There will be a conference in memory of Andrew Chamblin at Trinity College, Cambridge, on October 14. The registration deadline is September 1. Anyone who knew or worked with Andrew is encouraged to attend. Andrew, a theoretical physicist who several of us here at CV knew very well, passed away in February, and there was previously a conference in his honor in Louisville in March.

What do you say about a President who is prepared to ignore the clear will of Congress, a significant majority of the country, and mountains of scientific data? What do you say when, faced with a complicated issue for which, to most people, there isn’t an obvious a priori answer, the leader of the free world relies on ideology to set his agenda, rather than wrestling rationally with the issue on its merits? What do you say when a man who has led thousands of Americans and countless Iraqis to their deaths over a lie, feels it is up to him to preach morals?

It really makes you want to cry, and I am at a loss for words, except for those that would make for an extremely family-unfriendly post. However, the situation is so unbelievably absurd that it does lend itself to excellent humor. If this path helps you at all, The Daily Show has been having a field day with the stem cell veto. Click on the image and take a look. I hope it provides a little relief.

The rumors are apparently true: Thomas Pynchon has a new book coming out, scheduled for release on December 5 of this year. We know they’re true because the book already has an amazon.com page where you are welcome to buy it. As Slate notes, an intriguing aspect of the story (you knew there would be one, didn’t you?) is the appearance — followed soon thereafter by the disappearance — of an “author blurb” on the amazon page. Here it is, rescued from the amazon discussion board.

“Spanning the period between the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, this novel moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York, to London and Gottingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska Event, Mexico during the Revolution, postwar Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all.

With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.

The sizable cast of characters includes anarchists, balloonists, gamblers, corporate tycoons, drug enthusiasts, innocents and decadents, mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, psychics, and stage magicians, spies, detectives, adventuresses, and hired guns. There are cameo appearances by Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi, and Groucho Marx.

As an era of certainty comes crashing down around their ears and an unpredictable future commences, these folks are mostly just trying to pursue their lives. Sometimes they manage to catch up; sometimes it’s their lives that pursue them.

Meanwhile, the author is up to his usual business. Characters stop what they’re doing to sing what are for the most part stupid songs. Strange sexual practices take place. Obscure languages are spoken, not always idiomatically. Contrary-to-the-fact occurrences occur. If it is not the world, it is what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two. According to some, this is one of the main purposes of fiction.

Let the reader decide, let the reader beware. Good luck.”

–Thomas Pynchon

Did Pynchon really write this blurb? Why did amazon remove it? (I’m guessing that it was written by an overly enthusiastic publicist, and that’s why they removed it.) Is it true that Russian mathematician Sofia Kovalevskaya will play a prominent role in the new book? What is the title, for crying out loud? Wondering is half the fun.

The notoriously reclusive Pynchon is fond of sprinkling science throughout his works, and scientists are fond of reading them in turn. Gravity’s Rainbow, his masterwork, has a well-deserved reputation for being somewhat intimidating. But I would encourage anyone to read Mason & Dixon, his most recent book and arguably his most entertaining (not that it’s a breeze, mind you). Admittedly, there are scary parts:

“Gentlemen,” advises this ominous Shadow, “— you have fallen, willy-nilly, among a race who not only devour Astronomers as a matter of habitual Diet, but may also make of them vile minature ‘Sandwiches,’ and then lay them upon a mahogany Sideboard whose Price they never knew, and then forget to eat them. Your only hope, in this room, is to impersonate so perfectly what they assume you to be, that instincts of Predation will be overcome by those of Boredom.”

My most important contribution (to date) to literary scholarship is the discovery of the subtle deployment in M&D of the collapse of the wavefunction as a metaphorical theme for the progress of the surveyors over the hills to the West, observing as they go and reducing Probabilities to Certainties.

Update: according to a followup article in Slate, the title of the novel is Against the Day, and the blurb is really written by Pynchon. Shows you what I know.

The 2006 SLAC Summer Institute est arrivé!

This is the 34th SLAC Summer Institute and the topic this year is the physics of the Large Hadron Collider. The LHC begins operations next year and we are riding the wave of excitement and expectation as the field gears up to explore the next high energy frontier. Everyone is full of anticipation for the discoveries that are waiting for us at the Terascale, which hold the promise of addressing some of our most basic questions about the nature of matter, space, time, and energy. Anticipated particles such as Higgs bosons are produced in roughly one out of every 10^12 collision events, and hence the analogy of panning for gold.

