Dear Chancellor Katehi:

With a heavy heart and substantial deliberation, we the undersigned faculty of the UC Davis physics department send you this letter expressing our lack of confidence in your leadership and calling for your prompt resignation in the wake of the outrageous, unnecessary, and brutal pepper spraying episode on campus Friday, Nov. 18.

The reasons for this are as follows.

• The demonstrations were nonviolent, and the student encampments posed no threat to the university community. The outcomes of sending in police in Oakland, Berkeley, New York City, Portland, and Seattle should have led you to exhaust all other options before resorting to police action.

• Authorizing force after a single day of encampments constitutes a gross violation of the UC Davis principles of community, especially the commitment to civility: “We affirm the right of freedom of expression within our community and affirm our commitment to the highest standards of civility and decency towards all.”

• Your response in the aftermath of these incidents has failed to restore trust in your leadership in the university community.

We have appreciated your leadership during these difficult times on working to maintain and enhance excellence at UC Davis. However, this incident and the inadequacy of your response to it has already irreparably damaged the image of UC Davis and caused the faculty, students, parents, and alumni of UC Davis to lose confidence in your leadership. At this point we feel that the best thing that you can do for this university is to take full responsibility and resign immediately. Our campus community deserves a fresh start.

Sincerely,

Andreas Albrecht (chair)
Marusa Bradac
Steve Carlip
Hsin-Chia Cheng
Maxwell Chertok
John Conway
Daniel Cox
James P. Crutchfield
Glen Erickson
Chris Fassnacht
Daniel Ferenc
Ching Fong
Giulia Galli
Nemanja Kaloper
Joe Kiskis
Lloyd Knox
Dick Lander
Lori Lubin
Markus Luty
Michael Mulhearn
David Pellett
Wendell Potter
Sergey Savrasov
Richard Scalettar
Robert Svoboda
John Terning
Mani Tripathi
David Webb
David Wittman
Dong Yu
Gergely Zimanyi

After the incident, UC Davis police chief, Annette Spicuzza, had this to say:

“There was no way out of that circle. They were cutting the officers off from their support. It’s a very volatile situation.”

Imagine in your mind the kind of “volatile situation” to which this description might apply. Now here’s the picture:

Having never been pepper-sprayed, I have no idea what it’s like, although it doesn’t seem pleasant. But these protestors can take some solace in the idea that this kind of display will bring more support to their movement than a million chanted slogans. The police were obviously badly trained, but the ultimate responsibility lies with UC Davis Chancellor Linda Kaheti, who ordered them in. It’s a horrifying demonstration of what happens when authority is unchecked and out of touch. I’m not sure where the propensity of local authorities to call in police dressed like Storm Troopers started, but it has to end. This isn’t what our country is supposed to be about.

Here’s the video:

Update: On the question of since when are all protests met with police in riot gear freely dispensing pepper spray, Alexis Madrigal has researched the answer, which is: since the 1999 WTO/anti-globalization protests. Apparently police training is not flexible enough to accommodate the fact that different situations call for different responses.

In addition to the stores of radioactive material, however, there is also waste consisting of items such as gloves and the like with trace amounts of radioactive contamination (much of it left over from the cold war). This stuff is stored in 55-gallon barrels in “Area G“, which is only ~10 km from the lab boundary (which presently constitutes the edge of the fire). The barrels are being systematically transported to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in Southern New Mexico. However, there are still thousands of barrels left on lab property, and this stuff isn’t housed in the same bomb-proof bunkers as the high-level radioactive material. So if the fire were to get to this material, and somehow compromise one of the barrels (which are supposed to be fire proof), it could conceivably incinerate some of the contents and generate radioactive smoke. Although highly unlikely and not an unmitigated disaster, this is nonetheless something to be avoided if at all possible. The barrels are stored on pavement surrounded by a large area which has been completely denuded of vegetation (partially because of the previous fire, and partly because of lessons learned from the previous fire). There is very little to burn in the immediate surroundings, and the fire would have to jump some canyons to get to the barrels. And, again, the potential intervention of helicopters and airplane drops of fire retardant material make it even less likely that anything could go amiss. So the general feeling is that Area G is also safe. Over the last few days the lab has been doing a remarkable job of keeping everyone apprised as to what’s happening (e.g., twitter, flicker, website; also see links in my previous post [and comments])

But, perhaps most importantly, it seems like fire fighters have gotten the upper hand over the last day or two, and the area around the laboratory and town seems to be relatively secure. Extensive fire breaks have been built, with back burns helping to clear out potential underbrush and ensure an appropriate buffer. And, in the latest positive development, this evening we had some fairly spectacular thunderstorms and rain. One side effect is that the smoke has completely dissipated, and from my living room (in Santa Fe) we now have a clear view across the Rio Grande valley to the Jemez mountains above Los Alamos. After two weeks of hearing about the fires, and seeing the smoke, now for the first time we can actually see the flames themselves. This came as quite a shock. It is a scary but strangely beautiful sight (from ~30 miles away).

