The Center for Inquiry is a great organization — their mission is to “foster a secular society based on science, reason, freedom of inquiry, and humanist values,” which sounds like a good idea to me. They sponsor a number of activities including lectures, education, conferences, and research. I’ve given talks at the local branch, and it’s a great thrill to meet with such an engaged and enthusiastic audience.

And they’re in a bit of trouble. As a non-profit, they rely on donations, and their major donor seems to have mysteriously disappeared. About $800,000 of their annual operating budget is suddenly gone.

We’re not going to make up for that with a few appeals on the internet, but we can help them adapt during a tough time. Consider donating, even if it’s just a few bucks.

I’m reading an interesting new book, Bursts by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi. It’s just released today, but I scored an advance copy by virtue of sharing the same publisher. The basic idea is simple: human behavior obeys power laws! That is, things we occasionally do tend to be clustered together, rather than simply occurring with uniform probability. I can’t vouch for either the truth or usefulness of the claims put forward in the book; we all know that power laws can be slippery things. But the stories related along the way are pretty amusing. (And there’s a very spiffy web page.)

I’ll admit that I jumped right to a chapter in the middle that relates the correspondence between Einstein and Theodor Kaluza in the year 1919 and thereabouts. Kaluza had just come up with the idea that electromagnetism could be unified with gravity by hypothesizing an extra dimension of space — a scenario now known as Kaluza-Klein theory, which underlies all the contemporary excitement about extra dimensions of space. Many crackpots like to assert that our contemporary system of scientific publishing is overly ossified and hierarchical, and that a modern-day Einstein would never be appreciated; the truth is close to the opposite, as back in those days you really needed endorsement from someone established to get your papers published. So Kaluza wrote to Einstein, who was originally enthusiastic about the idea, and they had a flurry of correspondence. Eventually (as I now know) Einstein cooled on the idea, and Kaluza left physics to concentrate on pure mathematics. A couple of years later, after getting nowhere with his own attempts to unify gravity and E&M, Einstein turned back to Kaluza’s approach, and wrote him again, offering to present his paper to the academy.

The book’s interest is actually in the “burstiness” of the correspondence — a flurry of letters back and forth in 1919, then silence, then the conversation resumed in 1921. I was struck by this paragraph, relating the growth of Einstein’s celebrity after the eclipse expedition of 1919 provided evidence supporting general relativity.

[Einstein's] sudden fame had drastic consequences for his correspondence. In 1919, he received 252 letters and wrote 239, his life still in its subcritical phase, allowing him to reply to most letters with little delay. The next year he wrote many more letters than in any previous year. To the flood of 519 he received, we have record of his having managed to respond to 331 of them, a pace, though formidable, insufficient to keeping on top of his vast correspondence. By 1920 Einstein had moved into the supercritical regime, and he never recovered. The peak came in 1953, two years before his death, when he received 832 letters and responded to 476 of them.

Can you imagine what Einstein would have faced in the email era? One thing is for sure: he was a champion correspondent. He composed approximately 14,500 letters, more than one per day over the course of his adult life.

Not for the first time, Einstein makes me feel like a slacker.

I attended SkeptiCal 2010 on Saturday, a conference on science and skepticism organized by Bay Area Skeptics. The conference sold out all 200 slots, and the audience is a pretty lively bunch. I was invited here to speak at a breakout session in the afternoon on “Myths and Facts about the LHC” which I trust was entertaining, given all the media attention to the possibility that the LHC will destroy the world by producing a black hole, that the Higgs boson is coming back from the future to prevent its discovery, and the various notions about CERN in Angels and Demons such as that the lab is using the LHC to create an antimatter superweapon. All relatively standard topics for the skeptics…

The opening talk, but Eugenie Scott, addressed the rather deep question of how skepticism relates to science: is one included in the other? Do they overlap? Her conclusion, arrived at with humor, grace, and thoughtful examples, was that science is contained within skepticism, that the general approach to knowing we call skepticism is applied in the case of science to understanding the natural world. As a physicist, I need to continually put myself in the mindset of the (mostly) non-physicists in the audience. Skepticism is to a physicist as natural as breathing…this is not true of everyone in the world!

