Great Valentine’s appropriate story on NPR the other day via the always awesome Radio Lab, involving Carl Sagan,
a whirlwind marriage proposal by phone, a 2500 year old Chinese song, and brain waves of new love sent into space on a golden record for future alien civilizations to find.

This is a love story. And, oddly enough, it starts with an interstellar space mission and a golden record. Toward the end of the summer of ’77, NASA launched two spacecraft as part of the Voyager Interstellar Mission. On board each craft was a golden record that included, among other things, the sound of a kiss, a mother’s first words to her newborn child, music from all over the world, and greetings in 59 different languages…

Sagan’s wife Ann Druyan tells the story.

Orginally broadcast on the “Space” episode of Radio Lab — listen to the whole thing here.

Last week in Aspen we learned that this week would be when a major decision was reached by CERN at the annual Chamonix meeting as to how to operate the LHC at high energy. Following the magnet quench incident in September 2008, a year-long shutdown ensued for repairs to the magnets, and retrofitting of the rest of the machine for better quench protection circuitry and helium pressure release valves. Not all sectors were warmed up to room temperature for the retrofit last year, but all magnets were trained to go as high as beam energies of 5 TeV (design energy is 7 TeV per beam).

In November and December the LHC commissioning resumed, and it became the world’s highest energy collider on December 8, eventually delivering about 50,000 collisions at 2.36 TeV to CMS and ATLAS before shutting down for Christmas.

But the question facing the LHC managers this week was whether attempting to operate the LHC at 5 TeV on 5 TeV in 2010 was worth the risk to the machine itself. Clearly another disaster of the scale of the one in 2008 would cripple the program for a long time. In the end the decision is to operate the LHC at 3.5 TeV on 3.5 TeV (7 TeV collision energy, 3.5 times that of the Tevatron) and accumulate a substantial amount of physics-quality data: 1 inverse femtobarn, or stop by the end f 2011, whichever comes first. This corresponds to something like ten trillion proton-proton collisions, of which only a small fraction will yield events interesting enough to record for later analysis by the experiments, and of these, only a tiny fraction yielding data relevant for physics.

After a one to one-and-a-half year shutdown in 2012 to retrofit the rest of the machine and make other preparations, the LHC will attempt to double the energy, to 14 TeV in the center of mass, in 2013 and accumulate substantial physics data. My best guess is that if the Higgs boson is to be discovered, it will be at high energy with this large sample of 14 TeV data. We might be able to rule it out at 95% confidence in certain mass ranges if it’s not there, but we ought not be able to do that if it is, right? Patience, patience!

Nevertheless, there is no question that in a few weeks, when operated at 7 TeV collision energy, the LHC will become an awesome discovery machine. There are many new physics scenarios in which we will be able to see new phenomena with just a fraction of the full 1 fb^-1 sample. Will nature give up her secrets so readily though? She may not – we may spend this year and the next rediscovering the Standard Model, building up understanding of the detector, and sharpening our analysis tools in order to discover quite subtle effects. No matter what happens, this is the most exciting time in particle physics in decades.

Like most state schools, University of Washington is in the process of absorbing a series of budget cutbacks. These cuts are part of a long trend of reduced state support, as can be seen in this plot dug up by my colleague Gordon Watts, but have been accelerating recently in response to the state’s economic troubles:

While the University historically has been able to handle the slow erosion of state support in a manner that allowed for continued quality in the educational experiences of our students, the latest cuts are now at a point where they are having a direct impact on the students (beyond the steady increase in tuition and fees, needed to make up for the declining share of state support). As detailed in an article in today’s Seattle Times, class sizes are growing, and students have less direct access to their instructors.

This quarter, I am living with the “new normal”. Click below the fold if you dare.

(more…)

I am heartbroken to learn the loss of a member of the physics community in the recent avalanche in Switzerland. I have few details, but it appears one physicist was killed in the avalanche, and that at least two others from the party have been hospitalized. Many others were lost, including some of the rescuers, who were swept up in a second avalanche.

Condolences to all who have been affected by this tragedy.

Well, I’ve spent quite a bit of time away from the blog recently, feeling rather overwhelmed as a number of responsibilities accumulated over the last hectic year finally caught up with me. But, for now at least, things seem to be in check and I’m hoping to get a little more writing done.

The last few months of the year were quite a ride. For example,

• I started teaching again (after a sabbatical at Cornell, and then a one semester leave to help me settle in at Penn), and very much enjoyed introducing the complexities (no pun intended) of contour integration, asymptotic methods, Sturm-Liouville theory, etc. to a whole new batch of beginning graduate students at a whole new institution.
• The first (albeit limited) renovations were completed as part of the Center for Particle Cosmology, and helping oversee these, as well as planning for much larger future renovations took up a huge part of the Fall semester. In the end though, this should be well worth it, with a new and highly-functional space for us to work and collaborate in.
• I started doing significant service again; organizing departmental colloquia and sitting on our graduate admissions committee. Plus some new editorial work
• I went to Australia, to speak at the COSPA-09 meeting in Melbourne (if you look carefully you’ll see both Sean and me in the group picture on the main page.) This was my third visit to Melbourne, and once again I was struck by what a liveable and lovely city it is. The conference was great fun, and I saw a number of talks that gave me something to think about back in Philly.
• I finished some papers.
• We ran an intense and, I thought, successful workshop – New Horizons in Particle Cosmology – to inaugurate the Center for Particle Cosmology. This involved some of the biggest names in our field, and included a very well-attended public lecture by Paul Steinhardt. My colleague Justin Khoury deserves considerable praise for taking on most of the organizational work of the conference and lecture.

