Astro Coffee in Ohio

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Mark at 9:04 pm, April 5th, 2007

I spent yesterday at The Ohio State University, in Columbus, delivering the High Energy Physics/Astrophysics seminar in the physics department. It was a good time and, as well as the talk itself, it was great to see a couple of friends - John Beacom and Stuart Raby - and spend some time talking physics with several other people I know, most notably Samir Mathur and David Weinberg.

I spent some of the morning talking with Samir about his Fuzzball resolution of the information loss problem in a class of string-theoretic black holes, and the possible implications for cosmology. In the afternoon I sat down with Stuart and Akin Wingerter and they told me about their work on realistic compactifications of string theory. John and I chatted briefly about neutrinos and dark matter, but mostly gossiped, and David was nice enough to spend time chatting with me about the content of my talk - gravitational approaches to cosmic acceleration - since a scheduling conflict meant he hadn’t been able to attend.

This is a pretty typical day when one travels to give a seminar - the talk itself takes up an hour of your time, but more important reasons to travel (and to have people visit you at your own institution) are the physics conversations you spend the rest of the day having.

However, the visit to OSU did have one unusual, and extremely enjoyable, difference. The astronomy department has a rather well-known daily journal club called Astro Coffee. Journal clubs exist at many institutions (we have one here), but they are notoriously difficult to do well. They do provide a useful way to keep up with the most interesting papers on the archive, and they are a good way of encouraging students to keep up with the literature. However, it can be difficult to maintain momentum, and the travel schedules of faculty members (I am particularly at fault here) often make journal clubs poorly attended and/or sporadically held.

AstroCoffee is different. Every day (that’s right, I said day, not week!) somewhere between fifteen and thirty people gather, from 10:30am - 11:00am, to discuss recent astro-ph papers. I’ve certainly heard of this, but haven’t attended on any of my previous visits to OSU. This time John invited me and I could see that these guys have clearly got it right. Students, postdocs and a bunch of faculty were there, had skimmed the papers in advance, and had interesting and detailed things to say. This isn’t typical at a weekly club, never mind a daily one. People were feisty too, meaning that you probably might not want to be there when they discuss one of your papers, although you’d undoubtedly learn things that would improve it.

The sheer size of the department is definitely one thing that helps this to work. But the unusual commitment of a significant number of faculty (and therefore their students and postdocs) is a big deal. Although the papers they focused on yesterday weren’t particularly close to my expertise, I’d be there every day if I was at OSU, because I’d clearly learn a huge amount and one couldn’t help but have new ideas in this environment. I’ve got to work on our journal club!

I finished up the day with a very nice dinner, got an early night at my hotel, and arrived back in Syracuse in time for lunch and to teach this afternoon. Unfortunately, because of my travel to OSU, I missed this weekâ€™s cosmology journal club here.

Academia, Science, Travel
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21 Comments on “Astro Coffee in Ohio” rss feed

mollishka on Apr 5th, 2007 at 9:21 pm

Yay, Coffee! I didn’t realize you were “that guy from Cosmic Variance” until I got back to my office and one of my officemates told me…
Jack on Apr 5th, 2007 at 10:50 pm

Does Mathur really believe, as the diagrams in all of his papers suggest, that black hole singularities are timelike?

Frankly, the fuzzball stuff is about as believable as Nobelist Laughlin’s ideas. ie, not.
Suresh on Apr 5th, 2007 at 11:41 pm

What I’m interested in is this: how does one make a flourishing journal club ? they always start with such enthusiasm, but what helps them reach critical mass, and sustainability ?
Brad Holden on Apr 6th, 2007 at 1:39 am

AstroCoffee sounds very Princetonian. I wonder how THAT happened….
Mark on Apr 6th, 2007 at 6:17 am

Mollishka - which person were you?

Jack - Samir and I didn’t discuss this in terms of diagrams, but since he is dealing with supersymmetric black holes, they are charged, and these black holes do indeed have a timelike singularity within GR.

