Blogs / Cosmic Variance

The Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter has released a new online museum, The Emergent Universe. This is, I think a truly novel approach to communicating the central ideas of the new field of emergent phenomena and complexity, combining the underlying physical basis of a wide array of examples with art and music. The site itself presents an animated, non-directed interface to branching sets of topics and what I guess one would call exhibits (since it’s a museum after all). A lot of these are quite fun, and instructive. A visitor is left with the feeling that there is lots more to explore. The interface itself, I have to say, is very cool and a glimpse of what is to come on the internet. Today’s text- and photo-heavy web pages are bound to give way to sleek sophisticated designs like this one…

Have fun!

The prizes were awarded this evening at Harvard’s annual IgNobel Prize ceremony. This year’s theme was “Risk”. Among the winners are:

Veterinary Medicine: Catherine Bertenshaw and Peter Rowlinson, Newcastle, for showing that cows who have names give more milk than nameless cows. (Not sure what that has to do with risk…)

Peace: Stefan Bolliger (sp?), et al., Univ. of Bern, Switzerland, for determining whether it is better to be smashed over the head with a full or empty bottle of beer. (The empty ones work better!)

Public Health: Ilena Badnar of the University of Chicago for inventing a brassiere that can be converted to a pair of gas masks. Paul Krugman with a pink bra cup on his face…woah.

Biology: Fumiyake Yamaguchi et al. for demonstrsating that the feces of giant pandas can be used to reduce kitchen waste by 90%.

It’s great that Little Miss Sweetie Poo keeps the speeches short by running up and yelling “please stop! I’m bored!”

Hopefully the whole list and the video will be up on their web site soon!

Tomorrow, thousands of University of California faculty will walk out in protest of state budget cuts, furloughs, and increases to student fees. The action will happen across all ten UC campuses (can you name them all?) and is supported by simultaneous strikes by two unions (UTPE and CUE) representing clerical and technical employees of the university. Here at UC Davis, there is a large rally planned for the main quad in the morning to draw public attention to the issues.

Since my last post on this topic, when it appeared that there would be salary cuts announced, there indeed were. But, especially in the summer, things happen slowly at universities. The original proposal was to give everyone except graduate students a 5% pay cut. The faculty were asked for their input on whether they preferred a pay cut, a salary reduction, or a hybrid. Once it was established that the format would be furloughs, we were asked if furlough days should be on teaching days or not. Despite the overwhelming sentiment of the UC faculty that the students should feel some of the pain of the budget cuts (which they already do through increased fees this year and next) the UC Office of the President elected to mandate that furlough days not be on teaching days.

Many of us thought that it was completely crazy to make pay cuts apply to everyone. For example, on the federal grant on which I am principal investigator (meaning I manage the budget) we pay our postdocs 100% from federal funds, including their benefits and overhead, which is essentially a tax paid to the university. Cutting the salaries of our postdocs would have only a negative effect on the university budget, and would demoralize the most productive research workers at the institution. It would damage for years our ability to attract good people. These arguments won out, and so the furloughs apply only to faculty and staff. (The application to medical school personnel is even more complicated – we won’t go there.)

In the end, the faculty furloughs are on a graded scale according to pay, tooping out at 10% for those making over $240,000 per year. (You can see everyone’s salary in the whole UC system using the nice tool provided by the San Francisco Chronicle…it’s eye-opening.) But even faculty and staff earning less than $40,000 will get a 4% furlough, which, to many of us, seems cruel.

Anyway, things simmered along during the summer, with anger building steadily. The walkout was planned about a month ago, and has really caught fire now. But then, last week UC President Yudof, faced with the spectre of even deeper cuts next year (when federal stimulus money for the state of California runs out), and a continuation of the “fiscal emergency” he declared into the next academic year all but certain, he announced plans to dramatically increase student fees by 30%, to over $10,000 per year for the first time ever, in addition to the 9.3% increase pushed through in May to help close the budget gap.

Ultimately, we all realize that the budget problems we face stem from the poor economy coupled with the effects of Proposition 13, passed over 30 years ago. By requiring a 2/3 majority in the state legislature to pass budget actions, it has led to a tyranny of the minority, a minority of, yes, Republicans who simply will not accept any new tax no matter what it does to the future of the state. Prop 13 caps property taxes at 1% of assessed value of a home, and caps the rate at which that value can rise to 2% per year, unless the house is sold. Clearly in a housing market that saw huge increases past decades, with far faster increases than 2%, this has led to enormous inequities in tax rates. For example, though my neighbors across the street have a house worth about what ours is, they pay about a quarter of what we do in taxes. This has benefitted the elderly greatly, and was a strong motivation for Prop 13 originally, but it has hamstrung the ability of both the state and local governments to support education, both K-12 and higher education.

