Cate Blanchett to play Bob Dylan in biopic.

The resemblance is uncanny.

To be candid, Blanchett will not have to shoulder the burden all by herself; Heath Ledger, Christian Bale, and Richard Gere are among those who will portray different aspects of Dylan in the upcoming I’m Not There, due to be released next year.

I hope you’ve seen the Wallace and Gromit movie “The Curse of the Were-Rabbit”. W+G have to catch a giant rabbit, which has been terrorizing lots of English vegetable gardens, etc, etc. Mayhem follows, and much hilarity, all very cleverly executed…. I blogged about it some time ago, and you can see some of the pictures of the models and sets that they had on display at the showing in that post too.

I was put in mind of it last week when I popped over to London to play the role of uncle, wander the streets for a bit, do a bit of sightseeing, and hemorrhage a bit of money. I was all prepared to be annoyed by the Guardian, which was once my favourite newspapers, since I had not seen it very often since they (lamentably) made major modifications to the format. As it turned out, I did not get annoyed too much, although I would prefer it if they took it back to the correct size for a respectable newspaper. It still has a lot of news and good writing in it, and I am led to understand that the huge amount of football-related stuff in it is a passing phase because there is some sort of contest going on in Germany of some relevance. (Um… that would be “soccer”, you folks over on the extreme left hand side with the funny shaped ball.)

The other reason I was not annoyed? Within a day of being there I spotted one of those typically English stories which -happily- makes it to the national news from time to time. Very endearing:

Giant ‘were-rabbit’ comes a cropper on road (Martin Wainwright reports)

A hungry outsized rabbit which visited allotments in Felton, Northumberland, angering residents with its predations, is thought to have been killed in an accident that left the bumper hanging off a car.

The animal, which reportedly yanked whole turnips out of the ground, has not been seen since Rael Rawlinson, 18, driving in the village at the weekend, crashed into a “rabbit-like animal” roughly 2ft long and found hair on her bumper.

There have been no more sightings of the animal - nicknamed were-rabbit - which led growers to recruit two armed watchmen at the allotments.

Sad.

You can’t make this sort of thing up….. is what I would like to say, modulo the first paragraph. So I guess that clinched it. The Guardian is still my favourite newspaper.

Well, today I learned* of an even more “were-” rabbit that really exists and is very much alive, in Germany. The story has been doing the rounds for a long time now, but who cares? Just look at this picture (sit down first):
Continue reading ‘Big Ears’

Hey, anyone remember the metric system? Perhaps some of our international readers could provide insight into what it is like to live in a world governed by units that come neatly packaged by factors of ten, rather than the charmingly anthropocentric system of ounces and inches and acres that we favor here in the U.S. True, some of us science types will occasionally speak of centimeters, but in my circles we usually set hbar=c=1 and express everything in electron volts, so it’s barely metric at all.

Via Lawyers, Guns & Money, Dean Dad reminds us of the time when a titanic struggle raged for the soul of this great nation, with the forces of American exceptionalism valiantly beating back the invaders who would have us measure football fields in meters rather than yards. (Or, even worse, “metres”!) Without the patriots of the Reagan Administration to save us from the malaisical cosmopolitan wussification favored by Jimmy Carter, the speed limit on many interstate highways might be 90 km/hour even today.

Some of our younger Gen-Y readers might be skeptical that this was ever such a big deal. One of my favorite stories recalls a discussion in an English class at the end of my first semester in college in 1984. Our mischievous professor asked each of the students to give an example of a belief we held that we thought would be controversial among our fellows. Given that this was a middle-class suburban Catholic institution, there were too many ways for me to get in serious trouble here (um, “God doesn’t exist”? “abortion should be legal”?). But I chickened out, and settled on something that I thought satisfied the letter of the assignment without being too crazy — I declared my support for the metric system.

