Sorry for the light blogging of late. Actual work intervenes, and it might remain that way for a while. But I’ll try to pop in whenever I can.

Stephen Hawking is celebrating his 70th birthday today. That in itself is an amazing fact, just as it was amazing when he celebrated his 40th, and 50th, and 60th birthdays, as well as every other day he’s lived and thrived with a debilitating neuron disease. The extra fact that he continues to make contributions to science pushes beyond amazing to practically unbelievable.

Everyone likes to tell Hawking stories, and this blog is no exception. So here is mine, meagre as it is. I’ve gotten more than enough mileage out of this one in person, I might as well put it on the blog so I won’t be tempted to tell it any more.

At the end of 1992 I was a finishing grad student, applying for postdocs. One of the places I applied was Cambridge, to Hawking’s group at DAMTP. There is a slight potential barrier for American students to travel to the UK for postdocs, so they like to get out ahead of things and offer jobs early. Unfortunately I was out of my office the day Hawking called to offer me a position. Fortunately, my future-Nobel-Laureate officemate was there, and he took the call. He explained that Stephen Hawking had called to offer me a job — I was thrilled about the offer, but understood “Hawking called” as metaphorical. But no, Brian later convinced me that it actually was Hawking on the other end of the line, which he described as a somewhat surreal experience. Of course after the initial introduction the phone gets handed over to someone else, but still. (more…)

To celebrate my birthday today, I’m heading back into Second Life to do a chat with Alan Boyle of MSNBC.com fame. Alan has previewed some of the topics we’ll be discussing in a post at Cosmic Log. It’s possible the Nobel Prize will be mentioned. (The physics one. Don’t expect any insight from me on quasicrystals, except that they’re awesome.)

We’ll be chatting at 9pm Eastern/6pm Pacific, at the Stella Nova Theater. If you’re not already on Second Life, it’s super easy (and free) to join. (Here’s some very useful information for beginners.) And you get to design an avatar that looks like you would want to look, rather than your inevitably-disappointing real self.

The chat is part of the Virtually Speaking series hosted by FireDogLake, in this case co-produced with the Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics. Alan does a regular series of interviews on science, so you may get hooked. Our chat will be a multi-media extravaganza, so you can choose to listen in various ways:

• Directly in Second Life.
• Audio on BlogTalk Radio. This is an archived podcast, available on iTunes, so you can listen later if you like.
• There is also live chat on IRC. Enter #vspeak into the channel field.

Yes I know, very complicated. If simplicity is more your bag, here’s a guest video on dark energy that I did for the wonderful Minute Physics series.

I’ve decided I need to become a programmer again. As an undergrad, and to a lesser extent as a grad student, I wrote code all the time. But since I started doing research, it’s been pencil-and-paper almost all the way through, with occasional dips into Mathematica or plotting programs.

That must end, so I’ve decided to learn Python. I just need something simple for number-crunching and graphics, and everyone in the know seems to have nice things to say about the language. (Secretly I would like to play around with genetic algorithms and cellular automata, but I’m not going to admit that.) I tried to get Fortran, my previous language of choice, up and running on my Mac … it didn’t go well.

So… any tips? Pointers to well-written resources and tutorials (online or in print) would be especially helpful. Keep in mind that the target audience is an aging theoretical physicist who hasn’t programmed in 20 years, and for that matter has been pretty much command-prompt free (working on my Mac) for the last five.

The things I admit in public on this blog, sheesh.

Hello out there in blog-land. I’ve been traveling (and working!) too much to actually blog, most recently at the terrific SciFoo Camp held at Google. This is an informal “unconference,” where on the first night participants scramble to a big whiteboard to suggest events for the next day and a half. I helped organize a session on “Time” that turned out to be popular, featuring short talks by Geoffrey West, Max Tegmark, David Eagleman, Mark Changizi, and Martin Rees. Other interesting sessions I went to talked about sleep, narratives, the brain, the Turing Test, and why the difficulty of putting chiral fermions on a lattice is evidence against the idea that we live in a computer simulation. (That last one was from David Tong.)

But just between you and me, while staring at the intimidating whiteboard full of interesting possibilities for what to do next, I was struck by a depressing insight: I am tired of data.

