Blogs / Cosmic Variance

Hey, in a couple of years you may be able to send an object up into space and get it back for as little as $99! A private company in California (as it is so often) is aiming to make this happen by 2008. The payload will need to fit inside a space the size of a standard soda can, and weigh no more than 350 grams, but that’s probably room to be pretty useful actually. To the right is an artist’s impression of the spacecraft they are expecting to build to accomplish this.

I learned about this from a New Scientist article by Kelly Young. You can read the whole thing here.

Now some of you are thinking about the fun things you’d want to send up there for a short trip, ranging from personal objects to scientific experiments you might design.

Care to share?

-cvj

On the BBC Radio 4 programme “In Our Time” this week, there was an excellent program on the history of immunisation. For about a week you can get the link to the programme here. Beyond that, dig into their archives, here. I thought the discussion on this programme was just excellent (once again….see their archives for other great ones, some of which I’ve blogged about here before), with host Melvin Bragg talking with guests, Nadja Durbach, Associate Professor of History at the University of Utah, Chris Dye, Co-ordinator of the World Health Organisation’s work on tuberculosis epidemiology, and Sanjoy Bhattacharya, Lecturer in the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL. Here is the blurb on the programme from the website:

THE SEARCH FOR IMMUNISATION

In 1717, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the wife of the British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, wrote a letter to her friend describing how she had witnessed the practice of smallpox inoculation in Constantinople. This involved the transfer of material from a smallpox postule into multiple cuts made in a vein. Lady Montagu had lost her brother to smallpox and was amazed that the Middle Eastern practice of inoculation rendered the fatal disease harmless. In Britain, the practice was unknown.

Inoculation was an early attempt at creating immunity to disease, but was later dismissed when Edward Jenner pioneered immunisation through vaccination in 1796. Vaccination was hailed a huge success. Napoleon described it as the greatest gift to mankind, but it met unexpected opposition after it was made compulsory in Britain in 1853.

How did a Gloucestershire country surgeon become known as the father of vaccination? Why did the British government introduce compulsory smallpox vaccination in 1853? What were the consequences of those who opposed it? And how was the disease finally eradicated?

This is an excellent programme. Have a listen. Go on……

-cvj

Via digby: Jorge Hirsch at UC San Diego has gathered a few of his friends — Nobel Laureates, Boltzmann and Fields Medalists, Medal of Science winners, and past Presidents of the American Physical Society — to write a letter to President Bush, urging him not to use nuclear weapons against Iran. The signatories are:

• Philip Anderson, professor of physics at Princeton University and Nobel Laureate in Physics
• Michael Fisher, professor of physics at the Institute for Physical Science and Technology, University of Maryland and Wolf Laureate in Physics
• David Gross, professor of theoretical physics and director of the Kavli Institute of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara and Nobel Laureate in Physics
• Jorge Hirsch, professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego
• Leo Kadanoff, professor of physics and mathematics at the University of Chicago and recipient of the National Medal of Science
• Joel Lebowitz, professor of mathematics and physics, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey and Boltzmann Medalist
• Anthony Leggett, professor of physics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Nobel Laureate, Physics
• Eugen Merzbacher, professor of physics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and former president, American Physical Society
• Douglas Osheroff, professor of physics and applied physics, Stanford University and Nobel Laureate, Physics
• Andrew Sessler, former director of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and former president, American Physical Society
• George Trilling, professor of physics, University of California, Berkeley, and former president, American Physical Society
• Frank Wilczek, professor of physics, MIT and Nobel Laureate, Physics
• Edward Witten, professor of physics, Institute for Advanced Study and Fields Medalist

In reality, winning a Nobel Prize doesn’t make you an informed judge of geopolitical affairs. But anyone in their right mind can see it would be a bad idea to launch a nuclear first strike against Iran or anyone else, and these folks are in their right minds. Hopefully they can lend some heft and gather some publicity for the cause.

Part of me wonders whether the administration understands perfectly well that a nuclear strike would be madness, but they want to give the impression of being reckless cowboys so that Iran will dismantle their nuclear program — that’s a hopeless plan, of course, but at least not wildly irreponsible. Then I remember that they have consistently acted like reckless cowboys in every previous situation, and my heart sinks a little. Remember DeLong’s Law: “The Bush Administration is always worse than one imagines, even when taking into account DeLong’s Law.”

