So there’s snow in Chicago, and I’m stuck on the tarmac in Baltimore, on the phone to United Airlines, trying to reschedule my connection. But alas, the chipper recorded gentleman has not offered me the option “If you are currently trapped in an airplane, please say ‘Trapped’”. I take the best of the available options, but that man on the phone keeps prodding me for more information, none of which seems to be leading me closer to dealing with the “trapped on an airplane” issue. In increasing frustration, I start muttering “Operator. Operator. Operator”. After which I hear:

Infinitely patient phone guy: “I heard that you want an agent. Is this correct?”

Me: “Y.e.s.”

Infinitely patient phone guy: “Thank you! Before I transfer you, I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

Me (muttering): “oh fuck you.”

Infinitely patient phone guy: “I’ll transfer you to an agent immediately!”

Apparently, the voice recognition system has an escape hatch.

On Wednesday morning I arrived in Melbourne to take up the second half of the Sir Thomas Lyle fellowship I’ve held for the past couple of years. The thirty-something hour total traveling time left me somewhat disheveled and exhausted but, since it was 9:30 am, going to bed would have ruined any plans for efficient jet-lag recovery, and so I showered and headed in to the physics department.

You may recall my post from last year about my time in Melbourne, in which I recounted a delightful Saturday spent with my friend Ray Volkas visiting art galleries and bars (OK, more of the latter than the former) and generally getting to know Melbourne through its tremendous martini, wine and beer joints. Yesterday (also Saturday for me), having pretty much recovered from the trip, I spent an equally fun day, although displayed much more restraint than last time (it may have something to do with the seriousness required of me now that I’m a Reverend – more about that coming in a separate post soon, you can be sure!).

Perhaps the most unusual experience of the day was taking on “The Edge”. During last year’s visit Ray had pointed out to me that construction was nearing the end on what was to be Melbourne’s tallest building – the Eureka Tower. This year, the construction had indeed finished and, like most super-tall buildings these days, it has an observation deck allowing 360 degree views of the city. Certainly this is a fun way to get a look at the city, but I’ve been on observation decks before – including another in Melbourne – and it wouldn’t on its own be particularly notable, were it not for one unusual feature.

The Edge is a glass cube with an occupancy of up to twelve people. While I’m not completely sure about this particular glass, its effect is the same as switchable glasses that are laminates separated by polymer dispersed liquid crystals. Such glass can instantly be switched from opaque to transparent. This works because, in its normal state, the material between the glass is liquid crystal droplets immersed in a polymer. These droplets are randomly oriented and light is very efficiently scattered, so that the glass is opaque. However, when an electric current is applied the liquid crystals align with the electric field and light passes straight through.

So one gets in the cube, the walls and floor are opaque, and it slides slowly (with a number of prerecorded scraping and creaking sound effects) three meters out of the building, as in the picture below taken from the web page.

At this stage, all that one notices is that the walls and floor are a little lighter. Then, of course, someone flips a switch, and the entire cube is transparent, and you are suspended from the 88th floor, almost 300 meters above Melbourne. It is a pretty remarkable experience. If you’ve been on the observation deck for a while before doing the edge, it really isn’t too terrifying, although I think if you got off the elevator (9 meters per second by the way!) and went straight in, it’d be quite disorienting. Still - very fun.

So this was a nice way to pass the afternoon, and then in the evening I went to several very fun bars - Jwow wine bar, Lounge (Upstairs) and Double Happiness - and out for a nice dinner in Chinatown with a fellow Englishman and physicist - Andy Martin. Another successful first Saturday in Melbourne! Thanks guys.

I’m going to spend much of today working, trying to make progress on the project that Ray, his student – Damien George - and I are working on, trying to blend our complementary expertise about extra-dimensional models to address some outstanding questions about brane-world cosmology. I really want to get this project on a firm footing before I leave in two weeks, since Damien is going to spend next semester visiting me at Syracuse and I want to be sure we can hit the ground running when he gets there.

