In almost any project, the path between “a good idea” and the “final exciting result” contained a proposal. It may have been a proposal to obtain access to scarce resources (like telescopes or accelerator beams), or it may be have been a proposal to obtain other more prosaic resources (i.e., money, to pay for the needed personnel and supplies). Whatever the nature of the proposal, however, I guarantee that the competition was ridiculously stiff, and that the odds of having any given proposal accepted were quite low (for reference, in most astronomy contexts, over-subscription rates tend to be factors of 5-10). These unfavorable odds can be incredibly demoralizing. They also can have profoundly negative impacts on a talented scientist’s career, if the odds never manage to tip in their favor.
Given the inspiration of the looming Hubble Space Telescope deadline, I thought I would share some of my “big picture” views on crafting successful proposals, expanding significantly on the more succinct advice given in an earlier post. While I’ve developed these opinions based on my experience in astronomy, I suspect they’d apply to many other fields, both within and beyond science. So here goes…
The annual Edge Question Center has now gone live. This year’s question: “What is your favorite deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation?” Find the answers here.
I was invited to contribute, but wasn’t feeling very imaginative, so I moved quickly and picked one of the most obvious elegant explanations of all time: Einstein’s explanation for the universality of gravitation in terms of the curvature of spacetime. Steve Giddings and Roger Highfield had the same idea, although Steve rightly points out that Einstein won’t really end up having the final word on spacetime. Lenny Susskind picks Boltzmann’s explanation of why entropy increases as his favorite explanation, and mentions the puzzle of why entropy was lower in the past as his favorite unsolved problem — couldn’t have said it better myself. For those of you how prefer a little provocation, Martin Rees picks the anthropic principle.
But as usual, the most interesting responses to me are those from far outside physics. What’s your favorite?
The good news about winning the Nobel Prize: you get better parking on campus.
The bad news: Sheldon Cooper makes fun of you on national TV.
Of course you don’t need to watch the ceremonies to learn what all the scientists are wearing this year. I am reliably informed that a regular tuxedo is not good enough; you need to go full white tie and tails. (Interestingly, the Peace Prize is more casual; black tie or “national costume” is perfectly acceptable.)
Can we define “life” in just three words? Carl Zimmer of Loom fame has written a piece for Txchnologist in which he reports on an interesting attempt: biologist Edward Trifonov looked at other people’s definitions, rather than thinking about life itself. Sifting through over a hundred suggested definitions, Trifonov looked for what they had in common, and boiled life down to “self-reproduction with variations.” Just three words, although one of them is compound so I would argue that morally it’s really four.
We’ve discussed this question before, and the idea of reproduction looms large in many people’s definitions of life. But I don’t think it really belongs. If you built an organism from scratch, that was as complicated and organic and lifelike as any living thing currently walking this Earth, except that it had no reproductive capacity, it would be silly to exclude it from “life” just because it was non-reproducing. Even worse, I realized that I myself wouldn’t even qualify as alive under Trifonov’s definition, since I don’t have kids and don’t plan on having any. (And no, those lawsuits were frivolous and the court records were sealed.)
It’s the yellow-taxi problem: in a city where all cars are blue except for taxis, which are yellow, it’s tempting to define “taxi” as “a yellow car.” But that doesn’t get anywhere near the essence of taxi-ness. Likewise, living species generally reproduce themselves; but that’s not really what makes them alive. Not that I have the one true definition (and maybe there shouldn’t be one). But any such definition better capture the idea of an ongoing complex material process far from equilibrium, or it’s barking up the wrong Tree.
There are three types of scientific explanations: those involving cats, those involving dogs, and those that aren’t very interesting. Via Andrew Revkin, here’s a well-done animation that uses a dog to explain the difference between a long-term trend and a short-term variation.
Show this to your local climate denialist when they get confused about the distinction between “climate” and “weather.” Not that it will change their minds, but the dog is cute.
Sorry for the light blogging of late. Actual work intervenes, and it might remain that way for a while. But I’ll try to pop in whenever I can.
Stephen Hawking is celebrating his 70th birthday today. That in itself is an amazing fact, just as it was amazing when he celebrated his 40th, and 50th, and 60th birthdays, as well as every other day he’s lived and thrived with a debilitating neuron disease. The extra fact that he continues to make contributions to science pushes beyond amazing to practically unbelievable.
Everyone likes to tell Hawking stories, and this blog is no exception. So here is mine, meagre as it is. I’ve gotten more than enough mileage out of this one in person, I might as well put it on the blog so I won’t be tempted to tell it any more.
At the end of 1992 I was a finishing grad student, applying for postdocs. One of the places I applied was Cambridge, to Hawking’s group at DAMTP. There is a slight potential barrier for American students to travel to the UK for postdocs, so they like to get out ahead of things and offer jobs early. Unfortunately I was out of my office the day Hawking called to offer me a position. Fortunately, my future-Nobel-Laureate officemate was there, and he took the call. He explained that Stephen Hawking had called to offer me a job — I was thrilled about the offer, but understood “Hawking called” as metaphorical. But no, Brian later convinced me that it actually was Hawking on the other end of the line, which he described as a somewhat surreal experience. Of course after the initial introduction the phone gets handed over to someone else, but still. Read the rest of this entry »
So you don’t enter the new year completely unprepared, here are my most secure predictions for 2012. Unlike other prognostication websites, these predictions are based on Science!
