Blogs / Cosmic Variance

If you watch the Daily Show, you know the inane humor of John Oliver, one of the regular “corespondents” on the show. My colleagues at CERN tell me that he’s visiting CERN now, filming one of his inimitable segments on the LHC and the experiments, to be aired “some time after April 21″. Personally, I can’t wait to see it – he is always funny and usually pretty sharply barbed. He apparently rode an LHC dipole magnet like Slim Pickens rode the bomb in Dr. Strangelove, and asked one of our guys “is there anything you do here that’s not boring?” His video spots are always edited tightly to get the maximum laugh quotient. Anyway, here he is in the CMS cavern, earlier today (thanks to my student Matt Searle for the photo!)

We’re happy to welcome The Intersection, featuring the bloggy stylings of Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum, to their new home here at Discover Blogs! Anyone who isn’t already following their excellent work is encouraged to go have a look.

It’s great timing, as Sheril and Chris are experts in the intersection of science and journalism (among other intersections), and that’s going to be a hot topic in the days to come. There was something of a dustup a few months ago, set off by dueling Bloggingheads dialogues, first from science bloggers Abbie Smith and Ed Yong, then by journalists George Johnson and John Horgan. Apparently Abbie was questioning the role of journalists in an era where scientists can reach out themselves through blogs, and George responded in a somewhat intemperate fashion. (He later apologized for the tone, although not really the sentiment.) Much back-and-forth ensued — see responses by Brian Switek and Chad Orzel. And just last week, Geoff Brumfiel at Nature wrote a feature exploring the relationship between science journalism and science blogs, with the tagline: “But can the one replace the other?”

Well, no. Science blogging will never replace science journalism, any more than other kinds of blogging will replace other kinds of journalism. (Of course blogging can include just about any kind of writing, including what we usually call “journalism”; I’m thinking here of the specific case of people whose day job is doing science, and who blog in their spare time.) They have very different roles. Journalists are paid to cover stories of wide interest, to get multiple perspectives on new results, and to be as objective as possible in separating the wheat from the chaff. Science bloggers are sometimes going to blog about something newsworthy, but most can’t be bothered trying to cover every interesting story, and years will pass before a typical blogger picks up a phone to interview a source before posting. Instead, they bring a special expertise and inside knowledge to a field that no general-purpose journalist can hope to match.

I’m not sure what the source of controversy really is. It seems perfectly obvious that science blogging should enrich and extend conventional science journalism, not aspire to replace it. (See also sensible takes from Jessica Palmer at bioephemera and Curtis Brainard at the Columbia Journalism Review. [Hey! A blogger and a journalist!]) Movies didn’t replace live theater, airplanes didn’t replace cars, mammals didn’t replace birds. These are things that serve different functions.

The conversation we should be having is how the two forms can work together. How great would it be, for example, if major newspapers regularly linked to relevant blog entries by real experts when a big science story broke? It might actually require some effort to make something like that happen, just because of the way journalism these days works, including the tradition of embargoed results. When the Bullet Cluster results indicating the existence of dark matter were first released, I was lucky enough to be a participant in the original press conference, so I had access to the papers before most people did. Consequently, I was able to write an informed post that could be pointed to by people looking for an expert-level discussion. But ordinarily, such pre-embargo access is only given to professional journalists. If the communities worked a bit more closely together, we might be able to more regularly combine the reportage and explanatory skills of professional journalists with the in-depth perspective of professional scientists.

Meanwhile, newspapers are dying. CNN shut down its science division. The amount of real science journalism is shrinking dramatically, and any scientist who thinks that’s a good thing for the field as a whole is living in crazy land. The old ways of doing business are crumbling, and we have to find new ways to work together.

A couple of weeks ago there was an interesting opinion piece in the NYTimes about how physicists are the harbingers of doom, and are responsible for the end times. Or, more specifically, it’s because of physicists that the financial markets are in tatters all around us.