This isn’t to say that I am tired of experiments. We can’t learn anything about the world without looking at it, and my favorite areas of physics are bubbling along with provocative new results (or at least hints thereof). When data is taken by an experiment in the cause of deciding some scientific question, that’s fine.

It’s the fetishization of data for its own sake that I find fatiguing. It’s hardly surprising that, surrounded by sci-tech folks at the Googleplex, one would be overwhelmed by talk of data collection, data visualization, data analysis, and so on. And good for them! We are being swamped by data in unprecedented forms and quantities, and it’s a crucially important task to sort it all out and understand how we can use it.

I’m just personally kind of exhausted by it all. (And it’s my blog, so if I want to bust out the occasional irrational rant, who will stop me?) Data — like theory! — is a tool we use in the quest for a higher goal — understanding. If people want to show me that they understand some unanticipated new phenomenon on the basis of some data that they collected and analyzed, I am as enthusiastic as ever. But my standards are rising for simply being impressed by new ways of gathering or visualizing data for its own sake.

At least, for the moment. Next time I see a really pretty picture, I’ll undoubtedly forget I said any of this.

Tonight’s the premiere of Curiosity on the Discovery Channel, featuring Stephen Hawking talking about cosmology and God, followed by the “Curiosity Conversation” panel that I’m on along with David Gregory, Paul Davies, and John Haught. Hawking’s hour-long show is scheduled for 8pm Eastern/5pm Pacific, and will then repeat 3 hours later (11E/8P). Our half-hour panel discussion follows immediately afterward — you do the arithmetic.

There’s a lot to say about these shows, and in particular there’s a huge amount that we didn’t have time to say during the panel. So as I sit in front of the TV, I’ll be live-blogging along by adding updates to this post. This will be the early show, so the fun will happen 8pm-9:30pm Eastern. Hey, Nathan Fillion live-tweets during Castle, so why not me? There is also a chat going on at the Discovery site.

The main attraction of Hawking’s program is not that he has disproven the existence of God. Certainly I don’t think he’s going to be changing the minds of many religious believers. His argument is essentially that the universe is self-contained, and doesn’t really have “room” for God (nor any need to invoke a creator). It’s very easy to wriggle free of that conclusion, if you are inclined not to accept it.

But “changing people’s minds” isn’t the only reason to talk about something, even about controversial issues. Religion, like sex and death, is one of those topics where it’s very difficult to simply have a dispassionate discussion without making people uncomfortable. It can happen within a group of similarly-minded people, of course, but once a wider range of views gets involved, it’s hard to maintain comity. (Comedy, on the other hand, is pretty easy.) I don’t mean everyone has to agree — just the opposite. We should be able to talk about things we completely disagree on, while still maintaining level heads.

That’s why I think this episode of Curiosity is potentially important. It’s a forthright statement of a view that doesn’t often get aired in American media. Even if nobody’s mind is changed, simply talking rationally about this issues would be a step forward.

Pre-show update: I should note ahead of time that I was not wearing a tie. Haught, Davies, and Gregory were all wearing ties. But Hawking wasn’t. Maybe atheists don’t wear ties? (Although I’m pretty sure Jesus never wore a tie, either.)

Start: We begin with a disclaimer! These are Stephen Hawking’s opinions, not those of Discovery.

4 minutes: I hope the analogy here is clear. “People who believe God made the universe are kind of like the Vikings shouting at the Sun to stop a solar eclipse.”

8 minutes: Snark aside, the message here is a fundamental one. Nature obeys laws! Something that’s certainly not a priori obvious or necessary, but a really profound truth.

14 minutes: I wasn’t able to find an independent confirmation of this story about Pope John XXI condemning the idea of “laws of nature.” (It’s true that he did die when the roof collapsed.) Presumably this refers to the Condemnations of 1277.

20 minutes: The universe is a big, messy, complicated, and occasionally quite intricate place. On the face of it, the idea that it’s all the working-out of some impersonal patterns of matter and energy, rather than being constructed by some kind of conscious intelligence, is pretty remarkable. (But true nonetheless.)

27 minutes: Hey, a tiny ad for Discovery Retreats!