The Arthur H. Compton Lectures are a great tradition at the Enrico Fermi Institute here at the University of Chicago. Twice each academic year, a postdoc (!) from the EFI gives a series of 8-10 lectures on Saturday mornings, aimed at the general public, on a topic of current scientific interest. The EFI focuses on research in particle physics, astrophysics, and gravitation, so that’s what the lectures tend to cover. They are a great resource, and it’s amazing to see over a hundred people from the community trudge to a lecture hall every Saturday morning to hear about modern physics.

This Spring’s lectures are being given by Nick Halmagyi, a string theorist whose office is right across from mine. The title is String Theory: With a View Towards Reality, and Nick is gradually putting notes and slides online. With two lectures gone by, reality itself has been the focus thus far, as Nick sets up the current state of particle physics. String theory will undoubtedly follow, and when the moment comes to draw the connection between the two time will probably have run out.

Previous Compton lecturers are a distinguished lot, including our very own Risa. The EFI does a terrible job at keeping them online, but I was able to dig up slides from a few recent lecture series.

• The Story of Galaxy Formation in Our Universe, Risa Wechsler
• The Origin of Mass in Particle Physics, Ambreesh Gupta
• The Age of Things: Sticks, Stones and the Universe, Matthew Hedman
• Cosmic Fireworks, Frank Timmes
• Sketching the Biggest Picture—The Adventure of Experimental Cosmology, Clement Pryke
• Invasions in Particle Physics, Maria Spiropulu
• Brown Dwarfs and Extrasolar Planets, Edward Brown
• Unravelling the Mysteries of our Evolving Universe, Joseph Mohr

Any recent ones with online slides that I missed, let me know. And if you’re in the neighborhood, anyone is welcome to come to Nick’s lectures, which are at 11 a.m. most Saturdays. He speaks with a distinct Australian accent, but it’s ususally possible to understand him.

From the Guardian, an article by Bobbie Johnson: Um…. apparently bloggers are influential people, so watch out.

We might be influencing you right now. Are you feeling influenced?

A quote from the article:

“Bloggers and blog-readers are ‘influentials’ - the minority that pays attention to events outside of political and news cycles. They also tend on average to be better off, better educated and, more importantly, employed.”

Well, I don’t know about that other stuff, but…. better go do some work now…..for my employer. Among other things, I’ve got two movie scripts to read. No, really…. more later.

-cvj

(Thanks, spyder.)

Heh…. brought to you by the power of blog search engines, a report on one of our more unusual graduate school interviews for USC physics, by an interviewee……

Two things of note:

(1) I was listening very carefully. I was impressed by his work experience. I prefer to listen in such interviews rather than talk. The interview is about the interviewee, not me.

(2) It was Santa Monica Farmer’s market…two blocks in from the beach on which he had breakfast.

(3) (Ok, three. Three things of note.) He seems to have forgotten what must have been the weirdest thing of all (in retrospect). As we were walking along wheeling my bike (the ever-wonderful Brompton) two British visitors cycled by and one of them was riding a Brompton. Of course, they shouted out, pulled over and we chatted for a while, and together shook our heads in lamentation of the lack of other such bikes in the region, etc. They were on a conference visit, and had popped their folders into a suitcase and flown over, just as I described in an earlier post. They were appreciating LA properly by cycling around between conference sessions. Excellent. Needless to say, I was over the moon about this, and enthused about it for a while before the interview/chat resumed.

(3.5) “Clifford is a string theorist. That means he’s really smart.” Um…. apply several helpings of pinches of salt here.

-cvj

You will recall that last month I went to a memorial service and all-day symposium for Andrew Chamblin, who passed away in February. (You can read much more in this link, particularly in the comment thread.) The memorial was in Louisville, Kentucky, where Andrew was on the Physics Faculty. Several of Andrew’s friends, colleagues and collaborators came to the event. The dominant component of the attendance was from people who were in either of the physics departments at Louisville, Lexington and Cincinatti, the three closest cities, which have physics links with each other (some of those links involved collaborations with Andrew). Andrew’s family and several close friends were there, and some physicists from further away, such as myself. There were also readings of the numerous letters and tributes that were sent and from other communications (e.g. from the thread of the post I did on this blog). These were from friends and colleagues from much further afield who were unable to make it to the Louisville memorial symposium and service.

Before I say a bit more about the events of the day, I’d like to draw your attention to the fact that there will be two more memorial services for Andrew, one at Oxford and the other at Cambridge. This will give many more of Andrew’s friends and colleagues the chance to gather in his memory, and to pay tribute to him. Please tell as many people as possible about these events in case they wish to attend and/or participate. Furthermore, a Memorial Lecture Fund has been set up, to which everyone is invited to contribute. There will be an Andrew Chamblin Memorial Lecture every year, funded by the contributions to this. (Every little bit helps, so don’t be shy.)

