Via Swans on Tea, a great article about Richard Feynman’s days in the 1980’s working for Thinking Machines on their groundbreaking massively-parallel computers. (Reprinted from Physics Today.)

Richard did a remarkable job of focusing on his “assignment,” stopping only occasionally to help wire the computer room, set up the machine shop, shake hands with the investors, install the telephones, and cheerfully remind us of how crazy we all were. When we finally picked the name of the company, Thinking Machines Corporation, Richard was delighted. “That’s good. Now I don’t have to explain to people that I work with a bunch of loonies. I can just tell them the name of the company.”

But then there is this:

The charming side of Richard helped people forgive him for his uncharming characteristics. For example, in many ways Richard was a sexist. Whenever it came time for his daily bowl of soup he would look around for the nearest “girl” and ask if she would fetch it to him. It did not matter if she was the cook, an engineer, or the president of the company. I once asked a female engineer who had just been a victim of this if it bothered her. “Yes, it really annoys me,” she said. “On the other hand, he is the only one who ever explained quantum mechanics to me as if I could understand it.” That was the essence of Richard’s charm.

“Charming” and “sexist” are not actually exclusive properties. We don’t have to say “he is sexist, but very charming, so it’s okay”; nor do we have to say “he is a brilliant and charming man, but incorrigibly sexist, and therefore cannot be admitted to possess any good qualities.” People can be talented and charismatic and warmly human, and yet have a looming blind spot when it comes to gender.

All of which is perfectly obvious, but worth reiterating because the pervasive culture of science is steeped in a sort of geeky pseudo-machismo that is handed down through the generations. Charming it may be, but far from harmless. The latest evidence to add to the teetering pile comes from a new study by the Center for Work-Life Policy, who looked at the career paths of women in science, engineering, and technology.

Based on data from 2,493 workers (1,493 women and 1,000 men) polled from March 2006 through October 2007 and hundreds more interviewed in focus groups, the report paints a portrait of a macho culture where women are very much outsiders, and where those who do enter are likely to eventually leave…

They also do well at the start, with 75 percent of women age 25 to 29 being described as “superb,” “excellent” or “outstanding” on their performance reviews, words used for 61 percent of men in the same age group.

An exodus occurs around age 35 to 40. Fifty-two percent drop out, the report warned, with some leaving for “softer” jobs in the sciences human resources rather than lab bench work, for instance, and others for different work entirely. That is twice the rate of men in the SET industries, and higher than the attrition rate of women in law or investment banking.

The reasons pinpointed in the report are many, but they all have their roots in what the authors describe as a pervasive macho culture.

Engineers have their “hard hat culture,” while biological and chemical scientists find themselves in the “lab coat” culture and computer experts inhabit a “geek culture.” What they all have in common is that they are “at best unsupportive and at worst downright hostile to women,” the study said.

Too many scientists figure that, if someone leaves the field, it must have been because they weren’t good enough. There are other reasons. Providing equal encouragement to everyone entering into science would not only make for happier people, it would make for better science.

Harvard University’s endowment is $35 billion, and some people aren’t happy about it. Massachusetts legislators see money that could be theirs, and are contemplating new taxes. Social activists see money that could be going to charity, and want to divert it. Distinguished alumni who have landed at public universities wonder why, with all that cash, Harvard graduates such a tiny number of students.

These are all legitimate concerns, and I won’t be suggesting the ideal policy compromise. But there is one misimpression that people seem to have, that might as well be corrected before any hasty actions are taken: the purpose of Harvard is not to educate students. If anything, its primary purpose is to produce research and scholarly work. Nobody should be surprised that the gigantic endowment isn’t put to use in providing top-flight educational experiences for a much larger pool of students; it could be, for sure, but that’s not the goal. The endowment is there to help build new facilities, launch new research initiatives, and attract the best faculty. If it weren’t for the fact that it’s hard to get alumni donations when you don’t have any alumni, serious consideration would doubtless be given to cutting out students entirely. Sure, some would complain that they enjoy teaching, that it keeps them fresh, or that students can be useful as research assistants. But those are reasons why the students are useful to the faculty; they are not assertions that the purpose of the institution is to educate students for their own sakes.

