On Friday evening I emerged from what have been a crazy couple of months, during which I’ve been in a paper crunch. When one works on a number of different projects at any one time, with a variety of collaborators, postdocs and students, the resulting papers generally seem to see the light of day at seemingly random times. Sometimes a few papers come out more closely together than at other times.

But sometimes it gets a bit ridiculous, and that’s what happened this summer, with a lot of projects suddenly getting close to completion about the same time - five papers to finish up in the space of a couple of months. I can’t complain - I love the work - but I found this particular random bunching of projects reaching completion to be a bit much, and I haven’t been getting much free time or even time to sit back and spend time focusing on any new ideas (or even time to blog!!).

But on Friday my collaborators (Rachel Bean and Eanna Flanagan, from Cornell) and I finished up two of the papers we’ve been working on. We’ve been studying a class of instabilities that can occur if dark matter and dark energy are coupled in a nontrivial way. There are a number of models in which this happens, and indeed one might think that if one tried to include both dark components of the cosmic energy budget into a simple particle physics theory, then there might quite naturally be couplings other than gravity between them.

We’ve done a great deal of work on this problem, and our long paper is sufficiently involved that we accompanied it by a letter that covers the main points and physical interpretations without all the analysis and examples that we have in the longer paper. For an idea of what we’re about, the abstract to the longer paper reads

We consider theories in which there exists a nontrivial coupling between the dark matter sector and the sector responsible for the acceleration of the universe. Such theories can possess an adiabatic regime in which the quintessence field always sits at the minimum of its effective potential, which is set by the local dark matter density. We show that if the coupling strength is much larger than gravitational, then the adiabatic regime is always subject to an instability. The instability, which can also be thought of as a type of Jeans instability, is characterized by a negative sound speed squared of an effective coupled dark matter/dark energy fluid, and results in the exponential growth of small scale modes. We discuss the role of the instability in specific coupled CDM and Mass Varying Neutrino (MaVaN) models of dark energy, and clarify for these theories the regimes in which the instability can be evaded due to non-adiabaticity or weak coupling.

It’s very satisfying to complete a project, although also a little sad, since one usually has such fun working on them, and learns a great deal. In this case, we’re still working on more projects and have lots of new ideas, so I’ll still be enjoying the collaboration, even though this particular project is over. Plus, I can now devote a little more time to a few other ideas I’ve been working on with my graduate students, who’ve been putting in the bulk of the calculational work on them over the last couple of months.

I know it seems obvious, but two of today’s news stories brought home the absurdity of how people are judged.

On the one hand we have a Republican (who would have guessed?) Senator who is accused of soliciting sex in an airport men’s bathroom.

On the other is this priceless story about legislating against the wearing of too baggy clothes.

What is striking is that I don’t think the first should be news except that the Senator in question consistently votes against gay rights and gay marriage. His fellow Senators seem concerned with the actual behavior, which I think is irrelevant, and unconcerned with his hypocrisy, which I think is abhorrent.

But the individuals involved in the second story seem to ignore completely the behavior of the persons wearing the dangerously low-riding jeans. Even those defending these loose-legged louts seem to miss the point:

“The focus should be on cleaning up the social conditions that the sagging pants comes out of,”

No, the focus should be on how they behave, not on what they wear.

Being a good citizen is about how you behave to others - what rights you support or try to deny them, or how you treat them - not about how you choose to meet sexual partners or about how you dress.

Our semester started yesterday, and so, as you might imagine, the last week or so has been taken up with prepping for my class and trying to finish up some papers that will inevitably get less time in the coming weeks. I’m particularly looking forward to class this semester, since I’m teaching the introductory graduate General Relativity class. For my money, G.R. is the one of the most beautiful subjects to teach or study (I’m also quite fond of graduate mathematical methods) and I’m anticipating a lot of fun as well as quite a lot of work, since the class is pretty large this year (about 12 people for now, with three or four of them auditing).

I don’t usually follow a text in my classes, preferring to give the students a range of reference material and then to try to present a relatively self-contained course on the subject matter. This class will be no exception, although since some guy recently wrote a new book that closely follows the way I’m used to thinking about G.R., I will follow that far more than I usually follow any single text.

Another thing that has been taking up some time in the frantic last week or so is the upcoming third season of Café Scientifique Syracuse. When we started this two years ago there were four organizers. Two of these have recently left the area, and so my remaining co-founder, geologist Scott Samson, and I have been busily recruiting some new organizational blood from Syracuse’s science departments. We’ve also changed the venue - moving to a place I particularly like - a cocktail and wine bar called Ohm Lounge.