Right now I’m gearing up for next week’s beginning of my graduate General Relativity class, which is my absolute favorite subject to teach. I’m also preparing for quite a bit more travel this year, although not for a few weeks at least. But most importantly, of course, I’m hard at work on a number of projects that I hope will come to fruition in the pretty near future.

So this post is just intended to get back into the swing of things. I’ll leave you with an interesting new link. NPR is entering the science blogging field with a good-looking new blog featuring, among others, science writer and friend-of-the-blog, K.C. Cole, and former guest contributor, physicist Marcelo Gleiser. Their blog is called 13.7 (for reasons you might try guessing before checking on) and I hope you’ll check them out – we wish them all the best.

Here are the opening sentences of Chapter Five of my book:

When most people hear “scientist,” they think “Einstein.” Albert Einstein is an iconic figure; not many theoretical physicists attain a level of celebrity where their likeness appears regularly on T-shirts. But it’s an intimidating, distant celebrity. Unlike, say, Tiger Woods, the precise achievements that Einstein is actually famous for remain somewhat mysterious to many people who would easily recognize his name.

And now we can add, “and some achievements should really stay mysterious, thanks just the same.”

Today the LHC at CERN became the planet’s highest-energy particle accelerator, surpassing the Tevatron by 20%. The LHC accelerated protons from the injection energy of 0.450 TeV (0.45 trillion electron volts) to 1.18 TeV; the Tevatron has collided protons and antiprotons with beam energies of 0.98 TeV . As early as Wednesday the LHC team plans to attempt the feat with beams circulating in both directions, and will then become the world’s highest energy particle collider in the world.

Now, let’s see if the mainstream media can start to distinguish “power” from “energy”! After all, power is total energy per unit time. All you need to do to get more power is to put more particles into the machine…the Tevatron, by this measure, is still far more powerful, with many thousands of times more particles per beam. And there are much lower-energy machines with higher total beam power. In fact it will be a while before the LHC becomes “the world’s most powerful accelerator”.

No worry, though! In the more subtle sense of the word the LHC will soon be the most powerful scientifically. (And with great power comes….yeah, yeah.) But seriously: with higher energy, which is what counts here, the LHC will be able to create new massive particles that the Tevatron simply cannot, and therefore begn to probe a new scientific realm.

At that point, it will be powerful indeed. Can’t wait!

Am I the only one who finds the idea of a “perpetual calendar” ridiculous?

You know who uses calendars? People who have no idea what day it is.

Making such people responsible for setting the date on their own is bonkers.

My last 10 days (posted after a recovery weekend), by the numbers:

Shuttle launches witnessed: 1
Shuttle launches since 1981: 129
Shuttle launches remaining: 5
“Shuttle Experience” rides experienced: 1

Cost of Space Shuttle Atlantis [dollars]: 1.7 billion
Total cost of the International Space Station [dollars]: 157 billion
Science publications resulting from research by the International Space Station: ~200
Total cost of the Hubble Space Telescope [dollars]: ~4-6 billion
Science publications resulting from Hubble Space Telescope data: >8500

Years between first trans-Atlantic air passenger and first man walking on Moon: 42
Years since last human walked on moon: 37
Moons of earth where water was found: 1

Cities visited, where snow was visible: 2
Cities visited, where it has never snowed: 2
Cities visited with a “Disney Land/World”: 2
Mickeys seen: 0
Alligators seen: 2
Geckos seen: 1
Astronauts met: 1
Space geeks met: ~ 40

Tweets sent at first “tweetup”: 24
Tweets sent in lifetime: 24
Number of distinct words heard starting with an extraneous “tw”: >15
Days after my first tweet that Palin decided to resume tweeting: 4
Books released by Sarah Palin: 1
Stewardesses I saw that were the spitting image of Sarah Palin: 1

Oceans swum in: 1
Oceans I was close enough to swim in: 2
Places visited that are the Holiest site of a religion: 1
People met that are writing a book about escaping that religion: 1
Points bowled: 67
Team place out of nine teams of bowling scientists: 1st

Flights taken: 7
Amount of carbon emitted by those flights [lbs]: 2240
Net amount of energy generated by my solar panels [kW/hrs]: ~100
Equivalent amount of carbon not emitted [lbs]: 100
Cost of offsetting that 2240 lbs of carbon [dollars]: 12.63

Talks given on completely different topics: 3
Talks listened to: 41
Talks listened to without my laptop open: 15
Non-astrophysics talks I heard that mentioned dark matter: 10

NSF proposals submitted (as Co-PI): 2
HST Multi-Cycle Treasury proposals submitted (as Co-I): 2
Total number of HST MCT proposals submitted by the community: 39
Total number of HST orbits requested by those 39 proposals: 26801
Interviews given: 3
Days with at least 3 nearly identical deadlines: 2

Emails received @ work address: 768
Emails sent: 253
Emails still in my inbox: 361

Average number of hours slept per night: 5
Brain cells lost by multi-tasking: Uncountable.