Frankenstein is one of the great scientific novels. Mary Shelley wrote it in the early 1800s, when the study of electricity was at the forefront of science. It was considered, quite literally, the spark of life. In the play this science was represented by hundreds of lightbulbs hanging over the audience. The birth of the creature arrives as a brilliant electric spark, with all the bulbs burning simultaneously, so bright as to wash out the rest of the world (and, momentarily, saturate the digital projector). I saw the play a few days after the Sendai earthquake and tsunami, as the nuclear incident was unfolding, and fear and uncertainty hovered over Japan. The parallels with the play are unmistakable. The full title for the novel is Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. It was Prometheus who stole fire from the gods and gave it to humanity. For his crime he was condemned to have his liver eaten by a giant eagle every day, only to have it grow back at night (the Greeks were nothing if not creative). Frankenstein “steals” the spark of life, bringing the gift of creation to humanity. For this, he suffers at the hands of his creation. Now, as we struggle to contain the nuclear fire at the center of the Fukushima reactors, there is a similar feeling of dread. What monster have we unleashed on the world?

The novel only remotely resembles the conception of Frankenstein in the popular imagination. It is not a gothic horror story, so much as a comment on science, humanity, and society. The story is a beautiful and thoughtful reflection on what it means to be human. The monster is sympathetic and compelling, in a similar manner to Satan in the unadulterated genius of Milton’s Paradise Lost (a poem which Frankenstein’s monster reads and is profoundly affected by). One forgets that “Frankenstein” is not the name of the monster, but rather the name of the scientist and creator. This misconception is perhaps appropriate, since in many ways Frankenstein is indeed the true monster. He denies and betrays his own creation, and is incapable of showing him love or understanding. His creation becomes a complete outcast, being the only one of his kind on Earth, instantly loathed and detested by all who see him. Frankenstein, by casting out his child, creates a monster where none was present before.

Despite the dangers of fire, we would not turn our back on Prometheus’ gift. Frankenstein’s creation is not inherently evil. He is endowed with the spark of life, and becomes twisted into a dark and inhuman creature through mistreatment, abandonment, and neglect. The nuclear spark is similarly indifferent. Although it can have terrible consequences, it also offers the ability to power our civilization without warming our planet. The dangers attendant with nuclear power almost certainly pale in comparison with the dangers of global warming. The challenge is to learn to control our discovery, rather than become engulfed by it.

One of the largest earthquakes on record, unleashing a devastating tsunami

Thousands of Japanese casualties, with hundreds of thousands displaced, and untold suffering

An ongoing serious nuclear accident, with the potential to become a nuclear disaster of global proportions

A popular uprising in Bahrain, put down by troops from neighboring Saudi Arabia

Egypt overwhelmingly voting for constitutional changes towards a democracy, in its first real election in decades (after overthrowing its dictator of 30 years in a popular uprising)

Crude oil crossing $100/barrel, with impact on global markets

Global food prices at record highs, and rising, leading to concerns about global unrest

The UK, US, and France are now at war with Libya (with the UN’s imprimatur)

None of the above. It was a basketball game. I guess there’s some sort of tournament going on. Must be important.

The earthquake happened at 2:26pm. Two minutes later, the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear plant went into SCRAM mode, and shut down. The control rods were inserted. The diesel generators fired up. Everything worked to plan.

The Fukushima-Daiichi plants are boiling water reactors. In simplest terms, this is just a pile of radioactive material (generally uranium) which gets hot (literally hot, not just radioactive). You run water over it, generate superheated water and steam, drive a turbine, and produce electricity. Instead of burning coal, you use radioactive decay as the source of heat, but otherwise the basic mechanism is surprisingly similar to a conventional power plant. You turn off a nuclear reactor by inserting control rods, which absorb a lot of the neutrons, and inhibit further fission reactions. So, two minutes after the quake, the control rods were inserted, and the reactors were no longer undergoing nuclear fission. However, one of the peculiarities of nuclear power is that even after the reactor is shut “off” there is still a significant amount of residual radioactive material. This material continues to decay, generating significant heat (>10 megawatt; by now [almost a week later] it’s ~1 megawatt, enough to power a thousand homes). Thus, even after turning a reactor off, it still generates significant power for a few weeks, and the resulting heat needs to be removed and the radioactive core kept cool . And to do this, you need to pump in a lot of water (ideally thousands of gallons/min) at high pressure. And this requires a fair amount of power.