The first meeting of the Fall takes place in a week, on Tuesday September 4th, and my colleague Mark Bowick - string theorist turned soft condensed matter theorist is presenting, with a talk titled “Soft and Squishy Matter at Science’s Cutting Edge”. Mark gives great talks like this, with no slides (as Café Scientifique was originally envisioned) but plenty of hands-on demonstrations of the physics he’s describing.

Well, back to work. I don’t teach tomorrow, so should have some time for research, although there’s another first in the afternoon - the first faculty meeting of the semester!

I returned a week ago from a few days at Penn State University, where I was chairing and speaking in the session on cosmology at the Inaugural Conference of the Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos. This was a delightful trip for a number of reasons, not least because I could drive there rather than dealing with the increasing difficulties posed by flying. Driving also meant that it was easy to take along a couple of my graduate students - Alessandra Silvestri and Michele Fontanini.

The conference took place Thursday through Saturday and my duties were all on Thursday afternoon, meaning that the rest of the meeting was free for me to focus on what others had to say and take advantage of chances for some individual physics discussions. There were some excellent talks, with particularly nice ones, in my opinion, from Joe Polchinski (The Black Hole Information Paradox), Slava Mukhanov (The Origin of the Big Bang: Inflation After WMAP) and Frans Pretorius (Black Hole Collisions).

Slava is a master of these kinds of talks and even on topics I’m supposed to know a lot about, I always find I learn something new from him, although we did disagree about the importance of fine tuning in whatever microphysical theory underlies inflation. In his talk Joe expressed his personal opinion that the information loss paradox is now solved within string theory, although the audience did not universally share this view, and he faced some polite questioning from Institute Director Abhay Ashtekar.

Another plenary talk was delivered by Roger Penrose, who discussed what he described as “a crazy idea” to address the cosmological entropy problem in the context of cyclic universes. I did not follow the proposal entirely, but the session ran out of time before I could get a clarification.

The conference was not without some down time either, with an enjoyable banquet, after which I joined Deidre Shoemaker, Pablo Laguna, and several others to watch their colleague, my friend, and former Quantum Diaries contributor Stephon Alexander sit in as saxophonist with a jazz band playing at a local bar. Here he is, second from the right in this rather poor iPhone photo

Right now I’m supposed to be in Puebla, Mexico, delivering a set of lectures at the Dual C-P Institute of High Energy Physics workshop on SUSY and String Phenomenology. However, my travel schedule had no room for error in it, and due to bad weather all possible flights were canceled on Friday evening, guaranteeing that I would miss two out of my three talks and making my trip pointless. So I’m home cooking Mexican food to make myself feel better.

While I wish I’d been able to make this trip, there’s a lot to be said for not traveling these days, and right now I find myself in the extremely unusual position of having over five weeks without travel stretching ahead of me, before I go to California for some guy’s wedding and then off for a long trip to Australia. To offset this apparent freedom, however, our semester begins in one week!

We’ve been hearing a lot over the last few days about the damage to the tiles on the shuttle Endeavour. Roland Piquepaille at ZDNet blogs has now posted some exclusive pictures of the affected region, provided by Neptec Design Group.

I don’t know how serious this is, but now at least I understand what they mean by a gouge in the tiles. Here’s keeping our fingers crossed for the safety of the astronauts on board.

I’ve just spent a few days living like an undergraduate; and I loved it!

For most of us, the path to a scientific paper is an extremely nonlinear one, as Sean described in his recent trilogy (I, II, III). In a collaboration this is compounded by the fact that (for theorists at least) there are several people working simultaneously. These people are calculating independently at times, mixing notations, making their own approximations, using their favorite techniques, and writing things their own ways. Regular meetings, either in person, or on video or teleconference calls then hopefully iron out the differences.

While collaboration has some of the drawbacks above, it has many positives, not least of which is the creativity and array of technical skills that several people can bring to an initially ill-formed idea. But perhaps the main reason I love collaborating, and choose to do it so often, is that I truly enjoy the process. Discussing fascinating physics with talented colleagues is a delightful part of my job, and I wouldn’t give it up for the world. So whether someone comes to me with an idea they want to discuss, or I have a good idea of my own, I frequently take advantage of having other scientists with common interests around, and more often than not collaborate.

However, one thing that one needs to do in any collaboration is to check all the equations independently. Much of this checking is ongoing as the project progresses, but sometimes you take something complicated that a collaborator has done on faith in order to push ahead and see where an idea is going, coming back later to double check the details. This has been the process in many of my collaborations, and it is a perfectly enjoyable and rigorous way to work. One checks everything, of course, but not in order, and not in one continuous sitting.