I am, however, going to try to spend part of the day in an Irish pub that I’m pretty sure carries the right television sports channel on which I can catch at least part of the second Indians-Red Sox ALCS game. Sports are, in fact, the only downside of my visit here. I have arrived when, coincidentally, two teams that I follow have reached critical stages of major competitions. The Cleveland Indians, having defeated the Yankees in the ALDS, are now one game in (a loss) to a seven-game series for the ALCS. For those of you who aren’t baseball fans, the ALCS (and the NLCS) are essentially the semi-finals for the World Series. At the same time, the rugby union World Cup is currently on and England - the defending champions – played in the semifinal this morning and knocked out France to reach the final. The problems for me are the time differences, which mean that I might be able to catch a little of the baseball and can’t really hope to watch the rugby. Two further problems are that the Indians knocked out the Yankees, but there are no Yankee fans here for me to rub it in to, and England knocked out Australia in the quarter finals, but nobody in Victoria cares about rugby – it’s all about AFL here – and so I can’t even rub that in! So frustrating!

Anyway, this is a very nice place, where I can mix good work and great fun for the next couple of weeks. I’ll be sure to write again soon.

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!

Greetings from the International Congress on Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science in Beijing. I once read, in Ray Monk’s biography of Bertrand Russell, about a year that Russell spent lecturing on philosophy in Beijing. He was extremely taken with the city and the country, predicting that it would flower into a leading role in the world. This momentarily puzzled me, as my vision of China didn’t seem in sync with Russell’s democratic ideals. But then common sense clicked in, and I realized that we were talking about a period just after World War One, during the Sun Yat-sen era. The new Republic of China was struggling to emerge out from Imperial rule, and the Communist takeover was decades in the future. One could have easily imagined that this sprawling country, united by a common language and a rich heritage of culture and innovation, would rapidly take its place among the free and prosperous nations of the world. The fact that it didn’t is one of the great tragedies of twentieth-century history.

These days China is increasingly prosperous, but not quite free. Upon landing at Beijing International Airport, one fills out the usual customs declaration form, full of admonishments against bringing in firearms or questionable agricultural products. But there is an extra item on the list of dangerous imports: writings, recordings, or other collections of information that could be judged as a threat to the political, moral, or social good of the nation. The didn’t actually ask to search my laptop, but the warning was there.

It’s well known that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) censors blogs, so I’ve been poking around using the internet connection here in my hotel room, trying to judge the extent to which this is true. (The flipside, of course, is the perilous situation of bloggers located in China; apparently they’ve been required to register in order to blog, but I don’t have the latest on that. I should mention that there are all sorts of blogs about China, not that I have any expertise about them.) Access to most websites is fine, but certain addresses are certainly being blocked. Of course it’s impossible for me to distinguish between the actions of the local ISP, the city of Beijing, or the Chinese government itself, but you draw conclusions using the data you have, not the data you wish you had.

Any blog on Blogspot is definitely off-limits (so I can’t visit Preposterous Universe for old time’s sake). You can type in the address or click a link, and the browser will think for a minute, and then return a “Problem loading page: The connection has timed out” error. My impression is that that’s been true for a long time, although apparently it’s been on and off for a while now. Typepad blogs are also off-limits, so no Cocktail Party Physics for me, although that might be a recent development. Livejournal seems to be unavailable, and likewise Xanga, but blogs hosted on Wordpress.com seem to be available. You can search on Google Blog Search or Bloglines, but Technorati is blocked. I haven’t found any individually-hosted blogs that were off-limits, although certain news sites like philly.com are mysteriously banned. The Eagles are in the middle of training camp, how am I supposed to keep up? Also, the New York Times is readily accessible, so make of that what you will. I also couldn’t reach the BBC, although I can actually watch the BBC news channel on my hotel room TV.

Google, of course, is available, in the wake of their somewhat-infamous deal struck with the Chinese government. But Wikipedia is a little confusing — blocked at times, available at others. Apparently this is an ongoing skirmish. I typed in “China” to Google, and the first link was the the Wikipedia page, so I clicked there, and saw it no problem. Then I typed “China internet” into the Wikipedia search box, and was given a list of pages, including Internet Censorship in the People’s Republic of China. But when I clicked there, it briefly began to load, before switching to a “The connection was reset” error. A little spooky, to be honest. Right now I seem to be able to see most Wikipedia pages, although apparently not those specifically about the PRC (although the main China page is still okay). You might think, no problem, I can just look at the Google cache pages for whatever Wikipedia article I’m interested in. But no, you can’t; nothing in Google’s cache seems to be available. So much for infamous deals.