The basic idea is that greedy physicists have gone to Wall Street, cooked up all sorts of arcane derivative products, and subsequently unleashed these weapons of mass destruction on the financial markets. This sentiment is best epitomized by a statement from none other than Warren Buffett (perhaps the world’s most successful investor, and certainly the world’s richest): “beware of geeks bearing formulas”

Undoubtedly there is some truth underlying this sentiment, in the sense that there are plenty of (mostly lapsed) physicists working on Wall Street. And these physicists have indeed helped develop fairly mathematical and esoteric models for the markets. These models made it possible to leverage excessively (i.e., invest significantly with very little money down), and made it exceedingly difficult to evaluate risk. And it sure is convenient to find scapegoats on which to blame the global recession. But, fundamentally, the markets are in free-fall because of rampant and unfettered greed. And it turns out there was plenty of that to go around. For the last few years it was simply too easy to make huge sums of money by taking on large risk. So long as the markets went up, all was good. But when there’s the possibility to make vast sums of money, there’s an equal and opposite possibility of losing vast sums of money. Newton’s 3rd law of finance, I suppose. And this law has been much in evidence as of late.

Well, it seems that (influenced by Sean, I’m sure) Maureen Dowd has picked up on John McCain’s twitter feed, and has placed yet another mocking stab at science in the mainstream press. (”Catfish and grape genetics”? Ha ha ha! “Promotion of astronomy”? Bwah!)

The specific line from McCain’s feed is the sarcastic “nothing says new jobs for average Americans like investing in astronomy”. And I think this is the essence of why scientific projects continue to be held up for derision.

Simply, most people assume science has absolutely nothing to do with them. Nobody blinks an eye at massive building projects that funnel money to construction workers, even though construction accounts for only 5% of the non-farm employment in the US. However, even though the “average american” is highly unlikely to work in construction, they at least imagine that they could.

In contrast, science is perceived as something that is done by an elite group of people that “average americans” could never hope to join, or even meet. So, it’s not that the government’s money is going to someone else, it’s that it seems to be going to someone they could never, ever be. I’ve always found it terribly sad that scientists are almost universally cast as a tribe of “others”, so distinct from “average americans” that they cease to be realistic aspirational figures. Pro-basketball players are equally unusual and elite in their physical attributes, training, and skill sets, but that doesn’t stop generation of kids wanting to grow up and play in the NBA. In contrast, scientists often come across as “born that way”, and not as the end products of rigorous training that a large fraction of smarter-than-average people could engage in. (And note that it’s not just the fault of the nebulous “media” — in their quest to climb to the top of the scientific heap, plenty of scientists cultivate an aura of “impressiveness”; while this may be useful for their individual careers, it can be plenty demoralizing for those on the lower rungs, who are questioning if they have what it takes.)

On top of this is a disconnect between what science actually does, and people’s perception of how it affects their own lives. Most “average americans” probably don’t have many gripes with the NIH budget, because they understand that curing disease is something that could potentially help them in the end. Most physical sciences, however, don’t present obvious, immediate connections to people’s day to day life, or to the main engines of the US economy. Those connections are of course there (grape genetics = wine production = millions of dollars in farming economy = tasty beverages produced more cheaply domestically), but they’re not obvious. Science is left playing catchup every time we’re mocked — yes, lots of articles came out pointing out that “volcano monitoring” was in fact useful, but not in time to stop the initial spurt of derision on the national stage.

Sadly, I don’t have any obvious solution to this, except the usual calls for increased outreach and better science teaching.

May 15 will be the premiere of Angels & Demons, the Ron Howard movie starring Tom Hanks and Ayelet Zurer, based on the Dan Brown novel. The narrative moves between particle physics at CERN and religious politics at the Vatican — feel free to provide your own characterization of that particular binary opposition.

We have no idea how good the movie is going to be, but it’s sure to garner attention, and it does feature physics prominently. So the Division of Particles and Fields of the American Physical Society figures that we might as well get some mileage out of it. They recently sent around the email below, encouraging physics departments to host “Angels & Demons lecture nights” to capitalize on the interest generated by the movie. Seems like a good idea to me — rather than spending energy finding flaws in the physics as portrayed in the movie (which are sure to be there), let’s grab the opportunity to spread the word about some exciting science that’s being done in the real world. If nothing else, the most common question about the LHC will change from “Will it make a black hole that will destroy the world?” to “Will it make an anti-matter bomb that could destroy the Vatican?”

