I’m blogging from a meeting room at the Airlie Center in Warrenton, Virginia, where I am taking part in a NASA meeting titled From Quantum to Cosmos: Fundamental Physics Research in Space. The ostensible rationale for this meeting is “to demonstrate how fundamental physics research in space can provide the knowledge needed to address outstanding questions at the intersection of physics and astronomy”. However, it is also worth pointing out that this is also a closeout meeting for part of NASA’s fundamental research efforts, which have suffered extreme cuts due to the recent reorientation of NASA’s priorities.
I’m here to deliver a plenary talk on Cosmic Acceleration and Modified Gravity, which I gave during the inaugural session last evening. I’m also chairing an exciting set of plenary talks that occur tomorrow, with a lineup of Gia Dvali, Cedric Deffayet, Eric Adelberger and Ho Jung Paik. Sean is also here and will be delivering a related talk in one of today’s plenary sessions.
As I’ve tried to convey above, there are really two parallel threads running through this meeting, and I hope to post a couple more times with my thoughts on each of them separately. The primary, and most important thread is the physics. This is a meeting with an unusually eclectic and distinguished participant list (plus me). Yesterday evening’s session included fascinating presentations from Nobel laureates Bill Phillips and Doug Osheroff. This morning kicked off with a talk by Jack Marburger, director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and I’m currently listening to Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek’s talk. Later, we’ll hear from yet more Nobel laureates – Wolfgang Ketterle and John Hall. You should be impressed by this list, but I should also point out that there is a much longer list of truly tremendous scientists here, who just don’t happen to have Nobel prizes yet. There are probably even other Nobel laureates here, whose names I’ve just missed on the list.
The second thread is that of science and space policy. NASA’s recent budgetary woes are part of a larger crisis in fundamental science funding is the United States. As well as Jack Marburger, various participants from the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, and the European Space Agency are present, many of who will deliver talks and then take part in a round table discussion on Wednesday, to conclude the meeting. This promises to be a lively session, given the current climate, and I am interested to see the views of these people, most of whom seem genuinely interested in supporting science through this hard time.
So what scientific issues are all these minds here to discuss? Well, the idea is to explore, understand and frame future opportunities to do fundamental physics experiments in space. This means that, although there will be wonderful talks here about observational cosmology and astrophysics, the main focus is on what we might learn from laboratory experiments in space.
Since the conference just got underway last evening, I’ll need another day at least before I can provide a sensible account of some of the topics, or of the politics. But to whet your appetite, let me just comment on one thing that I learned from Bill Phillips’ talk yesterday. Phillips gave a tremendously energetic and wide-ranging presentation, describing an array of techniques and advances in the physics of cold atoms and their uses, in particular, for performing precision timing measurements. These include applications ranging from exquisite tests of the equivalence principle (by measuring the rates at which clocks constructed from different materials fall under gravity) to using precision detections of variations of gravitational potentials in Homeland Security applications (one could imagine using such techniques to scan large containers without ever opening them).
But it was something very simple that he said, that I felt like I should have known, that really impressed me. When I teach General Relativity, I love to describe gravitational redshift to students and see their reactions when they realize that clocks really do run at different rates at different places in a gravitational field. When I describe this, I usually comment on the tiny size of this effect on Earth, between sea level and high in the atmosphere, for example. What Phillips mentioned, which was new to me, is that the accuracy of atomic clocks has recently improved to the point at which it has become possible to measure the gravitational redshift on Earth over a vertical distance of one foot!
I found this truly astounding and expect I will learn about many other such results and ideas over the next three exhausting days (sessions from 8:30am to 9:00pm). I’ll write again describing more of them in a day or so.
May 22nd, 2006 at 11:06 am
Time variable concepts, are a wonderful expose into the new concepts developing in our “views of earth.”
This is wonderful information that you are reporting on.
