So for the first time ever, I stepped into our fancy new Molecular Biology building (it’s been finished for a year or so now….). I was expecting to be accosted by security the moment I walked in, because, I don’t really expect that they’d let us poor theoretical physicists walk around in such splendid surroundings! Luckily, the first person I saw as I walked in was Mike Waterman (he who helped host the reading of our play last month), whose Computational Biology group is now also in this building. So all was ok.

Why was I there? Well, it’s been an incredibly long day (all day committee meeting retreat in a hotel boardroom in downtown LA) and now it’s Friday night…. and so that means fun, of course! Seriously, I went back to campus for a short while and ran into my colleagues Gene Bickers (condensed matter physics) and Leonard Adleman (biology, see below), carrying a blue cask. They turned out to be on their way back to Leonard’s lab (he’s both a Computational Biologist and a Molecular Biologist) to make ice-cream using liquid nitrogen! Better yet, they invited me along to have a look and try some! (Above is Leonard and his daughter Stephanie.)

So, remember our last cooking time together when I made beef lo mien? Well, it’s time for desert…. So, pour in the ice-cream mix, which one of the experimenters (Pablo) had prepared earlier (his secret recipe, perhaps):

Pour out some liquid nitrogen (boiling point is 77 K = -196 °C = -321 °F) into a handy container for accurate pouring….

Continue reading ‘Friday Night Tasty Fun’

Physicists (like us) are, with good reason, eagerly anticipating results from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, scheduled to turn on next year. The LHC will collide protons at much higher energies than ever before, giving us direct access to a regime that has been hidden from us up to now. But until then, a whole host of smaller experiments are interrogating particle physics from a variety of different angles, using clever techniques to get indirect information about new physics. Just a quick rundown of some recent results:

1. Yesterday the MINOS experiment at Fermilab (Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search) released their first results. (More from Andrew Jaffe.) This is one of those fun experiments that shoots neutrinos from a particle accelerator onto an underground journey, to be detected in a facility hundreds of miles away — in this case, the Soudan mine in Minnesota. They confirm the existence of neutrino oscillations, with a difference in mass between the two neutrino states of Δm² = 0.0031 eV². The neutrinos left Fermilab as muon neutrinos, and oscillated into either electron or tau neutrinos, or something more exotic. MINOS can be thought of as a follow-up to the similar K2K experiment in Japan, with a longer baseline and more neutrinos.
2. The previous week, the D0 experiment at Fermilab’s Tevatron (the main proton-antiproton collider) released new results on the oscillations of a different kind of particle, the B_s meson (a composite of a strange quark and a bottom antiquark), as reported in this paper. For better or for worse, the results are splendidly consistent with the predictions of the minimal Standard Model. These B-mixing experiments are very sensitive to higher-order contributions from new physics at high energies, such as supersymmetry. D0 is telling us something we have heard elsewhere: that susy could already have easily been detected if it is there at the electroweak scale, but it hasn’t been seen yet. Either it’s cleverly hiding, or there is no susy at the weak scale — which would come as a surprise (a disappointing one) to many people.
3. Finally, a little-noticed experiment in Italy has been looking for axion-like particles — and claims to have seen evidence for them! (See also Doug Natelson and Chad Orzel.) The usual (although still hypothetical) axion is a light spin-0 particle that helps explain why CP violation is not observed in the strong interactions. (There is a free parameter governing strong CP violation, that should be of order unity, and is experimentally constrained to be less than 10^-10.) The axion is a “pseudoscalar” (changes sign under parity), and couples to electromagnetism in a particular way, so that photons can convert into axions in a strong magnetic field. (Another mixing experiment!) The axion relevant to the strong CP problem has certain definite properties, but other similar spin-0 particles may exist that couple to photons in similar ways, and these are generically referred to as axion-like. Zavattini et al. have fired a laser through a magnetic field and noticed that the polarization has rotated, which can be explained by an axion-like particle with a mass around 10^-3eV, and a coupling of around (4×10⁵eV)^-1. My expert friends tell me that the experimentalists are very good, and the result deserves to be taken seriously. Trouble is, the particle you need to invoke is in strong conflict with bounds from astrophysics — these particles can be produced in stars, leading to various sorts of unusual behavior that aren’t observed. Now maybe the astrophysical bound can somehow be avoided; in fact, I’m sure some clever theorists are working on it already. But it would also be nice to get independent confirmation of the experimental effect.