Don’t believe me? Here is the test: when was the last time Harvard made a senior tenure offer to someone because they were a world-class educator, rather than a world-class researcher? Not only is the answer “never,” the question itself is somewhat laughable.

This is not a value judgment, nor is it a particular complaint about Harvard. It’s true of any top-ranked private research university, including Caltech. (Note that Caltech has over 1200 faculty members and fewer than 900 undergraduate students.) And it is not a statement about universities in general; many large public universities, and smaller liberal-arts schools, take education very seriously as a primary mission. This is by no means incompatible with being a top-notch research institution — the physics departments at places like Berkeley or UC Santa Barbara would be the envy of almost any private research university. But those places also take their educational mission very seriously, which Harvard, honestly, does not.

Of course, certain individual faculty members at Harvard might be great teachers and care deeply about their students; but that’s a bonus, not a feature of the institution. (Harvey Mansfield, to a visiting colleague: “You should close your door. If you don’t, undergraduates may wander in.”)

None of this is necessarily good or bad; it’s just a recognition of the state of affairs. Harvard et al. judge themselves by the research and scholarship they produce. Students will always keep applying to those places and trying to get in, because the aura of intellectual attainment produced by precisely those scholarly accomplishments will always act as a powerful draw. Such students are by no means making a mistake; the intellectual atmosphere at such places truly is intoxicating, and if nothing else the interaction with your fellow talented students can be a life-changing experience. But to try your best to get into Harvard and then complain once you are there that the professors seem interested in their own work rather than in teaching is to utterly miss the point. And to complain that Harvard has a giant endowment that it chooses to use for purposes other than educating more students is equally misguided.

After Congress slashed the budget for high energy physics just before Christmas last year, well into the 2008 fiscal year, Fermilab had to scramble to figure out how to cope with a huge shortfall in its budget.

The response was twofold. Firstly, all employees would be subject to “furloughs” in which all salaried employees would take one week off without pay in every two-month period. This has made it hard to get, say, five Fermilab people in a meeting together the past few months, and of course was a big burden on the families involved.

The second aspect was layoffs. At one point it seemed that as many as two hundred people, from all parts of the lab, might lose their jobs. But now it appears that it will be 140 people, since a number of people chose retirement.

There was happy news this past weekend: the furloughs, at least, will end! Apparently an anonymous donor gave a large gift to the University of Chicago, to help Fermilab. (The University of Chicago and the Universities Research Association, through an organization called the Fermi Research Alliance, now contract with the federal government to run the lab.) This gift will mean an end to the furloughs.

This is very good news for Fermilab, which has continued to operate the Tevatron at record-setting luminosities, and the CDF and D0 experiments are collecting huge quantities of high quality data with mature, well-understood detectors. The two experiments each now have more than thirty times the data sample than that used to discover the top quark in the mid-1990s, and hopes for a major discovery are high - if it’s going to happen this next year is crucial, before the LHC starts operating.

The LHC is nearing completion, and should be ready in July to begin circulating the first tenuous protons around the complex. Later in the year, perhaps October, the first attempts could be made to accelerate the protons to 5 TeV energy and collide them. This will provide the first shakedown runs of the big experiments ATLAS, CMS, ALICE, and LHC-b. But the first serious physics data will be in 2009.

As for the layoffs, well, as far as I know they will move ahead. By all portents we will have a continuing resolution from Congress again this year, and with a new administration it could be some time before we know the state of funding for the field in the next fiscal year.