This May, Sony Pictures will release Angels and Demons, a movie based
on Dan Brown’s best-selling novel that focuses on an apparent plot to
destroy the Vatican using a small amount of antimatter. In the book
and the movie, that antimatter gets stolen from CERN.

Starring Tom Hanks and directed by Ron Howard, parts of the movie were
actually filmed at CERN. It’s not every day that a major motion
picture places particle physics in the spotlight. The US particle
physics community would like to take advantage of this opportunity to
tell the world about the science behind the movie, the Large Hadron
Collider and the excitement of particle physics.

Along these lines, the Fermilab, SLAC and US LHC users organizations
will join forces to organize Angels and Demons public lecture nights
at universities or other venues across the country when the movie
premieres in mid-May. While each institution will be responsible for
the local logistics of planning the public lecture, the Fermilab
Office of Communications and the CERN Press Office can help. A Web
page on the US LHC Web site (http://www.uslhc.us/Angels_Demons) will
provide you with materials that will include:

- a template PowerPoint talk, for your use if helpful

- a template poster to advertise the lecture at your institution

- tips on answering tough questions

- information on how to broadcast the lecture on the Web

If you would like to host a lecture, please contact Elizabeth Clements
(lizzie@fnal.gov) or Katie Yurkewicz (katie@fnal.gov). They will give
you more information and help you with publicity for your event.

While the movie contains a great deal that is not about science,
physics is central to its plot. This makes it possible for US
physicists to lecture on the science behind the movie, the Large
Hadron Collider and particle physics in general. The physics at the
heart of Angels and Demons–the potential destruction of the Vatican
by a small chunk of antimatter–calls attention to what happens when
matter and antimatter meet. This in turn calls attention to the fact
that the absence of practically any antimatter in the universe is
crucial to our existence. To understand that absence is one of the big
challenges of particle physics. Public lectures could discuss the
challenge of the missing antimatter, possible solutions and how
experiments in both the intensity and energy frontiers will explore
these mysteries.

In order to allow enough time to plan and advertise the lecture at
your institution, the time to get started is now. We hope that you
will make the most of this wonderful opportunity to get the public
excited about particle physics and the many anticipated discoveries
that lie ahead.

Sincerely,

Boris Kayser, Chair
Division of Particles and Fields
American Physical Society

Outside of school, my access to scientific information as a child came from my family’s weekly library visit, the chemistry and microscope sets my parents bought me over a couple of Christmases, and from television and newspapers. At that time, in England, this actually constituted quite a lot of exposure to science, since the newspapers and television contained quite a wealth of scientific content. Nevertheless, I didn’t have real access to more direct experiences, and I certainly didn’t know scientists personally, or visit laboratories at a local university.

The sole exception to this were the trips to Jodrell Bank, 35 miles or so from our home, that my parents and grandparents would occasionally take me on. It is so long ago that I don’t really recall every detail of these trips (this was way before I had even taken any kind of real science classes), although I do remember actual working scientists explaining how some of the equipment worked, and what some of the exhibits they had out for visitors were. What has clearly stuck in my mind though, over all these years, is the planetarium. I remember sitting there in the dark, the night sky whirling overhead, and one of those booming planetarium voices describing the sheer absurdity of the sizes and distances involved, and just flat-out loving it! It isn’t what made me a cosmologist, but it is one of my first recollections of being enthralled by what we as humans can actually figure out about the universe.

Of course, Jodrell bank was much more than a planetarium – it is an important astronomical facility, contains the third largest steerable radio telescope in the world, and is a treasure of British science. Despite this, the facility was almost closed last year, and remained open only after a phenomenal public outcry. The Guardian details this, and the exciting ongoing science at Jodrell Bank in a recent article by James Randerson. As someone who was inspired as a child by Jodrell Bank, it is wonderful to see it going strong and safe from closure (at least for now).