This topic is also very timely for SLAC; last Friday we were officially admitted into the ATLAS Collaboration! ATLAS is one of the two (high pT) experiments designed to probe the TeV energy scale. SLAC will be one of the tier-2 computing centers in the ATLAS grid and will be a major physics analysis center on the West Coast.

We are in our 3rd day of the Institute and, speaking from an organizors point of view, all is running smoothly (except for the usual MAC-PC issues). We have an exciting program of lectures and topical talks. We opened with an overview of the physics anticipated at the Terascale, expertly given by Guido Altarelli of CERN. We had two lectures on the most important aspect of the LHC: the accelerator! The LHC accelerator is very complex and let’s face it, without a working accelerator, we can’t do our science. This series was given by Lyn Evans of CERN, who is basically the guy in charge of the LHC accelerator complex. James Stirling of Durham, the guy who literally wrote the book on his lecture topic, beautifully explained the theory behind proton proton collisions. Lance Dixon of SLAC will continue on this topic, outlining the details of higher precision calculations. We have a series of detector talks, introduced by Jos Engelen (deputy director of CERN), where we focus on a specific detector component each day. Michael Peskin of SLAC will discuss the connections between colliders and cosmology. And that’s just the first week! Next week, we will separately explore specific physics topics in depth (Higgs, Supersymmetry, top-quark, extra dimensions, etc), taking a look at both theory and how the signatures will actually be observed in the demanding experimental environment at the LHC.

We have a variety of other activities as well. There are 5 afternoons of topical talks, one each on results from the Tevatron, B-physics, astrophysics, neutrinos, and heavy ions. Alternating afternoons we hold discussion sessions where the students get to grill the lecturers. This evening is the first of 2 poster sessions where the students will present their work. Next week is the annual SLAC versus Summer Institute soccer game. And we have 3 dinners which give the students the chance to mingle with each other and the lecturers and drink good wine. Last night was Hawaiian night, unfortunately SLAC’s resident hula dancer had broken her ankle and could not perform.

Over 200 participants have registered and seem to be enjoying the school so far. We are one of five LHC-themed summer schools this year (Fermilab, TRIUMF, Warsaw, and Trieste being the other 4) and we thank our participants for coming to the SLAC Summer Institute!

The internets move faster than I do. Interesting stuff that has accumulated in the past couple of weeks while I have been balancing work with jet-setting.

• Backreaction is the go-to blog these days for cool expository posts about physics. Bee, newly hitched, has great articles about extra dimensions and neutrinos.
• Not to be outdone, jao at physics musings has some musings about physics diagrams. Feynman’s, of course, but also these funny pictures invented by Penrose to represent tensor algebra (pictured right). (Not sure what to call them, as “Penrose diagrams” is already taken.) They are a cute way of keeping track of the index gymnastics of ordinary tensors. I’m not sure if they actually represent an advance over the indices (of which I’m quite fond), but if nothing else they provide an interesting insight into the mind of someone smarter than most of us.
• An interesting multi-blog disscussion was prompted by a provocative post at Feministing about a study claiming that conditions in the womb can affect men’s sexual orientation. Jessica wondered out loud whether or not we should even be studying these issues; she has legitimate concerns that whatever results are obtained could be used to excuse yet more repression. As a scientist, the answer is obvious: of course we should be studying these issues. We should study everything! But we should not pretend that our investigations have no consequences, and constantly be on guard against those who would put scientific discoveries to bad uses. Chris at Mixing Memory has a typically insightful post, as does Dr. Free-Ride (who also links to all the rest of the discussion). Janet also segues elegantly into a related issue, “how should scientists talk to non-scientists?” In a later post she defends a counterintuitive part of her answer: non-scientists have a duty themselves to improve the professional/amateur discourse.
• Speaking of which, Angela at Tech Space steps onto her soapbox to harangue a bit about the state of science journalism. She points to a recent article in the Columbia Journalism Review by friend-of-CV KC Cole. I’ll let you read, but the short answer is that we can blame the editors.
• To end on a down note, George W. Bush has decided to put any doubts that he is the most anti-science President in our nation’s history completely to rest. Aided by a fawning Republican congress, he has managed to skate through six years of administration without vetoing a single piece of legislation — until now. Bush is expected to veto a bill just passed by Congress that would loosen restrictions on the use of embryonic stem cells in medical research. (As DarkSyde reminds us, the cells in question come from blastocysts that are already slated for destruction. They are going to be destroyed; the choice is between using them to fight disease — or not.) There are enough anti-Enlightenment Republicans in the Senate to prevent an override of the veto, so this particular avenue of scientific inquiry will continue to be stifled. In the United States, at least.

