First a programming notice: turns out I will not be on the Colbert Report tonight. Never fear — I was just bumped back to next week, Wednesday March 10 (11:30 p.m., 10:30 Central). Business as usual in TV land, no big deal. I was hoping that I was nudged in favor of a newly medaled Olympic hero, or at least minor royalty, but it looks like tonight’s guest will be Garry Wills. He’s one of my favorite writers, but still. Obviously some Catholic favoritism going on here.

Small scheduling glitches aside, the Colbert Report and the Daily Show remain two of the best places to hear interviews with interesting academics on TV, especially with scientists. In USA Today, Dan Vergano writes about this curious state of affairs. Neil deGrasse Tyson brings up a good point, that Johnny Carson’s version of the Tonight Show used to feature interviews with heavyweights such as Carl Sagan and Margaret Mead. These days, not many non-satirical network news shows bring on scientists (or anthropologists, or for that matter philosophers or English professors) as a regular event.

When Conan O’Brian took over the Tonight Show, the Science and Entertainment Exchange received a request from the producers to suggest some entertaining (and hopefully enlightening) scientists they could consider bringing on as guests. I don’t know if they ever followed up on that idea, and now I guess we’ll never know. Hopefully the success of Stewart and Colbert will convince the networks that Americans don’t necessarily turn the channel when faced with people who think carefully about the universe.

Every scientist who writes a popular-level book harbors a secret (or maybe not-so-secret) ambition: to be invited on the Colbert Report. Not only because Stephen Colbert is a funny guy, and it’s a good way to sell books — although there is that. The truth is that Colbert (and the Daily Show) love talking to scientists. The sad part of that truth is that more people are exposed to real scientists doing cutting-edge research by watching Comedy Central than by watching, shall we say, certain channels you might have thought more appropriate venues for such conversations. But the happy part is that Colbert and Jon Stewart help bring some fun to science, and expose it to an audience it might not otherwise reach.

So, mark your calendars: I’m going to be on Colbert on Wednesday, March 3. (Scheduled to be, anyway — updates as events warrant.) I have a book to sell, not that I would have turned down the opportunity otherwise.

The precedents are pretty formidable — below the fold I’ve put some of Colbert’s recent interviews with some famous physics/astronomy types. Two things seem immediately obvious: (1) for scientists, these folks are very good at doing entertaining interviews, and (2) Stephen Colbert is an amazingly good interviewer, managing to mix topical jokes and his usual schtick with some really good questions, and more than a bit of real background knowledge. I think this is going to take some preparation.

Anyone want to venture some guesses as to what questions he might ask? Every little bit of anticipation helps.

(Note on above link to the Onion: “Punkin Chunkin,” “Manhunter,” and “Heavy Metal Taskforce” are all real Science Channel shows. “Extreme Gravity” is, as far as I can tell, not.)

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Like any good author, one of my duties is taking to the airwaves to flog my book. A list of upcoming events can be found at Booktour.com, and of course you can always subscribe to the Facebook page or Twitter feed. But I wanted to highlight some stuff coming up over the next two weeks:

• Friday January 29, 12:30 p.m. Pacific: I’ll be appearing on NPR’s Science Friday with Ira Flatow. (That’s today/tomorrow, depending on when you’re reading this.) Listen online, or via your favorite public radio station.
• Saturday January 30, 2:00 p.m. Pacific: From Eternity to Here will be the subject of a Firedoglake Book Salon. I’ll be answering questions online, and our host will be none other than Chad Orzel, who has a book of his own you should check out.
• Saturday February 6, 10:00 a.m. Pacific: Crank up your avatars, I’m giving a talk in Second Life. (And if you don’t already have an avatar, it’s easy to get one. And you can shop for clothes!) Sponsored by MICA, it will be held at the large amphitheater on StellaNova.
• Saturday February 6, 5:00 p.m. Pacific: For everyone here in Los Angeles and environs, I’m doing a good old-fashioned book reading/signing at Skylight Books, an awesome independent bookstore in Los Feliz. 5:00 on Saturday night — what better way to kick off the evening’s festivities?