The plant was working perfectly for roughly 30 minutes after the earthquake. The tsunami was on its way, but the plant operators were blind to it. Had they known, they could have depressurized the nuclear cores in anticipation. But they were focused on riding out the earthquake, which they did admirably. And then the tsunami hit. Just a few years ago, after the tsunami in the Indian Ocean, the Fukushima-Daiichi plant was upgraded to deal with a worst-case, 5.3 meter tsunami. The wave that hit the plant last Friday was roughly 10 meters high. It swamped the diesel generators, as well as the fuel tanks and the switching station. The system was “live” because of the SCRAM, and the local electrical grid got fried. Fortunately there were backup batteries, which lasted another 9.5 hours. At around midnight the batteries ran out of power, and the plant was no longer able to cool its reactor cores. At this point, the Troubles began.

As the core starts to heat up, it boils off the surrounding water. Eventually the fuel rods are exposed to the air. This causes the core to heat up even faster, and also causes a reaction with the zirconium cladding (which holds the uranium fuel pellets in place), generating hydrogen gas. Without any cooling, the fuel gets hot (> 1500 K/2200 F), and starts to melt. The hydrogen gas collects, and eventually explodes (think Hindenberg). This happened in reactor #1 on Saturday, blowing the roof off of the reactor building, but leaving the containment vessel (which is ~1 meter thick steel) intact. On Monday a similar explosion happened to #3, and on Tuesday there was an explosion at #2. Both of their containment vessels were probably compromised. Rupturing a containment vessel is very bad. So long as most of the radioactive material is contained, the damage to the outside world is similarly contained (modulo venting of various radioactive gas, which has been happening, but not at profoundly dangerous levels). Once a containment vessel is ruptured, the radioactive material can end up anywhere; the sky’s the limit. Chernobyl did not have a containment vessel.

The current situation seems to be that seawater is being pumped into all three broken reactors (#1–3), and they are in thermal control. It seems likely that all three sets of fuel rods are partially melted and damaged. It also seems likely that the containment vessels in #2 and #3 have been compromised, although probably not severely. There are some concerns about spent fuel rods in pools near reactors #3 and #4. So long as the rods are covered in sufficient water, they are stable. If the rods are exposed, they heat up. And when they get hot, they start to burn through their cladding, and emit radioactive material. These pools are not within containment vessels, and therefore they are potentially even more dangerous than the cores of active reactors. Their radioactive emission goes directly into the surroundings. But so long as there is water in the pools, they should be fine. The latest claim (by the Chairman of the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission) is that the storage pool at the #4 reactor has little to no water. If true, this is a very ominous development.

This is by far the most dire situation on the planet at the moment. It has the world’s attention. We’ve had almost a week. Why can’t we just fix it? There are a number of serious complications. First, there’s the issue of radiation. People are unable to walk up to most of the buildings and see what’s going on, lest they get immediate and severe radiation poisoning. There are remote sensors and cameras, but fundamentally everyone is guessing as to what’s happening inside. Even if we knew exactly how things looked, it’s still a major engineering feat to get the appropriate amount of water running through these highly complex systems to do the cooling. There have been explosions, there are stuck valves, there are broken pumps, there are ongoing fires. The world’s resources are focused on this problem. Millions of lives potentially depend upon the outcome. And, thus far, progress has been haphazard and halting, despite heroic efforts on the part of the Japanese crew. The engineering challenges may simply be too great.

The worst-case scenario for the Daiichi reactors plays out something like this: 1. the storage pool at #4 is indeed dry. Because it’s uncontained, the radiation levels in the area get very high. Everyone needs to evacuate the complex. 2. Without anyone manning the cooling systems, the cooling stops. Everything overheats. 3. There are various explosions, resulting in a breach to a containment vessel. 4. There is a subsequent steam explosion, and a plume of radioactive material is generated. 5. Wind carries the plume in the direction of Tokyo (world’s largest metropolis), a mere 140 miles (225 km) away. We can’t even contemplate trying to evacuate and treat a city of 35 million people. As far as I can tell, things do not appear to be headed in this direction. But such an outcome is unfortunately not outside the realm of possibility, and just contemplating this should freak you out. But, to reiterate, it’s very unlikely, and a lot of things would have to go catastrophically wrong. I’d love to quantify just how unlikely, but cannot. My guess is that nobody can, since there are too many uncertainties, and we’re fundamentally in uncharted territory.