None of which has prevented me from reading any of my favorite blogs. I just do what I always do, and read the feeds via Bloglines. They’re all perfectly visible, even for the blocked sites. Google reader works just as well. A lack of internet savvy on the part of the censors, or an intentional oversight? The one thing that one can’t do is leave comments (or start up your own blog, obviously), and maybe that’s the point.

(I also notice that when I visit google.com, I am not automatically redirected to the local version google.cn, which seems to happen in European countries. Is this because the hotel’s service provider is rigged for foreigners, and ordinary citizens have different rules? Not sure.)

It could be much worse, of course. I mean, here I am, typing away on my own blog, with little fear that the secret police are going to burst into my hotel room in the middle of the night to haul me away. But the biggest single reason I don’t have that fear is that I know that word would get around, and that it wouldn’t look good — free information protects free people. Amnesty International has a campaign, irrepressible.info, to protest against internet censorship around the world. The more noise people make about this issue, the more pressure governments will feel to keep the web free.

Update: In the United States, we prefer to have our censoring-for-political-content performed by corporations, rather than directly by the government. Different cultures, different systems.

Just a brief note to report that we have escaped from Yearly Kos unscathed. The science panel was a great success; Chris Mooney and Ed Brayton gave sparkling talks, Tara Smith moderated with aplomb, Lindsay Beyerstein snapped pictures, and the whole thing went smoothly due to the organizational skills of Stephen DarkSyde and Jennifer “Unstable Isotope” Thompson. The hot lights of CNN and C-SPAN glared down upon us, but we refused to wilt. Ed has a brief report here, and Chris describes the session in detail at the Huffington Post.

The conference highlight was the Democratic Presidential candidates’ forum, featuring all of the major candidates not from Delaware. (See reports on the forum here, here, here, and a convention overview by Ezra Klein here.) It was a sprightly debate, ably moderated by Matt Bai. Despite (or perhaps because of) the restriction to very brief answers, real distinctions between the candidates did shine through. Bill Richardson, for example, actually volunteered his support for a balanced-budget amendment, essentially removing himself from consideration as a serious candidate. John Edwards was slick and said good things, but that was in part because he ignored all of the questions. Hillary Clinton was, predictably, strong and well-informed, but this wasn’t her crowd. She bobbled a question about accepting donations from lobbyists, claiming that just because she took money doesn’t mean she would be influenced by the lobbying. My own biggest problem with Hillary is that she’s too willing to buy into a dramatically reductive view of how the world works, whether in all sincerity or just as a political stance. She dismissed the importance of anti-American sentiment in the world, claiming it was just anti-Bush sentiment, and claimed that we were now safer because we have to take our shoes off before passing through airport security.

I’m a longtime Barack Obama supporter, and the convention reinforced my feeling. His performance at the forum was careful and specific, not letting his charisma shine through, but he was enormously compelling in a breakout session afterward. Obama gets what it’s like to live in a complicated world, because he encapsulates a complicated world all by himself: American mother, Kenyan father, born in Hawaii, lived for four years in Indonesia as a child, educated at Harvard, trained as a street organizer in Chicago. He has an incremental but ambitious health care plan, and was anti-war from the start. Still, I’d be absolutely thrilled to support any of Obama/Clinton/Edwards against any of the embarrassments currently in contention for the Republican nomination. It’s an incredibly strong Democratic field, which is something I never thought I’d see.

But the really interesting news (to me) at the conference was that Bill Foster is running for Congress. Bill’s name might not be familiar to you unless you’re a particle physicist — he’s played a major role in a number of particle-physics experiments, including Fermilab’s antiproton Recycler Ring. Before becoming a physicist, he became independently wealthy when he and his brother founded a company (while at college) that has become the world’s leading provider of lighting systems for theaters. He’s running in Dennis Hastert’s district, although it’s not yet clear whether Hastert himself will be standing for re-election. It’s a Republican district, but not so much so that we couldn’t imagine taking it in a year when Republicans are as unpopular as they’ve been in recent memory. You can donate here to Bill’s campaign.