And one little update, to cleanse the palate and restore the jaunty mood.

• It’s Yeats Day at Le Blog Bérubé.
  

  O sages standing in God’s holy fire
  As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
  Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
  And be the singing-masters of my soul.
  Consume my heart away; sick with desire
  And fastened to a dying animal
  It knows not what it is; and gather me
  Into the artifice of eternity.

  Now that’s some serious poeting.

As Sean has just reported, Ben Barres, a tenured professor in neurobiology at Stanford, is speaking out about his experiences as a scientist. His story is an interesting one and, in my book at least, there’s enough material for a second post.

There has been much recent discussion on the cause of the dearth of women working in the sciences. One hypothesis is that there is a systemic bias against women in the system. Barres has performed the ultimate experiment to test this hypothesis by starting life and her career as female, undergoing a transgender process, and continuing life and his career as a male. Same person, same innate scientific abilities, with observations and experiences from both sides of the fence. One couldn’t ask for a better experiment in a controlled laboratory environment! The only systematic error introduced into the process is that scientific acceptance and recognition takes time to establish and can come more easily to a more senior scientist. Provided, of course, that their early work was any good.

Barres has described his experiences in a recent Nature article (subscription required unfortunately), which has been picked up by a horde of newspapers. The summary is that doors and acceptance she never ever knew existed, suddenly opened up to Barres as a male. For some reason, I’m not surprised… I won’t be surprised either if the sun sets in the West tonight. Kudos to Barres for telling his story!

A main focus of the Nature article is a set of action items that Barres suggests to remedy the systemic bias and increase the number of women in the sciences. These are important and are the reason for this second post. They are:

1. Enhance leadership diversity in academic and scientific institutions.
2. Recognize the importance of role models and increase the diversity of faculties.
3. Take the responsibility to speak out against discrimination.
4. Boost the self-confidence of girls.

In my view, this is a great list! Each step is simple enough to inact and from my own experience I can say that they are somewhat lacking and would make a difference. They are not the only positive steps one can take, of course, but they are a good start. It’s time for institutions to tackle these 4 steps in a serious manner.

Lastly, I feel compelled to spout my personal opinion regarding the hypothesis that innate differences exist in the mathematical and scientific abilities between the female and male brains. (Restricting myself to family oriented language here) It is a complete, total, unadulterated, unmitigated, pile of crap. Some will undoubtedly cry out that I am being unscientific by refusing to test a proposed hypothesis. However, from my view, the hypothesis has already been tested and disproved. It’s been proven wrong by the number of successful women scientists working today. The number is not 50%, but in fact, is large enough to be statistically significant. Take a look at the accomplishments of the women who are stubborn enough to have pushed past the systemic bias - women such as Helen Quinn, Sally Dawson, Lisa Randall, Anne Nelson, Young Kee Kim, Vera Luth, Persis Drell, Risa Wechsler, Eva Silverstein, Nan Phinney, Helen Edwards, Elizabeth Simmons, Marcela Carena, Ritchie Patterson, Janet Conrad, Kay Kinoshita, Sau Lan Wu, Angela Olinto, Marjorie Shapiro, Mary Kay Gaillard, and hell, let’s include me too. This is just a random list of women scientists working in the US in HEP that I can think of at the moment, and yet they are all amongst the top in the field. If we are innately inferior, then how come so many of us do so well? What better set of data does one need?

Ben Barres had just finished giving a seminar at the prestigious Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research 10 years ago, describing to scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard and other top institutions his discoveries about nerve cells called glia. As the applause died down, a friend later told him, one scientist turned to another and remarked what a great seminar it had been, adding, “Ben Barres’s work is much better than his sister’s.”