Now I know lots of CV readers will comment that these layoffs are no worse than the fate many in the private sector suffer routinely, as corporate fortunes wax and wane. I can also tell you that the taxpayers are getting an incredible bargain - the field makes every dollar count, and the people who do this work, some of the most brilliant minds I have had the privilege to know, are totally dedicated to getting the science out; they aren’t in it for the money, to be sure. We are challenging our prevailing notions about the most fundamental features of our world: matter, energy, space, and time. What lies ahead is truly unknown, and where the discoveries will lead us is only a guess. But just look at the past, how our knowledge of the most fundamental has given us the incredible technology we now enjoy. I think Congress, and the governments of the world, would do well to double down on this one…

Anyway, to that anonymous donor, all I can say is this: you rock! Thank you!

I made a chart! This is the kind of thing you do when you return from a long trip and are jet-lagged.

These are the 2008 research budgets for physical sciences, in billions of dollars, for the main funding agencies in the U.S.: the Department of Energy, NASA, and the National Science Foundation. For helpful comparison purposes, I’ve also plotted the $14.9 billion that has been misplaced over the course of our reconstruction efforts in Iraq. Not the cost of the war itself, which has been over $500 billion so far and will be well over a trillion when all is said and done. Just the funds that were … lost. Embezzled, whatever. Labels are so confining.

Readers with interests outside science funding are welcome to suggest their own comparisons.

Greetings from Paris! Just checking in to do a bit of self-promotion, from which no blog-vacation could possibly keep me. I’ve written an article in this month’s Scientific American about the arrow of time and cosmology. It’s available for free online; the given title is “Does Time Run Backward in Other Universes?”, which wasn’t my choice, but these happenings are team events.

As a teaser, here is a timeline of the history of the universe according to the standard cosmology:

• Space is empty, featuring nothing but a tiny amount of vacuum energy and an occasional long-wavelength particle formed via fluctuations of the quantum fields that suffuse space.
• High-intensity radiation suddenly sweeps in from across the universe, in a spherical pattern focused on a point in space. When the radiation collects at that point, a “white hole” is formed.
• The white hole gradually grows to billions of times the mass of the sun, through accretion of additional radiation of ever decreasing temperature.
• Other white holes begin to approach from billions of light-years away. They form a homogeneous distribution, all slowly moving toward one another.
• The white holes begin to lose mass by ejecting gas, dust and radiation into the surrounding environment.
• The gas and dust occasionally implode to form stars, which spread themselves into galaxies surrounding the white holes.
• Like the white holes before them, these stars receive inwardly directed radiation. They use the energy from this radiation to convert heavy elements into lighter ones.
• Stars disperse into gas, which gradually smooths itself out through space; matter as a whole continues to move together and grow more dense.
• The universe becomes ever hotter and denser, eventually contracting all the way to a big crunch.

Despite appearances, this really is just the standard cosmology, not some fairy tale. I just chose to tell it from the point of view of a time coordinate that is oriented in the opposite direction from the one we usually use. Given that the laws of physics are reversible, this choice is just as legitimate as the usual one; nevertheless, one must admit that the story told this way seems rather unlikely. So why does the universe evolve this way? That’s the big mystery, of course.

The story apparently started on March 5 of last year, when an envelope addressed simply to “Fermilab” arrived there. In the envelope was a single sheet of paper with strange markings, apparently in code (click on it to see it larger):

An even higher resolution version can be found here.

An article in Fermilab Today, today, indicates that the top and bottom sections with the I II and III marks have been decoded to read

FRANK SHOEMAKER WOULD CALL THIS NOISE

and

EMPLOYEE NUMBER BASSE SIXTEEN

Symmetry magazine’s online site has an article on it, and you can find links to the decryption, and sort of follow the logic so far. The amount of stuff on the net is expanding rapidly today…but I think it has not yet been fully decoded.

Firstly, who is Frank Shoemaker? He was a faculty member at Princeton for many years, and made many contributions to experiments at Fermilab, including to the one I worked on for my thesis back in the 1980’s. He was a very genial and fun colleague, great with electronics and hardware. He was also known for designing and building demonstration spark chambers that are to be found in various physics departments and museums, and give a vivid image of cosmic ray muons passing through.

Frank is now retired (and asks not to be disturbed as a result of all this).