Hope to see you there, virtually or in person!

All of Caltech, and the cosmology community worldwide, is mourning the death of Andrew Lange. He was one of the world’s leading scientists, co-leader of the Boomerang experiment that provided the first precise measurement of the first acoustic peak in the cosmic microwave background. He took his own life Thursday night.

It’s hard to convey how unexpected and tragic this news is. Very few people combined Andrew’s brilliance as a scientist with his warmth as a person. He always had a sparkle in his eye, was enthusiastically in love with science and ideas, and was constantly doing his best to make Caltech the best possible place, not just for himself but for everyone else around him. He was one of the good guys. The last I spoke with him, Andrew was energetically raising funds for a new submillimeter telescope, organizing conferences, and helping plan for a new theoretical physics center. We are all walking around in shock, wondering how this could happen and whether we could have done anything to prevent it. Caltech has had several suicides this year — hard to make sense of any of them.

The message from Caltech President Jean-Lou Chameau is below the fold. For any local readers, there’s contact info if you would like to talk to counselors for any reason.

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And here you thought the holidays were over. Silly you. Today is the greatest holiday of all: Book Release Day!

That’s right — From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time is out today. That means you could head over to Amazon.com and buy the book right now:

From Eternity to Here at Amazon

Don’t worry, we’ll wait. Of course you could also buy it later, but there are benefits to having a great first day, and we’re aiming to get as many Amazon purchases as we can. So you might want to take Lee Billings’s advice:

Just drafted a micro-review of @seanmcarroll’s “From Eternity to Here”. It’s really quite good–I suggest you all buy several copies.

I’m excited, anyway. You can find various goodies on the web page, including a reprint of the prologue, an annotated table of contents, a list of upcoming events, links to blurbs and reviews and other commentary, and a collection of related articles. Heck, I even went out and made a video:

I don’t think Spielberg is checking his rear-view mirror, but my budget was a bit lower.

Looking back through my old emails, I was first talking seriously about writing a book on the arrow of time in August, 2006. The contract with Dutton was agreed upon in May, 2007. Worked on it on and off, and finally started working in earnest in mid/late-2008. I emailed the manuscript to the publisher at 2:42 a.m. on Friday, May 8, 2009. And now it’s released to the world.

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I think we can all agree that I’ve been admirably restrained with respect to talking about my upcoming book before it even appears. (Maybe you don’t think so, but believe me — I’ve been restraining myself.) Die-hards have been able to follow the excitement at the Facebook page, where fascinating details about cover blurbs and review copies have been politely sequestered.

All that is about to end soon! Yesterday I received in the mail an actual copy of the hardcover, a tangible artifact testifying to the reality of this long-anticipated event. Here it is, rubbing shoulders with a few other well-known bestsellers.

The official release date is January 7. Yes, there will be a Kindle edition; at some point later in January there will even be an audio book. And I’m certainly not going to stop you from ordering it. But my publisher tells me that what would be really great is if a bunch of people ordered it exactly on January 7. So that’s when I’ll really be encouraging you.

Even after the book is out, I don’t want to turn the blog into all book, all the time. But I do want to try a book club experiment, where we go through individual chapters, one week at a time, with me revealing some of the thought processes that went into each chapter and all of us having a back-and-forth discussion. Should be fun!

No formal book tour, but I’ll be doing a few readings and events. Check the Facebook page or book web page for more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Greetings from Down Under! Current at the CosPA conference in Melbourne, after spending a couple of days in Sydney — a brief fling through Adelaide up next.

It’s been a mixed bag so far; while I’ve had great fun interacting with people here in Australia, I’ve also been struggling with a nasty cold I picked up on the flight over. Spent yesterday mostly in bed, too fogged up to even work on my talk for Friday. But when I’ve had the strength to be up and about, it’s been a treat. Here’s an iPhone snap of the University of Sydney; that clocktower in the middle houses, appropriately enough, the Centre for Time.