In the last week, however, I got to do something unusual, for me at least. One lengthy collaborative paper I’m working on is nearing completion and I realized that there were a number of these technical results that I needed to go over in detail. But in this case, I also felt that the paper was getting sufficiently long, and we’d changed notations sufficiently many times, that the structure of the equations appearing in the draft (but not the ideas, or the heart of the calculation, of course) had become a little murky to me. So I decided to sit down with our draft and go through every single calculation, from the beginning, to make sure not only that I checked the things I hadn’t checked before, but also that I was completely happy with the notation, the structure, and the arguments. Usually this isn’t required at this stage, but here I really felt I’d benefit from it.

And it turned out to be remarkably nostalgic fun, as well as practically useful for our paper! You see, I hadn’t quite thought of it this way, but working through a draft like this is rather like an extreme, lengthy version of the kinds of initial parts of exam questions one gets as a student. You know the kind - the ones that start

“Show that such and such a result is true. Now, using this result and such and such a definition, do such a transformation and thereby prove that this unlikely looking expression is true. Interpret this in the light of this interesting observation.”

This kind of problem tests a certain skill set, but not necessarily the same one that one uses to make progress on problems to which one doesn’t know the answer. It can be a bit like working out to build muscles that will be useful for a particular sport. The muscles will definitely help, but unless you have the actual skill to play the game itself, they will only get you so far.

Too many of these kinds of exercises can be dreary indeed. Nevertheless, for me there was always a bit of a thrill to sitting down in front of a clean and empty pad of paper and working my way through a maze of reasoning to get to the required answer. I’d typically hit a dead end several times before figuring out a correct strategy, and those dead ends invariably taught me something deep about problem solving in general, and the specific physics or mathematics at hand.

In this case, my task turned into the equivalent of a three day exam, with the end result being thirty or more pages of calculations (and I write quite small and neatly - yes, I am extremely anal), and a couple of Maple worksheets to help me check various approximations. I had little boxes around important results and everything. It was just like being a student again, although wasn’t accompanied by vats of coffee and a late night run to the college bar for a quick pint at last orders.

Luckily nothing major was wrong, although I found a number of typos and one missing term. However, my picture of what we’ve done is now much clearer and more coherent. It is unlikely that I’ll do anything so formally organized with many future papers, but this was such fun! It almost made me want to take a class in something technical I don’t know much about, before reality crashed in and I realized that I basically have negative time to devote to anything like that.

I probably should have been more clear at the beginning of this post - I was living the working life of an undergraduate. Hope you weren’t looking for stories of drinking games, walks of shame and quick bong hits before class, although I do hear those are the subject of Daniel’s next post.

Early Friday morning I returned from a five-day jaunt to Reykjavik, where I was taking part in the inaugural meeting of the Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi).

Of course, these days one rarely “jaunts” anywhere. The flying portion of this trip, which was perhaps just a little more trouble than the average, may be summarized by: First flight delayed so many times that entire trip is postponed one day; spend 3.5 hours on phone with some of the world’s most incompetent customer service people (Travelocity), and their runners-up (Icelandair), before finally getting some help rescheduling from Delta; arrive in Iceland one day late, only to discover that you will be luggageless for at least a day; spend next 2 days in same clothes; fly back to New York; second flight delayed significantly; deal with useless and borderline rude Delta service at airport; board plane 1.5 hours late; spend 2 hours on runway; finally arrive home (at least with luggage this time) at almost 2am.

However, although I think I seriously need to review the amount of traveling I do, given how broken the system is, I must say that my time in Iceland was worth it.

We’ve discussed FQXi here before, in a guest post from Associate Scientific Director Anthony Aguirre, in which he not only laid out the philosophy and goals if the organization, but also addressed concerns that I and others had voiced about the sole current financial backer of the endeavor - the John Templeton Foundation (JTF). I have agonized over this ever since. I am clearly not in agreement with the goals of JTF. On the other hand, FQXi is independent of them, has its own charter, and is, as far as I can tell, supporting good, defensible science. They are also actively looking for a more diverse funding stream and, in fact, their seed grant from JTF will soon expire. Most certainly, if they had a number of donors, of which JTF was one, I would not spend time worrying about these issues.

In any case, earlier this year FQXi invited me to take part in their inaugural meeting and I decided that this would be a good way to dip my toe in the water and get a brief first-hand look at what they’re about, while getting to talk with colleagues old and new about a lot of intellectual issues that I spend time thinking about. So I accepted their kind invitation and submitted myself once again to the tortures of modern air travel.