28 minutes: Hawking says Einstein might be the greatest scientist ever. He has long favored Einstein over Newton, I’m not sure why. Hawking appeared on an episode of Star Trek: TNG, where he was a hologram playing poker with Einstein, Newton, and Data. He actually wrote the script, and Newton doesn’t come off well.

36 minutes: Ah, negative energy. Depends on what you mean by “energy,” but this isn’t the venue to get overly technical, obviously. Roughly, matter has positive energy and gravity has negative energy. That’s hopefully enough to help people swallow the crucial point: you can make a universe for nothing. There isn’t some fixed resource, out of which we can make a universe or two, before we hit Peak Universe. There can be an infinite number of universes.

41 minutes: People on Twitter are asking why Hawking doesn’t have a British accent. He easily could, of course; voice-synthesis technology has come quite a way since he first got the system. But he’s said that he now identifies with that voice he got years ago, and doesn’t want to change it; it’s identified with him.

47 minutes: Okay, here’s the payoff. He’s saying that generally we’re used to effects being caused by pre-existing events. (The first step toward a cosmological argument for God’s existence.) You might think that a chain of causation takes you back to the Big Bang, which then requires God as a cause. But no! The Big Bang can just … be.

50 minutes: The point of the black hole discussion is to get to the idea of a singularity, a conjectural point of infinite curvature and density. The Big Bang, in classical general relativity, is also a singular moment. But classical GR isn’t right. We need quantum gravity. Hawking believes that quantum gravity smooths the singularity and explains how there was no pre-existing time. (At least in the TV show, unlike A Brief History, he doesn’t start talking about “imaginary time.”)

56 minutes: Ultimately Hawking’s argument against God is pretty simplistic. He assumes that if God created the Big Bang, God must have existed before the Big Bang, but there was no “before the Big Bang,” QED. It’s easy enough to simply assert that God doesn’t exist “within time” (if that means anything). It would have been better (IMHO) to emphasize that modern cosmology has many good ideas about how the universe could have come to be, so there’s no need to rely on a divine creator.

58 minutes: Final thought from SWH: no life after death! Enjoy it while you’re around, folks. An important message.

Panel discussion starts: Forgot to mention that Paul Davies has shaved off his moustache. Disconcerting.

4 minutes: Also disconcerting: watching myself on TV. Hate it. But I persevere for the greater good.

5 minutes: Here’s Michio Kaku, not saying very much.

7 minutes: Jennifer Wiseman and I were actually grad students together! She’s good people, even if we disagree about the whole God thing.

9 minutes: I come out in favor of basing purpose and meaning on reality. But I’m pretty sure a longer remark was cut off there. Arrrrgh! Nothing nefarious, we intentionally recorded a bit more than they had time to show. But enormously frustrating that there was so little time.

13 minutes: Not sure why we kept talking about the multiverse. Hawking didn’t bring it up, did he?

17 minutes: I thought a lot of what Haught said was not even really trying to argue in favor of God’s existence, but simply expressing a desire that he exist. “God is the grounding of hope” isn’t evidence for God’s existence.

22 minutes: Haven’t said anything completely silly yet, so that’s good. But so little time…

27 minutes: Always time for more Michio!

30 minutes: Arrrrgh again, this time for real: in the live conversation, I had the last word and it was a pretty good one. In the televised program, not so much. Had to end wishy-washy.

Thanks for tuning in. Wouldn’t it have been wonderful to have the time for a real conversation? But big ups to Discovery for hosting the panel at all — it’s a rare event on TV.

It’s been a while, and I’ve been meaning to provide an update on our little charity suggestion bleg. If you’ll recall, I wanted to take my ill-gotten gains from the 3 Quarks Daily Prize and send them to a worthy charity, but rather than just defaulting to my usual favorites I sought from new wisdom from the collective intelligence out there.

The bad news — in some sense — is that there are far too many truly worthy causes. Apparently we have a way to go before achieving a utopian condition throughout all the countries of Earth. Who knew?

Nevertheless I was happy to learn about GiveWell, an organization whose purpose it to figure out what kinds of charitable donations actually have the greatest impact. (It was advocated by Ian, Edgar, and Rationalist.) It’s obvious that different types of giving can have disparate impacts, but it’s very hard to figure out what approach is most effective, and having an organization dedicated to doing the hard work of figuring that out is invaluable.