You would have thought I had called the Pope a Communist. The class (including the professor) exploded in exasperation, rolling their eyes and moaning “Oh no, you’re not one of those people, are you?” People are very attached to their weights and measures, as it turns out. But I stuck courageously to my convictions, defending the usefulness of making easy conversions between units at different scales.

If I were to do it again, though, I might go with the god-doesn’t-exist business.

For the last couple of months, The Guardian has been producing a weekly science podcast, in which the Guardian science team discusses various topics and interviews experts on the issues of the week.

Some examples are

• An interview with David Bodanis, who recently won the Aventis science book prize for his book How Electricity Switched on the Modern World (Incidentally, it is worth either listening to or reading about what he did with his prize money, which reminded me of what my friend Paul did with his). (This week’s episode, May 22)
• A discussion with Vivienne Parry (also nominated for the Aventis prize) about psychedelic drugs (May 1)
• The story of the battle to keep Hooke’s papers in Britain (April 3).

Whatever one might think about the general trend of science coverage in The Guardian, I think this is a pretty fun idea that is likely to catch on in other places. It’s also interesting to see how the lines between various types of media are becoming blurred as new technologies become easier to use.

You can subscribe to The Guardian science podcasts using iTunes.

This was spotted during my very enjoyable visit to the Science Museum on Sunday, described earlier. I am disturbed by this picture for several reasons. Click on it and read the text surrounding the picture. I am not even complaining about the fact that this picture -in prominent display in the spaceflight part of the London Science Museum- contains a lot of silly science fiction nonsense about warp drive (it is right next to a model of the Starship Enterprize) - this stuff has no place in an otherwise excellent display of real science, in my opinion.

What I am complaning about is the fact that the Science Museum has decided to shy away from using the word “theory” when describing Einstein’s General and Special Relativity. They’ve replaced the word “theory” with “law”. Why? You might consider this to be an issue of mere semantics but it is not. There is a very important misunderstanding of what the word “theory” means in a scientific context. This misunderstanding is dangerous. This misunderstanding has already been exploited for political means, and I am sure that it will be exploited again. Recall the discussion about the NASA administration official saying that the Big Bang is “just a theory”, for example. (See a post about it here, with discussion.) (See also a post about the use of the word in a scientific context, here.)

Why does it matter? Surely, since members of the general public think that the word “theory” is less compelling than “law” we might as well use the latter, no? I don’t agree. What we should be doing instead is better educating the public as to the meaning of the word, making it clear that the terms “Theory of Evolution”, or “Theory of Relativity” do not imply that these are not powerful, established parts of the scientific knowledge base.

In fact, I would go as far as to say that replacing “theory” with the word “law” is far more dangerous that it seems. The word “law” does not do as well as “theory” in invoking a vitally important part of Science that distinguishes it from, for example, the typical organized Religion. Science is an on-going process of refinement, adventure, challenge and re-evaluation. It is a different type of “search for truth” than organized Religion. Science is all about the asking of questions and refining of one’s understanding of how the world works. It is not about obeying a set of laws. To focus on the word “law” is a mistake.

A scientific theory establishes a truth about the world, with an understanding that Continue reading ‘Danger in London’s Science Museum’

Despite the annoying use of the words “spooky” and “weird” (why do people so often use those words when talking about quantum mechanics? why? why? why? why?!), I’d like to point you to a nice New Scientist article about the possible use of quantum entanglement to detect gravitational waves. It is by Zeeya Merali, and you can find it at this link.

Have a look and come back and tell us what you think, and/or ask questions. We’ve experts in both areas as readers who might also comment, and who might respond to others’ thoughts on the matter.

-cvj

The next Categorically Not! is Sunday 4th June. You may recall my post on the Categorically Not! series of events held at the Santa Monica Art Studios. They’re fantastic, and I strongly encourage you to come to them. Have a look at the last two descriptions here and here.

