Blogs / Cosmic Variance

While procrastinating on my taxes, I stumbled across this (courtesy of Bitch Ph.D.). If you haven’t yet seen it, you simply must take a look and wade through the comments. A blog must-read. Could be a classic.

It is Friday, and time for some fun. This time the fun is in a good cause. (Well, actually, it always is, but….)

I was touring our Senior Labs here just half a hour ago, as I’m part of a committee looking at what we’re going to do in the future with regards purchasing new equipment, syllabus issues, etc (these are instructional labs). Standard stuff of the professorial day that I won’t bore you with further.

I was wandering around looking at the equipment (I always get a bit giddy with excitement when I go into labs….I really love doing experiments and building things in general……) when my eyes fell upon a printout of a chart reminding students of the colour coding scheme for determining the properties of a resistor. For those of you who never had the pleasure of building electronic circuits, basically there are bands of colour put in given sequence on the resistor (and electronic component) that allows one to determine how much electrical resistance it has at a glance. Much better than writing numbers onto the side, or something like that, if you take into account the size of the devices, durability, etc. Each colour corresponds to a number and you can reconstruct the value of the resistance in no time, given practice.

When I was a kid, bent over a soldering iron in my room for way too many hours, I learned from a book that the way of remembering the sequence of colours (black, Brown, Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Violet, Grey, White) was to use a mnemonic. Unfortunately the mnemonic was:

Black Boys Rape Only Young Girls But Virgins Go Without.

Sigh.

Anyway, I was excited to see that there’d been some progress, and somebody had made the effort to make a change, but then I read it:

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Greetings from New Mexico, where I selflessly rise early to share a couple of items on the fight-to-save-honest-science front:

• At Daily Kos, DarkSyde has an interview with Representative Brad Miller (D-NC) about his efforts to ferret out instances of the overt politicization of science within the administration (as we mentioned before). He wants to gather enough evidence to hold an investigation by the House Science Committee.
• Phil Plait points us to Defend Science, a group that is holding protests and circulating a petition decrying attacks on objective scientific thinking within the U.S. I personally wasn’t that fond of the way the petition itself was written — a little too overheated, with a lot of capital letters — but it’s absolutely a worthy cause, and I am happy to go along.

Yesterday, my colleague Krzysztof Pilch and I decided to walk over to the Davidson Conference Center on campus to have a look at the undergraduates’ presentations of their research projects. USC is very committed to getting undergraduates involved in real research with professors, and every year they have a day of poster presentations. I became aware that it was this time of year because two of the students in my electromagnetism class who are usually almost flawless in their attendance missed class a couple of times. (I learned later that it was because of the final production of posters for their projects, etc, etc…..)

I think that this is simply a wonderful thing. It’s really excellent to see the students get engaged with a project, and begin to apply several of the things that they’ve been learning in class to new intellectual challenges. It makes it all worth it…..

So we went along to have a look, found the room where the Physical Sciences and Engineering projects were:

…. and presented ourselves to the students, and let them do their dog-and-pony show. You’ll recall me telling you about my being a judge of the wonderful California State Science Fair last year, where the participants were considerably younger….. Well, this was rather like that, except that I was not a judge, and the students were older, and I did not ask them what they wanted to be when they grow up. There was enthusiasm, a bit of nervousness, some glances over at the project of your neighbours to see how they were doing, etc…. all just plain valuable fun. (Go and have a look at my description of that event, by the way).

Here’s Michael Johnson, who’s in my electromagnetism class. He’s a double major (Mathematics and Physics) and his project (”Thermodynamic Properties of Liquid Helium Nanodroplets and Multielectron Bubbles”) gave him a chance to show off his skill set in both areas, doing some modeling of the droplets and bubbles in question:

He worked on this in my colleague Vitaly Kresin’s lab, where the focus is nanocluster physics.

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This has been a particularly heavy couple of weeks for me, which is about to culminate in a rather long trip. It has also been illustrative, in a short time, of what goes on in the life of a physics professor.