Our first installment of unsolicited advice concerned the difficult question of how to get into graduate school; this one presumes that one has successfully leapt the hurdles of GRE’s and ornery admissions committees, and is faced with the perilous decision of which offer to accept. (If one has either one or zero offers, presumably the decision-making process is somewhat easier.) We will not, at the moment, be addressing whether you should be going to graduate school in the first place, or how to succeed once you get there.

This is a much more difficult task than the first installment. Not that it’s more difficult to decide where to go than to get into grad school in the first place; just that it’s much more difficult to give sensible advice about how to do it. When it comes to getting into grad schools, everyone agrees on the basic notions: good grades, test scores, letters, research experience. Choosing where to go, in contrast, is a highly personal decision, and what works for one person might be utterly irrelevant to someone else. Rather than being overly prescriptive, then, I thought it might be useful just to chat about some of the issues that come up. Ultimately, you’ll have to decide for yourself how to weigh the various factors.

• Why do you want to go to grad school in the first place? Sure, maybe you should have already given some thought to this question — but now is the time to get serious. Is your goal to become a professor or other professional researcher (which is typically assumed)? Or is it just to get a Ph.D., and then see what happens? Or is it simply to learn some science?

  As a general principle, the purpose of grad school is very different from that of your undergraduate college education. At least in the U.S., college serves multiple purposes: training in some concentration, to be sure, but also a broadly-based liberal education, as well as more general exposure to critical thinking, and crucially important social and personal aspects. Grad school is much more focused: it serves to train you how to be a working research scientist (or whatever, although I’ll be speaking as if it is science you’ll be studying, as that’s what I know best). In college it’s good to be a broad person and cast your net widely in the oceans of learning and experience. In grad school, however, there is a lot to be said for focusing as much as you can on the specific discipline in which you are specializing. Not that you should stop having broad interests, but it might make sense to sacrifice some of them temporarily to the goal of becoming an expert researcher.

  The reason for this is that, like it or not, you are entering a competition. Not necessarily grad school itself (where grading and suchlike are notoriously relaxed, although there may be competition for advisors and fellowships and such), but the ultimate job market. Most people who go to grad school want to get jobs as scientists, probably in academia. There are far fewer such jobs than there are grad students, so most people who get a Ph.D. will ultimately not succeed in becoming professors. And the other people who want those jobs are also very smart and dedicated. So, if you are serious about choosing this as your life’s path, it makes sense to really devote yourself to your craft during your grad school years, and give it your best shot. I personally think that the rigorous training provided by a Ph.D. is extremely useful and rewarding even if you don’t become a professor, but you should certainly enter the fray with open eyes.

  If becoming a professor is what you want to do, you should choose your school accordingly. At the same time, I’m a firm believer that your life doesn’t completely end just because you’re in grad school, nor that the process itself should be unpleasant. It should be extremely challenging, taking you to the limits of what you are capable of doing — but the days you spend in school are also days that you are alive, and you shouldn’t completely shut yourself away. That’s the difficult balance to strike. (Told you this wouldn’t be very helpful.)

Continue reading ‘Unsolicited advice, Part Deux: Choosing a grad school’

So I was a bit daunted by the task of trying to describe the excellent departmental colloquium we had here at USC Physics and Astronomy, mainly because I just did that long post just before this one on Categorically Not!, and I’m really quite a bit tired and still have to do a ton of stuff before going to sleep.