Here is K.C. Cole’s teaser:

It’s perfectly clear. Or is it? Actually, the notion of transparency is surprisingly murky. The clear night air is opaque to much of the light raining down on us from the rest of the universe. The daytime sky blocks even the light of stars. Your body, on the other hand, is perfectly transparent to radio and TV signals; to a neutrino, you’re not even there—trillions passed through you as you read that sentence. Transparent objects can cast shadows. Perceptive people can see right through you. Institutions—including governments—often try to hide what goes on inside, and it’s the job of other institutions—like the press—to make sure they remain at least reasonably transparent.

For our June 4th Categorically Not! UCLA astronomer Matt Malkan will take us on a tour through the universe as astronomers see it, or try to see it, right back to the beginning of time where (and when) newborn galaxies were just coming into being. The birthplaces of galaxies, stars and planets are shrouded in dust, so astronomers, “like aggressive papparazi,” must go to great lengths to get images. (Having spent 20 hours in a delivery room on two occasions, Malkan says he can “appreciate this cosmic modesty.”)

For an artistic perspective, Melinda Smith Altshuler will show how she uses transparency to create works of art with astonishing mystery and depth in her studio at the Hangar. Melinda has shown locally with Sherry Frumkin and most recently with Sara Lee Art Projects at Bergamot Station—as well as in France, Italy, Korea and Central America. She has taught Studio Arts at Crossroads School in Santa Monica, and is an Associate at the Institute of Cultural Inquiry, Los Angeles.

And finally—accounting! What are credits and debits anyhow? To find out, Zoe-Vonna Palmrose enlisted the help of the 50,000 year old Thog family of mastodon hunters (who will not appear with her) and former Microsoft CFO Mike Brown, (who might) to write the Thog’s Guide to Quantum Economics—which she’ll be giving out Sunday. USC’s PricewaterhouseCoopers Auditing Professor, Zoe-Vonna has been a key player shaping the U.S. financial reporting environment, where transparency is today’s buzzword.

As usual, it is held at the Santa Monica Art Studios, come at 6:00pm for drinks, cookies and a look around the space, and there’s a 6:30 start. For more information, visit the Categorically Not! website.

Hope to see some of you there!

-cvj

It is one of my favourite times of the year in Los Angeles. It rained a few days ago and so the air is clear, the sky is blue, and the sunlight is now clear and crisp on everything it touches. On days like this I cycle right past the bus stop and go all the way into work on the bike. There are flowers in gardens everywhere. (There are also wild flowers along the sides of the freeways, for drivers who care to look.) There are flowering trees all over the city.

In particular, there are several long stretches of many blocks all over LA that almost convince you that the city was going completely purple. This is because of the spectacular Jacaranda tree:

Learn more about this lovely tree here. I learned that the horticulturalist Kate Sessions (1857-1940) is responsible for importing and popularising the Jacaranda in Southern California. Learn more about her here and here.

-cvj

I was asked the other day whether Alan Guth should expect to win the Nobel Prize for inflation, now that WMAP has found tentative evidence for a slight “tilt” in the primordial perturbations, just as we might expect from inflation. At the moment I’m leaning toward “not yet,” but it started me thinking about which cosmology discoveries have yet to be honored by Nobels but should be at some point. (After the 2004 prize for asymptotic freedom, there aren’t really any completely obvious particle-physics prizes lurking out there, although prizes for color, spontaneous symmetry breaking, and CP violation would be quite warranted.)

There are two discoveries that are obviously Nobel-worthy: the temperature anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background, and the acceleration of the universe. One that is a bit less obvious, but still extremely strong, is dark matter. In each case, however, it is not precisely clear which people should actually get the prize, given the constraints: (1) laureates should be individuals, not collaborations, (2) prizes are giving to living people, not posthumously, and (3) at most three people can share one prize.