One of the perks of civilization that hasn’t quite caught on in these parts is affordable internet access in hotel rooms, so don’t expect a lot of blogging over the next week or two. Instead, I can point you to a couple of recent videos. One is an extended interview for Edge, entitled Why Does the Universe Look the Way it Does? It is an interview (presented in text and video), not a carefully pre-planned document, so not all thoughts are arranged as elegantly as one might like. Here is some of the flavor:

We are in a very unusual situation in the history of science where physics has become slightly a victim of its own success. We have theories that fit the data, which is a terrible thing to have when you are a theoretical physicist. You want to be the one who invents those theories, but you don’t want to live in a world where those theories have already been invented because then it becomes harder to improve upon them when they just fit the data. What you want are anomalies given to us by the data that we don’t know how to explain.

The other one is a panel discussion on Time Since Einstein, from the World Science Festival. As the description there says, it features Roger Penrose, David Albert, and some other people it would be too exhausting to list individually. Here’s part 1 of 5:

World Science Festival 2009: Time Since Einstein, Part 1 of 5 from World Science Festival on Vimeo.

Now if only my immune system would finish off the little viral buggers inside me, I could get out and see a bit of this interesting country.

Later today I hop in an airplane to fly to the antipodes, or at least to Australia. (The actual antipodes would be in the middle of an ocean.) Looking forward to it, as this will mean I’ve visited every non-Antarctic continent at least once.

But the reason I’m blogging about it is because I’ll be giving some public talks, and it would be great if any local CV readers dropped by to say hi. I’ll be hitting three different cities:

• Monday 16 November: Sydney
• Friday 20 November: Melbourne
• Monday 23 November: Adelaide

With all these public talks in a row, you would almost think I’m touring in support of some sort of book. That was part of the original idea, but now the book won’t be officially released until January 7. So instead I’ll just be talking in support of … Science! And trying to stay clear of dangerous creatures.

p.s. Wow, I almost did an incredibly boneheaded thing by showing up at the airport without a visa. Why in the world do you need a visa to go from the USA to Australia? I thought it was like a southern version of Canada. Fortunately, when you check in online you get “reminded” that a visa is required; even more fortunately, there is an online instant-visa service that seems to work. This is why I’m a theoretical physicist and not put in charge of anything important.

Lev Kofman passed away this morning. He was a great physicist, animated by passion and joy. I was last in his office, at CITA, two years ago. As usual, the conversation stretched across wide swaths of physics, governed only by Lev’s irrepressible enthusiasm and interest. He will be missed.

Lev Kofman: June 17, 1957 – November 12, 2009

We are deeply saddened to inform you that the fabulous Lev Kofman, husband of Anna, father of Sergei 13 and Maria 15, brother of Svetlana, and our great friend, died in the early morning of November 12 from cancer. Many of you were able to commune with Lev as the situation deteriorated over the past weeks, by visits, phone calls, and emails read to him. We are deeply grateful for that: and it provided some solace for Lev to know the tremendous impact he has had on the lives of so many of you.

He bravely kept the physics going strong throughout his illness, characteristic of Lev. His scientific outpourings and influence will transcend this passage. As you know, he made fundamental contributions to Lambda cosmology and dark energy, structure in the cosmic web, inflationary theory, its Gaussian and non-Gaussian aspects, and gravitational waves. He initiated and developed the theory of preheating, showing how all matter could arise from a coherent vacuum energy at the end of inflation, his cosmic baby. And much more besides. He was the quintessential leader, for CITA and CIFAR as a whole, and for the vibrant early universe group he established, providing inspirational guidance to a generation of young researchers.

He felt the physics to his very core. Beyond this, it is the indomitable, fun-loving, deeply philosophical spirit, a gourmand of life in all its manifestations, that we will miss so much.

With our best wishes in these sad times,

Anna Chandarina (Kofman)
Svetlana Kofman
Dick Bond
Andrei Linde
Renata Kallosh