It was by the science writer (and now USC professor) KC Cole, and the title was “Lost in Translation: Writing about Science for the General Public”. Excellent title. Very very interesting topic, don’t you think, given all that we’ve discussed here and all that I have been known to rant (a bit) about here on the issue.

But guess what? It turned out (thanks to a quick google-blogs search) that another blogger came to the colloquium and did a post on it! So I don’t have to! Great stuff!…Please follow the link to it here. Whoever you are…thanks!

So I get to just say that it was a really fantastic presentation, and pop up a couple of pictures of KC in action, and urge you to read the post of the blogger, and comment here and there if you like:

As the blogger noted, some people (including them) had to sit on the stairs. This was because we had an excellent turnout, by physics department members from all groups who had a genuine interest (and told me that they really enjoyed the (unusual for a colloquium) topic and speaker) and from people from several other departments (not just science ones, but the school of journalism, the Dean’s office, etc). Here’s a shot of a bit of the audience….

On the subject matter itself (and the depressing and often comical state of science journalism in some prominent circles), we laughed, we cried…. we wondered what we could do to make it all better.

(1) Letters to your editor (suggested by KC) is one important way. Why does the LA Times not have a science section any more? Where is the actual science coverage in that paper now? Why did the Guardian abandon theirs? (Has their promise to put science routinely all through the newspaper come off? Is the science still good? Easy to find? I don’t know……I’ve not been reading the print version any more…. do tell if you know…)

(2) Another is to make sure that those young people in science, or in the arts, who might end up writing for newspapers one day (or editing them) get to know the importance of science in our society, and how we can’t have a real democracy if most of our population can’t make informed decisions about some of the big ticket items in politics today that affect our future and our quality of life…… yes, the ones which are all about science. Get them learning how to write, how to communicate the content as honestly as possible.

(3) Another is to, well, blog about the issue. And blog about your science. Practice writing for (and explaining science to) others as much as you can. The readers and the science writers will take notice and come to you, and maybe eventually some of the editors (the biggest part of the problem) will take notice too. If the editors (and writers) don’t take notice soon enough, they will become irrelevant anyway since (if this blogging lark continues to mushroom) more and more people get will continue to their science from sources closer to the producers of the knowledge….the web/blogosphere.

That latter possibility/probability is a big part of the reason I’m doing this blogging gig.

-cvj

So I told several people that I would probably blog about the most recent Categorically Not! event that took place on Sunday night as soon as I got home. It did not happen because somehow I ended up late night dancing at a salsa club in Culver City, and did not get home until well after midnight. (You’ll be pleased to know that I will not show you any pictures of that event.) I had to then get up in time to give a coherent 9:00am class on advanced and retarded potentials in electromagnetism.

So sorry about the delay. Here’s my report on the proceedings. Please come in and comment, adding bits that I did not mention, telling us whether you liked the event, and discussing the ideas, if you like.

The topic was “Intuition”. We had one of the most well-attended events in terms of audience numbers, and three really great presenters! Everybody was really engaged in the material and there were so many wonderful questions (and answers).

We kicked off with Joe Polchinski (KITP-UCSB) talking about the creative process in science, particulalry theoretical physics.

It was done as a sort of Question and Answer session with our host KC Cole setting the stage first with some introductory remarks about that area of research, and then asking Joe some questions to which he gave answers in general terms and specific terms. The specific terms involved him talking about thought experiments (he mentioned for example Einstein’s reasoning about the Equivalence Principle by imaginig freely falling in a elevator….). He explained why thought experiments are useful guides to new insights. (He talked about his own thought experiment that led to his discovery of D-branes. He imagined what happened when you start with a higher dimensional string theory and curl up one of those dimensions and shrink it. He referred to this process as putting open and closed strings into a box and then shrinking the box away…… I won’t go into the details here. - For the string theorist readers: It is his famous T-duality argument I like to use in my lectures on the topic. Several of you will know it.) Here’s Joe and KC in conversation:

