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.

Happy New Year, everyone.

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.

Donor’s Choose is an awesome non-profit that allows public school teachers to post their needs for educational materials for their students, and allows donors to choose which projects get funding. This year, like the last three years, science bloggers are participating

A list of projects we suggest is here:

Cosmic Variance Donor’s Choose Page

I’ve chosen a list of physics and astronomy focused projects in low income school districts –
chip in a few bucks (you can donate as little as $5 or as much as you like!), and make a difference inspiring the next generation of scientists!

Last year 26 of you donated more than $3500, which directly impacted 1,485 students (super impressively, the year before we managed to raise $12,000!) This is our 4th year of participating, but I was woefully slow putting this post up and getting the ball starting. I hope you dear readers will pick up the slack anyways, and give generously to these awesome projects. Luckily, between now and midnight on Saturday, there is a special bonus: the Donor’s Choose Board of Directors is matching all donations with a gift card that you can use to support any project of your choosing, so your money will go double in the next few days. Let’s see if we can beat last year’s numbers in the next 3 days, and help some students get the tools they need to learn science!

Note that this is not because particle theorists are especially prizeworthy; this new award joins a host of other dissertation prizes in other subfields of physics. Advisors everywhere, take note!

Message to members of the American Physical Society’s DPF, Authorized by Alice Bean, Secretary/Treasurer of DPF
*********************************************************
Dissertation Award in Theoretical Particle Physics

Starting this year, the Division of Particles and Fields has established a Dissertation Award in Theoretical Particle Physics. The Award recognizes exceptional young scientists who have performed original doctoral thesis work of outstanding scientific quality and achievement in the area of theoretical particle physics. The annual Award consists of $1,500, a certificate citing the accomplishments of the recipient, and an allowance of up to $1,000 for travel to attend a meeting of the DPF or APS, where the Award will be presented.

Nominations will be accepted for any doctoral student studying at a college or university in the United States or in an education abroad program of a college or university in the United States for dissertation research carried out in the field of theoretical particle physics. The work to be considered must have been completed as part of the requirements for a doctoral degree. Nominees for the 2012 Award must have passed their thesis defense between September 16, 2010 and September 15, 2011.

The deadline for submission of nominations for the 2012 prize is October 1, 2011. For detailed guidelines and to submit a nomination, see

http://www.aps.org/programs/honors/dissertation/particle.cfm

• The James Webb Space Telescope, having gone so far over budget that large swathes of NASA’s science program has been shelved to make room for it, is now in danger of being cancelled.
• Everyone knows that education is of paramount importance, especially for economically disadvantaged kids. Therefore, communities across the country are — cutting back on school time, especially for economically disadvantaged kids.
• Transformers: Dark of the Moon — the climactic conclusion to auteur Michael Bay’s explosive trilogy of awesome explodyness — grossed over $116 million over the holiday weekend.

On the other hand, Google+ was launched. So it’s not all bad.

Although the fire continues to threaten (including Cochiti and Santa Clara Pueblos), the worst seems to be over. The fire won’t be fully extinguished until the rains come in earnest, which could easily take another month. For the time being, the fire breaks appear to be holding, and life is slowly returning to normal. And the sunsets have been spectacular:

R xxxxxx xxxxxx@hotmail.com to me

Sean,

Neutrons have no chemical properties and reflect no light, but they do have mass and occupy space =matter, and clouds of them will never be visible in space!

I find it difficult to believe people who are supposed to be so smart are suck fucking retards!

Cheers Retard ,

Robert

For the curious:

• Lifetime of neutron
• Age of the Universe

Always happy to help a fellow seeker of knowledge.

