Foreign Policy has compiled a list of the Ten Worst Predictions for 2008. You’ll be happy to hear that physics has made the cut!

“There is a real possibility of creating destructive theoretical anomalies such as miniature black holes, strangelets and deSitter space transitions. These events have the potential to fundamentally alter matter and destroy our planet.” —Walter Wagner, LHCDefense.org

Scientist Walter Wagner, the driving force behind Citizens Against the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), is making his bid to be the 21st century’s version of Chicken Little for his opposition to the world’s largest particle accelerator. Warning that the experiment might end humanity as we know it, he filed a lawsuit in Hawaii’s U.S. District Court against the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), which built the LHC, demanding that researchers not turn the machine on until it was proved safe. The LHC was turned on in September, and it appears that we are still here.

Admittedly, FP didn’t get it quite right — as loyal readers know, it’s something of an exaggeration to say that the LHC was “turned on in September.” Protons circulated around the ring, but there were no collisions, and there won’t be until later this year. Still, they were right about the wrongness. The LHC is perfectly safe.

The other predictions were also amusing. Here’s my favorite:

“If [Hillary Clinton] gets a race against John Edwards and Barack Obama, she’s going to be the nominee. Gore is the only threat to her, then. … Barack Obama is not going to beat Hillary Clinton in a single Democratic primary. I’ll predict that right now.” —William Kristol, Fox News Sunday, Dec. 17, 2006

Weekly Standard editor and New York Times columnist William Kristol was hardly alone in thinking that the Democratic primary was Clinton’s to lose, but it takes a special kind of self-confidence to make a declaration this sweeping more than a year before the first Iowa caucus was held. After Iowa, Kristol lurched to the other extreme, declaring that Clinton would lose New Hampshire and that “There will be no Clinton Restoration.” It’s also worth pointing out that this second wildly premature prediction was made in a Times column titled, “President Mike Huckabee?” The Times is currently rumored to be looking for his replacement.

Of course, asking Bill Kristol to predict the future is like asking Rod Blagojevich to head a good-government task force. Here’s my prediction: Kristol will continue to say dumb things, next year and far into the future. And get paid handsomely for doing so.

If you spend a lot of time in the MGM Grand in Vegas (and who doesn’t?), you will have walked by Television City. It’s a fun place to get some free entertainment if the craps tables have been unkind (or if you had a great meal at Joel Robuchon), but it’s serious business for CBS/Viacom: this is where they show clips and pilots of prospective shows to average Americans, to gauge whether they should be picked up for seasons to come. Apparently it’s easier to find average Americans in Vegas than over here in LA.

So here’s your chance to chime in on our contest to choose a science-themed TV show. Recall that the idea behind the elevator pitch contest was that you had bumped into CBS bigwig Les Moonves, and taken the opportunity to quickly pitch a TV idea that made use of science in some way. While you might have thought that Mr. Moonves was just humoring you, in fact he took some of the ideas very seriously, and ultimately picked six of them to make pilots of each. Sadly, we don’t have clips from the actual pilots; something about intellectual property rights. But here are the original descriptions of the six finalists; note that CBS has tentatively assigned names to each show.

Below the fold there is a poll, where you can vote on which show you like the best! Voting will be open for the next week. For the winner, a T-shirt, and who knows? Some people in high places read this blog.

1. New Horizons (Jason Dick)
   

   Takes place about a century from now. Humanity has discovered planets around other stars harbor life. We send out a generation ship, where multiple generations of intrepid explorers will be born and die before it reaches its destination. This show follows their journey, where they are faced with mechanical failure, collisions with small dust grains that cause lots of damage, and people who crack under the stress of their situation. Mostly it’d be about a human drama of extremely driven people who are in a difficult situation, and whose children are forced to carry the torch of their parents.

2. Three Geeks in Boston (Naveen)
   

   Three guys share an apartment in Boston: a freelance writer training for an ultramarathon, a chemistry student who wants to work in a Michelin star restaurant, and a disillusioned theoretical physicist in grad school. The runner views himself as a lab rat and writes about his experiments with the latest training gadgets and techniques. The chemist hopes that molecular gastronomy will be his path to a dream job with Heston Blumenthal or Grant Achatz. The theoretician realizes how his math can be applied to topics ranging from tracking flu epidemics to studying the sociology of Facebook.