But the other thing I remember about Jodrell Bank is that it appeared in a famous Dr. Who episode (the last one starring Tom Baker as the Doctor). The reason that the Guardian article caught my eye is that it is accompanied by a “Science Facts and Science Fiction” piece, also by Randerson, detailing the history and highlights of the observatory. And indeed there it was, in the middle of the article

In a 1981 episode of Doctor Who, the Doctor’s fourth incarnation, played by Tom Baker, fell to his death from a walkway at the Lovell telescope. He regenerated into Peter Davison.

followed by another sci-fi link that I had completely forgotten, but was delighted to be reminded of

In Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Jodrell Bank scientists missed the alien invasion because they were having a cup of tea.

I really should visit there again some day!

I’m sorry, but I cannot seem to get this stimulus package off my mind. For my whole life I have watched the federal government bounce along with a few hundred billion dollars of non-military discretionary spending, give or take. Mostly take – this portion of the federal budget is the part most under pressure, year to year. Of course the largest portion of federal spending goes into servicing the national debt, and into Medicare and Social Security. But I digress.

Now, under extreme economic duress brought about, ultimately, by the collapse of the housing market and with mortgage-backed securities added as an accelerant, the economy is in free fall. The government is seemingly on the verge of an absolutely massive, $900 billion spending spree, most of which is for the sorts of discretionary spending that would have taken years, or decades, to happen. If ever. It’s among the most extraordinary things I think I have seen in my life.

Many in Washington appear to be very, very, nervous about doing this, but just about all are convinced that the government needs to do something, whatever it can, to avert what would amount to a very long, deep economic depression. Opinions abound, and there is a lot of crazy stuff being said on both sides. A lot of it comes down to the old partisan bickering about how the Dems want to tax and spend, and all the Repubs want is to stop spending and cut taxes (though all they did when in power was cut taxes, for corporations and the already rich, and dramatically increase spending). There has been a lot of noise about this or that item in the various versions of the bill, with detractors invariably questioning its “stimulatory” value. (For example, check out what the GOP thinks is non-stimulatory here.)

So what’s the best thing for the government to spend money on? Where does one get the best bang for the buck? Lost in the main stream media discussions has been any mention of the velocity of money. If the government spends a dollar on something, how likely is it that it will be spent again, and again? How likely is it to generate revenue? Create jobs? Increase GDP?

If money has velocity, then its mass must be its value. The product of the two is the momentum of the economy. And, as good physics students, we all know that to change momentum you need a force. That, I assume, would be prices: the less the price the more likely you are to spend it, increasing the velocity. But, then, the lower the price the more value the money has – here the analogy with Newtonian physics breaks down. It’s non-linear.

Over at MotherJones.com there is a very interesting, if short, article by James K. Galbraith. But even more interesting is the graph accompanying it:

They say this comes from Moody’s Economy.com, though I have not found it yet…I am not a subscriber. It purports to show the economic return enjoyed for each type of dollar spent, though I am not quite clear on just how economic return is defined.

Anyway, taken at face value this graph would seem to squelch definitively the incessant chant for tax cuts, and give strong motivation for spending on infrastructure and the economic safety net. Come on, MSM, cover this story! Galbraith’s main point is that the government ought to be taking a much longer view, and I think that at least part of the $900 billion stimulus does exactly that: the portion devoted to research and development can lead to the sorts of new technologies that will truly sustain the next economic expansion.

I would love to see added to the graph above a bar corresponding to federal support for basic scientific R&D. Even if you just figure that if you give a professor money she spends it all on hiring a postdoc, how does that impact the economy? One of my main worries is that all the science money in the stimulus package will go to “one-shot” big-ticket items, when what we need is people, too. But that kind of money is not represented by a one-off stimulus, but a sustained year to year program of spending on science. What we need is a long-term increase in federal spending on science. A long term commitment, in other words, reflecting basic science policy.

Indeed, also lost in the discussion has been this: just what the hell is the federal budget for 2010? Ordinarily, the administration’s budget request would be rolled out the second week of February or so. Like, next Monday. Not to mention that there would usually be a State of the Union address; all we know for the past 10 days is that Obama will address Congress some time in mid-February. If I were him I would like to do it after passing the stimulus package…

We do live in interesting times.