• I’m hopping on a plane for France. Spending next week at the Pope’s old palace in Avignon, conferencing with fellow cosmologists about the latest and greatest in the field. I have apparently been appointed to honorary Grand Old Man status, as I’m giving the closing talk at the conference. The title is “White smokes and Dark smokes in cosmology,” and I presume you all understand the reference. I didn’t pick the title, I swear. No live-blogging, but if I’m feeling energetic I might drop in with updates.
• I’m still thinking about the Open Science idea, haven’t forgotten. But I haven’t really homed in on an appropriate project if we were to try it out. Ideally (I think) you would have something relatively modular, where people could work on separate sub-tasks and then bring them all together. But my own kind of research really isn’t like that; it’s more like I have a single idea that works or doesn’t, and we work out the basic consequences. But still contemplating.
• Subsequent to the post about NASA giving up on LISA, more official words have come from NASA itself. (The original posts here and elsewhere were based on emails from officials to scientists.) You can read more at Steinn’s blog, or some words from project scientist Robin Stebbins at Jennifer’s Discovery News blog. As far as I can tell, NASA has indeed given up on LISA, but they’re saying that “funding for gravitational wave astrophysics is unchanged,” which is certainly great news.
• Also at Discovery, Jennifer blogs about Silent Sky, a play by Lauren Gunderson about Henrietta Swan Leavitt. Well worth checking out for you Southern Californians. Amazing what ground-breaking scientific research the women “computers” at Harvard College Observatory managed to do, essentially in their spare time.
• Sad news out of Yale: an undergraduate physics and astronomy major was killed in a machine shop accident. Thoughts go out to her family and friends.
• U.S. Federal prosecutors, clearly sitting around bored with nothing better to do, have indicted leaders of online poker sites, and attempted to shut down the sites entirely. There is some legal confusion concerning the status of online poker, stemming from a silly piece of legislation called the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act. It’s fairly clear that the people who wrote the bill intended to make online poker illegal, but the sites contend that they’ve found ways around the constraints, and have been operating openly for quite a while now. (I personally play at Full Tilt Poker.) Even more clear is that people should be able to play poker for money legally if they want to, and this is an absurd overreach by the government. But it might very well be the end of online poker, at least until the legislation is repealed.
• Interesting in giving a TED talk? Here’s your chance: they’re accepting auditions. Make a one-minute video that blows them away, and you might find yourself speaking in front of a global audience. Think of it as American Idol for ideas instead of voices.
• And while we’re talking about videos, the Dunlap Institute at the University of Toronto has a new effort to put science videos online. Right now mostly focused on their own videos, which have an astronomy slant, but they’re planning to branch out. Worth a look.

Off to Old Europe with me, see you on the flip side.

(And if this makes no sense, please watch here, or, if you must, read about it on wikipedia)

See also Lenny Susskind’s reminiscences.

In any case, one of the first very large TEDx Events was organized as a part of Universal Children’s Day in November, with a whole bunch of simultaneous organized events called TEDxYouth. I had the opportunity to give a talk at one of the events TEDxYouth Castellija, to about 400 middle and high school students, about how the Universe works.

Because of the younger audience, they cut the standard ted talk time of 18 minutes to 6 minutes, which made it even harder — at least for those of us used to having a whole hour to say something! Anyways, I managed to try to explain dark matter, galaxies, and the last 14 billion years in this short time. You can take a look here:

The rest of the speaker lineup was really great, and very diverse, including a graffiti artist, the founder of guitar hero, the google chef, and a super compelling biochemist.

My favorite talk was by Garang Akau, one of the lost boys of Sudan, who has subsequently graduated from Stanford and started his own NGO called New Scholars, focused on incubating youth-led enterprise in Africa. His fearlessness and optimism in the face of incredible hardship was seriously inspiring. Check it out:

The best part of the whole thing was meeting and talking with some of the kids, who were truly engaged and curious. Lots more awesome talks are available from TEDxYouth Castelleja and from the rest of the TEDxYouth events. Looks like the day was a smashing success all around, and will be happening again next November.

Besides the big TED conferences, there are also independently-organized events known as TEDx. Caltech is going to host such an event for the first time, TEDxCaltech, on January 14. The theme is “Feynman’s Vision: The Next 50 Years.” In practice that means three groups of talks: Conceptualization and Visualization in Science, Frontiers of Physics, and Nanoscience and Future Biology. Check out the list of speakers. If it weren’t for the fact that I am on it myself, I’d emphasize what a great program this is — any event that includes both Scott Aaronson and Lyle Mays shows quite a bit of promise. Throw in Leonard Susskind and Craig Venter, and it might be worth a special trip.