The workshop was held at the Radisson SAS Saga in Reykjavik, Iceland; a place I have never been to previously, and always thought would be intriguing. Arriving early on Sunday, I checked in, cleaned my smelly self up as much as possible and headed right back out to attend the first real sessions of the meeting. The first day was filled with the only invited talks of the entire conference - overviews on Quantum Mechanics, Inflation, Non-String Quantum Gravity, String Theory (or Non-Non-String Quantum Gravity, as might have been more fair), The Late Universe, etc. Most of these talks were excellent, providing a clear summary and, most importantly, some common vocabulary useful when you have participants with such diverse experience - people interested in the Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics may have a great deal to say to those fascinated by how to put a measure on eternally inflating spacetimes, but they may never know if they don’t get a common language straight.

Monday, the entire day was spent at the Blue Lagoon Spa, which sounds decadent, but … oh, okay, it was decadent. But if it makes you feel better, we had an hour of short talks in the morning there, and three hours of group discussions in the afternoon. Groups were organized on the basis of three foundational questions each participant had submitted in advance, and I ended up in an “arrow of time” group, which was fun, but not quite what I’d expected. Nevertheless, I learned quite a lot from the discussions, which is what its all about.

The spa itself was a remarkable place, with a hot pool, warmed by geothermal springs, and lined with natural mud that is supposed to make physicists pretty if applied in the correct way. None of us figured out the correct way. Here’s a picture courtesy of the extremely fun Valerie Jamieson (from New Scientist, and who has also blogged about the trip over at the New Scientist Space Blog), who I’ll mention again in a while.

Tuesday was all business. The discussion groups from Monday were supposed to report to the workshop, not on the answers they had arrived at (who’s going to solve any of these foundational questions in a day?) but rather on the questions that their discussions had raised. Our group meandered around a little in our presentation, but homed in on what is, perhaps, the only clearly defined question: Why did our universe begin in such a low entropy state? (Something we’ve discussed here at Cosmic Variance on a number of occasions. See also Sean’s discussion at Preposterous Universe).

That evening there were no organized activities, and so I had dinner with my friends Lawrence Krauss and his wife Kate at The Pearl restaurant, which overlooks Reykjavik and executes a complete rotation every two hours. Great fun indeed.

Wednesday was mostly an excursion day and, I should say, one of the more amazing of these that I’ve ever been on. The buses took us first to Thingvellir National Park, where the Icelandic parliament - one of the oldest in the world - was founded in 930. We had only a little time to survey the spectacular scenery, before moving on to Geysir National Park, home of the original geyser, after which all others are named. That one has essentially stopped spurting now, but another still goes off every 5-7 minutes. This was a good place for a quick lunch, with the geyser periodically spurting in the background.

Back on the bus, we drove out across an alien landscape of boulders and black sand until we were within a half-mile of the Langjokull glacier. Here we stopped and were supplied with heavy-duty ski suits, overshoes, gloves and helmets, before being shuttled down to the glacier itself on a huge specially-designed vehicle.

At the glacier, we paired up and were supplied with snowmobiles and a brief lesson on how to drive them. Here I am before actually driving one.

A mutual realization that it was better to be paired with someone who appeared to be paying attention to this lesson than with one of those who were gazing at the landscape ensured that Valerie Jamieson and I rode together.

This really was a remarkable trip. We rode out until all that one could see in any direction was the glacier, with the mountains and volcanoes in the distance. It was spectacular. We stopped at the halfway point and took photographs. Some of our group got into a snowball fight (a rock-and-iceball fight really). In the photograph below you can see Valerie and me on our vehicle, with some of the perpetrators in the background, most notably Wojciech Zurek (with beard), who turned out to be quite an iceball marksman.

After driving back and shedding our glacier-wear, we spent some time on science again, getting split up into new groups and assigned to discuss our new questions during the rest of the day and the evening. I ended up in a fun group with Anton Zeilinger (of quantum teleportation fame), Dmitry Budker, Markus Aspelmeyer, Valerie Jamieson and John Donoghue (who abandoned us for another group he’d already been discussing with) to discuss the question of whether we should expect that the physical constants should be changing over time.

