Blogs / Cosmic Variance

Early Friday morning I returned from a five-day jaunt to Reykjavik, where I was taking part in the inaugural meeting of the Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi).

Of course, these days one rarely “jaunts” anywhere. The flying portion of this trip, which was perhaps just a little more trouble than the average, may be summarized by: First flight delayed so many times that entire trip is postponed one day; spend 3.5 hours on phone with some of the world’s most incompetent customer service people (Travelocity), and their runners-up (Icelandair), before finally getting some help rescheduling from Delta; arrive in Iceland one day late, only to discover that you will be luggageless for at least a day; spend next 2 days in same clothes; fly back to New York; second flight delayed significantly; deal with useless and borderline rude Delta service at airport; board plane 1.5 hours late; spend 2 hours on runway; finally arrive home (at least with luggage this time) at almost 2am.

However, although I think I seriously need to review the amount of traveling I do, given how broken the system is, I must say that my time in Iceland was worth it.

We’ve discussed FQXi here before, in a guest post from Associate Scientific Director Anthony Aguirre, in which he not only laid out the philosophy and goals if the organization, but also addressed concerns that I and others had voiced about the sole current financial backer of the endeavor – the John Templeton Foundation (JTF). I have agonized over this ever since. I am clearly not in agreement with the goals of JTF. On the other hand, FQXi is independent of them, has its own charter, and is, as far as I can tell, supporting good, defensible science. They are also actively looking for a more diverse funding stream and, in fact, their seed grant from JTF will soon expire. Most certainly, if they had a number of donors, of which JTF was one, I would not spend time worrying about these issues.

In any case, earlier this year FQXi invited me to take part in their inaugural meeting and I decided that this would be a good way to dip my toe in the water and get a brief first-hand look at what they’re about, while getting to talk with colleagues old and new about a lot of intellectual issues that I spend time thinking about. So I accepted their kind invitation and submitted myself once again to the tortures of modern air travel.

The workshop was held at the Radisson SAS Saga in Reykjavik, Iceland; a place I have never been to previously, and always thought would be intriguing. Arriving early on Sunday, I checked in, cleaned my smelly self up as much as possible and headed right back out to attend the first real sessions of the meeting. The first day was filled with the only invited talks of the entire conference – overviews on Quantum Mechanics, Inflation, Non-String Quantum Gravity, String Theory (or Non-Non-String Quantum Gravity, as might have been more fair), The Late Universe, etc. Most of these talks were excellent, providing a clear summary and, most importantly, some common vocabulary useful when you have participants with such diverse experience – people interested in the Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics may have a great deal to say to those fascinated by how to put a measure on eternally inflating spacetimes, but they may never know if they don’t get a common language straight.

Monday, the entire day was spent at the Blue Lagoon Spa, which sounds decadent, but … oh, okay, it was decadent. But if it makes you feel better, we had an hour of short talks in the morning there, and three hours of group discussions in the afternoon. Groups were organized on the basis of three foundational questions each participant had submitted in advance, and I ended up in an “arrow of time” group, which was fun, but not quite what I’d expected. Nevertheless, I learned quite a lot from the discussions, which is what its all about.

The spa itself was a remarkable place, with a hot pool, warmed by geothermal springs, and lined with natural mud that is supposed to make physicists pretty if applied in the correct way. None of us figured out the correct way. Here’s a picture courtesy of the extremely fun Valerie Jamieson (from New Scientist, and who has also blogged about the trip over at the New Scientist Space Blog), who I’ll mention again in a while.

Tuesday was all business. The discussion groups from Monday were supposed to report to the workshop, not on the answers they had arrived at (who’s going to solve any of these foundational questions in a day?) but rather on the questions that their discussions had raised. Our group meandered around a little in our presentation, but homed in on what is, perhaps, the only clearly defined question: Why did our universe begin in such a low entropy state? (Something we’ve discussed here at Cosmic Variance on a number of occasions. See also Sean’s discussion at Preposterous Universe).

That evening there were no organized activities, and so I had dinner with my friends Lawrence Krauss and his wife Kate at The Pearl restaurant, which overlooks Reykjavik and executes a complete rotation every two hours. Great fun indeed.

Wednesday was mostly an excursion day and, I should say, one of the more amazing of these that I’ve ever been on. The buses took us first to Thingvellir National Park, where the Icelandic parliament – one of the oldest in the world – was founded in 930. We had only a little time to survey the spectacular scenery, before moving on to Geysir National Park, home of the original geyser, after which all others are named. That one has essentially stopped spurting now, but another still goes off every 5-7 minutes. This was a good place for a quick lunch, with the geyser periodically spurting in the background.

