Mostly I’m holed up at home these days, pounding out paragraph after paragraph about the LHC and the Higgs boson. But even the most dedicated author needs a sanity break, and mine is coming tonight, in the form of The Avengers. I won’t bore you with an explanation of what the movie is about, as 99% of the potential audience has pre-decided on geeky enthusiasm and/or hipster disdain (or both!). But I will take the opportunity to post a clip featuring everybody’s favorite Marvel character: Agent Phil Coulson of SHIELD. (And one of those leather-clad superheroes people seem to like so much.)

In case you can’t get enough, Clark Gregg has collected all his favorite Agent Coulson moments. (Just ask the professional screenwriters: “I’m sure avengers is great, but the only marvel movie i’d truly kill or die to see is (more…)

Not wanting to let Sean get away with the only marshmallow-related post this year, I’d like to bring to your attention that, for the fifth year running, the Washington Post recently held its Peeps Diorama Contest. This would be a pretty strange topic to cover on this blog were it not for the fact that one of the entries was the wonderful ATLAS Peeped!

Designed and Constructed by Marilena Loverde and Laura Newburgh, ATLAS Peeped is a painstaking and delicious reconstruction of the detector and its environment, with great attention to detail in adapting it to the peep universe. For example, please note the textbooks in the following (click on the photo for a full-size version)

I really hope Michael Peepskin is reading this.

As a theorist, I can’t help but leave you with a detail with equations

See! And I had thought peeps would naturally gravitate towards the soft sciences.

Update: I had earlier referred to a third person helping create this, but was mistaken, and have edited the post accordingly.

Sometimes a label conveys it all: “Robot Quadrotors Perform James Bond Theme.” This video was shown today at the TED conference by Vijay Kumar of Penn. (H/t Al Seckel.)

Note that the little helicopters are pre-programmed; they’re not being remotely controlled by any human beings.

Every professional football game begins with the flip of a coin, to determine who gets the ball first. In the case of the Super Bowl, the teams represent the National Football Conference (NFC) or American Football Conference (AFC). Interestingly, the last 14 coin flips have been won by the NFC.

Working out the numbers, the chances of 14 coin flips in a row being equal is 1 in 8,192. (The linked article says 1 in 16,000, which comes from 2^14; but that first coin flip has to be something, so the chances of 14 in a row are really 1 in 2^13. The anomaly would be just as strange if the AFC had won every time.) That’s a better than 3.8-sigma effect! Enough to call a press conference, if this were particle physics.

The question is … is this really a signal, or did we just get lucky? Is it a fair coin and the NFC has just been the happy recipient of a statistical fluctuation, or is there something fishy about the coin? Remember Barry Greenstein’s parable about how different people compute probabilities.

And let it be a lesson the next time you’re excited about 3-sigma anomalies.

Apologies that real work (to the extent that what I do can be called “work”) has gotten in the way of substantive blogging. But I cannot resist sharing the amazing things I learned this weekend — amazing to me, anyway, although it’s possible I’m the only one here who wasn’t clued in.

Thing the first is that Morgan Freeman, many years before he went through the wormhole, was a regular on The Electric Company, along with performers like Rita Moreno and Bill Cosby. (Via Quantum Diaries, of all places.) This was public television’s show from the 70′s that was meant for kids who had moved on from Sesame Street — I was more of a Zoom kid myself, but I must have seen Electric Company episodes with Freeman playing hip dude Easy Reader.

Thing the second is that Easy Reader’s theme song, sung in the clip above, is a dead ringer for Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab.” Flip back and forth between playing them if you don’t believe me. So much so, I am told, that DJ’s in clubs will sometimes mix the two tunes together. Not at the clubs I go to, I guess.

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.)

From The Daily Show, via Why Evolution is True, here’s a hard-hitting expose on the slick con called “science” that is scamming America.

I am generally a fan of the two-party system. Sadly, at the moment in this country, one of the parties is completely crazy.

Update: Sorry that the video isn’t available outside the U.S. Note that Lisa Randall was a guest earlier on the show.

From Barry Greenstein’s insightful poker book, Ace on the River:

Someone shows you a coin with a head and a tail on it. You watch him flip it ten times and all ten times it comes up heads. What is the probability that it will come up heads on the eleventh flip?

A novice gambler would tell you, “Tails is more likely than heads, since things have to even out and tails is due to come up.”

A math student would tell you, “We can’t predict the future from the past. The odds are still even.”

A professional gambler would say, “There must be something wrong with the coin or the way it is being flipped. I wouldn’t bet with the guy flipping it, but I’d bet someone else that heads will come up again.”

Yes I know the math student would really say “individual trials are uncorrelated,” not “we can’t predict the future from the past.” The lesson still holds.

Happy Labor Day, everyone.

Having finally seen Thor on screen, I’m happy to give it thumbs-up. It works well as a summer superhero movie, and the acting — especially Tom Hiddleston as Loki, but also Chris Hemsworth as Thor — was much better than average for this kind of fare. (See takes from Adam Frank and Kyle Munkittrick.)