The 1992 observation of CMB anisotropies by NASA’s COBE satellite was the first step in a revolution in how cosmology is done, one that has come to dominate a lot of current research. Subsequent measurements by other experiments have obviously led to great improvements in precision, and most importantly extended our understanding of the anisotropies to smaller length scales, but I think the initial finding deserves the Nobel. So to whom should the prize be awarded? On purely scientific grounds, it seems to me that there was an obvious three-way prize that should have been given a while ago, to David Wilkinson, John Mather, and George Smoot. Wilkinson was the grandfather of the project, and was the leading CMB experimentalist for decades. Mather was the Project Manager for the satellite itself (as well as the Principal Investigator for the FIRAS instrument that measured the blackbody spectrum), while Smoot was the PI for the DMR instrument that actually measured the anisotropies. Unfortunately, Wilkinson passed away in 2002. Another complicating factor is that there were various intra-collaboration squabbles, leading to books by both Smoot and Mather that weren’t always completely complimentary toward each other. Still, background noise like that shouldn’t get in the way of great science, and these guys definitely deserve the Nobel.

The first direct evidence for the accelerating universe came from two groups: the Supernova Cosmology Project and the High-Z Supernova Team. The issues of priority are a bit complicated, but both groups certainly deserve substantial credit in discovering this surprising and enormously influential result. The SCP is an easier case: they started first, and were clearly led by Saul Perlmutter, who is a shoo-in for the Nobel. The High-Z team was a bit more democratic, and started second but actually went on record first with the claim that the universe was accelerating. Their PI was Brian Schmidt (full disclosure: my old grad-school officemate); the first author on the discovery paper was Adam Riess; and their spiritual leader was Robert Kirshner (most of the team members were either students or postdocs of Bob’s at one point or another). Hard to construct a sensible prize from that mess, but if I were in charge of the universe I might give 50% of the prize to Perlmutter and 25% each to Schmidt and Riess, and feel really bad about not including Kirshner. But the discovery is clearly worthy of a Nobel, and I likely won’t complain with whatever way they choose to divvy up the award.

Then we get into murkier waters, I think. The idea of dark matter is one of the most influential and important in modern cosmology, and a Nobel would be perfectly appropriate. You might complain that we haven’t actually discovered dark matter yet, which is certainly true and relevant; but one way or another, something is going on with the dynamics of galaxies and clusters that is above and beyond what our current theories predict, and that empirical fact is hugely important. It was first pointed out by the late Fritz Zwicky in the 1930’s, comparing the velocities of galaxies in the Coma cluster to their total mass. But the field matured immensely with Vera Rubin’s measurements of the rotation curves of spiral galaxies, giving direct evidence that the gravitational force fell off more slowly than the distribution of visible matter could account for. Rubin absolutely deserves the prize, in my opinion. Then there is the more specific cold dark matter idea, which is a specific model for the nature of dark matter and its role in galaxy formation; credit for that is more diffuse (although the paper by Blumenthal, Faber, Primack and Rees was obviously influential), and we’re less sure that the basic idea is right, so I don’t see any need for a prize there quite yet. I think it would be great to give a joint prize to Rubin and someone else, perhaps Wendy Freedman for measuring the Hubble constant, or Jim Peebles for developing physical cosmology.

Then we get to inflation, which is a sticky issue in various ways. There is absolutely no question that inflation has been one of the most, arguably the most, influential idea in cosmology in the last several decades. There is a great deal of discussion about who gets credit for it, since a number of papers discussed very similar-sounding ideas; but it was clearly Alan Guth’s 1981 paper that put the story together in the right way. However, Guth’s model (”old inflation”) didn’t quite work, and the two follow-up papers by Andrei Linde and by Andreas Albrecht and Paul Steinhardt (”new inflation”) actually showed that the idea was plausible. That’s a total of four people, you’ll notice. Because Andy Albrecht was a graduate student at the time of his inflation paper with Steinhardt, and because both Linde and Steinhardt have gone on to write many more influential papers about inflation, credit is sometimes informally given to “Guth, Linde, Steinhardt and others…”, which is a little unfair.