For those of you who are not aware of the Awesome power of the String Theory Masters, for it is seldom on display, check out Joe demonstrating -with careful concentration- the existence of extra dimensions. He’s reaching with both arms into the dimension we call “the M-direction” while KC and the audience look on, astonished, as the arms disappear temporarily. Here’s a closeup:

On the issue of intuition, I was pleased to hear Joe (and the other two speakers later) appropriately demystify aspects of the term by emphasising the importance of good ol’ plain hard work which is needed to develop a huge library of “things you’ve seen before” which help form a bedrock from which intuition can spring. This is true in any field. The most important asset is experience to draw on. So much familiarity with a set of practices or techniques that you internalise them completely. That comes with hard work. There’s no getting away from it, folks!

Continue reading ‘Intuitively Excellent’

The Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi) was mentioned in the comments of Mark’s post about John Barrow’s Templeton Prize. This is a new organization that is devoted to supporting innovative ideas at the frontiers of physics and cosmology. It is led by Max Tegmark of MIT and Anthony Aguirre of UCSC, two leading young cosmologists, backed up by an extremely prestigious Scientific Advisory Panel.

Sounds like a great idea, but some of us have questions, primarily concerning the source of funding for FQXi — currently the John Templeton Foundation. The Templeton Foundation is devoted to bringing together science and religion, which may or may not be your cup of tea. I’m already on the record as turning down money from them (see also this Business Week article) — and believe me, turning down money is not part of my usual repertoire. But Max and Anthony and the rest are good scientists, so we here at Cosmic Variance thought it would be good to hear the story behind FQXi in their own words. We invited Anthony to contribute a guest post about the goals and procedures of the new institute, and he was kind enough to agree. Feel free to ask questions and be politely skeptical (or for that matter enthusiastically supportive), and we can all learn more about what’s going on.

———-

I (Anthony Aguirre) have been invited by Sean to write a guest blog entry discussing an exciting new project that Max Tegmark and I have been leading: Foundational Questions in Physics and Cosmology (”FQX”). This program was publicly announced in October, and the Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi) was formally launched as a legal entity in February, as was its first call for proposals. There is a plethora of information on FQXi at www.fqxi.org, but the kind invitation by Cosmic Variance provides a good opportunity to outline informally what FQXi is, why we think it is important, to address some reservations voiced in this forum, and to generate some discussion in the physics and cosmology community.

What is FQXi all about? Its stated mission is “To catalyze, support, and disseminate research on questions at the foundations of physics and cosmology, particularly new frontiers and innovative ideas integral to a deep understanding of reality, but unlikely to be supported by conventional funding sources.” Less formally, the aim of FQXi is to allow researchers in physics, cosmology, and related fields who like to think about and do real research about really big, deep, foundational or even “ultimate” questions, to actually do so — when otherwise they could not. We boiled this type of research down into two defining terms: the research should be foundational (with potentially significant and broad implications for our understanding of the deep or “ultimate” nature of reality) and it should be unconventional (consisting of rigorous research which, because of its speculative, non-mainstream, or high-risk nature, would otherwise go unperformed due to lack of funding.) The particular types of research FQXi will support are detailed in the FQXi Charter and in the first call for proposals, which also features a handy (but by no means whatsoever comprehensive) list of example projects, and their likelihood of being suitable for FQXi funding. In addition to straightforward grants, FQXi will run various other programs — “mini”-grants, conferences, essay contests, a web forum, etc. — focused on the same sort of science.

Why is FQXi important? There are a number of foundational questions that are of deep interest to humanity at large — and are the (often hidden) passion of and inspiration for researchers — but which various financial and “social” pressures make it very difficult for researchers to actually pursue. National funding sources, for example, tend to shy aware from research that is high-risk/high- reward, or speculative, or very fundamental, or unconventional, or “too philosophical”, and instead support research using fairly proven methods with a high probability of advancing science along known routes. There is nothing wrong with this, and it creates a large amount of excellent science. But it leaves some really interesting questions on the sidelines. We go on at length about this in the FQXi Charter — but the researchers FQXi aims to support will know all too well what the problems are. Our goal is to fund the research into foundational questions in physics and cosmology that would otherwise go unfunded.