We, as a state, are eating our seed corn. The University of California and the California State University systems are a tremendous engine for both long and short term economic growth. From this great compilation of statistics about UC let me just point out a few:

• More than 220,000 students are enrolled in the University of California.
• For every dollar of state money, the university secures six dollars in federal research money.
• UC researchers patent three new inventions per day.
• UC has the highest proportion of low-income students among the country’s top research universities.

It’s just stupid to think that de-funding the university will not seriously damage the state in the long run.

When I am out on the quad tomorrow, it will be with the intention of motivating the leadership in this university to fight, fight like hell, to make the case to the public and the legislature that we MUST support a public option for higher education. So far I haven’t seen the passion. President Yudof, and the chancellors of the ten campuses should all be out there on radio talk shows, TV, and the print media making the case to the public that this situation is dire. They should join forces with other state institutions to over turn Prop 13.

The mountains surrounding Los Angeles are on fire. One of the world’s largest metropolises has an uncontrolled wildfire at its very doorstep:

The Mount Wilson Observatory sits in the middle of the San Gabriel Mountains, and is visible on a clear day from many places in the Los Angeles basin. As you walk around Pasadena you can’t help but glance up at the dome, and imagine Hubble diligently performing his observations almost a century ago. By demonstrating that the nebulae aren’t in our galaxy, he ushered in one of the most humbling developments in the history of humanity. He showed that our galaxy is only one of many, and that the Universe stretches well beyond the limits of our familiar Milky Way. And, as if this weren’t insulting enough, he established that the rest of the Universe is running away from us at a tremendous clip.

The fire is now threatening this historic observatory. A live webcam (more commonly used to provide astronomers sky conditions [is it snowing?]) shows the view from the top (it occasionally goes down due to heavy traffic; if it doesn’t load for an extended period it may be a bad sign). Lots of smoke, but no flames at the moment. This is, of course, a chilling reminder of the 2003 fire at Mount Stromlo. You can follow the progress of the fire here. Perhaps our man on the ground will chime in with some live-blogging? Note: Phil is keeping us informed.

As it happens, many communication towers are also found on Mount Wilson. Should the fire sweep across the peak, communications for much of the Los Angeles area may be compromised. No cellphones. No TV. No LAX. Back to the stone age.

Although this looks like a still from a Hollywood disaster movie, it is much scarier. This is really happening. It is a sobering reminder that, despite our best efforts, Nature still trumps Man.

Ted, we will miss you.

Back in 1996, after the initially very mysterious explosion and crash of Flight 800 from JFK to Rome, there were numerous eyewitness accounts of a “streak in the sky” just before the crash. This led to the “missile theory” of the crash, which was eventually attributed to the explosion of the center fuel tank by the NTSB. But, also at the time, it was suggested that a meteor of sufficient size could have struck the plane, bringing it down.

Could a meteor have brought down Air France 447? Today we are starting to see reports that there actually may have been a meteor:

However, both pilots of an Air Comet flight from Lima to Lisbon sent a written report on the bright flash they said they saw to Air France, Airbus and the Spanish civil aviation authority, the airline told CNN.

“Suddenly, we saw in the distance a strong and intense flash of white light, which followed a descending and vertical trajectory and which broke up in six seconds,” the captain wrote.

Obviously for any given flight the chances are very, very small that a meteor will bring down an airliner, but as Hailey and Helfand pointed out in a letter to the NYT in 1996, the correct question to ask is this: “What is the probability that, for all flights in history, one or more could have been downed by a meteor?” They concluded that there was a 1-in-10 chance that this could happen…let’s use their logic, brought up to date somewhat, for 2009, for Flight 447.

Helfand, an astronomer, is presumably the one who estimated that “approximately 3,000 meteors a day with the requisite mass strike Earth”. This is a difficult number to get. How much mass? How fast does it need to be moving? But let’s assume that this number is correct; it translates to 125 meteors per hour.

Next we need to know the total number of flight hours at altitude for all commercial planes. In 2000 there were about 18 million flights per year. Clearly in the past 20 years (which we’ll take as our reference, since it spans 1989-2009, with both flights 800 and 447) it was not always so…but let’s take a guess that the 18 million figure is roughly correct for that 20 year period. That would yield 360 million commercial airline flights from 1989-2000. Hailey and Helfand assumed that each flight was two hours in duration. Again, a tough number to find on line, so we’ll take it at face value, giving us 720 million flight hours in our reference period.