All are welcome to come! The flip side of the fact that so much work goes into making the talks successful is that a corresponding level of commitment is asked of the audience — so you don’t simply buy a ticket, you apply, and it does cost money. But who can put a price on inspiration?

“Hello?

“Jonathan, it’s me – Mark. Don’t speak, just listen. I’ve figured it out.”

“What are you …?”

“Remember what we always talked about? How one day we’d crack the system? How we’d ride this cosmology gig all the way to the bank? And how we’d make these poor saps so very very sorry for taking all that free knowledge for granted for all these years?”

“Oh yes – that I remember! And when that day comes, we’ll squeeze the cash from those rubes so hard that the streets will run red with their blood!”

“Well my friend, that day has come.”

“Don’t toy with me Mark!”

“Listen carefully. We begin tonight. We write, slowly but steadily. This will take two years. It will require patience, dedication and hard work, but I know we can do it if we keep our eyes on the prize. We are going to be rich beyond our wildest dreams, and we can bankrupt those losers at the same time. Jonathan, we’re going to write a Scientific American article!”

A stunned silence followed from Jonathan, as I began my trademark cackle, imagining sucker after sucker shelling out their hard-earned cash for nothing but knowledge! It was beautiful – just perfect. A crack of lightening and almost immediate rumble of thunder drowned out my joy before it reached its enviable crescendo.

“Was that a cackle?”

“Yes Jonathan, it was.”

“No Mark, this is a cackle!”

And so it began.

Happy Halloween!

Our challenge page has had a great response so far — many, many thanks to everyone who has donated. Every donation is rewarded with a direct thank-you from the classroom that you helped. Here are a few of our responses:

“I simply cannot thank you enough for your selfless donation for much-needed supplies to use in my classroom. I know that your generosity will allow students with learning disabilities to engage in hands-on activities that relate to their everyday lives in reading, writing and math.” — Ms. S, Columbus

“I AM SO EXCITED about this project being funded! I have always wanted this Lakeshore kit to assist my instruction in science. I know that the students will be excited when they are able to work in groups and pairs to understand scientific concepts using this set. Words cannot express how thankful I am to each and every one of you for your contribution to our classroom!” — Ms. L, Forsyth, Georgia

“The items that you will provide for my students will help them with counting. Can you imagine the look on their faces when they see all the resources that they will get? I can. Its a look that I constantly get when I introduce a new concept and they are interested in learning more.” — Mrs. B, Los Angeles

We’re kicking serious butt in the Discover Blogs sub-challenge, which is nice, but our collective behinds are in turn being kicked by the pretenders at Seed, especially the squid people. Do you really want to stand for that?

And while we’re stooping to cheap psychology, did you notice this recent study that women give more to charity than men? Guys, are you going to just sit there and make these scurrilous accusations become reality?

More seriously, I love the big donations, but it would be nice to see more at the $5/$10/$20 level. Doesn’t cost too much, and it can mean a lot to kids without basic school supplies. You’ll feel good!

Last but certainly not least, we wanted to give huge thanks to everyone who helped spread the word via blogs or Twitter. Here’s the roll call of honor:

Louise Butt
Swans on Tea
@Paradise_Host
@barneygrubbs
@pandeiacomic
@BadAstronomer
@VeniceRiley
@ronsimon
@cosmicutopia
@buffalodavid
@cbcnasa
@break1ngscience
@leafwarbler
@pjrobar
@alltop_science
@rationalsquad
@leafwarbler
@pie_r_round
@mdsteele47
@reckonso
@katiebisbee

and who could possibly forget

Janiece at Hot Chicks Dig Smart Men.

Thanks! Every little push helps.

How much thought do you think went into creating this bit of branding genius? Even better, of what did those thoughts consist?

Wonder no more! Here is the full marketing document prepared by the marketing group that reveals the unique blend of physics, theology, symbolism, art, and a certain je ne sais quoi that made this landmark of design possible.