The best-case scenario, and probably most likely, is that the Fukushima-Daiichi plant will limp along, but without any catastrophic events (such as a major Chernobyl-style radioactive explosion and fire). The fuel will continue to cool, the fires will be put out, the amount of radiation will subside, and eventually the entire site will be entombed and become a testament to human hubris.

Information about the ongoing nuclear crisis is surprisingly scarce. Google, as usual, is operating as a clearinghouse for information (including details on the rolling blackouts and a person finding database). The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is doing its best to keep the world apprised. There is also Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency. Other places to check are Reuters and the BBC.

These are the sorts of events that highlight our shared humanity. There are many ways to help, including the Japanese Red Cross (donate through google) and Doctors Without Borders. Our hearts go out to the people impacted by this tragedy. Science is a particularly international endeavor. I have friends and colleagues in Japan, and thankfully they and their families appear to be okay (although shaken). Many thousands have not been so lucky.

We have scenes of complete devastation of the Japanese homeland coupled with ongoing concern of radiation exposure. Echoes of a previous time are unmistakable and unavoidable. I’ve put together the following montage (on the left is Hiroshima in 1945, on the right is Sendai today):

I am by no means trying to imply that these events are in any way equivalent. They most certainly are not. But the images are scary, and give a sense of the scale of the disaster.

A force this big propagates around the world, so beaches here in Southern California were expecting heightened wave activity — nothing very serious, but certainly noticeable. Scientists of course immediately leapt into action to estimate what kind of effects should be expected. The National Weather Service circulated this map of predicted wave heights. Click to embiggen.

Naturally, the House of Representatives is trying to cut funding for tsunami warning centers.

Among the cuts is $1.1 billion from the Department of Energy Office of Science, the agency which funds the majority of basic physics research at universities and national labs. This is out of a total proposed budget of $5.12 billion for basic research. That request for FY2011 was slightly above the FY2010 actual appropriation, meaning that the proposed cut for FY2011 represents more than a $890 million decrease relative to FY2010.

If enacted (and what happens next is a high-stakes game of chicken), clearly, this represents a 20% rescission half way through the fiscal year. Effectively it’s a 40% cut. Imagine you are a national lab director, or a university PI like me. If I am told that I will not get the money we were awarded by the DOE, we will need to let people go, no question. People are talking about closing the national labs for some period, and I have heard rumors that the Tevatron at Fermilab, scheduled to shut down in September, will actually be turned off in a couple weeks on March 1, ten years to the day that Run 2 began.

The exact programs within the DOE Office of Science to be cut will be detailed by the committee soon, I expect. But this is utter devastation for the people that form the bedrock foundation of our high tech economy, and train the next generation of scientists and engineers. It is breathtakingly stupid.

And how does cutting $100 billion in government spending “help our economy grow and create jobs”? The immediate result will be the loss of something like a million jobs. This is just an order of magnitude guess, based on the notion that all government spending supports jobs one way or another, at about $100k per job. Maybe it’s 600k, maybe it’s 1.5 million – I don’t know. But to say this creates jobs? I am totally baffled by this logic. I am no economist, but maybe one out there can enlighten me.

As far as I can see, we cut federal spending so the ultra-rich can keep their tax breaks, and they invest the money they keep overseas where labor is cheaper. So we are killing American jobs – some of the best ones we have in high-tech and alternative energy – and sending them out of the country. This is incredible.

The administration’s FY2012 request will be released tomorrow. No doubt the house majority party will declare it DOA…

The dream for a superconducting proton synchrotron at Fermilab goes back to at least 1976, when it began to become clear that the interesting mass range to explore in order to understand the weak interaction would be around 100 GeV. The lab was engaged in a wide range of fixed target experiments, using the Fermilab Main Ring proton synchrotron as its workhorse, and in 1977 the b (or bottom) quark was discovered there. This meant there had to be a top quark, as well as very massive (80-100 GeV) W and Z bosons.

But Europe pulled ahead – it already had the Super Proton Synchrotron, and plans to convert it into a proton-antiproton collider. Whoever did so first would have the energy to produce W’s and Z’s directly, and nail down their masses. And maybe, whoever managed to create the first high energy proton-antiproton collider would be able to find the top quark, whose mass could be, well, just about anything above the b quark mass of 5 GeV, but probably at least 20 GeV.