They also claim that if there were 3500 planes in the air at any time, this would correspond to covering two-billionths of Earth’s surface. Now the earth’s surface area is 5×10¹⁴ m². Using my trusty HP-15c, I get that this would imply an average target area for a commercial airliner of 291 m², which is reasonable. Each plane, that is, covers 5.7×10^-13 of Earth’s surface. If a meteor hits the earth it has that probability of hitting a given plane on average.

So, in our reference 20-year period we have 720 million hours of flight time, times 125 meteors per hour, times 5.7×10^-13 = 0.051, which we can take as the average number of airliners struck by meteors in the period 1989-2009. That’s a one-in-twenty chance of some plane going down for this reason in that 20 year period. Extrapolating to all flights ever would require a better estimate of total flight hours, but it’s not twenty times the number in the past 20 years, for sure – that is, it’s not yet close to one.

Obviously there are a lot of uncertainties in this estimate; perhaps a factor of two from the number of meteors of sufficient mass per day, the average flight duration and number of flights?

Anyway the meteor idea is not crazy, though not likely. The weather seems more likely to be at the root of the tragedy…but we may never know. One thing, though, is clear: if we keep flying big planes at high altitude, eventually one will get hit by a meteor.

All the signs are pointing to a major announcement by the University of California, possibly as early as tomorrow, in response to the large cuts in state funding in its next fiscal year, which begins July 1. The UC total budget of $19 billion includes core state funding which will be reduced from $3.3 to $2.8 billion, representing a 10% cut in state funding, which was 17% of the total university funding this year. On the table are furloughs, pay cuts, and staff reductions, some mix of which now seems inevitable.

The UC system has ten campuses, centrally administered from the UC Office of the President in Oakland. Earlier this spring the UCOP paved the way for legal authority to enact emergency measures in the face of fiscal emergencies such as this. Every department in the the entire system has been struggling to meet large budget reductions already, but the demise of the state ballot Propositions 1a and 1b meant that the reductions for the 2009/10 year were greater than hoped.

Then, on Friday, UC president Mark Yudof announced a 5% pay cut for senior management, down to the level of Vice Chancellors at each campus. It therefore seems rather likely that a general 5% reduction in some form is in the offing. The 23-campus California State University system faces a similar situation.

Overall, this is not that bad when you consider the fact that 235,000 California state workers will face a 14% pay reduction, and the the US economy as a whole is still shedding well over half a million jobs per month. But then, as the Chronicle of Higher Education asks, will higher education be the next bubble to burst?

CERN announced today that the final replacement LHC magnet was lowered into the tunnel, and is making its way to Sector 3-4 (between collision points 3 and 4). Last September’s incident led to 53 magnets – about half a kilometer of the 27-km ring – having to be removed, repaired or cleaned, and replaced. Check out the video of the final dipole going in on April 16.

New systems are being installed to better detect incipient magnet quenches, and the helium pressure relief systems are being upgraded. My understanding is that this will be done on the greater part of the LHC magnets this year, but not all of them.

The plan is to complete the installation of the replacement magnets, and then cool down all sectors. At present, half the machine is being held at liquid nitrogen temperatures, and the other half is at room temperature. It will take a couple months, once they start, to cool the whole machine down to superconducting temperature, about 2 degrees K.

So, by late summer the LHC commissioning can begin where it left off last September. Assuming all goes well, physics collisions are foreseen at 10 TeV by late fall. The machine will not run at the design energy of 14 TeV at least until the entire machine is retrofit with the new quench detection and pressure relief systems. And, the beam intensity (and hence collision luminosity) will not be anywhere near the ultimate goal during the first physics run.

The usual running pattern at CERN is to start in the spring, and collide beams through the late fall, and do machine maintenance, etc. during the winter when electric power is more expensive in Europe (they heat with nukes, basically; we burn fossil fuel in the US in winter).

But a decision was reached earlier this year to run the LHC through next winter, with only a brief two-week shutdown for Christmas and New Year.

What we can reasonably expect is that if all goes well, we can accumulate something like 100 inverse picobarns of collisions by spring 2010, and perhaps 200 pb^-1 by the end of the run in fall, 2010. Now, pb^-1 this is a strange unit – it has dimensions of inverse area. Formally we call it integrated luminosity. Basically it tells you how many collisions you’ve had, in essence. To get the number of some type of interesting events, you need to know the cross section – which has units of area – for producing that type of event. Then you simply multiply the cross section times the integrated luminosity.