We began this discussion on our bus on our way to the next mind-blowing destination, in this case Gullfoss (the Golden Waterfall). The photo below, taken from the Wikipedia site about Gullfoss, does a good job of conveying the splendor of this two-level waterfall that terminates in a ravine

As you might imagine, we were all pretty hungry after this. Dinner didn’t disappoint. Held at a rustic restaurant at Stokkseyri, a black sand beach on the southern coast, our lobster banquet was some of the best seafood I’ve ever had.

Thursday morning we were back to serious work, debating the results of the previous day’s group discussions. Well, as serious as work can be when the debaters must wear viking hats! Watching Lawrence Krauss and Fred Adams debate in this way, one brandishing a sword and the other an axe, has to be seen to be believed (sorry - I have no photos). The presentations were a little spotty but there were some definite highlights including, for me, the group that had debated the interpretation of quantum mechanics and the one that had talked about eternal inflation, although the latter didn’t get as much time as I’d have liked to see.

This was a fascinating and intellectually stimulating conference in an unusual and dramatic location; so I’m glad I went. Perhaps best of all, there wasn’t a hint of any religion, spirituality, or any such non-science about the whole meeting, which I was delighted with. I returned exhausted, however. The conference itself was full with planned activities and talks, and it was nice to finish up the days with a beer in the bar with friends. But this left plenty of sleep time, and I’d hoped to take advantage of this because life has been a little hectic recently, with a ridiculous number of papers approaching completion. I’ll probably blog about them in a month or so when they’re done.

But it turned out to be difficult for me to sleep in Reykjavik. At this time of year it doesn’t really get dark, but just becomes dusky for a few hours from around 11:30 until 2 or so. Although the hotel provides an eye mask, I found it uncomfortable and the light coupled with a little jet lag meant sleep didn’t come easily. On the plus side, I was able to get a few hours extra time to calculate and write each day. On the minus side, four hours sleep or so a night doesn’t really cut it.

Nevertheless, what a week!

(Others blogging about this trip include Eugene Lim and Scott Aaronson)

In early 2005, back when I blogged at Orange Quark, I wrote about my good friend Teri Weaver, who is a reporter (then based in Seoul, now in Tokyo), for the military newspaper, Stars and Stripes. Teri was heading off for a six week assignment in Iraq and had started an interesting and well-written blog detailing her visit. It was fascinating reading, and I was lucky enough to get some first-hand versions of the stories when Teri and I met up in Beijing later that year.

Well, it’s two years later and Teri is back in Iraq for another assignment and is once again writing at Stonesoup. The posts are a riveting and quite personal window into what it is like to be on the ground in Iraq, and I hope you’ll drop by and take a look at some of them.

Update: I hadn’t realized, but Teri’s blog is invitation-only! However, Teri has been nice enough to participate in our comment thread and writes

If you’d like to take a peek, send Mark your email and I’ll sign you up. I’m a little leary of putting it out there for the web-at-large.

Thanks! Teri

I’m writing this from Berlin, in my room at Harnack-Haus, a meeting center and guest house owned by the Max Planck Society. The institute itself has a fascinating history, of which I just found the following spellbinding

Immediately upon opening its doors, the Harnack-House began to feed the “Dahlem Legend.” Nobel Prize winners and their students met here in social exchange and for academic discussion, holding lectures and colloquia. The House served as a club for members of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. Here they could lunch, read the international press, drink coffee in the garden, engage in sports, and play music. Foreign scholars were lodged in the guest apartments. The list of guests and lecturers reads like a “Who’s Who of Science”: Albert Einstein, Peter Deybe, Werner Heisenberg, Fritz Haber, Adolf Butenandt, Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner, Otto Meyerhof, Max Planck, Max von Laue and Otto Warburg. One Nobel Prize winner, the biologist Hans Fischer, even received the news of his award during his stay at the Harnack-House.

I’m here on an extremely short visit (arrived in Berlin around 1pm yesterday and fly out early tomorrow morning) for the annual meeting of the editorial board of New Journal of Physics (NJP). While quite a trek, and a not inconsequential amount of work, this is nevertheless a fun meeting (even though I didn’t get to watch World cup games in London, like last year.)