Fermilab designed a new generation of superconducting magnets to operate at 3 Tesla, and began construction of the new ring, then dubbed the Saver (short for Energy Saver, since Energy Doubler, the initial name, sounded too expensive). At the same time CERN developed its antiproton source and the techniques for cooling the antiproton bunches for injection to the new SppS, the Super Proton-Antiproton Synchrotron (there’s a bar over the second p).

CERN won the race for the W and Z. In early 1983, not long after commissioning the new complex, handfuls of these massive carriers of the weak force were observed by the UA1 experiment, and confirmed by UA2. Carlo Rubbia, who lead UA1, and Simon van der Meer, who designed the antiproton source, shared the Nobel the next year. Would the top quark soon follow?

But in late 1983, the Fermilab Saver turned on, running extracted proton beams to the new raft of fixed target experiments awaiting them. My graduate thesis experiment, E615, was among them, and I count it among some of the most thrilling science moments in my career to have had my face plastered to the viewer of an oscilloscope, eyes dark-adapted, waiting for the first pulses from the counters in our experiment to tell me the secondary pion beam had arrived to us. The chain of injectors, a thousand new superconducting magnets, RF kickers, beam separators…it all worked! There were the pions! We went on, over the next year or so, to collect tons (for us) of data on the structure of the pion, still the best measurement to date.

UA1 and UA2 continued on, and CERN commenced deep tunnel drilling for LEP, the Large Electron Positron collider, slated to begin in 1988. It was designed to directly produce thousands of Z bosons by colliding electrons and positrons (antielectrons), and measure the Z as precisely as posible. At SLAC at Stanford, construction was underway to build the SLC, the SLAC Linear Collider, which would challenge LEP in the race for the Z. The age of the great colliders was in full blossom.

Fermilab commissioned its antiproton source in 1985 and 1986, and began collisions, redubbing the machine the Tevatron, as the ultimate goal was to reach 1 TeV per beam of energy – a trillion volts! The first engineering run was 800 GeV per beam, and much work remained to be done to get the beam intensity high enough to produce useful numbers of W’s and Z’s and surpass the SppS results.

SLC and LEP began operating in 1989 (a year late for LEP) but the Mark II experiment at the SLAC and the four (!) LEP experiments immediately made two important discoveries. First, by measuring the Z production rate, there appeared to be only three species of neutrino to which the Z could decay. This meant a fourth generation of quarks and leptons did not appear to be ready to be discovered. The second important SLC/LEP discovery was that the top quark must be rather massive, 150 GeV or more. This put it out of range of the electron positron machines, and meant that the top could be discovered soon at the Tevatron, if it could collide enough protons and antiprotons.

While Europe put its hopes of discovery in the electron positron machine, the US community was already building the biggest machine of all, the Superconducting Supercollider, or SSC, in Waxahachie, Texas. This mammoth proton-proton collider with 54 miles of superconducting magnets would begin operation in 1999 at an energy 20 times that of the Tevatron. “Throw deep” was Ronald Reagan’s exhortation to the physicists when presented with the project, and deep they threw. Too deep perhaps – by 1993, the cost of the project had grown too rapidly, and, in a cost-cutting mood not unlike the present day, in October of that year the US Congress killed the project, which had spent about $2 billion, and dug almost 15 miles of tunnel (now backfilled).

The demise of the SSC was a serious blow to the US high energy community, and left one option for staying on the high energy frontier: an enhanced Tevatron complex. But it took another half decade after the LEP startup to amass the data sample necessary to get the first glimpse of top-antitop production in the CDF and D0 experiments at Fermilab. In early 1995, during “Run 1″ of the Tevatron, both experiments announced the discovery of excess production of events consistent with that expected from top production. The mass of the top turned out to be a whopping 175 GeV. Pinning it down, and also measuring the mass of the W would answer the ultimate question: where is the Higgs boson lurking? Can it be seen at the Tevatron? Or would LEP2, with ever-increasing energy in the late 1990′s, get it first? Or would the Large Hadron Collider, scheduled to begin colliding protons in the LEP tunnel at CERN in 2004, be the first to see it?

Fermilab completed construction of the new Main Injector and Antiproton Recycler as the millennium turned, and cast its eye upon the Higgs boson. The two new additions to the Fermilab accelerator complex would allow a huge increase in the beam intensities, possibly enough to produce the very weakly interacting Higgs. I helped lead a study which, in late 2000, published the prediction: it would take somewhere around 15 inverse femtobarns of integrated luminosity, plus major upgrades to the experiments, to find the Higgs boson, at least the vanilla Standard Model one.