Wearing the little blue tag that identified me as a speaker at Yearly Kos, I was warned on multiple occasions to be on the lookout for Fox News and other nefarious media outlets, who were said to be lying in wait to ambush the innocent Kossacks, hoping to record them saying outrageous things for later broadcast. I was really looking forward to being thus ambushed, but it never happened. I spent hours lurking in the public areas, doing my best to look vulnerable and yet potentially outrageous, but no luck. My inevitable on-air showdown with Bill O’Reilly will have to wait for some other day.

p.s. It’s true, we did have non-YK fun while in Chicago. I’ll report later on our restaurant exploits, but I’d be remiss not to mention the trouncing at poker that was administered by Jeff Harvey on Friday night, thus falsifying (or at least offering one data point against) my conjecture about string theorists. Jeff had been dominating the local game since I left for California, and he proved on Friday that his success was no fluke. Or maybe it has been a fluke, but it’s a consistent one. Until next time, anyway.

In a few hours Future Spouse and I will be hopping on a plane for Chicago. All sorts of fun things are planned, but the nominal excuse for the trip is to attend the second annual YearlyKos convention, where perhaps we’ll score some party invitations. On Friday afternoon at 2:30 I’ll be speaking on the science panel, along with fellow bloggers Chris Mooney and Ed Brayton. The moderator will be Tara Smith of Aetiology, and we’ve even corralled Lindsay Beyerstein to be the official photographer; Stephen Darksyde, who put it together, unfortunately won’t be able to make it, but we hope to do him proud. Unconfirmed rumors suggest that the panel will be taped by C-SPAN for later broadcast, so don’t be shocked if you tune in hoping for some hot congressional-subcommittee action and catch science bloggers instead. It’s also supposed to be broadcast in Second Life, although I don’t know that means. Tara will also be moderating a science bloggers caucus on Thursday afternoon. Any CV readers who are at YK should certainly drop by and say hi.

Politics is a funny thing. Like last year, I anticipate being moved by the sincere passion for effecting political change in evidence among the participants, and also being a little creeped out by the attitudes of the less reasonable among them. Among the latter we are currently faced with the spectacle of Mike Stark, who decided it was a good idea to harass Bill O’Reilly at his house, putting up signs and stuffing reports of O’Reilly’s sexual-harassment lawsuit into his neighbors’ mailboxes (via Balloon Juice). This was Stark’s idea of a clever response to O’Reilly’s ludicrous attempts to smear Kos as a “hate site” by trolling thousands of diaries and millions of comments for outrageous remarks. Now, reasonable people can all agree that Bill O’Reilly is an obnoxious twit. But even twits shouldn’t be bothered at their homes, and that’s even true if they themselves have engaged in the tactic. “Two wrongs…” and all that. So it was depressing to read so many of the comments at Kos coming out in defense of Stark (although there were also many that took him to task).

Nevertheless, I have not given up my ambitions to someday be a big-shot A-list left-wing blogger. From my close readings of The Poor Man Institute and other sites, I gather that the accepted strategy is to post YouTube videos of progressive rock bands. All I can say is, if that’s the game you want to play, then don’t mess around.

Don’t. Mess. Around.

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)

When you travel extensively, you become accustomed to the routine of flying. You snag your window seat, unpack your kit of ipod, neck pillow, and water bottle, and then get down to the serious business of ignoring the flight attendent’s safety instructions. As a person to whom American Airlines once sent christmas cookies, I am the classic seasoned traveller.

However, I had a first yesterday, descending through the somewhat inclement cloud cover over Sydney. As I looked out the window to see if I could get a glimpse of the city, I instead got to watch the wing of the plane get hit by lightning (accompanied by a loud CRACK, which is the last noise you ever want to hear on a plane).

Now the startling thing in retrospect was that this was completely non-terrifying. The event ended before I could really process what had happened, and absolutely nothing happened to the plane. Lights didn’t dim, movie didn’t stop, oxygen masks didn’t drop. Yeah, there was a bit of screaming, but it didn’t really seem necessary as we showed no signs of plummeting out of the sky. Like running into birds, this is clearly something that planes are designed to cope with.

Now that I’ve been back from hunting dinosaurs with Project Exploration for a few days, I owe you all the report. I’m not going to go into all of the background, as that was covered pretty well in my blog posts about the 2004 trip, Dinosaur Report I and Dinosaur Report II. So this will just be a little photo-essay about the heavy lifting that was specific to this trip.