You make a very strong and dismissive statement about the believability of this work. I assume that this means you have discovered an error, in which case you should definitely contact Samir - he is a very pleasant and smart guy who is only interested in understanding the physics.

Suresh - this is the point I was making; that these people have managed something few others have. I mentioned what I think some ingredients are, but don’t undestand the full recipe. I think at OSU this has been going on continuously for about 10 years!
Jack on Apr 6th, 2007 at 7:30 am

I’m sure you know that singularities in charged black holes aren’t really timelike. Instabilities of the Cauchy horizon and all that. As for why the fuzzball stuff needs some work, you can make the appropriate modifications to this discussion:

http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/~distler/blog/archives/000530.html

The situations are not identical. But near enough.
Mark on Apr 6th, 2007 at 8:38 am

I indeed know about the instabilities of the timelike singularity in charged BHs.

I don’t see the connection between the discussion that you point to and Mathur’s calculations.
mollishka on Apr 6th, 2007 at 8:50 am

Mark: I was sitting at the end of the table. Brown hair. I started to ask what you mean by “infrared,” but Rick beat me to it. Incidentally, I wanted to come to your talk, but I somehow parsed “11:30 and I can’t remember which room” as “this afternoon and I can’t remember which room,” so by the time I got around to asking Gary when it was, it had already happened!

It’s interesting to hear you (and others) talk about how unusual Coffee is. As a graduate student, I’ve not really known an astronomy department without morning Coffee … it’s the norm. I think that once it reaches ciritical mass, it isn’t too difficult to sustain. People don’t “try to make time out of their day” for Coffee; Coffee is just an integral something that happens everyday. It’s also an excellent way to keep up-to-date on the current literature; I think one reason people are able to get into the habit of scanning all of the astro-ph abstracts (even the ones not directly related to their own research per se) is that if you understand something and can add to the conversation, the great, but if not, you are better prepared to ask questions which will probably get answered.

And the “fiesty” discussion you mention? It’s not all that scary, well, it can be, and the word “bogus” isn’t shied away from, but we really area friendly crowd and people generally get along with one another. Besides, it sometimes leads to papers! For example, there was Pinsonneault, DePoy, and Coffee (2001). I hear ApJ wasn’t too pleased when they figured that one out …
Sean on Apr 6th, 2007 at 8:52 am

Most shocking to me is the concept of astronomers being voluntarily up and functioning at 10:30 in the morning. I’ve slid by for years blaming my astronomical upbringing for my inability to be in the office before noon.
mollishka on Apr 6th, 2007 at 9:17 am

Sean: 10:30 seems to work well because it’s a horrible time for everyone … there are people who get in well before 10:30 and have already accomplished stuff by then, and then there are the people who complain about having to get up so early … *shrug*. It works!
Annalisa on Apr 6th, 2007 at 11:26 am

I’m from Columbus, Ohio and an alumni of OSU. I always had a fondness for the astronomy department, just because their general education courses were so excellent and the department seemed so active.

Sorry the weather didn’t cooperate with your visit. Earlier this week, it was 75 degrees and sunny!
Mark on Apr 6th, 2007 at 11:35 am

I remember you mollishka. The “fiesty” comment was meant in good humor - it certainly isn’t scary. I enjoyed the tone of the discussion a lot - frank, lively, friendly, fun and knowledgable.
Julianne on Apr 6th, 2007 at 12:15 pm

I think that part of the key to a self-sustaining preprint-coffee is critical mass of theorists. For a theorist, hashing out the latest papers is closely linked to developing new ideas for papers of one’s own. For observers and experimentalists, time spent talking about the latest papers is time taken away from reducing your own data or fixing your own device. It’s not that the latter doesn’t benefit from coffee-style discussions, but the benefit to one’s own work is much less immediate. The difference is really one of lead time. A theorist can potentially have an idea, sort through some calculations, make a few plots, and have 75% of a paper in a month. Moreover, during that time, just talking ideas out is a key part of the process. In contrast, when an experimentalist or observer takes up a new idea for research, it’s six months or a year until you get the proposal submitted, more time until it’s accepted, then many more months until you get the data (or build the device), and then many more months of analysis and interpretation. Thus, you’re really limited in the number of new ideas you can pursue, reducing the benefit of churning through dozens of possible new ideas every week.
Mark on Apr 6th, 2007 at 12:19 pm