I had that somewhat rare experience two days ago, getting the message from Physical Review Letters that our paper had finally been published online. In our field it can take quite a long time to get a paper all the way to publication; this one took longer than usual…

The paper describes the results of our search for Higgs bosons predicted in supersymmetric theories, in the CDF experiment at Fermilab. Alas, we didn’t see any evidence for Higgs boson production, despite earlier hints that something might lurk in our sample, and so we were able to rule out some regions of supersymmetric parameter space. We first obtained a preliminary result from this analysis in late 2007. A group of us from Rutgers University, University of Valencia, and UC Davis all worked directly on it, within our several-hundred-member collaboration, using Tevatron data recorded up through mid-2007. Since then we’ve more than tripled our data sample, but this result stuck with the data sample on which it was based and has finally reached publication.

The analysis was the topic of the Ph.D. thesis of my student Cris Cuenca, who was formally a student of my former postdoc Juan Valls at University of Valencia. Cris was a visitor in our group at UC Davis, and I was effectively his thesis advisor. After we got the preliminary results, Cris focused on writing his thesis, eventually defending it in Valencia in April 2008. One nice effect of that was that I got to visit Valencia for the first time: what a fantastic city!

Once the thesis was done, it was clear we needed to publish the result formally. In fact, we should have been already writing the paper but as usual it’s hard to find time to get started on writing projects. Here is a place we could have saved some time, though…

Anyway, I wrote a draft after the birth of our son Ian in June 2008, while helping with baby care at home. In our collaboration there is a very formal review process before submitting a paper for publication. The spokespeople of the collaboration “godparents” who perform a full internal review of the analysis and the draft of the paper. Without naming names, we got some very knowledgeable godparents who asked us hard questions. Some of these questions took weeks to answer, because more data analysis had to be performed. And some of them led to even more questions. This review process is a good thing — it ensures that the quality of the final paper is very high, and that the result is correct to the best of our ability. In fact, in the course of the review process we found that there was a minor software bug, and we repeated the full end stage of the analysis. As it turned out, the bug had very little effect on the final result but we needed to be sure. (At present there are only unknown bugs in the analysis software!)

Whenever there is a change to an analysis like this, it needs to be re-approved in our physics analysis group meetings, with two presentations: a “pre-blessing”, and then a “blessing” two weeks later. (Hey, I’m not responsible for the pseudo-religious jargon used in this process…) This eventually happened in March 2008.

With the result final and the godparents happy with the paper draft, it was time for the general collaboration review. The collaboration gets two weeks to comment on each draft. Then the authors go through comment by comment and reply to the commenters, modifying the draft as needed. The godparents reviewed our replies and then we arrive at the next draft. This part of the process can take many weeks depending on how much time the authors have two devote to the paper. Once the final draft stage is reached, a “paper reading” is scheduled at the weekly general collaboration meeting. Following the presentation of the result, the collaboration has 48 hours before the paper is submitted to the journal. For us this happened, finally, in June of this year.

We heard back from PRL in late July, with blind referee comments to address. There then ensued a back-and-forth between us and the referees, answering questions, making changes to our submission, and eventually reaching agreement that the paper would be published in PRL. This happened a few weeks ago, and our paper has now appeared in what I think is still considered to be the most prestigious journal in our field, though Nature possibly tops it. (That might inspire a comment flame war but I hope not…)

Maybe this is an extreme example, and I certainly will endeavor to bring results to publication much more quickly in the future. (I always say that.) Certain results, if they are “hot”, can be published on a fast track in CDF, within weeks, but that is quite rare.

Many will, no doubt, argue that print media of almost every form is on the way out. Will this happen to print science journals? I do think there is a strong need for blindly refereed publication of scientific results, even though many scientists have reviewed these papers by the time they are submitted.

And clearly once the LHC experiments have physics results to publish, we will need a very rapid means of getting them into print. For any striking new discovery we’ll want to have a paper submitted for publication when we announce the result…this is in contrast to the case of not-very-striking results, where we announce the results at conferences first and publish later. The reason is that the experiments will try to establish scientific priority by publishing striking results before the other one does, but I have to wonder, in the modern age of electronic media and collaborations with thousands of members, whether simply announcing or presenting the the result in public doesn’t accomplish that anyway. If ATLAS says they see a resonance in muon pairs at 1.5 TeV mass and so does CMS, the same week, will we really say “ATLAS found it first” or “ATLAS was the one to discover it and CDF confirmed it?” I hope the science mainstream media don’t present such a thing that way…but more than that I just hope this is a problem we will actually face!