3. The Parameters (astromcnaught)
   

   An enormous laser experiment blows a hole in local space-time. Things start to behave strangely, and hilariously, the world over. Young Ruford with the assistance of a mysterious mechanics professor has to adjust the parameters of reality back to normal. Different parameter each week. E.g. speed of sound drops to 1 meter a minute. Something electromagnetical causes clothes to start becoming transparent. Gravity becomes stronger…the world starts spinning faster…the moon draws closer…air becomes thicker…ice sinks. The dog’s called Rhombus.

4. The Scientific Inquisitor (Matt)
   

   A lapsed cardinal with a rigorous scientific background is called back into service by the Pope. When the vatican is under pressure to bestow sainthood on a politically inconvenient deceased priest, they dispatch the show’s hero. Our cardinal has secret instructions to debunk the would-be saint’s requisite “miracles”, thereby denying sainthood. He does so with scientific acumen and great aplomb. Each week, he struggles with being used by an organization he doesn’t respect, as well as his own emotional desire to believe in something beyond the cold materialism he practices. Both cynical and hopeful, the show illuminates the boundary between evidence and faith, in a (perhaps Sisyphean) struggle to find a balance between the two.

5. Friends with Experiments (Peggy)
   

   Friends in a top university molecular biology lab. Three young men and three young women – a couple of postdocs, grad students, a Sigma sales rep and a departmental administrator – find love and laughs as they run gels, hang out in the departmental lounge, attend conferences, and interact with the other wacky lab denizens. Plenty of opportunity for sight gags, such as an unbalanced ultracentrifuge “walking” through a wall or the noob grad student accidentally setting her bench on fire. And lots of opportunities for romantic situations: all-night sample collecting in the cold room, working closely in the darkroom, or a mixup that puts our male and female postdoc in the same hotel room at the AAAS conference. And what holds them together is their love/hate relationship with their research.

6. Apocalypse Tomorrow (Dr. Free-Ride)
   

   The economy has tanked and modern infrastructure (utilities, highways, food supplies, schools) is decaying – “pre-apocalypse”. We focus on a couple who left science a decade ago, moving to a small town for a new start. Their kids keep stumbling into sciencey situations, drawing their parents into them. Their town has a distinct anti-science vibe — science and technology didn’t hold off the decay gripping the community, and (we find out) the town is still scarred by tragic events due to mad scientists. Despite themselves, our family uses scientific reasoning and keen observation to rebuild the community and their own lives.

Click to get to the poll and cast your vote… (more…)

Yesterday’s launch event for the Science and Entertainment Exchange was a smashing success. The enthusiasm of everyone in the room was palpable, especially on the Hollywood side — these folks would love to be interacting more closely with scientists on a regular basis. (Let me pause to give a plug for Eleventh Hour, a show which I haven’t actually seen yet, but whose writers were complaining that they sometimes take grief for being too scientifically accurate.) I came away from the symposium with lots of new ideas, and also a deep-seated fear of our coming robot masters.

So, in honor of the new program, we hereby announce the Cosmic Variance Elevator Pitch Contest. I don’t know about you, but many folks I know with an interest in science take great pleasure in complaining about the embarrassing lack of realism and respect for the laws of nature apparent in so many movies and TV shows. Here’s your (fictional) chance to do something about it.

Opening scene: you step into an elevator at the headquarters of CBS/Paramount Television in Hollywood. (Unclear why you are there — perhaps to have lunch with your more-successful friend from high school, who works for their legal team.) There is only one other person in the elevator with you for the journey to the top floor — and it’s Les Moonves, President and CEO of CBS! (Again, unclear why he is taking the same elevator as you — we’ll fix that in post-production.)

Here is the perfect opportunity for your elevator pitch.

You have thirty seconds — which, as this blog is still a text-based medium, we’ll approximate as strictly 100 words or less — to pitch your idea for a new TV show that is based on science. It can be an hour drama, a half-hour sitcom, a reality show, game show, documentary, science fiction, whatever you like. For example:

I have an idea for a show called Cosmic Variance. It’s about seven scientists who blog during the day, but at night they fight crime! And to do it, they used advanced notions from modern physics and astrophysics, from adaptive optics to quantum decoherence. They’re young, they’re sexy, and they break hearts as they bust heads. But their university colleagues are already suspicious of their blogging, so they have to keep the crime-fighting activities completely secret. They have a deep underground lab where they carry out cutting-edge experiments, and there’s a canine sidekick named Sparky.

Okay, that’s a fairly silly example. I’m not eligible to win the contest. But you, the reader, are! So here are some of the ideas you want to keep in mind while polishing your pitch:

Most importantly: Les Moonves’s goal in life is not to make science look good. It’s to make money. So don’t pitch that this show would make the world a better place, or make science seem interesting; convince him that it’s exciting to everyone and will attract millions of eyeballs.