Jo Ashbourn, who has been working very hard on several aspects of the memorials and the fund, writes about the memorial services:

“There will be a memorial service for Andrew in Oxford on Friday 9th June at 2:00pm in Christ Church Cathedral with tea in Christ Church Dining Hall after the service.

The following day in Cambridge on Saturday 10th June there will be another memorial service for Andrew at 2:30pm in Pembroke College Chapel with tea afterwards in the Old Library.

The two services are designed to be different for two phases of Andrew’s life, but everyone is welcome to either or both. If you would like to come, please email hacmemorial (at) yahoo.co.uk so we can keep track of the numbers attending.”

…and about the memorial fund she writes:

The Andrew Chamblin Memorial Lecture Fund has just been set up in order to endow a lecture in Andrew’s name at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology at the University of Cambridge. The plan is to have an annual lecture on topics which were of particular interest to Andrew and we hope to have enough donations in order to have the first lecture later this year or early next year if possible.

Donations can be made as follows with completion of the forms below (see links):

USA donations

For US donors, tax-deductible contributions can be made to:

Cambridge in America
PO Box 271
New York, NY 10013,

with indication of the donor’s request that the gift be granted to the Andrew Chamblin Memorial Lecture Fund at DAMTP, University of Cambridge. [Links to form: doc , pdf]

UK / ROW donations

These donations should be made to:

The Cambridge Foundation
1 Quayside
Bridge Street
Cambridge, CB5 8AB,

with indication of the donor’s request that the gift be allocated to the Andrew Chamblin Memorial Lecture Fund at DAMTP, University of Cambridge. [Links to form: doc , pdf]

All donations will be gratefully acknowledged. If anyone has any questions, please email hacmemorial (at) yahoo.co.uk for more information.

The Louisville day of events was very special. First, there was a series of really (more…)

A little late, but I didn’t want to let slip this interesting discussion about the agonizing process of making experimental particle physics results ready for public consumption from Tommaso Dorigo and Gordon Watts. You’ll recall that we mentioned a couple of weeks ago the new results from Fermilab’s Tevatron on B-mixing, a measurement that puts interesting new constraints on the possibilities for physics beyond the Standard Model. The first announcement was from the D0 (”D-Zero”) experiment; as Collin pointed out in the comments, the CDF experiment followed with their own results soon thereafter.

From the CDF point of view, this is not how things are supposed to be; CDF is supposed to get there first, and D0 is supposed to confirm their results. Speaking from the CDF side, Tommaso talks about the process:

The publication process of CDF data analyses is baroque, bordering the grotesque. Once a group finalizes their result and presents it at internal meetings, the result has to be blessed. This involves three rounds of scrutiny, the full documentation of the analysis in internal notes, and often the fight with skeptics who like to sit at meetings and play “shoot the sitting duck” with the unfortunate colleague presenting the result. Usually, when an important result is on, the physicists who produced it are asked to perform additional checks of various kinds, and defend it with internal referees. When all of that is through, and not a day earlier, the result can be shown at Physics conferences.

After that happens, one would like to get the result on a Physics journal as soon as possible - to be cited!!! But just then, another much longer nightmare starts, when a process called “godparenting” begins and three knowledgeable colleagues (the godparents) are designated to scrutinize every detail of the work. Then a draft paper is produced, and in the following two weeks all the collaborators can play “shoot the duck” in written form, by sending criticism and demanding yet more checks. Then a second draft follows, and the process repeats…. In the end, usually six months pass between the blessing of a result at the physics meeting and the forwarding of a paper to a journal.

Gordon, from the D0 side, agrees with the general outline.

I don’t think it is that much different than what CDF has to go through — perhaps a bit more streamlined. We are all afraid that something wrong will make it out; hence all the layers of cross checking that go on. All of the collaboration is on the author list; this is the way the collaboration makes sure that the results that get out are correct. It can be a pain!

Read the whole things.

Of course there’s a lot more to the sociology of particle physics experiments than deciding when to release results. Interestingly, there are a lot of great books that take high-energy experiments and experimenters as their source material. Even novels — I recently read A Hole in Texas by Herman Wouk (best known for The Caine Mutiny and The Winds of War). It’s a short book set in the aftermath of the cancellation of the Superconducting Super Collider, imagining the hysteria if China managed to beat us to the Higgs boson. As a novel, I’ve read better; the romantic and political plots are somewhat perfunctory and not very believable. (And obviously written by a man; where else can you find no fewer than three attractive and accomplished women throwing themselves at a somewhat over-the-hill and not especially charming male physicist?) But the physics is surprisingly good; Wouk really put some effort into getting it right, including field trips to Fermilab and the SSC site.