Excerpts presented below the fold without further comment, which could only be superfluous.

In the meantime here’s a video from Barack Obama, supporting Dan Savage’s It Gets Better campaign. (Via Jezebel.) Savage is a well-known sex columnist, and Obama is President of the United States, so it’s a newsworthy pairing in its own right. But this is an important message for every teenager, or for that matter for every person. The campaign is aimed primarily at LGBT (lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgendered) kids, who are very commonly bullied and ostracized in school. But bullying isn’t right no matter who the target is. It does get better, as you grow up and figure yourself out and find supportive communities. It shouldn’t ever be bad in the first place, so we have to do what we can to change the cultural acceptance of harassment.

There is only one condition in which we can imagine managers not needing subordinates, and masters not needing slaves.

This condition would be that each (inanimate) instrument could do its own work, at the word of command or by intelligent anticipation, like the statues of Daedalus or the tripods made by Hephaestus, of which Homer relates that

“Of their own motion they entered the conclave of Gods on Olympus”

as if a shuttle should weave of itself, and a plectrum should do its own harp playing.

I suspect Aristotle would have been quite tickled at self-reassembling robots.

There is something communal and primal about Zozobra. It feels purifying and freeing; the sorrows of the city have been dispelled. And I can bike to it from my house, which is a lot more convenient than Black Rock City. It is uniquely Santa Fe.

This past weekend the LHC crossed a major threshold: 1 inverse picobarn delivered to the experiments – a factor of a thousand more collisions. By late next year we are all hoping to have recorded another factor of a thousand, for a total of 1 inverse femtobarn.

In an earlier post I explained these funny units, inverse whatever-barns. The point here, though, is that as we record exponentially greater numbers of collision events, with the proton beam energy 3.5 times greater than that at the Tevatron at Fermilab we will begin to really probe an unexplored mass scale in the search for new particles. What lies there is completely unknown.

So far the LHC experiments CMS and ATLAS have presented results on about a quarter of the data sample recorded so far, at the biennial International Conference on High Energy Physics, held this year in Paris. To sum it up in a sentence, both experiments have rediscovered our familiar standard model friends, among which the W and Z bosons and the top quark are the most massive.

The W and Z are both produced in proton-proton collisions by the collision of quarks with antiquarks. You should visualize the incoming beam protons as being composed not just of two “up” quarks (charge +2/3) and one “down quark (charge -1/3), but as sort of seething, roiling mass of quarks, antiquarks, and gluons. When the protons collide any two of these constituents, if they have enough energy, can annihilate to form a a W or Z boson.

The W and Z are the “carriers” of the weak force in the standard model. For commonplace processes like nuclear decay (like cesium-137, for example) it’s the weak force which allows it to happen. We describe the process as involving a “virtual” W boson which exists fleetingly, by grace of the uncertainty principle, with a mass thousands of times less than its true mass of 80 GeV. It’s this virtuality that makes the weak force weak, in fact, for nuclear processes.

But at the energies of the incoming proton constituents, there is plenty to make real W bosons, and also Z bosons. (We don’t ordinarily see the effects of Z bosons in nuclear processes, because Z’s can only couple a particle to its own antiparticle…) Now, if you have a real W or Z boson sitting there, it will decay in about 10^-23 seconds to a quark and an antiquark or to leptons. In the case of the W, which has electric charge +1 or -1, it decays to a charged lepton and its associated neutrino about 33% of the time, and the rest of the time to quark-antiquark pairs. A Z boson will decay to a charged lepton (e, mu, or tau) and antilepton about 10% of the time, or to a pair of neutrinos about 20% of the time, and the rest of the time to a quark-antiquark pair.

The LHC experiments cannot really see the quark-antiquark decays of the W and Z – there is just too much background from quark-quark, quark-gluon, and gluon-gluon scattering giving two outgoing quarks or gluons. When a quark or gluon emerges sideways from one of these collisions it sort of shatters into a collimated spray of high energy particles that we call a jet. This all is governed by the strong force, which, being stronger than the weak force, has much higher rate than the W- and Z-producing processes.