Two weeks ago I went to Chicago, to give the Physics Colloquium at Northwestern University. I’d never been to Evanston before and found it to be a lovely place, with my impression being helped by highly cooperative weather (it was in the high 60s and I was able to walk by the lake, enjoy the view of Chicago, and not freeze to death while doing it). I was treated wonderfully at Northwestern, cramming in a day full of physics discussions, including a fun one with the astrophysics postdocs (I know you guys are lurkers here) before my colloquium in the late afternoon.

I spoke on Connecting the Dark Side and Fundamental Physics and it seemed to go well, with plenty of good questions and then an intense discussion session at the blackboard for an hour during the post-colloquium reception. The day was capped off by a relaxing dinner with my extremely gracious host, Michael Schmitt, and three other physicists - André de Gouvêa (particle theory, particularly neutrino physics), who I already knew and Vicky Kalogera and Fred Rasio (Astrophysicists, particularly the physics of compact objects) who I hadn’t met before but who turned out to be perfect dinner companions.

The day afterwards (Saturday) I’d arranged an evening flight in order to hang out with Sean in Chicago. We sampled some of the city’s hedonistic offerings and even discussed a couple of projects, one of which is almost completed. I was back in Syracuse by 9:30pm.

I have since spent most of my time feverishly finishing one project (on ghosts in modified gravity models, with my former student Antonio de Felice and Mark Hindmarsh); working on the second one (on structure formation in some modified gravity models, with Sean, my student Alessandra Silvestri, and Sean’s student Ignacy Sawicki); teaching cosmology to my undergraduate class and preparing them for an exam next week; helping Alessandra prepare for her Research Oral; hosting a visitor and getting organized for a trip I’m taking tomorrow.

Yesterday was pretty busy. I was hosting a visitor and seminar speaker - Chris Hill, head of the Fermilab particle theory group. Chris spent all day with us, gave a fascinating talk and discussed physics with me and other faculty members.

In the afternoon, right after Chris’ talk, I went straight into another talk - the Research Oral exam of my graduate student, Alessandra. This is an exam in the style of a thesis defense, with a full committee, that we conduct about a couple of years after our graduate students arrive. It focuses on what research they are currently doing, and their plans for the future. Alessandra gave a virtuoso presentation on the work with Sean and Iggy that I mentioned above, answered tough questions correctly and with confidence, and passed with flying colors, making me happy for her and also very proud.

So, to celebrate Chris’ visit and seminar, Alessandra’s successful Research Oral, and the presence of another visitor, Toby Wiseman from Harvard (plus a great job that one of our postdocs just got, which I will report in a separate post), ten of us - faculty, postdocs, students and visitors - went out for a great dinner last night at The Mission restaurant.

Today I chatted again with Chris in the morning, and am now preparing to teach in the afternoon and then I need to get organized, because I leave tomorrow afternoon for a trip to Italy.

I know, I know, it’s a tough life. But don’t worry too much about me - I’ll be OK. I’m headed to the island of Ischia, in the Bay of Naples, to give a plenary talk on Colliders and Cosmology at the International Conference on the CMB and the Early Universe, taking place after the Planck Consortium Meeting. I’ll actually be getting to Ischia early on Wednesday (the conference starts on Thursday), but will be spending a few days before that visiting my family in the North West of England. This should be just enough time to gain ten pounds eating home-cooked food before stuffing myself with Italian delicacies for three days to gain a further ten and waddling onto the plane back to the U.S.

As you can see, life is pretty crazy (although I’m guessing that whole “island in the Bay of Naples” thing burned some of the sympathy you might have built up), but truly fun. These things, working hard on projects you love, teaching engaged students, mentoring smart up-and-coming physicists and fascinating travel to discuss your work, are some of the things that make this job, although long and hard, absolutely wonderful.