May 22nd, 2006 at 11:46 am
Mark, you mentioned participants from OSTP, ESA, universities, DoE, NSF — but if this is a NASA-related meeting, who from NASA is participating? As someone who has done a lot of “strategic mission planning” for NASA it would be a damn shame if there wasn’t a reasonable NASA representation at your meeting. Otherwise, your recommendations will likely fall on deaf (or deaf-er) ears, even with such luminaries singing the praises of fundamental physics research in space. Hope the meeting goes well, and do keep us updated. By the way, the Arlie house is pretty sweet digs, isn’t it?
May 22nd, 2006 at 12:20 pm
Fundamental science should have little difficulty grabbing onto the body hair of the Homeland-Security-Mammoth.
May 22nd, 2006 at 12:34 pm
Hi Jeff, sorry – thought it’d just be clear from the description of it as a NASA meeting – there are a bunch of NASA people here. It’s easier to direct you to the web site rather than to list them. Cheers,
May 22nd, 2006 at 12:38 pm
Wow! Thanks for sharing!
May 22nd, 2006 at 2:58 pm
The cutting of funding for NASA, and especially for scientific research will come at a much bigger cost to all of us down the road. One of the few venues in which non-oil based energy systems are absolutely required is space. As we move towards pollution of the planet, thermally, chemically, radioactively, and bounce across the “all to soon to be popped” peak oil bubble, space is the one place where fundamental research on alternative energy systems must be encouraged and funded. Yet, for some really unclear and perhaps even irrational reasons, the US and other nations (to a lesser extent) shift away from proposing and funding these all too important research opportunities. When we wait, and we will wait, until something dire must be done, it will be vastly more costly and vastly more rushed and hurried. This is bad scientific thinking on the part of politicians, who unfortunately seem to be doing an awful lot of bad science thinking these days.
May 22nd, 2006 at 3:05 pm
Hey Mark —
When you get a chance, check out Dan Kleppner’s reference frame article in the March 2006 issue of ‘Physics Today’; it’s a general discussion of setting time standards. One of the points made there is that time standards are getting sufficiently accurate that effects like tides and (on longer timescales) redistribution of water and glacial melting cause the earth’s geoid to vary by a foot or more over the appropriate timescales. Thus, having clocks accurate enough to sense the redshift over this distance means that one cannot even define the time that they keep – time standards are going to have a built-in fuzziness enforced by the variation of earth’s gravitational field. We always knew that GR meant “bye bye time standards” in principle; before too long, it will be true in practice (albeit at a tiny tiny tiny level).
Speaking of which, back to grading GR final exams …
cheers,
scott h.
May 22nd, 2006 at 3:34 pm
[...] Update: There’s a conference going on near Washington this week entitled From Quantum to Cosmos: Fundamental Physics Research in Space. Mark Trodden is blogging from the conference over at Cosmic Variance. [...]
May 23rd, 2006 at 9:23 pm
Mark ,from this meeting (or elsewhere) do you knwo about the current status of
the AMS experiment?
Thanks
May 23rd, 2006 at 11:23 pm
Hi Shantenu. It hasn’t been mentioned here (although I skipped a few talks today), except in passing. I’ll keep my ears open though and try to report if I hear anything first hand.
May 24th, 2006 at 5:03 pm
Thanks, Mark .
May 31st, 2006 at 9:16 pm
Fun With Bose-Einstein Applets
In one of my recent posts, about the Quantum to Cosmos meeting, I was enthusing about the beautiful physics of cold atoms. While writing, I was reminded of a wonderful Java applet about this topic, which I learned about in a colloquium that I saw Carl…
June 29th, 2006 at 9:57 am
[...] In one of my recent posts, about the Quantum to Cosmos meeting, I was enthusing about the beautiful physics of cold atoms. While writing, I was reminded of a wonderful Java applet about this topic, which I learned about in a colloquium that I saw Carl Weiman give a few years ago, before he won the Nobel Prize (but when people were sure he was going to get it). [...]
June 29th, 2006 at 9:59 am
[...] I mentioned last time that I had seen some exciting talks by people involved in cold atom physics, which is quite far away from what I do, but which fascinated me. This time I wanted to report, albeit idiosyncratically, on discussions that were more closely related to my fields of expertise. [...]