More money to support really exciting, interesting, and, yes, fun research seems like an unreservedly good thing. Nonetheless, a couple of significant reservations have been voiced to us, both by writers on this blog and others. These are:

1) Some feel research that is very speculative or “borderline philosophical” is just a waste of time and resources — if the research was worth doing, conventional agencies would fund it. We won’t accept this criticism from anyone who has worked on either time machines or the arrow of time (so Sean is out) :), but from others we acknowledge that they feel this way, we respectfully disagree, and we think that many of the giants of 20th century physics (Einstein, Bohr, Schroedinger, Pauli, etc.) would also disagree. Ultimately, those who feel this way are free not to participate in FQXi. We also note that we think it would by great if some private donors were also to support more conventional research in a way that complemented or supplemented federal funding (as they do in, e.g., the Sloan and Packard fellowships); that, however, is not the case here: the donation supporting FQXi is expressely for the purpose of supporting foundational research. Which brings us to…

2) The second major reservation concerns FQXi’s current sole source of funding: the John Templeton Foundation (JTF), an organization that espouses and supports the “constructive dialogue between science and religion.” It is understandable that some people may be suspicious of JTF’s involvement with FQXi, and in today’s political climate in which Intelligent Design and other movements seek to undermine science in order to promote a religious and political agenda, such suspicion is especially understandable. But it is as important as ever to also be open-minded and objective. The salient points, we think, regarding JTF and FQXi are:

• FQXi is a non-profit scientific grant-awarding organization fully independent from its donors (we are actively seeking other donors beyond JTF, see below) and operated in accordance with its Charter. Proposal funding is determined via a standard and rigorous peer-review process, and an expert panel appointed by FQXi. The structure of FQXi is such that donors — including JTF — have no control or influence over individual proposal selection or renewal. Specifically, scientific decisions are made (as enshrined in the FQXi corporate Bylaws) by the Scientific Directorate (Max & I), on the basis of advice from review panels and the Scientific Advisory Panel. The only condition of the JTF grant to FQXi is that FQXi’s grantmaking be consistent with the FQXi Charter, which, as stated previously, can be viewed in its entirity at fqxi.org.
• JTF’s stated interest in FQXi is captured in the FQXi Charter: the questions being tackled by researchers funded by FQXi intimately connect with and inform not just scientific fields, but also philosophy, theology and religious belief systems. Answers to these questions will have profound intellectual, practical, and spiritual implications for anyone with deep curiosity about the world’s true nature.
• While FQXi’s funding is currently all from JTF, we have been strongly encouraged by JTF to seek (and are actively working on finding) additional donors; furthermore, there is no guarantee of JTF funding beyond the first four years — though we certainly hope FQXi will go on long past the initial four-year phase.
• As for JTF benefiting “by association” with FQXi and the great research we hope that it will support, well, we feel that JTF has been extremely generous not just in giving a large sum of money to science, without strings attached, and with a great deal of support through the complex process of setting up FQXi as an independent institute of just the sort that Max & I wanted. If all this reflects well on JTF, I would submit that they deserve it.

We’ve tried hard to make FQXi’s operation and goals as transparent as possible, so those in the community can make informed decisions on whether they would like to participate in what we are hoping to do. We are very excited by the proposals that are coming in so far, and invite interested scientists to take a look at the call for proposals before it is too late (April 2). For those who are not actively researching foundational questions, we hope to have a very active public discussion and outreach program for both scientists and the interested public; we invite you to periodically check the FQXi website.

Thank you for this opportunity to discuss FQXi at Cosmic Variance.