Here in Syracuse, the semester is approaching an end, the baseball season has started, the World Cup is on its way, summer is arriving and my bike rack and golf clubs are back in the trunk of my car. If I can just see my way through twenty or thirty tasks remaining to be done, I might even get to use them, you never know.

The next Categorically Not! is Sunday 23rd April. You may recall my post on the Categorically Not! series of events held at the Santa Monica Art Studios. They’re fantastic, and I strongly encourage you to come to them.

Here is K.C. Cole’s teaser:

Really?

Look around you. Is the scene you see “real”? Or a story made up inside your head? What about atoms? Are they real? What about love? Physics tells us that familiar space and time are illusions (while black holes and quantum weirdness are real). Artists reveal deep truths by pretending. What does it mean to say something is “real,” anyway? Physicist Steven Weinberg says it means we are granting it a measure of respect.

For this month’s Categorically Not! we are delighted to have Bay Area artist Bob Miller, whose explorations into the nature of light, seeing and believing are embodied in museum exhibits through-out the world. Bob will TALK A LITTLE about, and SHOW A LOT (capitals his) about what we’re REALLY seeing when we open our eyes. It really has a LOT to do with “The Wholeness of Seeing and Being,” he says.

From a scientific perspective, neuroscientist Richard Brown will demonstrate several engaging and powerful illusions currently being studied by scientists, present current views of why our brains evolved to produce illusions, and discuss the significance of illusions in our and understanding of “reality.” Richard studied neuroscience at Caltech and UCSF, and researched human color vision at UCSD’s Center for Brain and Cognition before moving to the Exploratorium in 1998, where he continues to develop interactive exhibits about perception, behavior and minds.

For a literary trip behind the looking glass, Pushcart prize winner Aimee Bender will lead us in a group writing exercise, as well as read and talk about her reality redefining fiction. Aimee is the author of The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, An Invisible Sign of My Own, and Willful Creatures, which feature a girl with a fire hand, a character obsessed with numbers, and pumpkinheads who give birth to children with the recessive gene that produces a head made of an iron. Aimee has published in Harper’s, Granta, The Paris Review and is heard on This American Life. She teaches creative writing at USC.

As usual, it is held at the Santa Monica Art Studios, come at 6:00pm for drinks, cookies and a look around the space, and there’s a 6:30 start. For more information, visit the Categorically Not! website.

Hope to see some of you there!

-cvj

A couple of publishing events of possible interest to CV readers:

1. As an interesting experiment in web publishing, Robert Frenay’s new book Pulse is being fully published online. The book is about the future of computers, technology, and complex systems, so its appearance in blog form makes a certain kind of sense.
2. Morse and Feshbach’s Methods of Theoretical Physics, a classic textbook and reference, has been reprinted after being out of circulation for a while. At almost $300, it’s not really an impulse buy, but you do get two volumes of about 1000 pages each. The reprinting was done under the supervision of Mark Feshbach, son of co-author Herman Feshbach.

Truth in advertising compels me to admit that I have not read either of these books! Nor I am getting anything for mentioning them, so it’s not really “advertising.” But both events are interesting.

Obviously a lot of smart and well-informed people have been thinking about this. Many, like Juan Cole, think that the Iranians are nowhere close to a bomb; ThinkProgress is slightly less sanguine. They are taking the trouble to make this argument because the US is claiming that it would only take 16 days for Iran to make a bomb. There are all sorts of reasons to disbelieve this particular claim: a history of crying wolf, an apparent misunderstanding of the concept of significant figures… Still, is it more like ten days, or ten years?

Steinn Sigurðsson looks at the problem as a physicist, and isn’t optimistic.

I don’t know Iran; I don’t have access to any classified information on nuclear weapons.
I do know something about physics…

First of all, Iran is clearly been working on putting together a full nuclear cycle for about 20 years

That means they want to be able to do it all in-house: mining, enrichment, burning, plutonium extraction, power generation and bomb production.