During the previous two trips I had been on with Project Exploration, the focus was on prospecting and the early stages of bringing fossils out of the ground. Clearing away the dirt, exposing bone, determining what we found, estimating the physical extent of the fossils. The eventual goal, of course, is to clear away everything but the bones and enough rock (called “matrix” in paleo-speak) to hold it together, wrap up the pieces snugly in wood and plaster (”jacketing”), and bring it all back home — in this case, Paul Sereno’s lab at the University of Chicago. But the process as a whole takes time, and three days of work by a crew of enthusiastic but untutored amateurs generally isn’t going to make it happen. But on this trip we were working on a site where most of the work had been done, and our task was to finish the job. In fact, we were back to the site I had gone to in 2005. In the meantime the locations of the various bones had been ascertained, many of them had been fully jacketed, and our task was primarily to finish off the biggest pieces. “Finishing off” means completing the jacketing process and transporting the jackets to Billings, Montana, where a freight company would carry them to Chicago.

The story is conveyed better by words than by pictures. Click to get hi-res versions in a new window.

Here is a view of our vans, as seen from the dig site. Each morning we’d get up bright and early to have breakfast at Dirty Annie’s (the finest dining establishment in all of Shell, Wyoming, featuring chokecherry pancakes the size of garbage-can lids). Afterwards we’d head out to the site in two rented vans, the backs of which were filled with all the paleontological necessities: burlap, plaster, water, picks, awls, hammers, GPS units, shovels, trowels, gloves, 2×4’s, buckets, tarps, brushes, kneepads, and sundry snack foods. The vans would bounce over dirt trails to the foot of the hill where the fossils were, and we would all jump out, eager to get our hands dirty. (On at least one occasion, unanticipated logistics forced the crew into drafting a theoretical physicist into van-driving duty. Thankfully, nobody was seriously injured.)

And here is the dig site, as seen from where we parked the vans. Just to the left of center there you can see the plaster around the main group of fossils — jacketing that bad boy and trucking it to Billings was our primary challenge for this trip.

For some reason (too excited by the goings-on, probably) I neglected to take a close-up photo of the main fossil group before we covered it with plaster. But to get the idea, here is a smaller group, this one a collection of vertebrae. In the field, the main goal is to roughly carve out the bone and get it back to the lab in workable condition. On the other hand, you don’t want to make it heavier than it needs to be, so you try to remove as much matrix as you can without sacrificing the structural integrity of the fossil. Once the bone is exposed, you cover it with tinfoil, then wrap it with burlap strips dipped in plaster. Delicate soul that I am, I resisted participating in the plastering at first, but ultimately I realized that everyone else was right, it really was the most fun part of the whole procedure. To make the jacket a bit stronger you can plaster pieces of wood to the whole collection, as seen in the bottom part of the picture.

Here is Paul on the first day, explaining to our intrepid crew of newcomers what we’ll be doing out here. The part of the process for which I was best suited was the delicate work with an awl and a brush, clearing away bits of matrix right up against the bone. Probably I’d be even better suited for the close-up work performed by the preparators back in the lab, who work under microscopes to remove things at the grain-of-sand level and reconstruct the bones. Actually, come to think of it, I’d be best suited to be sequestered in a room far away from any fossils, left with a pen and paper to think about the universe. So that all worked out for the best.

Paul, eager to get going, burns off nervous energy by doing push-ups. (He was the only one to employ that strategy.)

Here is the main collection of fossils, separated out from the surroundings and covered on the top with plaster. It consisted of vertebrae, ribs, and sundry other bones that I won’t pretend I could identify. Paul figured that it was a sort of Diplodocus, one of those lumbering herbivores with giant necks and tails that roamed North America during the Jurassic. But the structure of the hip bones differed from that of the ordinary Diplodocus, so Paul judged that it was a new species. By the second day he had promoted it to a new genus — apparently the rules for whether a new species is in a distinct genus or an entirely new one are a little fuzzy. In any event, our job was to hack away at the underpinnings of this rock, and eventually to bring it home.

And away we go!

Continue reading ‘Dinosaur Report III: The Journey Home’

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.