deny that there is useful software that isn’t available for Macs. And the variety of laptop hardware is much more diverse in the PC world, including attractively thin ultralights. So — reasonable cost-benefit analyses on either side? Your thoughts are welcome.

And play nice.

So it is Black History month here in the USA, in case you have not noticed. Yes, all the jokes about why the shortest month of the year was chosen for the USA’s Black History month have already been made, so I won’t go there (it is in October in the UK, by the way). No, instead I’d like to (as part of my promise to report to you on things that are part of my academic life) tell you about what happens to me during the month of February every year.

Pretty soon after February starts, the deluge of email I get every day gets enhanced a bit by emails from students from all over America. I (and the relative handful of us around the world) become part of an assignment, you see. It seems that these kids are instructed to find a black scientist and write something about them and do a presentation to their class about them. (If you get these emails too, put a comment and let me know!)

Of course, this is a very good thing overall (see earlier discussions here , here and here -including the illuminating sometimes depressing discussion threads- about increasing the number of times that young people are made aware of a career choice that they can make that society, through the media, etc, tells them that they can’t make), and I’m very willing to help where I can.

Unfortunately, most of the requests are essentially simply attempts to get me to do the inquirer’s homework, which, I have to admit, I am extremely resistant to do. For example you’ll get a questions like “Have you written any papers or books?”. Hmmm, so at this point I usually check that it is still the case that if you type my name into Google, I still dominate the first page you get. Yep, still true, and a few clicks from any of those links that come up can bring up all the stuff I’ve ever written. So in the interests of encouraging students to do the work, I usually send a link or two: to my personal webpage (here), or one of two profile pages for me at USC (here and here), or the departmental page on me (here), and hope that they’ll take the ten minutes or so it takes to get the data. (This year I also give a link to this blog.) Another is “what is your date of birth?”, probably originating from the fact that this is harder to find on the web. Well, I’m not comfortable giving that precise information out to random people, so that one gets punted, at least partially. This year I even got a girl on a mobile phone asking me these questions, although I wish she’d actually introduced herself and said what the conversation was about before just asking me personal information…. She was young, so it’s forgivable….Her mum eventually came on the line and explained a bit, and I sent some links by email along with some good wishes.

I’ll repeat that I do welcome these questions -at all levels- from these young people, since I like the idea that for a change, there are classrooms around the country discussing scientists of African descent, as opposed to sportspeople, entertainers, and criminals, which are almost all you ever see us doing as career choices in the media (I exaggerate only a little). The first two are all excellent things to be doing, but I just want young people to be aware that they can choose to do other things too, including being paid to just think about how the world works.

For the first time, this year I got a higher level of questions. They were from a pair of students (Nekia and India) from an older age group, studying at the Johnson C. Smith University. Here they are:

1. Who or what inspired you to pursue your career?

2. What was the most difficult moment that you faced while pursuing your goal as a mathematician? Why? How did you get through it?

3. Knowing that attending college and/or graduate school can be stressful and overwhelming, what would you recommend to students so that they can stay strong and not give up?

4. When you hear the words Black History who are some of the late mathematicians that come to mind? Why?

5. At what point in your life did you know that you wanted to be a mathematician?

6. How many books have you written? Which is your favorite? What inspired you to write them?

7. My partner and I research shows that you have written 62 papers. Were these papers written throughout your post-doctorial studies, or are they papers that were just written throughout your studies? Are these the only papers that you have written?

Wow. These are really good questions. So I’ll be writing back to them with some extensive answers and some links to things I’ve already written. It is really great that they took the time to write me a nice introductory email letter first of all, asking whether I would mind if they asked me some further questions. That was rather nice, I thought.

Notice that I’m thought of as a mathematician a lot in these discussions. This is because (I think) of the website entitled Mathematicians of the African Diaspora (MAD, yeah, I know), which seems to get updated from time to time with (roughly accurate…I’ve published a bit more, and I’ve been at USC for more than a few months, for example) information about several black scientists. I’ve no idea who does this, but it seems to be a first port of call for a lot of students doing these projects. I explained in an email to Nekia:

I’m “culturally” (the way I think, approach problems, and the type of problem I choose to work on) more of a physicist….. but I use a great deal of mathematics in my work, so some might mistake me for a mathematician.

I’ll end with an amusing story. Amusing to me, anyway. Continue reading ‘Black Scientists’