Also, needless to say, it did a great job of advancing the secret atheist agenda.

And the science? I was pretty happy with how it turned out. It was made clear that all of the super-ness was ultimately based on (some hypothetical set of) laws of physics, not just magic pulled out of the air — without descending into a dreadful level of midichlorian-like overexplanation. There is one phrase used in the movie that I think is directly attributable to my input: “Einstein-Rosen bridge.” This came about from a conversation between producer Kevin Feige and me that went something like this:

KF: We need the Bifrost Bridge to provide a way for the characters to travel great distances in space in a very short period of time.

SC: Sure, you probably want to say that it makes use of wormholes.

KF: Well, we can’t call it a “wormhole.”

SC: Why not?

KF: Sounds too Nineties.

SC: I suppose … you could call it an “Einstein-Rosen bridge.” Means the same thing.

So naturally, in the finished film, Jane Foster calls it an Einstein-Rosen bridge, and someone says “what’s that?”, and she replies “it’s a wormhole.”

Jennifer pointed out afterward that, while Jane Foster’s scientist character was appealing and a good role model, they did miss a chance to make use of her love of science in the service of the story. While we see our Earth-based heroes zooming around the desert chasing atmospheric anomalies, the connection to astrophysics is never explained, nor do they really talk that much about science. In one scene Jane makes goo-goo eyes at Thor as he talks about all this apparent magic just being very advanced science. Goo-goo eyes are fine, but any real scientist in that situation would have started asking questions about spacetime and exotic matter and quantum stability and so on. It would have been great if we had seen Jane fall for Thor, not because of what he looked like without his shirt on, but because behind the gruff exterior he knew more deep physics than she did. Maybe in a sequel.

I hinted that there was one thing all the scientists warned the moviemakers not to do, and indeed they didn’t do it. In one conception, the planet of the Frost Giants was to be shaped like a disk. Not a ringworld-style band that used rotation to mimic gravity, but just a flat planet in the shape of a record (or a DVD, for you youngsters). Which is fine, if somewhat fanciful. The potential disaster was that they wanted to have a big fight scene where frost giants would fall off the edge of the planet. Pulled by … what, exactly? Total gravity Fail. Fortunately they ditched that idea, although the concept survived in less egregious form in the depiction of Asgard, which looks like a mountain that sits on top of a galaxy. That also makes no sense, but it’s so far from trying to make sense that the audience just sees it as poetic license, not a simple mistake.

I know everyone is excited about this weekend’s premiere (at least here in the U.S.) of Thor, the latest superhero extravaganza from Marvel studios. At least I am, for my usual selfish reasons: I helped do some consulting (through the Science and Entertainment Exchange) for the movie. Also, there is a mystical hammer that smashes things; what’s not to like?

Unlike TRON: Legacy, where we came in after the screenplay had been drafted, on Thor we came in near the beginning. Marvel had done a lot of work on the idea, but there wasn’t yet a script. The Exchange set up a consult meeting with director Kenneth Branagh, the screenwriter, and few people on the design and production side of things, along with three scientists — Jim Hartle from USCB, Kevin Hand from JPL, and myself.

We bandied around lots of issues relating to the Thor universe and how it fit in with Marvel’s bigger plans. Once there was a script, I came in to read it and offer some more comments. Since that time, the script was re-written by the dynamic duo of Ash Miller and Zack Stentz, and I haven’t actually seen the film yet, so I can’t speak to what kind of impact we had in the end. Let’s just say that there was one thing in particular that they were planning on doing in the movie that drove all the scientists batty — I think we convinced them to fix it, but we’ll have to see. And once filming started, they recruited Caltech student Kevin Hickerson to help with the tech-gadgetry end of things. So I have high hopes. (Early reviews are very positive. And of course, Agent Coulson returns, with a larger role than in the Iron Man films. Everyone loves Agent Coulson.)

You might be wondering, where is there room for any sort of science in a comic-book movie about a Norse god in a red cape who swings a magical hammer? Well I’m glad you asked. Actually there were a couple of different things where the movie people were very interested in our input. One was constructing a coherent framework for the Marvel universe — ultimately, this story about Thor the thunder god is going to have to be compatible with Tony Stark’s Iron Man world, since the two characters are both part of the Avengers. (I also got to read the script for that, and yes — it is as great as the rumors suggest.)

Kevin Feige, president of production at Marvel Studios, is a huge proponent of having the world of these films ultimately “make sense.” It’s not our world, obviously, but there needs to be a set of “natural laws” that keeps things in order — not just for Iron Man and Thor, but all the way up to Doctor Strange, the Sorcerer Supreme who will get his own movie before too long. The thinking here is very much based on Arthur C. Clarke’s “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” In the trailer above, Thor basically gives exactly this pitch to Jane Foster.

That’s the other area where we science consultants were able to help out: (more…)