Back on the bus, we drove out across an alien landscape of boulders and black sand until we were within a half-mile of the Langjokull glacier. Here we stopped and were supplied with heavy-duty ski suits, overshoes, gloves and helmets, before being shuttled down to the glacier itself on a huge specially-designed vehicle.

At the glacier, we paired up and were supplied with snowmobiles and a brief lesson on how to drive them. Here I am before actually driving one.

A mutual realization that it was better to be paired with someone who appeared to be paying attention to this lesson than with one of those who were gazing at the landscape ensured that Valerie Jamieson and I rode together.

This really was a remarkable trip. We rode out until all that one could see in any direction was the glacier, with the mountains and volcanoes in the distance. It was spectacular. We stopped at the halfway point and took photographs. Some of our group got into a snowball fight (a rock-and-iceball fight really). In the photograph below you can see Valerie and me on our vehicle, with some of the perpetrators in the background, most notably Wojciech Zurek (with beard), who turned out to be quite an iceball marksman.

After driving back and shedding our glacier-wear, we spent some time on science again, getting split up into new groups and assigned to discuss our new questions during the rest of the day and the evening. I ended up in a fun group with Anton Zeilinger (of quantum teleportation fame), Dmitry Budker, Markus Aspelmeyer, Valerie Jamieson and John Donoghue (who abandoned us for another group he’d already been discussing with) to discuss the question of whether we should expect that the physical constants should be changing over time.

We began this discussion on our bus on our way to the next mind-blowing destination, in this case Gullfoss (the Golden Waterfall). The photo below, taken from the Wikipedia site about Gullfoss, does a good job of conveying the splendor of this two-level waterfall that terminates in a ravine

As you might imagine, we were all pretty hungry after this. Dinner didn’t disappoint. Held at a rustic restaurant at Stokkseyri, a black sand beach on the southern coast, our lobster banquet was some of the best seafood I’ve ever had.

Thursday morning we were back to serious work, debating the results of the previous day’s group discussions. Well, as serious as work can be when the debaters must wear viking hats! Watching Lawrence Krauss and Fred Adams debate in this way, one brandishing a sword and the other an axe, has to be seen to be believed (sorry – I have no photos). The presentations were a little spotty but there were some definite highlights including, for me, the group that had debated the interpretation of quantum mechanics and the one that had talked about eternal inflation, although the latter didn’t get as much time as I’d have liked to see.

This was a fascinating and intellectually stimulating conference in an unusual and dramatic location; so I’m glad I went. Perhaps best of all, there wasn’t a hint of any religion, spirituality, or any such non-science about the whole meeting, which I was delighted with. I returned exhausted, however. The conference itself was full with planned activities and talks, and it was nice to finish up the days with a beer in the bar with friends. But this left plenty of sleep time, and I’d hoped to take advantage of this because life has been a little hectic recently, with a ridiculous number of papers approaching completion. I’ll probably blog about them in a month or so when they’re done.

But it turned out to be difficult for me to sleep in Reykjavik. At this time of year it doesn’t really get dark, but just becomes dusky for a few hours from around 11:30 until 2 or so. Although the hotel provides an eye mask, I found it uncomfortable and the light coupled with a little jet lag meant sleep didn’t come easily. On the plus side, I was able to get a few hours extra time to calculate and write each day. On the minus side, four hours sleep or so a night doesn’t really cut it.

Nevertheless, what a week!

(Others blogging about this trip include Eugene Lim and Scott Aaronson)

I got here to CERN a few days ago, and things are quieter than recently. It’s the start of vacation season and so the cafeteria is not so full and parking is plentiful. Lots of summer students are hanging around in the evening, and some of the meetings are sparsely attended.

In the CMS experiment, the folks who have labored long and hard to build the world’s biggest and most complex silicon-strip detector have earned a bit of vacation. As of about August 1, this billion-dollar baby will begin buttoning up for its journey underground into the heart of the experiment.

So I found myself alone in the room with this thing, in the Tracker Integration Facility, and it is hard not to hold it in awe. “It” comprises thousands of flat detectors, each a thin rectangle of silicon crystal with microscopic aluminum strips embedded in it. These strips sense the passage of charged particles like pions, muons, electrons, and so forth, passing the tiny charge they collect to custom-designed readout chips which send the data in digital form to an army of processors which gather all the information from a single 25 nanosecond “beam bunch crossing” into a nice tight wad for later processing.