If you’re a friend of a Brit, then you’ll undoubtedly know that we’re a dry people, and you may sometimes find yourself doing a double take and wondering whether we’re joking or serious. But after reading yesterday’s Guardian, I’m wondering whether I’ve spent enough time out of the country to lose my own edge. Perhaps I can on longer distinguish finely-crafted satire from mind-numbing stupidity.

This crisis of self-confidence was brought on by reading Michele Hanson’s article, as part of Cif charades “:A special Christmas series in which Cif regulars write about a counterintuitive topic suggested by our readers” I’ve looked at others in this series, but unfortunately they haven’t provided me with the appropriate humor/bullshit compass necessary to divine the meaning of Hanson’s column. I’ve even checked myself against coumns that I know to be humorous, such as David Mitchell’s recent fun rant, but I can’t find a problem.

So maybe it’s me. Maybe I’ve lost the ability to tease out the dark humor in

Quantum physics is a bit of a black hole to me. You jump in and where do you get? Nowhere.

or

I wonder whether there weren’t better things physicists could have been doing over the last century. Just look where their work has got them. Niels Bohr, whose research led to quantum mechanics theories, went off to work on the Manhattan Project, and we all know where that got us. Thank you Oppenheimer, Bohr et al for the atom bomb.

For a moment, I thought I recognized something familiarly jolly in Hanson’s closing remarks

I asked another friend out with her dog. Her knowledge of plain, never mind quantum, physics was fairly basic. “Apples fall on your head,” she said. “Heat rises except in my oven, and E = mc².”

I can manage that, except for the last equation. Let’s not go there.

until I realized they just reminded me of a lazy undergraduate who claims they can’t do addition because they’re “not a math person”.

So I’m stumped. Surely The Guardian wouldn’t green-light a thoughtless and meaningless column by a patently ignorant and anti-intellectual author, would they? So how come I’m not finding it funny?

The excellent Symmetry magazine, jointly produced by Fermilab and SLAC, has a fun article following up on a recent debate held at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. The topic was “The Dark Side of the Universe”, and the pretext was the question of whether progress in tackling the deep issues of dark energy and dark matter will come from the particle physicists or from the cosmologists. Representing these constituencies were Joe Lykken and Rocky Kolb, both physicists from Fermilab, and both capable of representing the science while putting on an all-singing, all-dancing show.

The particle physics vs. cosmology setup (or Mr. Accelerator vs. Mr. Telescope, as Symmetry puts it) is a nice idea, and must have made for a lively exchange, enabling Joe, Rocky, and moderator Michael Turner to cover all the relevant bases. Hopefully though, given the track records of the participants, the audience will have come away with a message precisely the opposite of that implied by the debate format – namely that particle physics and cosmology couldn’t be more closely related.

There was a time, of course, when astronomers gazed at the skies, and dutifully reported on their contents, while particle physicists built ever more sophisticated microscopes with which to peer at the subatomic world. These endeavors seem to occupy two extremes of scale, and it is not obvious at first glance that they should have too much to do with one another. But as we’ve come to realize over the years, the key to understanding the behavior of the universe lies in understanding the microphysical, or fundamental, properties of its constituents, while precision cosmological observations can provide crucial information and constraints on particle physics models in regimes that we can’t dream of accessing with terrestrial accelerators.

An extremely recent sign of this can be seen in the flurry of activity in particle phenomenology driven almost exclusively by results reported by cosmological observations, in this case from the PAMELA experiment (I first mentioned this in my post on the ICHEP conference earlier this year). But the connections go back much further, as I was reminded of this week when I attended a series of short talks at Cornell, where I’m currently on leave, in memory of Edwin Salpeter, a renowned astrophysicist who very recently passed away. Salpeter began his career in particle physics, writing papers on field theory, the best known of which contains his discovery, with Bethe, of the Salpeter-Bethe equation describing two-body bound states in quantum field theory. But Salpeter was interested in astrophysics and is equally well-known for the Salpeter process in which applying the ideas of nuclear physics to the behavior of the interior of stars he showed how helium nuclei can fuse to form Carbon. Thus began our understanding of how astrophysics gave rise to most of the periodic table.

