Blogs / Cosmic Variance

There are countless violations of laws of physics and astronomical practice, but it’s still pretty cute.

You may recall that I’ve mentioned my colleague Mark Devlin, his work on the Balloon-borne Large-Aperture Submillimeter Telescope (BLAST) experiment, and the thrilling movie about it that his brother Paul put together.

Well, this evening cosmology will get some welcome exposure when Mark will be the guest on The Colbert Report, airing, as usual, at 11:30pm EST on Comedy Central.

A few friends of the blog have appeared on the show before, and it can be a real challenge to get any information across at all while Colbert is doing his thing (this is a comedy show, after all). But if you can manage it, you’ve got a much bigger audience than we’re used to. So good luck Mark!

As I advertised, the bloggingheads.tv discussion that Sean and I recorded on Wednesday is now posted

following on from on our first effort, and covering different, and somewhat more controversial topics.

Hope you enjoy it.

If the world contained more teachers (and certainly more physics teachers) like Alom Shaha, I, for one, would be delighted. Shaha teaches in an inner city school in London, and I’m sure he does an excellent job there. But remarkably, beyond this, he clearly pours all his available free time, wherever overworked teachers find that, into public science education. As far as I can tell he focuses on television, and works very closely with scientists to bring their work to his students, and the general public. And he is wonderfully successful at it.

I feel like I should have known about Shaha for a long time, particularly looking back at some of his earlier projects, such as an early film (which I think I saw, but didn’t know who was behind), three years ago, about the LHC. But he’s on my radar now because I’ve just finished watching his half-hour film Why is Science Important?

The clip I’ve embedded above is just the very beginning of the film – the entire thing can be watched on its website, in HD. It contains interviews with scientists, science educators, science communicators, and others; all giving their personal take on the question posed in the film’s title. The responses are diverse, as are, refreshingly, the participants. But if there is a common theme it isn’t that science can tell us how the universe evolved, or what describes the behavior of protons. Rather it is that science is about how to go about seeking the answers to questions, and how to evaluate the claims of others. This last point is hammered home repeatedly, not least in Shaha’s opening monologue above, where, after walking over a bed of glowing coals, he says

“You’ve just seen me walk across red hot coals, at a temperature of over five hundred degrees Celsius. I could tell you that I’m an expert in an ancient form of meditation that lets me block out pain at will. I could then tell you that you could lead a happier life if you follow my teachings. For a small fee, of course.

Or, I could tell you the truth; that walking on hot coals doesn’t require any kind of magical powers. It’s just the case that the coals are a poor conductor of heat, and I walk so quickly that there’s hardly any time for heat transfer to take place.

Separating truth from fraudulent mumbo-jumbo is just one reason why science is important.”

Projects like this don’t change the world on their own, of course. But as part of a common goal of bringing a passion for science to the public, and allowing them to see that its practitioners and enthusiasts are drawn from all walks of life they play an important role; not only for science, but for our increasingly science-dependent society. It doesn’t hurt that Shaha is young and good-looking, but what shines through is his infectious energy and enthusiasm for science and the important role of skepticism. And that’s what I hope anyone watching this film takes away.

As Sean mentioned yesterday, earlier this week the two of us recorded an episode of bloggingheads.tv, which appeared this morning and can be viewed below.

Although Sean is a veteran, it was my first time, and I wasn’t really sure what to expect, and as a result I was a little apprehensive about recording it. However, once we got going it was very enjoyable, and rather quickly it no longer felt so odd to be chatting over the phone while staring at myself on the monitor.

An hour sped by as we discussed the constituents of the universe, the mysteries surrounding baryonic matter, dark matter and cosmic acceleration, and just touched on the anthropic approach to the cosmological constant problem. We’re planning to do another one of these before too long, in which I think we’ll discuss inflation and more esoteric topics such as the early universe, the multiverse and (I strongly expect) the arrow of time.

Hope you enjoy it.

Update: Here’s a link to the bloggingheads.tv page, where a variety of download formats are available.

Suppose you (and perhaps a competing team) had an incredibly exciting discovery that you wrote up and submitted to Nature.

Now suppose that you (and the competing team) simultaneously posted your (competing) papers to the ArXiv preprint server (which essentially all astronomers and physicists visit daily). But, suppose you then wrote in the comments “Submitted to Nature. Under press embargo”.

In other words, you wrote the equivalent of “Well, we’ve submitted this to Nature, but they won’t might not accept it or publish it if the news gets into the press, so can all of you reading this just not actually, you know, tell anyone? Oh, but can you make sure that you give us credit for the discovery, instead of the competing team? Thx!”