If you unrolled and laid out all the silicon detectors in the CMS Tracker you could tile a tennis court. It’s mind bogglingly complex, the product of hundreds of people workng for a dozen years. But there it is, and you know what? It works. Its been put through its paces on the surface and it’s just about show time downstairs at LHC Point 5.

I call it a billion dollar baby but it’s hard to say what it really cost. That number takes into account at least some of the labor by engineers, technicians, physicists, and students all over the world, but probably not all of it.

With the testing of the tracker at an end and the transport not yet begun, I am here with my CMS pixel colleagues to take advantage of our last (and first, actually) chance at seeing if our detector will fit neatly inside the tracker.

We are working on the innermost detector in the CMS experiment, the pixels. Once you get so close to the collision that charged particles are millimeters apart, you can no longer use long strips to detect them but have to go to arrays of pixel sensors. Our detector may be a lot smaller than the tracker, but it has even more individual readout channels, around 45 million in total. Each pixel is 0.1 by 0.15 mm (100 by 150 microns) and is read out by a custom chip developed at PSI in Zurich, and bump bonded to the silicon sensors. (Enough jargon yet?) The data from pixels with charge above a preset threshold are sent out on a serial line, converted to an optical signal and digitized upon receipt in high speed electronics in an adjacent cavern underground, then sent up the data acquisition stream.

Anyway, when all this mumbo-jumbo is done we have a big set of three-dimensional space points along the trajectory of the same particles that have also passed through the tracker. But the pixel points allow us to see what happened very close to the primary proton-proton collision vertex. Combining the pixel hits along a track we can project back to the vertex with a resolution of about 10 microns. Given that the pixels are much larger than that this is quite a trick: we rely on the fact that particles split their signal among adjacent pixels, and we can use a sort of averaging trick to get much more precise than a single pixel width.

My task here, though is much more practical. We want to make sure that the pixel detectors we are building will fit inside the tracker, the two halves of the detector meshing neatly at the end of their grooves inside the tracker. Up until this point it’s been an engineering project, but now we have real hardware and we need to be sure that no parts will interfere mechanically with each other.

Stay tuned, and in a few days I will post some photos of that and tell you how it worked. Gulp!

Shakedown problems from our change of hosting services continue to pester us just a bit, but I think we’re getting the hang of it. We had to upgrade to a more powerful plan, which changed our monthly cost from “trivial” to “somewhat annoying,” so we’ve added some hopefully-unobtrusive Google ads to the sidebar. If you take our estimated earnings from the ads, subtract from that the piece demanded by the heavy hand of the state in the form of those collectivist utopians at the IRS, and subtract from what’s left the cost of our web host, you are left with a very good approximation of zero. Freewheeling public-intellectual leisure-time blogging is not the road to riches I was led to expect. (This despite the impression that I am only in it for the money.)

The “latest comments” plugin and the “comment preview” plugin both seem to have recently decided to act up, for reasons that may or may not have anything to do with anything else. They are temporarily disabled, but hopefully will see a comeback at some point.

Since things are largely in working order, however, this is as good a time as any for me to take my quasi-annual Summer Blogging Vacation. Not a real vacation, of course; precisely the opposite. There are a handful of good ideas languishing on my laptop, which need coaxing and encouragement in order to grow into refereed papers in respectable physics journals, and I’m going to concentrate on that for a while. I have all sorts of things I want to blog about, but for the most part it would take time to do a good job, and it’s time I don’t have right now. So I’m going to disappear for a few weeks, leaving you in the capable hands of the rest of the crew.

But I should go without offering congratulations to members of the Supernova Cosmology Project and the High-Redshift Supernova Team, who have just been awarded the Gruber Prize in Cosmology for discovering the acceleration of the universe. This wasn’t their first prize, and it won’t be their last. Our universe is big, it’s getting bigger, and it’s getting bigger faster — Edwin Hubble discovered the first two of these facts, and these two teams discovered the third. Not too shabby. For some inside scoop you should refer to the blogging member of the SCP, Rob Knop, who is also celebrating a new job. A distinguished astronomer forwarded to me the following sites, ready and available for follow-up reading:

http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/Phys-Gruber-Prize-2007.html
http://www.jhu.edu/news_info/news/home07/jul07/gruber.html
http://newsinfo.nd.edu/content.cfm?topicid=23706
http://carnegieinstitution.org/news_releases/news_2007_0717.html
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2007/07/17_gruber.shtml
http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/press/2007/pr200717.html
http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2007/07.19/99-darkenergy.html
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,22092372-12332,00.html

And of course I can’t resist:

“Cosmology is the most scientifically rigorous, aesthetically elegant, and the most poetic of the sciences.”
Peter Gruber, Chairman of the Board
The Peter and Patricia Gruber Foundation

Hey, I’m just quoting here.