Crooked Timber is having another of their excellent seminars, where several of the contributors gang up and discuss the work of someone else, who they often persuade to contribute. In this case they are discussing The Republican War on Science by Chris Mooney — well worth checking out. (Although PZ does yelp, with justification, about the inclusion of Steve Fuller. I’m sure that there are respectable pro-science Republicans who could have been brought in to critique the book.)

I never did a proper review of TRWoS myself, as I’ve been reading it piecemeal rather than properly from start to finish. Frankly, it’s too depressing to read too much at once. Like Ted Barlow, I approached the book gingerly, because it certainly is polemical and tells liberals like me what they want to hear. But ultimately I don’t really want to hear it — even if I would prefer Democrats in power rather than Republicans, I still don’t want to think that the current administration is so craven and dishonest as to blatantly distort the scientific process for political ends. But they are, and it’s important to keep our eyes open about it and resist politicization wherever it pops up. Chris’s book is an invaluable contribution to that project.

Two things.

(1) So on my wanderings through the Hollywood Farmer’s market yesterday (see right an earlier picture of the sort of loot you can get there), I decided to stop at my favourite tamale stand for lunch. While eating the tamale sitting on the curb, I met a very interesting person, Ysanne Spevack, (who was also sitting on the curb, chowing down on some excellent jerk chicken and fried plantains from the stand opposite) who’s an expert on the organic food industry, a mine of information about it and generally fun to talk to. See the amazing website that she edits and helps write, or her eight books, for more information about organic food. Excellent!

(2) Well, curbside eating turned into tea in a nearby cafe to talk further (it’s not often someone actually wants to [join me in] listen to me droning on and on and on about public transport and bikes, gardening and drought-tolerant plant varieties, etc) and then we were joined by a friend of hers. Turns out she’s a model. The reason that is interesting is because Continue reading ‘We Have Agents In The Field’

The new WMAP results have told us a lot about the universe. The basic findings are:

• The LambdaCDM model — a universe comprised of about 4% ordinary matter, 22% dark matter, and 74% dark energy — passes yet another test. The data fit quite well, and we have some new constraints on the cosmological parameters.
• There is some evidence that primordial perturbations, the small ripples in density that later grew into stars and galaxies, did not have precisely the same amplitude on all scales. More quantitatively, the scalar spectral index n was measured to be 0.951 +0.015/-0.019 (updated — see comment below), whereas purely scale-free behavior would be n=1. It’s not as statistically significant as we would like, but it’s something.
• Reionization, the process in which electrons were ripped from ambient hydrogen atoms when the first stars turned on, happened a little bit later than the first-year WMAP data seemed to indicate. This is an important input to our understanding of the “dark ages” between the early universe and the bright galaxies we see today.

All of this is very exciting to professional cosmologists. But consider the perspective of a newspaper that wants to convey that excitement to a popular audience. The data on LambdaCDM are important, but verifying that a known model is still consistent might not seem like earth-shattering news. The information about reionization is new, but early stars don’t quite have the origin-of-the-universe kind of implications that really seem exciting to the reader on the street. But, intriguingly, the slight scale dependence of the density perturbations fits very well with the predictions of the inflationary universe scenario. In this story, the tiny ripples in the primordial universe have their origin in quantum-mechanical fluctuations during the period when the universe is “inflating” (expanding quasi-exponentially at ultra-high energies). Since the expansion rate during inflation does gradually change with time, the amout of such fluctuations gradually evolves from scale to scale. Inflation traces back to the very earliest times about which we can sensibly speak (and long before we have any reliable data), so that is definitely something that could get the juices flowing.