There was only one problem. Prof. Barres, then as now a professor of neurobiology at Stanford University, doesn’t have a sister in science. The Barbara Barres the man remembered was Ben.

That’s the opening of this Wall Street Journal article about Ben Barres, a neurologist at Stanford who has been written about by just about everybody over the last week (including Arun in comments here). Not about his neurology research in this case, but about an article he wrote for Nature (subscription required) about his experiences as a transgendered scientist. Barres underwent treatments about ten years ago to go from being female to male, so he has a unique perspective on the different ways that male and female scientists are treated. Not completely unique, of course; the WSJ article also quotes Joan Roughgarden, also at Stanford, who was “Jonathan” up until 1998:

Jonathan Roughgarden’s colleagues and rivals took his intelligence for granted, Joan says. But Joan has had “to establish competence to an extent that men never have to. They’re assumed to be competent until proven otherwise, whereas a woman is assumed to be incompetent until she proves otherwise. I remember going on a drive with a man. He assumed I couldn’t read a map.”

They seem to be implying that women face obstacles in the world of science that men do not. In other news, the Sun rose in the East this morning.

Today’s New York Times has an interview with Barres by Cornelia Dean. They get right down to it:

Q. What’s your response to people who say you rely too much on your own experience and should take scientific hypotheses less personally?

A. They should learn that scientific hypotheses require evidence. The bulk of my commentary discusses the actual peer-reviewed data.

That’s not fair! Barres needs to understand that phrases like “scientific hypotheses require evidence” are only to be used by people who believe that the differences between men and women can be traced to variations in innate qualities. The mountains of data pointing to systematic biases are to be ignored.

So who are these unnamed people who think that Barres “should take scientific hypotheses less personally?” That sounds suspiciously like a straw man — most careful scientists would be reluctant to stoop so directly to an ad hominem attack, rather than dealing with the aforementioned mountains of data. Sadly, it’s a direct quote from our old friend Steven Pinker, himself a master of the straw-man technique.

Professor Pinker, if you are reading this, you are a brilliant thinker and an extraordinary writer and lecturer. The Language Instinct was one of the all-time classic books on science for a wide audience. Please do not work to make your public profile identified primarily with the claim that innate differences in capacity are more important than systematic biases in keeping women out of science. It is not only wrong, but wrong in a particularly damaging way.

One more time, to be as clear as possible, so that nobody reading in good faith can possibly misunderstand. I (and most people who harp on this) am not objecting to the hypothesis that there are innate differences in how male and female minds work, nor am I discouraging research on the subject. It’s an hypothesis, it should be tested, knock yourself out. Okay? It’s just not the question that is being talked about here. The questions “Why are there fewer women in science?” and “What are the innate differences in mental abilities and inclinations between boys and girls?” are just not the same. They may be related, obviously, but they are just not the same. And while the latter question is subtle and extremely hard to answer at the current state of the art, due to the extraordinary difficulty in separating out what is “innate” from what is influenced by the outside world, the answer to the former question is blindingly obvious to anyone who cares to open their eyes. Do you really need Ben Barres or Joan Roughgarden to tell you that men and women are treated differently as scientists? Read the Xie and Shauman book. Read Meg Urry’s article. Just look at what goes on around you. And don’t take reality so personally.

Update: via Crooked Timber, some interesting stories at Science + Professor + Woman = Me. For example, a question asked by a professor to a female grad student:

Q. So you’re doing a Ph.D.? Couldn’t you find anyone to marry you?

Of course, they are only anecdotes, so you should feel free to pretend that this stuff almost never happens, if that makes you feel better.

Birthdays are a good time to reflect on one’s place in the universe. Via Data Mining, here is a map of the blogosphere, on which we have helpfully circled Cosmic Variance.

The original map is interactive, so you can click on each circle to visit the corresponding blog. We are in a good neighborhood, close to such elite properties as Majikthise, Bitch Ph.D., Lance Mannion, Shakespeare’s Sister, Eschaton, The Huffington Post, and Talking Points Memo. At the top you see a big black dot (Engadget) and an even bigger looming orange dot (Boing Boing); the thicket at the right is filled with blogs I know nothing about, which tells you something, although I don’t know what.

Thanks for visiting, everyone! I wonder what this will look like ten years down the road.