But, ah, the leptonic decays of the W and Z! The sweetest is the lepton-antilepton decay of the Z. About 7% of the time a Z will decay to an electron-positron pair or a muon-antimuon pair. These particles come screaming out of the collision region into the detector carrying about half the Z’s total mass-energy of 91.2 GeV. This makes them readily identifiable and reconstructible. High energy electrons and muons leave a very straight track in our charged particle tracking system. Electrons then lose all their energy in the dense calorimeter surrounding the tracker. Muons, being 200 times more massive, tend to sail on through the calorimeter and magnet coil out to the muon tracking system that forms the true bulk of the CMS experiment. Here is a cool display of one of the first such events recorded in CMS:

In fact, the astute reader who knows the size of an atomic nucleus will conclude that the muons in the picture above must have traveled straight through quite a number of nuclei to reach the outer parts of the detector! This is because muons interact only via the weak and electromagnetic forces with nuclear matter, and, those forces are quite weak compared with the strong force.

With two muons, one can calculate the mass of the parent particle from which they came, using relativistic formulae. And by ICHEP the CMS experiment had recorded enough muon pair events to make the following beautiful graph showing the spectrum of masses from which opposite sign muon pairs arose. In the plot, at the far right end, the peak from the Z boson at 91.2 GeV is clear as a bell:

At lower masses one can see the peaks from the upsilon (Y), which is a bound state of a bottom and an antibottom quark, the J/psi which is a bound state of charm-anticharm, and lighter resonances. The broad smear of “continuum” muon pair production comes from virtual photons – the electromagnetic interaction.

These data, and similar data from eletron-positron pairs, is extremely important for calibrating the experiment. By measuring the position of the Z peak we can see whether we have properly calibrated our charge particle momentum scale, and then use that to calibrate the calorimeters via the Z to ee signal. The Z is our standard candle here, but as the saying goes, in high energy physics yesterday’s sensation is today’s calibration (and tomorrow’s background).

All these results and more are there for the world to see at the ICHEP web site. There are plenty more results, including the first glimpse of top-antitop events, and the results of some searches for new phenomena.

Nothing startling has come out yet, and we are eagerly awaiting the exponentially growing samples to analyze, with which we will push past the Tevatron sensitivity in a number of areas. But don’t count the Tevatron out just yet! The CDF and Dzero experiments have recorded thousands of times more collisions and results are still pouring out. And, oops, it’s time for me to go to that CDF analysis meeting now…

But there’s no reason it has to be like this. At any given moment, some concerned group of citizens will be agitating to improve the situation. Right now such a group is Get L.A. Moving. They’ve put together an amazing proposal for a serious subway network that would utterly transform the city, while respecting the natural contours of the existing urban environment. Click for bigger versions.

Looking at a map like this is a bittersweet experience — comparing what could be to what is. Of course it would be very expensive; they estimate about $35 billion, which doesn’t sound so crazy when spread over a number of years. Times are tough — but that’s exactly the reason why pie-in-the-sky plans like this should be taken seriously right now. There’s no better way to stimulate the economy than to pour massive amounts of money into legitimate infrastructure projects; you create jobs, but you also create value that lasts for many decades to come. Not to mention decreasing our reliance on fossil fuels, which hopefully doesn’t need to be justified.

Also — how cool would it be to have one of these babies crawling along underneath Sunset Boulevard?

In the back of my mind, the real obstacle to building a subway system in a mature city was that you couldn’t really imagine shutting down long stretches of busy streets for months or years at a time. But you don’t have to; modern tunnel-boring technology does it all underground.

Some will object that LA just isn’t dense enough to support a subway system; our attractions are spread out rather than localized to squares. That’s an utterly backwards attitude; build the subway, the density will come. With nice weather 340+ days a year, this is the perfect city in the world to have a mass transit system connecting a bunch of pedestrian-friendly outdoor plazas.

Of course, then everyone would want to come live here. So maybe it wouldn’t be ideal. But it would still be a good idea for the economy and the environment; so I’m willing to sacrifice.