1. Freely-falling objects will accelerate toward the ground at an approximately constant rate, up to corrections due to air resistance.
2. Of all the Radium-226 nuclei on the Earth today, 0.04% will decay by the end of the year.
3. A line drawn between any planet (or even dwarf planet) and the Sun will sweep out equal areas in equal times.
4. Hurricanes in the Northern hemisphere will rotate counterclockwise as seen from above.
5. The pressure of a gas squeezed in a piston will rise inversely with the change in volume.
6. Electric charges in motion will give rise to magnetic fields.
7. The energy of an object at rest whose mass decreases will also decrease, by the change in mass times the speed of light squared.
8. The content of the world’s genomes will gradually evolve in ways determined by fitness in a given environment, sexual selection, and random chance.
9. The entropy of closed systems will increase.
10. People will do many stupid things, and some surprisingly smart ones.
‘Tis the season when bloggers, playing out the string between Xmas and New Year’s, fill the void with greatest-hits lists from the year just passed. But a question inevitably arises: how does one decide which posts to include? There are many different criteria, and preferring one to another might lead to very different lists. This is what’s known as the measure problem in blogospheric cosmology.
This year I’ve decided to confront the problem pluralistically. Thus: here we have five different Top Five lists, chosen according to completely different criteria. Let us know if your favorite Cosmic Variance post of the year somehow managed to not be on any of the lists.
First, the most crude and common measure, the posts with the most page views this year.
Merry Christmas, or whatever holiday you choose to celebrate, everybody. And if you don’t choose to celebrate for any particular reason, feel free to celebrate for no reason at all.
Here’s a legitimately touching Xmas song, Tim Minchin’s White Wine in the Sun (indirectly via Balloon Juice). As an Australian, he has a warmer image of the season than we Northerners. This isn’t the one that got censored from British TV, which is more amusing than heartwarming, but also worth a listen.
I’ve been meaning for a while to do a post on “Books You Should Read,” but I put it off until the last minute (of 2011), so now it’s a shopping list. I’m sticking to books that came out in the last year or two, on subjects vaguely related to what we often talk about here on the blog, since I know people get grumpy when we deviate from the prescribed topics of conversation. And I’m trying to highlight books that aren’t already bestsellers, but deserve to be; I’m assuming you don’t need me to tell you about recent books by Lisa Randall, Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, or Brian Greene. (Or me, or my lovely wife.) Note for late shoppers: Amazon will get you all of these in plenty of time for Christmas. And pre-emptive apologies to anyone whose book I didn’t include — probably because I haven’t had a chance to read it yet.
How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming, by Mike Brown. My Caltech colleague Mike Brown is the person most responsible for getting Pluto demoted from planetary status, by discovering Eris and other Kuiper-belt objects. For a long time I thought it was silly to go to such trouble to re-classify a celestical body, but this book convinced me otherwise. Part of the reason is that Brown (or plutokiller on the Twitter) is an enormously engaging writer; few quasi-autographical science books have managed to mix the personal side with the science so effectively.
Science Ink: Tattoos of the Science Obsessed, by Carl Zimmer. My sleeper pick for book of the year, Carl Zimmer’s compendium of science tattoos is a real delight. I’m not especially fascinated by tattoos or their own sake, but the beautiful photography here is matched by Carl’s fascinating descriptions of the science behind each one. This would make a great gift for just about anyone.
The Bodhisattva’s Brain: Buddhism Naturalized, by Owen Flanagan. Western atheist/naturalists are occasionally criticized because we speak disapprovingly about traditional Western religions, while not paying attention to Buddhism and other Eastern philosophies. Here’s the book that redresses the balance, but in a very sympathetic mode. Flanagan is a thoroughgoing naturalist, but appreciates some of the insights into human nature that Buddhism has to offer. In this book he offers a careful philosophical examination of Buddhist beliefs and practices, in the light of modern scientific understanding of humanity and our universe.
The Infinity Puzzle: Quantum Field Theory and the Hunt for an Orderly Universe, by
Frank Close. “Quantum Field Theory” is the scientific concept that, in my opinion, features the largest ratio of “people should be familiar with” to “people are familiar with.” Frank Close looks at the historical development of the subject, one of the great intellectual triumphs of the 20th century. I could nitpick (Ken Wilson isn’t even mentioned once?), but this book is full of great insights.
Our day (and night) jobs notwithstanding, the blog is about whatever we find interesting — science, to be sure, but also arts, politics, culture, technology, academia, and miscellaneous trivia. We have similar outlooks on many things, widely disparate opinions about others, and will do our best to keep the discourse reasonably elevated.