Hmmm…so what would Frank consider noise? As a particle physicist, we think noise is anything that our detectors say is a particle or a real signal when in fact it was not. For example a random coincidence, or an upward fluctuation of a background would be called “noise”.

As for the bottom section, every Fermilab employee and user since 1967 (?) or so has been issued an ID with a sequential number; mine is V02833, for example. The V means “visitor”. It used to be V2833 before they got to five digits.

Just above the bottom section are three symbols. The second and third are apparently decoded by the middle section to read “FC”. So does this mean the Fermilab ID number S00252? I believe that is the ID of Pierre Piroue (also of Princeton!) and also now retired but apparently denies being the author. There is also speculation that the first of the three symbols is part of the Fermilab user ID number, if it’s not “S”. And why “BASSE” and not “BASE”?

And what is that whole middle section for? Is it a key, part of the message, or both?

So…it’s a mystery! Any ideas?

A moment of small genius spotted at a friend’s house:

It’s a magnet from a disemboweled hard drive, mounted right underneath a bottle opener. Snags the bottle cap like a charm.

CV’s spam filter has been a tad bit overenthusiastic these days, so I’ve recently had to troll through the spam to retrieve misfiled comments. As expected, the spam is a morass of viagra ads and truly horrid lists of porn-related search terms (where “horrid” means “things that Dan Savage would not approve of”). But lurking in there is a new breed of affirmation spam:

Warm greetings! Thanks for all the information, a very nice and well done site! Cheers.

I’d just like to thank you for taking the time to create this internet website. It has been extremely helpful

Moreover, now that they’re tired of thinking only of on-line casino gambling, spammers seem to wish to join the CV conversation:

Hey!, what made you want to write on Best Calculator Ever | Cosmic Variance? I was wondering, because I have been thinking about this since last Sunday.

I couldn’t understand some parts of this article Post: Juan Collar on Dark Matter Detection | Cosmic Variance, but I guess I just need to check some more resources regarding this, because it sounds interesting.

I am not sure that I can completely understand your comments. Would you be so kind as to expand on your reasoning a little more before I comment.

Sometimes, though, the spammers enthusiasm for our work transcends their usual respectful admiration:

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You really poses much expertise on nalize Public Schools | Cosmic Variance. I really enjoyed going through your posting. I really appreciate it.

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And at least among the spammers, our work is being appreciated.

Thank you. You have helped someone more than you could know.

Reflecting on his earlier speech on faith at the height of his campaign, Mitt decides to stand up for atheists:

But upon reflection, I realized that while I could defend their absence from my address, I had missed an opportunity…an opportunity to clearly assert that non-believers have just as great a stake as believers in defending religious liberty.

If a society takes it upon itself to prescribe and proscribe certain streams of belief — to prohibit certain less-favored strains of conscience — it may be the non-believer who is among the first to be condemned. A coercive monopoly of belief threatens everyone, whether we are talking about those who search the philosophies of men or follow the words of God.

We are all in this together. Religious liberty and liberality of thought flow from the common conviction that it is freedom, not coercion, that exalts the individual just as it raises up the nation.

(from a speech at the “Beckett Fund for Religious Liberty’s Canterbury dinner”). He loses a lot of ground with me on the rest of the speech, where he elaborates on his earlier claim that “freedom requires religion” and argues that without religion keeping us all well behaved, the US would have descended into anarchy or facism. All the same, it’s nice to see someone tied so closely with both politics and faith demonstrating understanding of why atheists get a bit squicked out with the notion of theocracies.

UPDATE: This was recovered from before the recent site troubles. As Sean mentioned, earlier comments have been lost.

And we’re back! The blog, that is — I’m still on vacation. But we were down for about 24 hours. Plausible explanations include:

1. Mitt Romney said something nice about atheists, and God was pissed.
2. Julianne said something nice about Mitt Romney, and the universe didn’t know how to react.
3. Computers are mysterious and complicated things, and frankly nobody understands how they work.

We should be in working order, although some comments were lost — sorry about that.

Here is a clip of Dianne Reeves singing “Stormy Weather.”