It seems like only a blink of an eye ago that I was on the job market, scared silly about the future and hoping to establish the knowledge, skill set and track record (and have enough plain luck) to land a faculty position. For a young physicist, during one of possibly several postdocs, those are both exhilarating and terrifying times, during which one has precious little else to do apart from one’s research, but has absolutely no job security whatsoever.

For many people in this position (most of us, let’s be honest), part of their “free time” is spent trying to figure out who among their peers is being interviewed for which jobs, and, if it is a job for which they themselves have interviewed, whether the job has been offered to someone else yet.

Once, this might have been a lengthy task, involving surreptitious phone calls, sometimes through intermediaries, to glean whatever information one could from the organic “rumor mill”. However, by the time I started looking for jobs, the process had become much easier thanks, naturally, to the Internet.

The prime source for information about jobs in theoretical particle physics groups is the Theoretical Particle Physics Jobs Rumor Mill, which was the main site I would visit for gossip when I was on the market. I think it was somewhat later that the Astrophysics Jobs Rumor Mill came along, which was also occasionally relevant to me and certainly involved a lot of people I know. Since then, rumor sites have sprung up in Austria/Germany/Switzerland/Denmark, Greece, New Zealand and the U.K.. Other subfields have also followed suit, in Nuclear Physics and Condensed Matter/AMO Physics.

The rumor mill sites elicit mixed reactions in the community. Most people who are on the market seem to like them and find them to provide a desirable service. Among search committee members feelings are less homogeneous; some are unperturbed about their, and others’, shortlists being public, while some clearly feel they have a right to keep the information secret.

There are a couple of different worries that I have heard some candidates and more people on the other side express about the rumor mills. The first is merely that the deliberations of hiring committees and the resulting offers they make are the private business of the universities and the candidates and nobody else’s business. They understandably don’t like the idea that, for example, if they make an offer to their first choice candidate and are turned down, then when they make their next offer it will be to someone who knows they weren’t the first choice.

The second worry is that there is a fear of a herd mentality developing, in which once it becomes clear that a couple of universities have decided on the same number one choice, this may influence the decisions at other institutions. After all, several fine institutions can’t all be wrong about a particular person being the best choice, can they?

From my perspective, having been on both sides of the hiring process, there is some merit to each of these worries. There is often very little separating the exceptional people who make it to an ordered list of people to whom a position will be offered, and if one is, say, third on the list and is ultimately offered the job, it is seldom a reflection on your absolute talent. I think the rumor mills can make it harder to see past that, when the information is clearly out there for anyone to see.

A herd mentality can sometimes develop, it is true. Often its only effect is to slow down the process as one person garners multiple offers and then sits on them for a while negotiating with the various institutions. Sometimes, however, this can derail the hiring process at some places. On the other hand, if an institution does not follow the herd, the information provided by the rumor mill can be invaluable, enabling the hiring committee to make an attractive offer to someone else, and to snap them up while other institutions are tied up playing the waiting game.

However, my attitude to the rumor mills has always been that the various pros and cons I’ve identified above are, at the end of the day, irrelevant. If one thing is clear on the Internet, it is that information that is out there will be made public whether one likes it or not. All that technology does in this situation is to formalize, simplify and make very efficient, the dissemination of the kind of gossip that people have always shared in the community. Like it or not, one just has to live with it - what are you gonna do?

This week, I learned from my friends at Berkeley - cosmologists Martin White and Joanne Cohn - that rumor mill technology is taking another leap forward. Joanne and Martin have set up an Astrophysics Job Rumor Mill wiki which, rather than individuals emailing in their information to a moderator, as they do now, can be directly edited by all contributors. As Martin put it

The idea is to take some of the burden off of the person(s) running the Astrophysics Job Rumour Mill by letting lots of different people edit a Wiki. A successful Wiki could result in an accurate and up-to-date page with little work for any one person if the community embraces it.

If you’re interested in how our rumors get propagated, take a look; and if you’re in the field and use the rumor mills, I’m sure Martin and Joanne would be interested in any feedback you might have.

Believe it or not it is precisely one year since Cosmic Variance’s launch. We don’t want to make a particularly big deal over our baby’s birthday, and we certainly won’t be having an elaborate party and inviting other people with young blogs over to hang out and pretend like the blogs know what’s going on.

But we’re having fun and hope you’re enjoying it. Thanks for continuing to visit.