It is clear that they did the science in the early-to-mid-90s, they tested centrifuges, built small high neutron flux reactors and got small amounts of plutonium extracted.

So, they learned Pu chemistry, what isotopes you get with different burns, and maybe some metallurgy.

They then set up centrifuge halls and played with an AVLIS (laser isotope separator).

They also ordered a 1GW reactor from the russians, and refined uranium oxide (aka “yellowcake”) into both uranium tetrafluoride, uranium hexafluoride and uranium metal.
Supposedly several tons of uranium oxide were processed.

Now: there are two ways to make bombs, at the basic level.
Get highly refined uranium-235 metal; or, fairly pure plutonium-239. In kilogram quantities.
U-235 bombs are simple and need not be tested. “A grad student could make one of those”.
Pu-239 bombs are notoriously fickle and are said to need testing (although maybe not so much any more…)

Read the whole thing.

Hofstadter’s Law says “It always takes longer than you think, even when taking into account Hofstadter’s Law.” For nuclear weapons, unfortunately, the word “longer” should be replaced by “shorter.” Historically, we always underestimate the proximity of other nations to full nuclear capability (unless we’re trying to cook up reasons to invade them). I don’t know what to do about it, but there’s every reason to believe that, left to its own devices, Iran will have some sort of bomb sooner rather than later.

If we are lucky, we have a teacher or two during our K-12 education that has a lasting impact on our lives. These are the rare ones that really care and can make a difference in our grown-up selves (would I be in science without Mr. K??). I had two such teachers during high school, and today, I learned that one of them passed away. Mrs. Hultgren was commander-in-chief of s-o-p-h-o-m-o-r-e English. She ran class like a Marine boot camp. She made you sweat and you either made the grade or were ridiculed in front of the entire class. You didn’t go to the 11th grade unless you passed.

I still have vivid memories of the first day of class. The main lesson was that this was going to be one heck of a tough time. She drilled the correct spelling of s-o-p-h-o-m-o-r-e into us. In the process, she honed in on cute, little, big-eyed, always perfect Teresa (who was a bit smug in my book) and reduced her to tears. OK - I’ll admit I enjoyed that, but was still left shaking thinking I could be next. The lesson plans are still clear in my mind. First we read about Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Norgay Tenzing. Then we spent 6 weeks with Lord of the Flies. It was simply amazing to be in Mrs. Hultgren’s class and have red-hair with freckles, same as the charactor of Jack. I managed to stand up to the daily taunting, and who knows how much that helped me in my quest to be a woman physicist. Springtime was Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, in olde English. Once again, I was in the forefront as my birthday is the Ides of March.

I had Mrs. Hultgren again, for English Literature when I was a senior. She still made us work hard, but was more mellow, probably because we took the class as an elective. It was one of my favorite classes ever. I was talking with her one day after class and discovered that she was recently divorced after 18 years of marriage. I asked why, and her response was so poignantly honest and open, that I remember it verbatim to this day. She said: “sometimes you can love someone dearly, but can’t live with them.”

Anyway, my highschool girlfriends and I generated some internet traffic today, which was nice. We were horrified to realize that we are the same age now (29) as Mrs. Hultgren was when she taught us. One of my friend’s oldest son is a s-o-p-h-o-m-o-r-e and is reading Lord of the Flies. My, how times change and things still stay the same!

This one is for you, Mrs. Hultgren:

Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs and peep about
To find ourselves dishonourable graves.
Men at some time are masters of their fates:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

By W.S. Merwin.

When I think of the patience I have had
back in the dark before I remember
or knew it was night until the light came
all at once at the speed it was born to
with all the time in the world to fly through
not concerned about ever arriving
and then the gathering of the first stars
unhurried in their flowering space
and far into the story the planets
cooling slowly and the ages of rain
then the seas starting to bear memory
the gaze of the first cell at its waking
how did this haste begin this little time
at any time this reading by lightning
scarcely a word this nothing this heaven