These particle physics-cosmology connections are now commonplace, and there is a reasonable argument that there no longer exists a clear distinction between the fields, but rather that they represent a continuum of approaches to understanding the fundamental building blocks of the universe. As I’ve mentioned before, whether one comes at the issues from the cosmology or the particle physics side, there are a host of common questions that arise. We observe dark matter through cosmology, but a definitive understanding of its nature may well rely on our particle accelerators; our universe is observed to contain negligible primordial antimatter, but we may not know why without colliders or data from a new generation of neutrino experiments; clusters of galaxies crystalized from the primordial plasma, but their origin may lie in quantum mechanical fluctuations at the earliest times; and I could go on and on.

These days, Mr. Accelerator and Mr. Telescope can’t live without one another.

I am going to go out on a limb here and write about a subject that I know next to nothing about. But that’s part of the problem…

Imagine the sensation it would cause in the news media: a new disease appears in the US, killing hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands per year. The death rate closes in on 100,000 people per year. People are terrified, the medical community launches a massive campaign to control and eradicate the new pestilence, the federal government creates a new bureaucracy, a special arm of the CDC to deal with this growing death toll.

Here’s the weird thing. It’s here, and we may well top 100,000 dead per year soon in the US. There is no media outrage, no massive federal programs, and precious little available public information at all about it.

The disease? MRSA: methicillin-resistant staphlyococcus aureus. This “superbug”, a virulent strain of staph, has a chilling death rate: about 20-30% of the people who get it die from it. This is a highly variable statistic, because most of these infections are occurring in hospitals, and the people who are there are already very ill, and often immune-compromised. This so-called health-care-associated MRSA (HA-MRSA) is to be distinguished from the growing number of cases of community-associated MRSA (CA-MRSA) which account for around 15% of the incidence.

In fact, getting the total US death toll number is rather difficult to do, because hospitals don’t want to report these deaths and have actively lobbied against state laws requiring them to do so. In California, I am happy to say, The Governator signed into law in September a bill requiring such reporting (though he killed such a bill a year ago!) As of October, only half the states in the country had such laws. (Interesting aside: in 2003, then-Illinois state senator Barack Obama championed such legislation and got it passed.)

Maybe the media is finally getting the story. The Seattle Times recently had an editorial on the subject, lashing out at the hospital industry for bring this pestilence upon us, after an investigative report.

Okay, so what about that 100,000 number? Okay, I made that up. But in 2005, it is documented all over that there were about 19,000 deaths in the US, and infection rates were climbing very, very rapidly. In California the Department of Health Services estimated about 9,600 deaths from hospital related infections, which extrapolates to around 80,000 deaths nationwide. Not all of these are MRSA, clearly. But I am going to take a wild guess that the 9,600 number was low-balled. It is striking that we don’t know how many people are dying from MRSA, but it could become the fifth or sixth leading cause of death soon.

There are a lot of things that need to change, not least of which:

- There need to be more media stories; people need their awareness raised.

- The government, and the CDC in particular needs to get very serious about getting accurate statistics out and available openly.

- Hospitals need to put in place whatever measures they can, from copper door knobs to better MRSA screening on intake, to better staff education (no pun intended) on infection control.

- There should be a major research effort launched to understand the new-gen superbugs like MRSA, C. difficile, and the lovely new one from the Iraq battlefield, A. baumanni.

I guess what I find most chilling here is the almost unbelievable cynicism of the hospital/health insurance companies who actively fight against having to report statistics on MRSA infection rates. To me, it just underscores a general conclusion that I have formed in the past several years: our health care system should not be managed by organizations that have a profit motive. Think about it: the free market has not produced an efficient, responsive health care system. The profit-based health insurance industry has only created an enormously expensive bureaucratic layer whose main effect has been to drive up health care costs at quadruple the inflation rate while continually restricting actual health care services, and has left 50 million Americans with no health care coverage at all.

I blame them.