Use the science. For our purposes, we’re less interested in a show idea that tacks on some science to make things sound cool, as we are in a concept that couldn’t happen without the science.

Story is paramount. As much as we love accuracy and realism, there has to be a compelling narrative. You need to convince Moonves that people will be emotionally connected to the characters and their situation.

It’s easy to mock the efforts of others, but here’s a chance to see whether you could really put together a compelling show idea. Leave your entry in the comments. They will be judged by our crack team of scientists/bloggers/crime-fighters, and the winner will get a Cosmic Variance T-shirt. (We have plans to upgrade the quality of our current swag options.) Please note that there is not some hidden plan to actually make any TV shows out of this — we have no clout along those lines, so if you are a professional scriptwriter, don’t dump your plans out in public here on our blog. But if you’re a pro you already knew that.

And then: memorize your pitch! You never know when you might find yourself trapped in an elevator with the right person, and you have to be ready.

My one big brush with celebrity since moving to LA came over a year ago. I was contacted by Brad Grossman, cultural attaché to Brian Grazer of Imagine Entertainment. (The position of “cultural attaché to Brian Grazer” is sufficiently interesting the search for Brad’s replacement after he eventually left became the basis for an article in The New Yorker.) Grazer is one of the biggest producers in Hollywood — he’s the partner of Ron Howard, who does the directing. Think A Beautiful Mind, Apollo 13 — entertaining movies that can also make you think a bit.

Of course, they were also responsible for The Da Vinci Code, which was neither very entertaining nor especially thought-provoking. But it sure did make lots of cash. So they signed up to make a film of Angels & Demons, the sequel. This time they really wanted to do a better job, but the raw material was not great; author Dan Brown is not known for putting a lot of work into accuracy and all that nonsense. So, among other things, they were talking to physicists — one of the major characters in the book is a physicist, and the opening scenes are set at CERN, and involve antimatter and baby universes. CERN even set up a webpage dealing with some of the physics issues.

So I got to have lunch with Ron Howard and Brian Grazer, and talk about what would happen if you dropped a gram of antimatter in the river, and generally had a good time. Then the writers’ strike happened, and eventually they made the movie — I didn’t have any further involvement, and have no idea how it’s going to turn out. We’ll find out this spring.

But here is the point: sure, if you are Brian Grazer or Steven Spielberg or someone at that level, you can afford to hire a person whose sole job it is to hook you up with expertise in whatever field your latest movie or TV show happens to involve. But for the overwhelming majority of Hollywood projects, neither the time nor the money nor the knowledge is available to make that happen in any reliable way. We all have seen plenty of bad science in movies and on TV. Some of it is because the creators aren’t especially interested in getting it right — but increasingly they are. Too much of the bad science is just because the writers and directors didn’t know any better, and didn’t know how to find out.

No more! Tomorrow is the launch event for the Science and Entertainment Exchange, a new initiative sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences. It’s a brand-new program, based in LA, to provide appropriate scientific expertise to all sectors of the entertainment industry. Not just making sure that a particular scene doesn’t violate the laws of physics too egregiously, but helping conscientious filmmakers accurately portray the culture of science — how those mysterious scientists really think and talk and dress. (I think it’s pretty obvious that the acronym for the new effort should be written as SEEx, which has the useful resonance with “seeks,” which is what a good scientist does. It also has some resonance with “sex,” which is less directly related to the scientific enterprise, but won’t hurt with the Hollywood crowd.)

SEEx is off to a great start, as they recently hired the lovely and talented Jennifer Ouellette to be the director of the new program. Jennifer was brought in a bit late, but has big plans for bringing together both sides of the cultural divide between these two glamorous and creative fields of human endeavor. Personally, as spouse of the head honcho of the program, I’m hoping to also benefit; in particular, I’d like to get to meet Jodie Foster some day. Just because she was such a positive role model of a scientist in cinema, you understand.

I first came across Second Life at a demonstration session put on by one of Linden Lab’s gurus at SciFoo camp in 2006. Since then I’ve heard about it occasionally, but was recently reminded about the details of how it works by Sean’s post on his talk in Second Life. This is all well and good and, although I’m not currently spending time in Second Life myself, I can see that there is real educational potential there, particularly with people like Rob involved.