But more importantly, we don’t know whether inflation is right. There is no question that it has made a number of predictions that have been dramatically verified: the universe is spatially flat, there is a spectrum of adiabatic and Gaussian primordial density perturbations, and that spectrum is nearly scale-free although not necessarily precisely so. And these predictions were by no means guaranteed in advance; models in which the perturbations were generated by cosmic strings, for example, were quite viable in the 1980’s, but have now been ruled out by CMB anisotropy observations.

Still, the idea that some non-inflationary mechanism set the initial conditions for the Big Bang still seems plausible to me, even if I don’t know what that mechanism would be. The predictions from inflation have been sharp, but they have not been the kinds of things that we couldn’t imagine getting from any other model. If we were to find evidence for gravitational-wave perturbations in the polarization of the CMB, of the type inflation could easily explain, then I might be convinced; but it’s quite possible that the gravity wave are really there but at a level too tiny to ever be observed.

So I’m somewhat torn. Inflation is a compelling and ingenious and influential idea, and it should be recognized. But the Nobel committee doesn’t like to give out prizes unless they’re completely sure that the discovery/theory to which they’re being given has no chance of being wrong. I’m not sure how to elevate inflation from the status of “probably on the right track” to the status of “correct beyond a reasonable doubt.” In the meantime, if the Nobel committee decides to take a risk and give Alan Guth the prize, you won’t hear any complaints from me.

You know the metaphor. Somebody’s looking for something, perhaps their keys, in the dark. There’s a lamp-post somewhere, spreading a circle of light. They confine their search to the circle of light, where they can see. Of course, the keys can be anywhere, not just under the light, and so this search has a seriously limited scope.

Well, a lot of research is like that, somewhat inevitably. Often with the additional limitation that you’re not sure what you’re looking for, either. You’re just hoping you’ll know it when you see it. This happens in all fields.

One place where I -as an outsider- always feel somewhat frustrated by the discussions is in the search for life elswhere in the universe. NASA makes some announcement about this sort of thing from time to time and it is always phrased in terms of looking for water. (See e.g., Saturn’s moon, Enceladus (right) where a water geyser was identified recently.) I find that a bit annoying, since they never mention other possibilities. I understand how crucial water can be for life as we know it, but is that really the only sign we should be looking for? And what if it is a red herring?

And what about life as we don’t know it? How do we know we’re not missing huge deposts of life on those objects in the solar system that we’ve ignored because they don’t have water? And one can go to some extremes with this, and have some fun. One thing I especially love to do is speculate about life existing in conditions that are so extremely different than ours that pretty much everything we can imagine about their experiences would be incredibly alien to us. How about creatures that live on the surface of the sun, for example, or in the accretion disc of a black hole, while it sucks the life out of its neighbouring star? What about vast gaseous creatures the size of several star systems, incredibly long-lived and slow to move - but alive, nonetheless. I could go on, but you can have more fun making up your own examples, I’m sure. The problem with most of them is - how would be able to find and recognize them as life?

Coming back to the lamp-post, or at least near it, I was pleased to see an article by Britt Peterson on Seed’s website about two colleagues of mine, USC professors Douglas Capone and Kenneth Nealson. It was about taking a different focus in the current searches for life.

Incidentally, I’d never really known what exactly “Astrobiology” was before this semester, nor met a real practicioner of the craft. Then Douglas approached me at a reception one day and asked me to come and teach a guest lecture to their Astrobiology class on the origins and evolution of the universe, right up to the formation of the Solar System. I was delighted to do it, of course, and in fact invited my colleague from Astronomy, Ed Rhodes, to do the second half of the presentation, focusing on the formation of the solar system, the search for extrasolar planets, etc, topics about which he has much more knowledge than I. We had a great time (and from the questions, possibly the students too), and may well do our double act again next year. (Perhaps even polish it up, get a manager, and take it on the road….)

The article refers to an opinion piece my colleagues wrote in the journal Science. They talk about focusing on Nitrogen. Here are some extracts:

Continue reading ‘Further Away From the Lamp-Post’