So a lot of stories focused on the support for inflation as the centerpiece of the WMAP narrative. Which is fine, as far as it goes, but needs to be treated with some caveats. First, of course, even in the most generous reading, the purported detection of scale dependence was only at a level of about 3.3 standard deviations, which is not a reliable discovery by most standards in physics. (In particle-physics lingo, it’s “evidence for,” not “discovery of,” which would require 5 standard deviations.) More importantly, even if there had been incontrovertible evidence for scale dependence, that would by no means prove that inflation was right beyond reasonable doubt; it fits well into the inflation story, but certainly doesn’t preclude the possibility of other stories. And finally, it should go without saying that the evidence being discussed is somewhat indirect; it’s not like we’re looking directly at what the universe was doing 10^-30 seconds after the Big Bang. (The cosmic microwave background is a snapshot of the universe about 380,000 years after the Big Bang, quite a while later.)

But those subtleties are hard to get across in a few words, and the resulting stories in the press showed evidence of the struggle between conveying the (undeniable) excitement and getting the story precisely correct. Indeed, the tension was evident right in the press release from Goddard Space Flight Center. There’s principal investigator Chuck Bennett, choosing his words with care:

WMAP polarization data allow scientists to discriminate between competing models of inflation for the first time. This is a milestone in cosmology. “We can now distinguish between different versions of what happened within the first trillionth of a second of the universe,” said WMAP Principal Investigator Charles Bennett of the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. “The longer WMAP observes, the more it reveals about how our universe grew from microscopic quantum fluctuations to the vast expanses of stars and galaxies we see today.”

Actually, it’s not the first data that allow us to discriminate between different models, although it is some of the most precise data to date. But the idea of “distinguishing between different versions of what happened” is a very good one, and a nice way to tell the story. Sadly, in the next sentence the possibility that inflation is not right seems to have been abandoned, as he speaks with apparent confidence about the origin of galaxies in quantum fluctuations.

This urge to overstate the case is evident elsewhere, as well. In the New York Times we read:

The reason, Dr. Spergel explained, is that the force driving inflation is falling as it proceeds. The smaller bumps would be produced later and so a little less forcefully than the bigger ones.

That, in fact, is exactly what the Wilkinson probe has measured. Dr. Spergel said, “It’s very consistent with simplest inflation models, just what inflation models say we should see.”

Michael Turner, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago, called the results, “the first smoking gun evidence for inflation.”

Here, David Spergel is being very careful to stress that the data are consistent with simple models, which is quite different from saying that it verifies those models are correct. Michael Turner is much less cautious, as “smoking gun evidence” would lead you to believe that the case was closed, which it definitely is not. It’s just very difficult to simultaneously be a cautious scientist and convey an accurate sense of the very real excitement that cosmologists have when examining these data.

If the quotes are ambiguous, the headlines are worse. Let’s face it, “Satellite Gathers Useful Data” wouldn’t sell a lot of newspapers. So many places went for the idea that we had actually observed the extremely early universe, rather than made some observations that constrained theories of the extremely early universe. So we get:

• Astronomers glimpse newborn universe
• NASA probe captures ‘cosmic growth spurt’
• Astronomers Detect First Split-Second of the Universe
• NASA probe peers back to an instant after Big Bang
• University physicists see origins of cosmos

Really, WMAP did not see the origin of the cosmos, any more than seeing an infant is the same as seeing someone being born. But it’s not hard to figure out where they got the idea — the NASA press release is titled “NASA Satellite Glimpses Universe’s First Trillionth of a Second.”

Interestingly, some of the headlines were misleading in the opposite sense, by being less exciting than the truth:

• Evidence for ‘Big Bang’ Seen
• “Smoking gun” about “big bang”
• Evidence for Universe Expansion Found

We already have plenty of evidence for the Big Bang! Some more of that would be anticlimactic indeed. And, needless to say, the fact that the universe is expanding is not exactly hot news. I know what they’re all trying to say, but can’t but feeling that if people had a better general idea about what we already know about cosmology, they wouldn’t be tempted to write headlines like this.