So, instead of blogging about the Incredibly Exciting Discovery (which I’d loooove to talk about), I’m writing about what a ridiculous fiction the authors are asking us all to participate in, for the sake of the authors’ potentially getting a publication accepted to Nature. The authors advertised a paper to thousands of interesting, engaged scientists, who are then supposed to keep their mouths shut so that the authors can get a paper into a particular journal — one that is not noticeably more influential in astrophysics (i.e. the difference between Nature and non-Nature is not nearly as big a deal as it is in biology).

Look folks, either come up with an agreement with the competing team to both shut your yaps until both your papers are simultaneously released from embargo, or suck it up and just submit the paper to the Astrophysical Journal or some other high prestige journal that doesn’t require Nature’s crazy embargo rules. Your result is terrific, you should be rightly proud, and Nature should be honored to publish your work. But, if a publication in Nature is really the goal you’re after, asking all the rest of us to be complicit is a bit silly.

Plus, I’m wiling to bet that Dennis Overbye skims astro-ph…

Update: Lots of good discussion and insight in the comments, so worth clicking through.

The Science and Entertainment Exchange has lurched into the early 21st century by starting its own blog, the X-Change Files. They’re going to have a weekly “column” rotating between Lawrence Krauss, Matt Parney, Jennifer Ouellette, Sid Perkowitz, and Jerry Zucker. So you know where to go for your regular dose of science and entertainment goodness.

Jerry Zucker and his wife Janet Zucker deserve a great deal of credit for turning the idea of the Exchange into a reality. More importantly, for a twelve-year-old such as I was at the time, The Kentucky Fried Movie was a major event in modern cinema. So I was pleased to see that the title of Jerry’s post (”I’d Like to Thank the National Academy”) was the same one that I had used when I gave a talk at the NAS annual meeting. Not that either one of us should be overly proud of that particular line.

Also, he gets away with saying stuff like this:

The really great thing about these scientists is that because their brains are exactly two-and-a-half times the size of the average person’s in the movie business (although in fairness, that also includes talent agents), they are actually more creative and therefore much better at coming up with science-related ideas for movies than our so-called “creative community.” I don’t mean to offend anyone but as much as I loved Slumdog Millionaire, it’s no Viagra. Often, science gets tacked on like wallpaper in a story, but when it’s really integrated into the narrative it can take things in surprising new directions. And thanks to the Exchange and the National Academy of Sciences, research just became much more fun.

That thing about the brain sizes is what they call “creative license.” But it’s deployed in the service of making a good point! Scientists are good at coming up with ideas, and it would be great if a closer relationship between science and Hollywood helped some of those fun ideas percolate into the wider culture. (My giant brain scoffs at giving specifics about how this will actually happen.)

You can always count on the Daily Show. As John presaged earlier this month, correspondent John Oliver visited CERN to do a report on the LHC, which has finally appeared. Watch as John Ellis lays the science smackdown!

The best thing about it is that, once again, Jon Stewart and company have taken an issue that completely flummoxed most major news media — in this case, the purported danger that the LHC will destroy the world — and actually get it right. In addition to visiting CERN itself, Oliver scored an interview with Walter Wagner (”graduated UC Berkeley with a Minor in Physics”), originator of much of the hysteria and lawsuits. You’ll get to hear Wagner explain that the probability the LHC will destroy the world is — wait for it — fifty percent. You know, because when you have two things that can possibly happen, obviously each has half the probability, right? I don’t want to say too much about Walter Wagner, because, if nothing else, the guy is really fond of a good lawsuit. So I have no comment whatsoever on Walter Wagner’s competence or sanity. But I do know people who are utterly incompetent and completely insane, who resemble Walter Wagner in certain ways. I’ll stop there.

See, major news media? It’s not that hard!

His Brains, anyway. (Which he never talked about himself, but that’s neither here nor there.) Random fluctuations make an appearance in Dilbert. (Hat tip Nick Suntzeff.)

One can only wonder what Calvin and Hobbes could have done with this.

I’m not supposed to give away too much here. But recall that Hollywood loves science, and occasionally we can help them out with an interesting idea or two. So it’s possible that if you were to watch tonight’s episode of Bones (8 p.m., 7 Central, on Fox), our plucky heroes Booth and Brennan could be investigating a murder that makes clever use of expertise in physics. It’s even possible that the murder technique was dreamed up in part by one of our previous guest-bloggers, which might very well be reflected in the name of the research institute where the dastardly deed takes place.

I’ve probably said more than I should already.