One thing that NJP likes to do is publish a number of focus issues each year. These involve enlisting one or more guest editors and getting them to corral a group of experts to contribute original research to a volume tightly concentrated on a particular topic. Sean and I (and our students) contributed a paper to one last year (for which Sean was the guest editor), but there are many others across all fields (which is what NJP covers). A full list, going back to 2000, when focus issues began is

• Focus on Measurement-Based Quantum Information Processing
• Focus on Complex Networked Systems: Theory and Application
• Focus on Interference in Mesoscopic Systems
• Focus on Dark Energy
• Focus on Accelerator and Beam Physics
• Focus on Casimir Forces
• Focus on Nanophotonics
• Focus on Correlated Electrons, Magnetism and Superconductivity in High Magnetic Fields
• Focus on Cold Atoms in Optical Lattices
• Focus on Gamma-Ray Bursts in the Swift Era
• Focus on Nano-electromechanical Systems
• Focus on Spacetime 100 Years Later
• Focus on Solid State Quantum Information
• Focus on Negative Refraction
• Focus on Photoemission and Electronic Structure
• Focus on Brownian Motion and Diffusion in the 21st Century
• Focus on Ultrafast Optics
• Focus on Orbital Physics
• Focus on Single Photons on Demand
• Focus on Turbulence
• Focus on Neutrino Physics
• Focus on Nanostructured Soft Matter
• Focus on Carbon Nanotubes
• Focus on Pattern Formation
• Focus on Quantum Gases
• Focus on Complex (Dusty) Plasmas
• Focus on Clusters at Surfaces
• Focus on Quantum Cryptography
• Focus on Turbulence in Magnetized Plasmas
• Focus on Supersymmetry in Physics
• Focus on Quark Gluon Plasma Searches in Heavy Ion Collisions
• Focus on Microlaser and Cavity QED
• Focus on Dark Matter

You can find links to all these at the focus issues site, and I hope you’ll take a look if interested, because anyone can read them, since open access is one of NJP’s raisons d’être.

I particularly enjoy the part of our meeting in which we brainstorm about possible future focus issues, and there are a couple coming out relatively soon that I am quite proud to have been either the originator or co-originator of. And, at today’s meeting, I suggested one specific focus issue to be initiated that was well received and which I think, when it comes out, will be of particular interest to many of our readers. It wouldn’t be right to go into details here (and I won’t in the comments), but I really hope it works out, and assuming it does, I’ll link to it here with a covering discussion.

Anyway, time for bed - my taxi will arrive ridiculously early tomorrow.

If you are really lucky, then you may have a great new idea about particle physics. It may be a way to address the hierarchy problem (why is gravity so much weaker then the known particle physics forces), or to generate mass for fermions (after all, we haven’t found the Higgs yet), or to understand the flavor hierarchy (how come there are three repeated families of particles in the standard model with increasing masses), or perhaps to unify all the forces into one (Grand Unification). Obviously, your obligation is to begin systematically computing the consequences of this idea for existing and future particle physics experiments.

Thirty years or so ago, with a few notable exceptions this would have been the end of the story. But it has become increasingly clear to most physicists that there exists a complementary list of consequences that should be figured out; those for cosmology. These days, this approach is basically second nature to any of us who might have new ideas about how the micro-world works, and reflects the modern thinking that particle physics and cosmology are not distinct disciplines, but are two sides of the same set of questions.

So, parallel to the cross-section and decay rate calculations, what are the most common cosmological areas in which one currently looks for further constraints on one’s new particle physics idea? What new questions do you need to ask yourself?
Continue reading ‘Constraints and Signatures in Particle Cosmology’

I almost never read children’s books, since my list of unread novels aimed at adults is already far too long. But a few years ago I took time, on the advice of friends, to read Philip Pullman’s trilogy - His Dark Materials. The initial book of the trilogy, Northern Lights, won the coveted Carnegie Medal in 1995. Last night it was declared the finest children’s book of the last 70 years, and awarded the Carnegie of Carnegies 70th Anniversary Medal.

The trilogy is remarkable fiction, taking on the themes of science, religion, authority and morality in a wonderfully rich array of parallel fantasy worlds. This is seriously educated fiction, drawing on cosmology, particle physics, philosophy, theology and history, and pitched at children. It is sometimes violent, sometimes upsetting, but ultimately uplifting. If you have kids, they’ll love it. If you haven’t read it already, you might find yourself itching for them to finish each book so that you can get your hands on it.

Glenn Greenwald has a thoughtful essay in Salon (titled “A tragic legacy: How a good vs. evil mentality destroyed the Bush presidency“), which is an excerpt from his upcoming book of the same name, in which he discusses the role that Bush’s simplistic and dogmatic worldview has played in his disastrous administration.

The article is an interesting read, and one doesn’t have to agree with everything that Greenwald says to accept the basic premise, which is that if one thinks one is the holder of an absolute truth, then the gray areas that make up most of life, and the complexity that underlies almost every important decision in the modern world, will forever be beyond you, and you are doomed to failure. While Greenwald applies this to the thought processes that led the country into the ill-conceived Iraq quagmire - that one can see people and actions as purely good or evil and hence make decisions based on that determination rather than a deep understanding of the situation - the general point applies to many other actions taken by the President.