David Morrison, senior scientist at NASA Ames’ Astrobiology institute, gave a truly mind-boggling talk about the rapidly increasing end-of-the-world-in-2012 phenomenon. It all started with Nibiru, the planet that the Zetas told a Wisconsin woman, Nancy Lieder, would crash into the earth round about then. Of course the thing snowballed and led to the movie 2012 (actually the movie appropriated the 2012 meme a few years into prouction). Morrison has received over 3500 emails about the phenomenon, ranging from death threats against him (because, natch, NASA is covering it all up) to suicide threats (who wants to live to see the end of the world?) and everything in between. He made a youtube video trying to allay fears of the world’s imminent demise. (Of course I told my session that the LHC was scheduled to resume at full energy on Dec. 21, 2012, the particular date in question.)

I had a difficult choice of parallel sessions to attend, but chose the one on psychics by Karen Stollznow. And, of all things, I learned something very interesting about quantum physics that I had been blissfully unaware of. Watch for a future post once I read up on that.

In the afternoon, Brian Dunning, creator and host of Skeptoid.com, delivered a devastating blow to the myth of the origins of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the most pervasive symbol of Catholicism in Mexico. What becomes clear is that this was another example of the Catholic church appropriating the symbols of the indigenous population it was attempting (ultimately successfully) to convert. In the beginning, though, he lamented the failure of the skeptical movement as a movement. He pointed out that all that skepticism can offer is negative: we kill sacred cows and remove the scales from peoples’ eyes. But how will we save critical thinking?

All in all I found the conference quite eye-opening, and I have realized that we have a long way to go to counter the rising tide of ignorance of science and what it means to adopt a skeptical world view. Even once-respectable types like Bill Nye and Michio Kaku are starting to fall to the dark side. Too many think of skepticism as simply disbelief, when all it means is to place rationality at the base of our intellectual foundation. Help!

Okay, I have tried, but pronouncing this one eludes me…I think it needs a new name. (Simply “Kull” might do.) This eruption, though not the largest volcanic event in recent history, has certainly had a huge impact on air travel. Initially, there were even fears of (I’ve always wanted to use this word in a sentence) pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicavolcanoconiosis from breathing the silica dust. But the last I heard was that not that much was making it to the ground in high enough concentrations to worry about.

The New York Times has some amazing video, relayed from British TV 4, which is absolutely a must-see. It is some of the closest scenes yet, though the video clearly shows some crazies in a helicopter very close to the plume. I want to see night shots, with the lightning!

Will they resume flights soon? I guess it’s too early to say, but what if it keeps spewing for a long time, like it did from 1821-1823? (After which nearby Katla went off.)

Could it disrupt the climate? I am going to guess that this is a possibility, given that Mt. Pinatubo’s eruption in 1991 cooled the planet by a fraction of a degree.

Groups of people with whom I disagree (so many, many groups…) should not hand in their census forms. That way they will be under-represented in official figures and basically count less. And do you really want to be in the government’s database when the black helicopters come?

Just kidding. Only two days left, hand in your census forms! Even people I don’t like.

Just after 1 pm European time today, the LHC at CERN collided two beams of protons with a total center-of-mass energy of 7 TeV (seven trillion electron volts), three and a half times more energy than the proton-antiproton collisions at the Tevatron at Fermilab, and far greater than the 2.4 TeV achieved by the LHC in December 2009. This milestone clearly marks the beginning, at long last, of the first major physics run of the new accelerator.

We’ve been waiting a very long time for this. In the 1980s the field had its eyes fixed firmly on the SSC, the Superconducting Supercollider to be constructed in Waxahachie, Texas. After years of design, the go-ahead was given by President Bush in 1988 shortly after his election to construct the huge machine, which was to collide protons with 40 TeV energy. Alas, changes to the design sent costs rising, and, after spending over 2 billion dollars on tunnel boring and lab construction in Texas, the project was canceled by Congress in October 1993.

Those were dark days for particle physics. Any hope of pushing to higher energies seemed to lie in pushing ahead with the design of the LHC at CERN, which had been simmering along but was looking like it would be too little too late if the SSC came on line first. Nevertheless, the Tevatron was just starting to gather significant physics data, and the CDF and D0 experiments would soon discover the top quark, completing the picture of the standard model quarks.