LEP2, in late 2000, was facing its own imminent shutdown to make way for the LHC, having reached 206 GeV energy and a sensitivity to a Higgs boson of at least 114.5 GeV, but had no evidence for the Higgs boson. The accelerator and detectors began to be removed the next year, 2001, just as the Tevatron began Run 2.

The first years of Run 2 at the Tevatron were plagued by problems, some due to the then-aging infrastructure, some from the years of downtime since 1996, and some due the fact that, well, colliding matter and antimatter in large quantities is just damned hard to do. There was a learning curve, and by 2003 the lab was on track to meet the design goals for the collider. Large new samples began to roll in, and physics papers began to roll out. But getting to even 10 inverse femtobarns before the LHC turned on seemed to be a receding hope.

The LHC was having difficulties of its own. The plan to operate in 2004, became 2005, then 2006. A somewhat snide plot of the projected start date as a function of time showed that the machine would start in late 2008.

Which it did. But then, as faithful readers of CV know, the LHC had its rather spectacular failure triggered by a faulty magnet interconnect, and propagated by a detection/avoidance system that failed to detect the condition and was insufficient to avoid the massive boil-off of six tons of liquid helium. The resulting damage took a year and 35 million Euros to repair.

In these years, the Tevatron marched on, reaching its first inverse femtobarn by mid 2005, then setting new records almost routinely in the following years. The huge new sample provided a treasure trove for us data-starved particle hunters. And it became clear that with the slow turn-on of the LHC, the Tevatron had a chance, albeit a slim one, to discover the Higgs or some other new physics before the LHC. And so in 2009 the run of the Tevatron was extended until late 2011. The machine has kept running, kept improving, and we now hope to have 10 fb^-1 by the time we shut down.

Will the Tevatron experiments see the SM Higgs boson before the LHC? It is looking quite doubtful, but there is some chance the run will end with a tantalizing excess. How long will it take the LHC? With the new data collected last year, only a tiny fraction of the Tevatron sample but at much higher energy, we are beginning to see the physics power of the new machine, and I owe you all a lot of posts on the picture beginning to emerge. But the Higgs boson could turn out to be at the hardest-to-discover mass of all at the LHC, around 120 GeV, in which case the LHC will almost certainly need to run well beyond the end of 2012 to get enough data. It may take as much as 10 inverse femtobarns at the LHC to see it at the golden five-sigma level. But of course we’ll get excited a long time before that.

And we know that the Higgs boson cannot be the one of the Standard Model, right? More on that tantalizing prospect later. (And three years ago from the Tevatron.)

[Update: I originally wrote that Giffords had been killed; this was wrong, and I apologize for the misinformation. That's what NPR and CNN and other outlets were reporting, and I mistakenly assumed that they wouldn't do so without incontrovertible reason. She is in critical condition following surgery. A doctor at the hospital says he is "optimistic" about a recovery -- please please please let this be true.]

I met Gabby at a reception a year ago. She seemed, on our very brief acquaintance, to be a really wonderful person — energetic, smart, full of optimism about doing good things as a member of Congress. Her husband, Mark Kelly, is an astronaut. If I may step away from the ideal of journalistic objectivity for a moment, this is a stupid fucking tragedy.

When a politician is shot, people will draw political conclusions. In this case, Gabby had been “targeted” by her political opponents using explicitly violent language. Sarah Palin released a map with a target site pointing at her district; her opponent had a “shoot an M16” fundraiser. (Via @mattyglesias.) At the time, various people were horrified at the casual invocation of this kind of violent rhetoric. Is it now inappropriate to link that rhetoric to the actual violence? I have no idea whether her killer was politically motivated in any way — he might have just been an unstable person with no agenda at all. Regardless, it would be good to tone down the language of deadly force in political discussions. Maybe both Democrats and Republicans can agree on that.

My heart goes out to her family and friends, as well as those of the other victims. We need more public servants like Gabby Giffords.

My strong first impulse is to be in favor of shining light in secret places. This can be taken to extremes, of course; there is such a thing as appropriate privacy, for governments and corporations as well as for individuals. But the natural tendency on the part of governments (or bureaucracies more generally) is to go too far to the other extreme, making secrecy routine where it should be exceptional — and using it to cover up embarrassment rather than protecting people’s lives. Something like Wikileaks is a great corrective to this tendency.