Once the machine shuts down in late 2010, and if we do have a sample of about 200 pb^-1, there will ensue a long shut down in 2010-2011 to complete the magnet retrofit. The LHC will then not run until late 2011.

This means that the lower-energy, relatively small sample of physics data is all we will have to analyze until 2012, three years from now! The experiments have already been simulating collisions at the lower energy and retuning analyses.

Though everyone is waiting breathlessly for the LHC to discover the Higgs boson, with lower energy and a smaller sample, I would not bet on the LHC finding it any time before 2012. In fact, a full analysis of the Higgs sensitivity at 10 TeV is yet to be done in ATLAS and CMS. This is a huge task, and will take months, but there is no question that it is more difficult at the lower energy, and it’s already very hard for the LHC to see, say, a 120 GeV Higgs boson. As I wrote in my post in March, this is also very hard for the Tevatron in the same time period. Those of us looking for a standard model Higgs boson have to exercise a bit of patience while working very hard toward the ultimate goal!

Neverheless, there is a ton of new physics that *could* emerge from even the first LHC physics sample from the 2009/10 run. If nature has new high-mass particles giving observable pair-production resonances at energies not accessible at the Tevatron, they could stand out in sharp relief above the standard model. Similarly if there are extra dimensions of space time, we may see excess pair production of standard model particles. If supersymmetry exists, and the experiments manage to understand well the apparent missing momentum transverse to the beam direction (a big challenge) then a first observation of the presence of supersymmetric particles might be possible.

At this point, all you can do is admire the wisdom of the great Zen master Yogi Berra, who said “If this was easy it wouldn’t be so hard!” But then, maybe we’ll get lucky.

Today’s New York Times magazine had a long feature on Freeman Dyson, loosely based on his skepticism about global warming. Dyson, one of the founders of modern relativistic quantum field theory, is skeptical about a lot of things, as a matter of fact.

Freeman spent two weeks at our department at UC Davis last year, gave a public lecture, a colloquium, and was available for a number of very stimulating conversations. We had lunch with him one day, and pressed him on his taste for smaller, lighter, faster experiments in particle physics, as opposed to the dominant large collider experiments such as those at the LHC, the Tevatron, and LEP. In his kind way, Freeman said it was all fine with him that such things took place, but that he simply preferred the more table-top variety, where the individual experimenter could control the variables and the measurement at hand. I do too, but as the NYT article quoted Weinberg as saying, “get over it!”

Anyway, about global warming. I have to say that my own skeptical streak doesn’t simply cave to the present dominant stream of thought on this issue either. As scientists we need to continue to question all of it. It seems to me that the dominant paradigm can be summarized in a number of straightforward notions:

• The earth’s climate is in an overall warming trend. The average global surface temperature, and the average surface temperature of the oceans, is increasing.
• The root cause of the increase in global surface temperature is in large part, or even dominantly, due to the increase of the level of greenhouse gases such as CO2 and methane in the atmosphere.
• The dominant source of the excess greenhouse gases is human activity: industry, transportation, agriculture and the like.
• If the global surface temperature continues to increase, then drastic and devastating consequences will ensue due to the melting of polar ice and the rising of sea levels, desertification of huge swaths of land, increased frequency and intensity of devastating storms, and other effects.
• By changing our means of energy production and ceasing the use of fossil carbon fuels as soon as possible, there is still a chance that we can evade the above ill effects.

My own skepticism increases linearly as we go down this list. The first two items, that the global surface temperature is increasing, and that it is due to greenhouse gases, seems to be incontrovertible. The extensive measurements and correlations reported by the IPCC are rather hard to refute at this stage. (It is a very great setback for this science that NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory crashed on launch last month, or we would have gotten the mother lode of data on these questions.)

That the dominant source of excess greenhouse gases seems incontrovertible as well, though here the climate models start to differ about the sources and sinks of global CO2, methane, and other gases. And, as the climate changes, not all the models can possibly predict all the outcomes. An example: in 2005, the Amazon experienced a drought which turned the region, with over half the world’s rainforest, from a net carbon sink to a net carbon source.
Was the drought predicted by any (or all) of the models? Was the net effect on carbon predicted?

The best models must combine physics, oceanography, chemistry, and biology all at once. Has it really been done yet? (Enlighten us all, gentle readers, if you know!)