Just to get an idea of what we’re talking about: to rate the relative effectiveness of different programs, GiveWell uses a metric called Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALY). It’s a well-known (in these circles) number, also used by the World Health Organization and others. The idea is to make some attempt — as hard as this may be from a rigorous philosophical perspective — to boil different kinds of good deeds to a single number. Maybe you actually increase someone’s lifespan, or maybe you prevent blindness — DALY boils it all down to one quantity.

And what you then find is — an extraordinary range of different values for different forms of charity. At the extreme end, consider supporting improved water sanitation to prevent diarrhea, which certainly sounds like a good idea to me. That gets you $4,185/DALY, so it takes about four grand to do the equivalent of giving someone an extra year of life. Compare this to deworming programs, which come in at $3/DALY. In this metric, in other words, deworming is about a thousand times more cost-effective than water sanitation. Obviously this is a crude measure, but it gives some idea of the range of possible outcomes.

When it comes to messy human problems, I don’t actually valorize “metrics” and “data” above all else; sometimes things work but it’s hard to quantify how much good they are actually doing. Nevertheless, in a situation of relative ignorance it’s really wonderful to have an organization trying to work out these numbers the best they can. My favorite part of the GiveWell website was the page labeled Shortcomings — not other people’s shortcomings, but their own shortcomings. They want to be as upfront and transparent as possible about their mistakes, and strive to do better. Yay!

After all that, I didn’t actually give the donation to GiveWell itself. Rather, I just followed their advice and gave to their highest-ranked charity: Village Reach, an organization that works to improve access to healthcare in remote and underserved areas in Africa and elsewhere. (Immunization programs, in general, are extremely cost-effective ways of improving health in poor communities.) It’s a relatively new, still quite small program, but with impressive effectiveness. I was very happy to donate, and certainly will continue to do so.

Which doesn’t mean that there still aren’t many other great choices. Thanks to everyone for chipping in with suggestions.

Tomorrow I get to go to my office, after being forbidden to do so for the last week and a half. Although the fire is still burning and only 27% contained, and is clearly visible in the hills above Los Alamos, the “containment lines are secure”, and the mandatory evacuation order has been rescinded.

The fire itself was international news. Now that the immediate threat to Los Alamos National Lab has passed, the news cycle has moved on. But there is perhaps an equally compelling story: The largest wildfire in New Mexico history, which burned 50,000 acres in 24 hours and has now consumed over 125,000 acres, came right up to the lab’s perimeter but did no damage to the lab. It easily could have swept through Los Alamos, which although not a Fukushima-scale disaster, would nonetheless have been highly undesirable (and not just because of all my precious notes at work). The real story here is that this laboratory did a remarkable job of protecting itself, with the help of an outstanding group of firefighters (over 2,000 people from all over, aided by a small army’s worth of planes and helicopters).

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

It turns out the Los Alamos fires are world news, even making it to the front page of the BBC online (right next to the Duke and Duchess visiting Canada). Who knew? I guess everyone’s really worried that my theory of quantum gravity, which is of course sitting in my desk drawer at work, might go up in flames. My office is just below and to the left of the green glass building in this photo:

Or perhaps the world is genuinely concerned that a lab of historic significance might burn? Or maybe, and I’m going out on a limb here, everyone’s worried that the lab’s nuclear material might catch fire? A quick sanity check is in order. Most of the seriously radioactive material is in “hardened” bunkers at the lab. These are built to repel terrorist attacks and the like. They are surrounded by large buffer zones, and it would be difficult for a forest fire to get close, much less around/over the bunker, since there’s nothing flammable nearby. And, needless to say, massive slurry drops from the air would also discourage the fire from even thinking about approaching. And even if the fire did somehow surround the structure, my understanding is that the facility would survive virtually unscathed. So this material is probably safe.

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).

Less than ten miles from my house in Santa Fe, a wildfire is raging. The Pacheco Canyon fire has burned 10,000 acres, and is currently 15% contained. Due to wind direction and topography it is being funneled into the Santa Fe forest and away from town. Despite some spectacular plumes of smoke, the fire has had surprisingly little impact on Santa Fe. The last week has been reminiscent of a Bruegel painting. Everyone going about their business, oblivious to the conflagration just outside of town.