And then you have your honest social-science explorations of the anthropology of the tribe of particle physicists. Beamtimes and Lifetimes, by anthropologist Sharon Traweek, treats HEP experimenters the same way we would treat an isolated tribe in the Amazon jungle, trying to figure out what makes them tick. (I’m still not sure.) But for my money, far and away the most insightful book is Nobel Dreams by Gary Taubes, the story of how Carlo Rubbia smashed the competition, not always using the most fair-minded tactics, to discover the W boson and win the Nobel Prize. Oh yes, and how he then failed to win another Nobel for discovering supersymmetry, despite repeatedly suggesting that his UA1 experiment had found evidence for it. A fascinating read, one that makes you tremble at the ambition of Rubbia and his lieutenants, admire the superhuman dedication of the many physicists on the project, and thank your lucky stars that your own working hours are a bit more sensible.

Update: Tommaso and Gordon explain more about the physics of the result.

Stanislav Evgrafovich Petrov is arguably the most influential person who ever lived, although I had never heard of him until seeing this post on Cynical-C and this tribute.

Our story unfolds on September 26, 1983. Lieutenant Colonel Petrov was the officer on duty at the Serpukhov-15 bunker near Moscow with the responsibility of alerting Soviet command if there was any indication that the U.S. had launched a nuclear missile strike against the U.S.S.R. The response, of course, would be massive retaliation, and the deaths of many millions of people.

Just after midnight, the computers indicated that an American missile had been launched. Petrov was skeptical, since it wouldn’t make much sense to just launch a single missile. However, soon thereafter, the computer indicated that another four missiles had been launched.

To make a long story short (see Wikipedia for more), Petrov decided that the multiple launches were still a computer error rather than a real attack, and declined to alert his superiors, putting the Soviet Union at risk if he were mistaken. As it turned out, Petrov was right, and he had certainly averted an accidental worldwide catastrophe. But he had disobeyed procedure in the process; his superiors gave him a reprimand and reassigned him to a lower-profile post. The entire incident was kept secret until 1998.

Forget Easter, here’s a guy who deserves our thanks.

The question is: what would you have done? Presume that you were in an equivalent situtation, responsible for the defense of your country, a mission in which you believed with all your heart. But you have no desire to have millions of people die unnecessarily. How certain would you have to be that an attack was actually occuring before you would set massive retaliation in motion? Fifty-fifty? 100-1? A million to one? Or would you never retaliate, knowing that your decision would lead to hundreds of nuclear warheads raining down on your homeland, and your mortal enemy presumably taking over the world?

That title is the first line from a poem that is quoted in this newspaper article (Rutland Herald) on physicist John Brodie, who died accidentally in January, at age 36. John wrote the poem to his father. John was such a sweet person, so softly spoken and good-natured.

I found the Rutland Herald article on Not Even Wrong. There was also an obituary which appeared in the Washington Post and in the Baltimore Sun. The Rutland Herald article takes the oppoortunity to go into more detail on John’s life, and the tragic circumstances of his death. An extract about his education:

Brodie had the look of an All-American — blue eyes, blond hair, a tall, toned body and a wide smile — but he was no “big man on campus.” Personable yet humble, he won acceptance to medical school, only to earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees in physics from Cornell in, respectively, 1991 and 1992.

Taking a year off to tour Africa, Asia, Australia and Europe with nothing but a backpack, the son of Quaker parents turned to Eastern religions and shoulder-length hair. But soon he was back to the books, earning a doctorate in theoretical physics from Princeton University in 1998.

And on his family background:

For Brodie, science was a family tradition. His late grandfather, Herbert Hartley, was an organic chemist who helped develop the polyurethane industry and was honored by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill for designing the antitank hand grenade used in World War II.

His father, Harry Brodie, is a retired organic chemist who developed the first estrogen-biosynthesis inhibitors now used to treat breast cancer.

His mother, Angela Hartley Brodie, is a University of Maryland researcher who last year became the first woman to receive the $250,000 international Charles F. Kettering Prize for “the most outstanding recent contribution to the diagnosis or treatment of cancer.”

On John’s research:

He went on to study the theory at Stanford University and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ont., and published more than a dozen research papers in peer-reviewed journals. (The Journal of High Energy Physics, for example, ran his article on “D-branes in Massive IIA and Solitons in Chern-Simons Theory” in 2001.)

I had a lot of fun talking physics with him, when I saw him at Stanford, and later at Perimeter, and I got a lot from those conversations. A sad, sad loss for the field.

-cvj