I don’t really see, however, how something like the wholesale release of diplomatic cables helps this cause. Some of the cables might have been covered up for pernicious reasons, but for the most part diplomats should have an expectation of privacy in these kinds of communications, as much as an ordinary citizen would when making a phone call. This doesn’t seem like a brave strike against government corruption as much as a bit of leering Peeping-Tommery. I’d personally be happier if Wikileaks were a bit more selective in what it shared with the world.

Personally, the most depressing aspect of the whole affair — even more than the cartoonish responses from craven politicians — has been the attitude of the established media. Sure, they will publish the stories, although usually accompanied by some sort of meek apologia. But on TV and in the op-ed pages, there is enormously more discussion about Julian Assange and Wikileaks itself than about what we have actually learned from the documents. A lot of people in the media these days consider themselves to be more like partners with government, rather than respectful adversaries. I’d love to see more thoughtful pieces about what we’ve learned from all these documents about how the world actually works.

Regardless of the ambiguities, I certainly hope Wikileaks keeps going. As Thomas Jefferson put it, “The press, confined to truth, needs no other legal restraint.” Or as Ruben Bolling more recently tweeted: “If a journalist is walking down the street, and happens to find a box of secret government documents, what should he do?” Telling the truth is always a good first strategy.

The prominence of his work on the Hubble Constant is in part due to the rather contentious history of this subject over much of the 90′s and early 2000′s. Allan was at heart a stellar astronomer, but one who found himself tied to Hubble’s legacy by virtue of being Hubble’s telescope assistant in the years leading up to Hubble’s unexpected death in 1953. As one of the earliest pioneers (with Martin Schwarzschild) of the technique of using main sequence turnoffs to assign ages to globular clusters, Allan was deeply (and understandably) bothered by experiments that returned large values of the Hubble Constant — these values implied ages for the universe that were younger than the oldest globular clusters, which was clearly an implausible contradiction. Instead, Allan and his collaborators published a long series of papers attempting to deal will every uncertainty and bias in the distance scale, and found a consistently smaller value of the Hubble Constant than the other competing team (the “Hubble Key Project”, led by Wendy Freedman with many collaborators). In time, Allan’s group’s on-going evaluations of the distance calibration gradually pushed their value of the Hubble Constant up somewhat, while the Key Project’s values were being nudged down a bit (although they never did actually meet, particularly as error bars shrank in more recent years). Simultaneously, the discovery of dark energy changed the age estimates for the universe, allowing old globular clusters to co-exist harmoniously with a moderate value of the Hubble Constant.

During this time, Allan developed a reputation for being, well, difficult. His scientific disagreements on this issue unfortunately veered occasionally into the personal. That said, I had the pleasure of being a postdoc at the Carnegie Observatories during this time, and had an office a few doors down the hall from him. Allan was invariably gracious and kind to the postdocs. He was scientifically engaged, and always willing to share his knowledge, which was both deep and wide. I enjoyed having him for a colleague for 4 years, during a very scientifically vibrant stage of my astronomical training, and I am very sorry to hear of his passing.

The sun kind of burped yesterday, and sent gigatons (or maybe definitely not hellatons) of material streaming our way – to Earth that is. There is an awesome video of it over at SpaceWeather.com. The particles, mainly electrons and protons in the sub-100-eV range, are expected to reach earth tomorrow (Aug. 3) and could give vigorous auroral activity. I am not sure that northern California is northern enough to see it, but who knows? Take pictures, someone!

Once, about six or seven years ago, on an airplane flight from Chicago to California, I was on the right side of the plane and stared for hours at the shimmering curtains of green and red and purple, slowly waving as if in a breeze. It was an amazing sight!

This has been an fairly quiet solar cycle, and we are now heading to a solar max in three years which is on track to be just over half as intense as the last one in 2001, and the lowest in over 100 years. Too bad, just when I got into amateur radio…

Since I have been watching, the number of earthquakes near Katla has been small, with a few periods of a dozen or so within a 24 hour period. Almost every time I have looked it’s been very quiet, perhaps one or two a day. I was away the previous two weeks, and apparently missed a day with 11 earthquakes on July 10. I checked again today, and I got the map below, with over a dozen earthquakes! Now, clearly, these are all small earthquakes, with magnitude near 1, and there are no reports of steam or ash as yet.

I bet it’s coming, though, fairly soon. The president of Iceland does, too.