That’s an interesting point that I hadn’t thought of Julianne. I don’t have a feeling for the theorist/observer composition of the OSU Coffee. I knew more theorists there, but there’s an obvious reason for that.
Andrea on Apr 6th, 2007 at 12:33 pm

While I was in grad school, an OSU-style Preprint Coffee was introduced into an environment of a pre-existing, less formal morning coffee (which featured a mixture of scientific discussion and socialization). Reactions, and success, were mixed. Many of the objections were to the narrowed focus of preprint coffee — it became more difficult for observers to come in with their latest plots to start discussions (either of the “hey, this is neat” or the “what the heck does this mean” variety) or for people to talk about the neat results from a conference they had just attended — the preprint structure made it very formalized, and unless you had a paper on astro-ph that day you’d be hard-pressed to talk about your own work.

I’m actually a bit surprised that you view morning coffee in the context of a journal club, and as a superior one at that — it seemed to me to be a poor imitation, at least in the implementation at my institution. There just wasn’t enough lead time for anyone other than possibly the person who led the discussion to have read the paper, and usually not even that person (the usual seemed to be for the person leading the discussion on a particular paper to have read the abstract and conclusion and looked at the figures), leading to a very shallow discussion. And quite frankly some days the papers of the day were poorly selected (or interested only the person selecting them), or there just wasn’t anything worth talking about.

I emphasize that although this was in imitation of the OSU model it was *not* OSU, and implementations may vary. But I didn’t find it terribly useful.
Mark on Apr 6th, 2007 at 2:35 pm

Hi Andrea - it was the effective use of the short lead time that surprised me. People actually read the suggested papers before Coffee and were ready to discuss them. I guess it wouldn’t work everywhere and, in fact, I guess the point is that it works hardly anywhere, but it does seem to work extremely well at OSU.
Kris on Apr 6th, 2007 at 3:14 pm

Hi Andrea,

but of course we are allowed (by ourselves) and encouraged (and do it frequently) to talk about a recent conference or a neat new result from a member of the department. And when a member of the department has a paper out, they will talk about it on that day at length(as Mollishka did on Monday). But the biggest value comes from learning what other people in the world are working on, and doing it every day. The superiority over any journal club (including our own) comes from discussing 10-15 papers a week at reasonable depth, as opposed to discussing one paper a week at great depth. Oh yeah, and we also drink coffee there, which is a good thing.
Mark on Apr 6th, 2007 at 3:29 pm

Hi Kris - nice to hear from you.
Kris on Apr 6th, 2007 at 5:15 pm

Hi Mark,

thanks for such a nice post. We do enjoy our daily ritual here, but as Mollishka said, after a while it seems like a very natural thing to do, so one forgets it is actually quite unusual. By the way, I was probably the guy sitting right next to her, talking too much.
Mark on Apr 6th, 2007 at 7:38 pm

I wouldn’t have put it that way, but did know
Stephen Uitti on Apr 10th, 2007 at 12:40 pm

Having studied the dynamics of clubs (or churches), the key is evangelism. You need to have a critical mass. You need to have something of interest. You need to have new stuff all the time. You need to have something for everyone to do (not just sit and absorb). And you need to get the excitement out - evangelism. Growth and death of a club is generally exponential. In a given time period you lose some fraction of the group. And, the effectivness of evangelism - which has to come from club members - is also dependent on the number of people doing it. Use “exponential decay” if you don’t like ‘death’. But you mourn for a dead club, too.

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Astro Coffee in Ohio

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