The complacency was broken Sunday afternoon when another wildfire erupted just west of Los Alamos. Within 24 hours the Las Conchas fire had grown to 50,000 acres, and was lapping at the boundary of Los Alamos National Lab (where I work). The fire momentarily crossed into lab property, and burned roughly an acre before being extinguished. It is to be noted that the lab is vast, covering an area of 36 square miles (93 square km). The fire was in one of the more remote parts of lab property, and burned less than 100th of one percent of the lab, with no buildings affected. The lab has been closed since Monday, and nobody knows when it’ll reopen. The town of Los Alamos was abruptly evacuated yesterday afternoon. Residents scrambled to put everything of value into their cars, and then drove off the hill with a huge plume of smoke at their backs. A decade ago a similar fire burned over 200 homes in Los Alamos, and incinerated much of the surrounding forest. Back then over 400 families returned to find their homes, and everything in them, reduced to ash. The memories of the previous fire weigh heavy.

As if the evacuation of almost 20,000 people weren’t enough to focus the mind, an additional concern is that the fire might sweep through the laboratory. Los Alamos has radioactive material on site, and although there are only modest quantities of truly dangerous material, it would nonetheless be disastrous to have this material compromised.

With Fukushima still unfolding there is a temptation to dwell on the impossibility of defending against mother nature’s wrath, and the attendant dangers of generating nuclear material. Although there is an interesting discussion to be had on this topic, the question of the moment is the status of the wildfire near Los Alamos. As usual, it is incomprehensibly difficult to get up-to-date information. Presumably the fire crews have a clear idea of the location of the fire line, and where the fire is headed, but none of this data appears to be publicly available. The best resources I’ve found are inciweb (Pacheco and Las Conchas), NMFire, and SWCC.

The lab has had years to prepare for this eventuality, and thus far there does not appear to be any significant source of concern. I am told that the Los Alamos lab perimeter is secure, that the fire is not presently threatening Los Alamos townsite, and that the immediate threat has been mitigated. But until the summer “monsoon” rains start in earnest (we had our first few drops of the summer yesterday afternoon), the progress of the fire is dictated just as much by the weather and wind as it is by human intervention. At present the Los Alamos fire is 0% contained.

For the moment an eerie calm has settled. It is a beautiful day here. The winds have subsided. The temperature has dropped to a comfortable 85F (29C). Santa Fe, Los Alamos, and the lab all seem to be out of danger for the time being. Besides the thousands of Los Alamos refugees, and the blaring headlines atop the local newspapers (“Los Alamos Under Siege“), day-to-day life continues as if nothing is amiss.

Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman, the hit (as these things go) show from the Science Channel, has commenced with its second season. It shows Wednesdays at 8 p.m. Eastern/Pacific time. If you watch tomorrow night’s episode, “Is Time an Illusion?”, there’s a good chance you will see me in a bar fight. Or at least in a bar, with fighting going on around me. And I’m pretty sure that if you wait until July 27th’s “Can We Travel Faster Than Light?”, you’ll see me throwing a Slurpee out of the window of a car to demonstrate addition of velocities. (What you won’t see is the long discussion we had about whether we should call it a “Slurpee” or a “Slushee.”)

I appeared on one episode of the show last year, and I’ve been on a few other science documentaries. But I don’t usually plug them ahead of time; not, as anyone who reads the blog will attest, out of any general reluctance to plug my stuff, but because you typically don’t get to see these shows before they air. And I’d just as soon not be associated with a complete piece of garbage.

But on the basis of what I’ve seen so far — last week’s episode, and several from last year — as well as talking to the show’s creators, I genuinely think that Through the Wormhole is well above the usual standard of quality one expects for these endeavors. Not that anything is perfect — there are one or two times when you’ll be thinking “how in the world did that person get interviewed here?” But there’s clearly been a lot of effort made to get the science largely right, and more importantly to take on big topics and tell something approaching a coherent story about them. Programming like this is growing thin, even on Discovery and the Science Channel, so when it appears and succeeds it should be applauded.

Also? Morgan Freeman read my book. So I at least owe him this much of a plug.