With the SSC out of the picture work on the LHC really began in earnest. The magnet design was finalized and plans for constructing the machine began to gel. It would take many years to complete the engineering, prototyping, and industrialization of the magnet production, and a lot of money. In 1997 the US and CERN reached an agreement (brokered in part by Rep. Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin) whereby the US would contribute about $50 million per year over ten years to the machine itself. This was precedent-setting: never before had the cost of machine construction at CERN, or Fermilab, or SLAC been borne in such large part by a foreign entity. It was essentially the price of admission for the US community to participate in the large experiments ATLAS and CMS, to which the US has committed about half a billion dollars. So though the LHC and the experiments are in Europe, the US has a billion dollar investment in the projects. And now it is time to begin to reap the rewards.

In 1997 it was foreseen to have circulating beams in the LHC by 2005. Construction of the detectors was steady, and it is arguably the case that the experiments were ready before the accelerator. But the completion date of both sets of projects slipped, to 2006, then 2007, and then finally in 2008 all was ready. And, as we all know, in September 2008, after one week of beam commissioning, the LHC suffered a major magnet quench accident which damaged over a kilometer of the machine, necessitating a year-long repair campaign, and a reassessment of the path to the full design energy of 14 TeV.

A large portion if the machine has yet to be retrofit to prevent the type of accident experienced in 2008, but it was decided to operate the collider at 7 TeV and gather physics data in the next year. The energy will open up a new regime to explore for physics beyond the standard model, and we are ready and eager to do just that!

More on the physics in the next post…

A sad but true fact:

Receiving a balloon animal is only Act 1 of an inevitable three act tragedy.

Today is the much celebrated pi-day . Ok, perhaps it’s not that big a holiday – I don’t think Hallmark is selling any pi-day cards yet – but anyone who uses google today knows that something mathematical and geeky is being honored. I promise not to go into diatribes about calculations of the first few million digits of pi, or how many digits one needs to keep in order to calculate the radius of the universe to atomic accuracy. Instead, I merely want to relay a simple short story a colleague of mine recounted to me years ago.

Several years ago, before pi-day was famous, a student called the phone number associated with the digits in pi that appear after the decimal point, i.e., 1-415-926-5358. Apparently this is rather common now, and in fact, appears to be promoted as a mnemonic for the first 10 decimal places for those folks we need to have those numbers handy at all times. But this story happened in earlier times, back before the Bay Area split into several area codes. And, as the clever reader has already guessed, that student reached the SLAC main gate. How cool to phone pi and reach the main gate of a major national scientific research laboratory!

Alas, time and phone numbers march on, and nowadays phoning pi yields a “your call cannot be completed as dialed” message. (And I’m told that I cannot publish this post without noting that 3-14-15 will be a more accurate pi day.)

I did my graduate work at the University of Chicago, and lived in Hyde Park. On occasion I would take the bus (the #6 Jeffery Express) to downtown. Although the buses were scheduled to run every 15 minutes, I would invariably end up waiting a half hour. Sometimes more. Often in the freezing cold, or the sweltering heat. Most infuriatingly, when the bus finally arrived, there was always another one immediately behind it! The buses inevitably came in pairs. Sometimes even in triples or quads.

Let’s assume that the buses are supposed to arrive every 15 minutes. If the buses adhered to their schedule, and I showed up at a random time, I should generally have to wait roughly half the mean bus arrival time: 7.5 minutes. If the buses were totally random, then I would have to wait the average time between bus arrivals: 15 minutes (if you haven’t thought about this before, this statement should sound crazy; perhaps I’ll do a future post on it). So the question is: why did I always end up waiting roughly 30 minutes or more?

I always assumed that the Universe was conspiring against me. This is a common feeling in graduate school. However….

(more…)

A physics student here at UC Davis, Austin Sendek, has launched a campaign to add another designator to the list of numeric SI prefixes such as kilo-, mega-, etc. to cover 10²⁷: hella. For example, 1 hellagram would be 10²⁷ grams, or 1000 yottagrams.

The term “hella” is one I first heard my sister-in-law utter in the context “that ski run was hella fun!”, which I immediately took as a shorthand for “a hell of a lot of”. I’ve since learned that it originated, reportedly, in San Francisco to mean just that, or “very” in general, as in “that tee shirt is hella awesome” – it’s not an uncommon utterance to hear here in northern California.

And, 10²⁷ is hella big, to be sure. A hellasecond is ten billion times the age of the universe, and the mass of the earth is about 6 hellagrams.

It seems that hella is poised to go viral…there are nearly 24,000 fans of the facebook petition, and it even made the local news last night in Sacramento.

Who decides such things? The International Bureau of Weights and Measures, that’s who. They added yotta in 1991. Sign the petition to them at the facebook site!