Interestingly, this column appears on the very same day that Bush has once again vetoed a bill to promote embryonic stem cell research. As Sheryl Gay Stolberg reports in The New York Times

“I will not allow our nation to cross this moral line,” Mr. Bush said, exercising the third veto of his presidency. At the same time, he issued an executive order intended to encourage scientific advances in regenerative medicine, a move that he said would respect “the high aims of science” without encouraging the deliberate destruction of human life.

His (Christian) morals must be the right ones. A human life is the same thing as a few cells. Although support for stem cell research is quite popular among Americans, there appears to be no room for discussion with the President about the complexities or scientific debate around these issues. Because his decisions don’t come from informed discussion; they come from ideology, which trumps reason, science, and complex debate with depressing regularity these days.

I’ve just read another fine, short and clear column in The Guardian by Ben Goldacre, whose take on most things I completely agree with. In this case, he’s discussing that a distinguished British academic - Professor David Colquhoun FRS of University College London - has been forced to remove his blog - DC’s Improbable Science Page - from university servers.

Now, for some blogs, this can be a good idea, in order to separate the personal ideas of the blogger on all kinds of subjects from those of their institution. However, this blog is written by a scientist and is entirely about science. In fact, it plays one of the most important roles of science, that of educating the public about how to apply scientific criteria and standards of evidence to things that directly affect their lives. In this case, the claims made by various purveyors of alternative medicine.

This is the kind of work that universities should explicitly support. Sure it costs money to deal with complaints from quacks. Sure the university will lose popularity in some quarters for supporting the fight against charlatans. Sure it may take valuable administrative and legal time and effort to back a scientist in a dispute with cheats and liars. But isn’t this the side a university should want to be on? Either an institution values science and the scientific method or it doesn’t.

The request to take down the blog comes after a number of complaints to UCL’s Provost, including one complaining about Colquhoun’s use of the word gobbledygook. But when he’s writing about topics like psychic surgery, or homeopathy, what better word is there. One might say that ideas like these are stupid, idiotic, complete bollocks, nonsensical, pseudoscientific, claptrap, balderdash, baloney, drivel, mumbo-jumbo, or any one of a hundred other fitting and appropriately insulting phrases, but gobbledygook works just fine.

For a concrete example of the work Prof. Colquhoun does to protect the public by fighting ignorance and scientific dishonesty, here’s a letter he wrote to The Independent, after they advertised the Helios Homeopathy Travellers Kit (costing £38.95) as one of their Top Ten Best Travel First Aid Kits

Sir:

On Monday 24th July you featured The Ten Best Travel first aid kits.

One of these was the Helios Homeopathy Travellers’ kit. All the “remedies” in this kit are in the 30C dilution. They therefore contain no trace of the substance on the label .You pay £38.95 for a lot of sugar pills. To get even one molecule you’d have to swallow a sphere with a diameter equal to the distance from the earth to the sun. That is hard to swallow.

Helios was one of the companies that was pilloried by the Newsnight programme when their representative recommended homeopathic prevention of malaria. That was condemned even by some homeopaths as dangerous and irresponsible.

It is quite simple. This medicine contains no medicine. You are endangering your readers by recommending it.

David Colquhoun
PROFESSOR OF PHARMACOLOGY
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON
LONDON WC1

What a great letter; short, to the point, funny, and phrased in a way that hammers home how silly the idea is in terms the public can understand. Society is in desperate need of scientists to play this role. As Goldacre writes

… in a world where most orthodox “public engagement with science” activity consists of smug, faux-radical “science meets art” projects, Colquhoun - a world expert on single ion channels - was showing the world what science really does. He took dodgy scientific claims, or “hypotheses” as we call them in the trade, and examined the experimental evidence for them, in everyday language, with humour and verve. I would say his blog is a treat for the wider public, and arguably a rather good use of the time and resources of a public servant who has devoted his entire life to academia, on its relatively low wages, never once working for industry.

More and more of our everyday lives depend on scientific discoveries, and the decisions we must make regarding them demand at least a rudimentary understanding of the scientific method. At the same time scientists face increasing demands on their time from grants, teaching and research. The very least a university can do is to stand behind those who find time to take on this valuable role.