This thing is going to need a name. The Exxon Valdez incident was a spill – there was a finite amount of oil aboard the ship. A lot of oil: 11 million gallons (40 million liters). The new one in the Gulf of Mexico could blow past that, depending on whether present efforts to close the valve or drill a relief well work.

The fact that we called it the “Exxon Valdez” incident clearly indicates the responsible (if not guilty) party involved. So, though I like the moniker “Spill, Baby, Spill” from a political point of view, it doesn’t lay any blame and this thing is not a spill. It’s a leak, and BP leased the rig from Transocean LTD, the world’s largest offshore drilling contractor. I think the responsibility has yet to be determined. If you rent a car, and wipe out a family in an accident because the steering was faulty, is it your fault or the car manufacturer’s? It may take some time, or even never be known, what happened a week ago to cause this tragedy.

The name of the rig was the Deepwater Horizon, but that doesn’t convey ownership or responsibility. Will this become known as the “BP Deepwater Horizon Spill”? The “Transocean/BP Leak”? The media seem to be stuck on “spill” and so I bet that will be in the name long term…and it will take a very long time to assess responsibility here.

My heart goes out to the families of the 11 lost on the rig, and to the thousands of fishermen and others whose livelihoods are in peril.

We’ve suspended new offshore drilling until we have understood this incident better. And no doubt a new debate about offshore drilling will ensue. This has certainly put the lie to those who claim that new modern drilling rigs are far safer than in the past, something even President Obama was saying as recently as April 2. Sigh.

The plot shows what we call “integrated luminosity” which is simply a measure of the number of collisions of protons in the interaction regions at the four experiments. In this case, it’s my own experiment, CMS, the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment. CMS and ATLAS are the two large general-purpose detectors, each with thousands of physicists eager for real physics data.

As you can see, the vertical axis of the plot is labelled in units of “nb^-1” or inverse nanobarns. The unit “barn” is a unit of area, a kind of joke from Enrico Fermi and friends who, despite the tiny size of a nucleus, said it was “as big as a barn” even though in cross sectional area it’s on the order of 10^-28 m² (which is in fact the definition of one barn). If we think about the cross sectional area of the protons colliding in the LHC, they have a cross sectional area (or simply a total collision cross section) of about 0.12 barns.

So what’s an inverse nanobarn? Well, if we try to collide lots of protons, we might ask “how many collisions per barn or cross sectional area did we make?” It’s like throwing little paint blobs at a wall, one at a time. Eventually the wall is covered, and then covered again, and then covered many times over. We can ask “how many paint blobs per unit area of the wall did we cover?” The nano in nanobarns means one billionth of a barn, and so, now, the LHC has managed to produce its first inverse nanobarn: one collision per every billionth of a barn of cross section.

It’s just a unit – all that matters is “how many collision events of my favorite kind should have been produced?” To get this, you multiply the number of inverse nanobarns by the production cross section for that kind of event, and also by the probability that you actually detect it. So for Z boson production, for example, the cross section is about 30 nanobarns, so we should have a few by now. (I am not at liberty to say whether we do or not…)

The plot has stair steps – the horizontal axis is real time, and the LHC machine is filled with protons, then brought to full energy, then collimators put in, then the experiment turns on and records data for some time until the accelerator folks decide to dump the beam out and refill. As you can see this cycle has been going like clockwork, with fill after fill of the machine. And the experiment has been recording a very large fraction of the delivered collisions, the losses being quite normal and due to end effects and the occasional glitch.

But then came the LHC baby’s first real step last weekend: squeezing the beam. By raising the quadrupole beam focusing magnets to high field, the transverse size of proton bunches in the machine shrinks down and the probability of collisions goes up. In this case, the luminosity went up by an order of magnitude – it was a stunning success. Any imperfection in the focusing fields can send the beam right out of the machine, and, clearly, that did not happen.

The goal in the next year is to get to one inverse femtobarn – a million times more data. In the next week or so the plan, if all goes well, is to achieve another couple orders of magnitude in luminosity. Shit’s about to get real, folks…

Sides comments:

Something in their business model is working. And I have a hard time imagining that NPR listeners won’t watch televised news programming as a matter of principle.

So where is the NPR of cable news?

To me, the reason seems dead obvious. Radio is the only delivery mechanism that you can absorb while doing something else. Driving? Check. Cooking? Check. Reading email? Check. Lingering in bed after the alarm goes off? Check.

I don’t have a “principle” against watching televised news. I just don’t have time. You could have Ira Glass and Carl Kassell doing the Hustle surrounded by frolicking puppies and I still wouldn’t make the time to sit down and watch.

Have fun!

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!