Then the last two: the negative effects. We dwell on these. Clearly ocean levels will rise rapidly in our lifetime if Greenland melts, and it appears to be melting faster than expected by the models.
That would be a bad thing, especially here in the Central Valley of California. My house is 15 meters above sea level, and a lot of the roads around here are lower than that. If Greenland melts, sea level will rise over 7 meters. Well, the Central Valley used to be a sea, and it will be again some day, no doubt. And with so much of the world’s population living so close to the sea, this is a serious, serious concern.

I am less convinced about the severity and frequency of storms with global warming, but my mind is open to being convinced by good science.

Lastly, can we do anything about it? The whole question of whether we’ve reached a “tipping point” seems to be hot right now. The answer lies in the climate models, so let’s keep our skepticism alive here. We don’t understand what causes ice age cold and warm spells. When those are in the models, and we can post-dict the previous glaciations, I’ll start to believe the models. The oceanic thermohaline circulation seems to be key here, but how? What about the Milankovich cycle? Chaotic perturbations in the solar system? Dust lanes in the Milky Way? No one said this would be easy…

And how soon could we wean ourselves from carbon, even if we wanted to? Oil may run out, but there is a crapload of natural gas and coal left to burn. Remember, “drill, baby, drill!” is the same as “burn, baby, burn!” And we have a lot left to burn.

I am not convinced at all that in 10 years we can “Repower America” and eliminate fossil fuels. And the rest of the world certainly won’t. That doesn’t mean we should not try, should not do research into new, non-carbon-based energy sources, expand our use of renewable, clean energy. We should! I am just very skeptical that it could be done even if it became the #1 national priority. It seems to me to violate physics itself, not to mention basic economic facts. Twenty years? Thirty? Eventually it will be clear to every one that we don’t really have a choice.

Sigh…Freeman, what’s the answer?

During the week of February 6, a workshop on the LHC performance was held in Chamonix, France. All of the main LHC machine folks gathered there, in one room, and discussed their strategy for the start of operations of the LHC, for all aspects of the accelerator. Reports have appeared on the blogosphere, for example here and here.

What’s new is that this afternoon at CERN, a 3 hour summary of the workshop was given in the main auditorium. And I was there. The auditorium was packed, and the audience peppered the speakers with questions. The CERN staff certainly appreciated the opportunity to hear the summaries and to ask questions. I know I did. It’s one thing to sit in California and read the slides and perhaps watch the video stream, but it’s another thing to be there in person, listen to the discourse, and to ask questions myself.

The talks ranged from safety issues, to what they learned with and without their few days of beam in 2008, to their plans for the next run. And here is the official schedule for the 2009/2010 run:

For me, the most interesting part of the talks was information on the next run:

The accelerator physicists presented the lab management with two options for the 09/10 run, depending on how many of the pressure relief valves in the arcs would be installed before the run. It’s worth noting that the full quench system will be operational in either scheme and that the pressure relief valves only serve to stem possible damage, i.e., they are not preventive. The accelerator guys were split on which plan was better. Management opted for the plan which gave beam in 2009.

The schedule is tight with no room for contingency in case of slippage.

Today, they are 1.5 weeks behind schedule, which is actually very good!

They will have a short run (few days?) with collisions at injection energy (450 GeV per beam). This is at the request of the general purpose experiments (ATLAS and CMS) in order to aid in the calibration of their detectors.

They will then run at 4 TeV per beam for a limited time (I asked specifically about this afterwards and was given various answers about the length of time at 4 TeV). Clearly, they will ramp up the beam when (and not before) they feel it is safe to do so.

Then they will run at 5 TeV per beam with the goal of collecting 200 inverse picobarns of luminosity.

To do this, they must run during the winter months December 09 – February 2010. CERN accelerators do not normally run during the winter months as the cost of electricity is 3 times higher than for the rest of the year. The additional electric bill for running the LHC during these months is $8M Euros.

It’s not clear how the lab is going to pay the additional electricity costs and the lab staff is clearly concerned about cuts, but management thinks it is manageable.

It’s not clear that the LHC will ever run at the design energy of 14 TeV. There is a problem with the number of expected magnet quenches as one tunes the beam from 6.5 to 7 TeV. Namely, it’s alarmingly high. They don’t know why yet, but are working on it. It is possible that the maximum energy the machine will ultimately reach is 13 TeV in the center of mass.

All in all, the news is good. They are expecting a reasonable set of good quality data at high energies with good discovery potential. Colliders are always slow to start up (just ask Fermilab), and the LHC will get to design parameters in good time.