Update: It is wonderful to hear that UCL is doing the right thing and now throwing its support fully behind Professor Colquhoun. Goldacre’s Bad Science Blog now has the text of a joint statement from UCL and Colquhoun that states, in conclusion

UCL has a long and outstanding liberal tradition and is committed to encouraging free and frank academic debate. The evidence (or lack thereof) for the claims made for health supplements is a matter of great public interest, and UCL supports all contributions to that debate. The only restriction it places on the use of its facilities is that its staff should use their academic freedom responsibly within the law.
To this end, the Provost and Professor Colquhoun have taken advice from a senior defamation Queen’s Counsel, and we are pleased to announce that Professor Colquhoun’s website – with some modifications effected by him on counsel’s advice - will shortly be restored to UCL’s servers. UCL will not allow staff to use its website for the making of personal attacks on individuals, but continues strongly to support and uphold Professor Colquhoun’s expression of uncompromising opinions as to the claims made for the effectiveness of treatments by the health supplements industry or other similar bodies

Congratulations to Prof. Colquhoun and to UCL.

(Many thanks to Justin for pointing this out in the comment section)

My copy of The New York Review of Books just arrived, and I spent an entertaining twenty minutes reading Lee Smolin’s lengthy review of two new Einstein books (subscription required unfortunately). You can read the article for yourself and decide what you think about the content, but I was struck as always by Lee’s talent for writing itself - his words are a pleasure to read.

Perhaps what I enjoyed best about the article is Lee’s insistence that it is important for biographers and writers in general to try to understand what kind of people their subjects actually were, as opposed to buying into the public personae that they and other interested parties have created. In Einstein’s case this is particularly true. As the best-known scientist of all time, there exists an elaborate construction of what the man was like and, for most people, the image they have is of the eccentric, kindly, noble, gentle genius, detached from the tedium and minutiae of everyday life. This is the kind of image that gets in the way of understanding the complexities, subtleties, and, frankly, the most interesting details of most people’s lives. It also perpetuates a cartoonish version of scientists, as people to whom real-world concerns, passions, involvements and ambiguities are alien. As Lee writes, regarding Einstein

This possibility challenges the stereotype that scientists and mathematicians tend to be nerds, out of touch with their bodies. [...] Some would prefer the myth of Stephen Hawking, who may seem to be a man with no body to speak of, in touch only with the universe (with his necessary support from a team of nurses and students hardly mentioned), than to think too much about Einstein seducing Berlin socialites in his sailboat, or Erwin Schrodinger inventing quantum mechanics during an erotic weekend with a lover and later showing up in Stockholm to receive the Nobel prize with both his wife and his mistress.

Here Lee is focused on why an honest representation of a scientist’s life is crucial to understanding his or her scientific legacy, and the insights that provides into the nature of creativity. But there is another reason to support unembellished, warts-and-all scientific biographies. This myth of the scientist as a strange, detached creature is one of the reasons that more people don’t see science as a viable career path from an early age. After all, not only is the stereotype a rather unattractive one, but it is so starkly different from the way most people (even extremely smart and creative ones) conduct themselves, that many must find it impossible to see themselves as scientists.

The more young people realize that scientists are real people - yes, ones with specific talents and skill sets, but real, three-dimensional people nevertheless - the deeper the talent pool from which the next generation of scientist will arise.

I have been reading with some interest the comments section of Sean’s recent post about blogging during the tenure process, and that of Rob Knop’s original post that prompted Sean’s observations. The specific topic of blogging while under scrutiny is something about which I think sensible guidelines are rather obvious - one may violate them at will, and such violations can make for wonderful voyeurism, but the consequences are clear and not necessarily unreasonable. However, what grabbed my interest most is the general sentiment that academia is broken and that the tenure process, and the requirements and guidelines that most institutions follow, are scandalously unjust. This also came up in another recent thread.

It is most certainly true that there are well-known examples in which the tenure process fails spectacularly - I know some of these extremely well. It is also true that some of the victims of failed tenure processes have blogged eloquently about the failings of the system, and, in general, I have no reason to doubt the facts in their individual cases. However, what one sees less often are descriptions of the well-executed tenure and promotion procedures that account for, in my experience, the vast, vast majority of cases.

Obviously, I cannot speak with authority or experience about all academic subjects, or absolutely all universities. However, I have spent a great deal of time at many different institutions, and have collaborators, colleagues and friends at an even larger number (I will generally not name institutions, for a reason.) Let me make it crystal clear in advance that I in no way wish to detract from the personal misery that many clearly talented people have described - I have close personal friends who have been or are in this boat. I merely think it might be useful to provide some balance.

So how is tenure supposed to work?
Continue reading ‘The Tenure Process’