But sometimes things get just plain silly! The Guardian is carrying a story of a real life couple who got divorced because the man was carrying on a platonic relationship with another woman in Second Life (I guess I should mention that his avatar also slept with a prostitute avatar also). So, first, while some things, like attending a talk by a cosmologist, may be almost as good in Second Life as in real life, I’m guessing sex isn’t one of them because it lacks the whole, you know, you getting laid part! Second, if you wanted to misbehave with a non-human toy form, put together from basic building blocks, you might as well make yourself a Lego partner – at least you could touch that.

Readers of the science blogosphere would have to be living under a rock to have missed the rise of fabulous geek-friendly web comics. Everyone’s fave Xkcd has been getting CV love for a couple of years now (and I’ve been remiss in linking to the latest size-o-everything visualization). PhD Comics is also a consistent source of relevant comics, though we’ve never linked to one of my early favorites. I’m also a long time fan of My New Fighting Technique is Unstoppable, and in particular this one, which is sadly too foul mouthed for me to show to any of my intro astronomy classes. Web comics have even produced entropy-confused dinosaurs and explorations of the anthropic principle that Sean has linked to, and my favorite piece of science-themed clothing (from Achewood).

Recently, the creator of Abstruse Goose is using his/her powers for good, by endorsing CV’s Donors Choose efforts through Scienceman. You may know Abstruse Goose through the immortal lines “You don’t find the Higgs Boson. The Higgs Boson finds you.“, or perhaps “Science. If you ain’t pissin’ people off, you ain’t doin’ it right“, or maybe because it’s the only place in existence where you’d find me and Ed Witten given comparable levels of respect. If you found your way here through AG, perhaps you should just move right along to Donors Choose and give the kiddies and their teachers a little love. Scienceman would want you to.

Aquaman, however, wouldn’t give a rat’s patootie.

Update: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal is sending folks to CV’s Donors Choose as well! Go Web Comics! Go!

LHC First Beam Day ended with a bang last night in the SF Bay Area – swissnex, an annex of the Consulate General of Switzerland in San Francisco, threw a party! Around 200 folks were there, with physcisists from all around the area. The champagne flowed, the food never ran out (a minor miracle given an entire roomful of physcists) and the consulate even gave out free bags of stuff. What more could you ask for? It was great to celebrate with colleagues and let our hair down.

Wired magazine was there and commemorated the event by interviewing folks about their LHC expectations:

Well, I did say the champagne flowed…. and we were all giddy in our excitement about the LHC! A truly excellent time was had by all.

Anyone watching this evening’s episode of Comedy Central’s new Lewis Black vehicle, The Root of All Evil (10:30, 9:30 Central), might just see some familiar scientists and/or bloggers. Maybe.

Elsewhere, stars of the CBS sitcom The Big Bang Theory (about which more anon) seem to have been reading up on their Spacetime and Geometry.

No appreciable bump in my Amazon ranking, though.

Rediscovering this ancient Sesame Street skit has been my one source of joy while I slog through the writing of an immense, tedious, but necessary data paper.

Sorry for the meager posting of late. I’m in one of those phases with papers that are justthatclose to being done, and have to concentrate on pushing them out the door. So blogging might be light for a while.

By way of light diversion, here’s the LA Times’ take on grading recent Nobel Laureates on their fashion savvy (hat tip to Jennifer). The first thing to note is that physicists come out looking good, although one suspects that the grading was done on a curve. Here is Peter Gruenberg, of Giant Magnetoresistance fame.

On the Hit/Miss scale, the Times bestows a “Hit” on Gruenberg’s ensemble. “Here’s a guy who knows cool,” they say. Who am I to argue with the mainstream media?

But it’s not only the physicists who seem to get the benefit of the doubt. Here’s Literature laureate Doris Lessing, just after the Prize was announced.

This one is also graded a “Hit.” Admittedly, I wouldn’t want to be graded on my fashion choices as I was being surprised by photographers upon returning home from a trip to the grocery store. But still, rhapsodizing about the “curving highlight of red scarf” seems a bit much.

In other cases, the Times is unduly harsh. Here is Rajendra Pachauri, Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

I’m sorry, but that is one stylin’ bureaucrat. Yet the Times gives him a “Miss,” complaining that the blue of his tie blends into the blue of his shirt. Like I said, graded on a curve, and not the same curve for everyone.

And then we have Medicine laureate Mario Capecchi.

Again, the Times comes down hard, especially on the hat. Obviously they’ve spent too much time at Oscar parties and not enough at convocation ceremonies. The guy’s receiving an honorary degree in medical biotechnologies from the University of Bologna. This is the one yearly chance for your typical academic to go whole hog for the pomp and circumstance. Good for him.