I have great sympathy for everyone involved in the process of bringing a story like this to the public — from the scientists working on the project, to the outside scientists who help interpret the results for reporters, to the journalists themselves, to the headline-writers with the unenviable task of squeezing some subtle thoughts into just a few words. But the readers need to take some of these overly enthusiastic declarations with a grain of salt. If you want the real scoop, you have to go beyond the newspaper headlines. For example, by reading blogs.

If you’re a physicist, and most likely even if you’re not, you will remember the cold fusion debacle of 1989. Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, working at the University of Utah, claimed to have achieved successful nuclear fusion - in this case the fusion of two Deuterium nuclei - at room temperature, thereby suggesting the promise of abundant cheap energy.

There were always theoretical problems with the idea that this experiment could work but, of course, what matters is what repeatable experiments tell you, not what theorists can explain. However, it became clear rather quickly that independent researchers could not consistently repeat Pons and Fleischmann’s results. In fact, before too long, the physics community reached a consensus, through repeated experimentation, that cold fusion had not been observed.

Although there was some short-term hype from the University of Utah, and an international discussion and controversy about the results, I think that how the cold fusion issue played out is a real success for science. The correct result was arrived at in the right way, independently of the reputations and personalities of the investigators and the interests of their institutions.

This doesn’t mean that everyone accepted the result, and there has remained a tiny band of people who, some for dishonest, financial reasons and some for reasons that are beyond me, insist that the Pons and Fleischmann result was real.

If you’d like the whole sordid story, then the entire episode is detailed and critically discussed by Bob Park in his wonderful book Voodoo Science: the Road from Foolishness to Fraud, which is devoted to describing how and trying to understand why scientific fraud occurs. Park is a hero of mine, and I relish the sense of relief and common cause that accompanies the arrival in my email inbox of his sharp, reasoned, funny and sarcastic newsletter - What’s New - every Friday afternoon.

I’m bringing up this somewhat old story because of a company I stumbled across via a piece on Slashdot Science. We all know that there are numerous dodgy investment deals out there, promising impressive returns from the use of questionable or plainly fraudulent scientific claims. So it is presumably little surprise to most people that there exists a company - D2Fusion - that is attempting to cash in, all these years later, on the discredited idea of cold fusion.

What made this story more interesting and disappointing to me is the piece of news that put them on Slashdot Science’s radar, with headline

He’s Back! Cold Fusion Pioneer Dr. Martin Fleischmann Joins D2Fusion Engineering Team to Deliver Long Awaited Energy Devices to the World

While it is fine (although sometimes personally somewhat embarassing) to come up with a theoretical idea or experimental result which is ultimately shown to be wrong, it is certainly not reasonable to insist, after multiple definitive tests, that everyone else is wrong and that your one result must be correct. Nevertheless, here is Fleischmann helping taking his discredited physics ideas public.

The press release is littered with the kind of hype that one would expect to be used to gloss over the fact that the basic physics behind this technology has been clearly shown to be wrong. Perhaps my favorite bit is

D2Fusion CEO Russ George notes, …

“True, our theoretical grasp of all the processes in play remains imperfect, but neither can we fully explain the workings of aspirin, acupuncture or high temperature superconductivity. Unresolved questions about their mechanisms have not stopped us from enjoying their respective benefits, which are pale indeed compared to what solid state fusion offers. We are now certain that heat generation from this process is copious, safe, inexpensive and reproducible, and in terms of commercialization that seems like a perfect place to start.”

Except that there are multiple, repeatable experiments confirming the efficacy of aspirin (and comparing to acupuncture isn’t helping your case pal!).

If you read all the way to the end, then you’ll see the important part of the text, which probably accompanies all announcements of new companies using emerging technologies

A number of assertions in this press release may be considered to be forward-looking statements made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties, including timely development, and market acceptance of products and technologies, competitive market conditions, and the ability to secure additional sources of financing. The actual results Solar Energy Limited may achieve could differ materially from any forward-looking statements due to such risks and uncertainties.

However, in this case all one needs is to look backwards to see whether the actual results will or will not differ materially from the statements in the press release.