For Science!

Today has been a good day for smackdowns! First up, Simon White in New Scientist, punching up his previous argument:

We need to apply a hard-nosed cost-benefit analysis to dark energy projects. We must recognise the cultural differences between high-energy physics and astronomy, and be willing to argue that astronomical discoveries – that the universe expands, chemical elements were built in stars, black holes exist, planets orbit other stars – are no less significant for humanity than clarifying the underlying nature of forces and particles.

Any large new astronomical project should be designed to push back frontiers in several areas of astronomy…

If we don’t do these things, we may lose both the creative brains and the instruments that our field needs to remain vibrant. Dark energy is a Pied Piper, luring astronomers away from their home territory to follow high-energy physicists down the path to professional extinction.

Next, Pope Benedict (via Atrios and Cynical-C), putting the hurt on those nefarious splitters:

The Vatican reiterated Tuesday that the Catholic Church is the one true church established by Jesus Christ and that other Christian denominations are defective, although they have elements of truth and sanctity.

In a brief document, “Responses to Some Questions Regarding Certain Aspects of the Doctrine of the Church,” the Vatican’s doctrinal office, with Pope Benedict XVI’s approval, reiterated controversial assertions made in its 2000 document, “Dominus Iesus,” that Christian denominations that do not have apostolic succession — the ability to trace their bishops back to Christ’s original apostles — can’t properly be called churches.

And finally, Senator Patrick Leahy, via Matthew Yglesias and a dozen other blogs:

A powerful elixir of sarcasm and high dudgeon mixed into a few sort sentences! Awesome.

Vote for your favorite.

So, I’ve been in the throes of grant proposal writing, which as far as I can tell is the worst part of becoming a professor. As such, I’ve been ignoring as much of my email as humanly possible for the past week. Until I got an email from David Weinberg this afternoon, announcing to the SDSS (Sloan Digital Sky Survey) mailing list the arrival of a new web-based galaxy classification project, Galaxy Zoo. The project was started by some scientists with SDSS, including Alex Szalay and Bob Nichol, and others. They had a press release today, and it’s already been covered by the BBC and was picked up by AP, so I think the website has gotten a bit hammered in the first day.

The basic idea here is to harness the collective eyes and brains of the internet to visually classify galaxies by morphology. It turns out that galaxy mophologies are in some ways a lot easier to classify by eye than by computer, just like faces and other complex images. This is one reason that now that surveys include millions of galaxies, morphology studies have not been as popular as other classification schemes based on colors or spectral types. Apparently, galaxy zoo to the rescue!

Here’s the first thing I learned: looking at pictures of galaxies is a lot more fun than writing proposals to the NSF to get funding to think about galaxies.
(Dear Galaxy Zoo: if I don’t get a CAREER grant this year, I blame you!)

There were tools to do this before, and I actually have managed to (finally) look
at a bunch of these Sloan galaxies over the past few years (I’m a theorist who’s never been observing, and normally I only look at fake galaxies in my computer — or real galaxies labeled by just a couple of variables like luminosity and color instead of their infinite structural variety). But the fact that galaxyzoo gives you a goal for looking at each galaxy makes it totally addictive. Plus galaxies are just pretty awesome looking! Even better, each galaxy has a link directly back to the SDSS Sky Server, which has tons of other info about the galaxy, like a spectrum where available, 5 band magnitudes, etc.
Personally, I found myself compelled to look at this information when perplexed about how to classify something. What’s it’s color? Is it star forming? What’s is redshift? All there. (Really, it was all there in the Sky Server before, but this is a pretty cool interface to it because you start by wondering.)

It turns out there’s a lot of cool stuff in the Universe. In just a bit of classifying, I found a couple of cool galaxy interactions (click for more info):

A galaxy that to me looks like the cartwheel galaxy with bad seeing:

My main gripe about the site is that they’ve made the classification pretty simple,
just allowing for 3 types of spirals, counterclockwise, clockwise, and edge on
(none of which are really different types in the classical sense), elliptical galaxies, and mergers.
What was I supposed to do with the cartwheel?
And what about this bloby guy, which has whopping H-alpha and OII emission and the mysterious zwarning “NOT_GAL”? Clearly has no structure but I just couldn’t bring myself to call it an elliptical.

Or these very nebulous beauties:

I kept wishing for a button that said “This one’s interesting” or allowed me to choose from a menu, including things like “close pair“, “blobby star forming thing“,
“scoop of neopolitan ice cream” or “i’ve got a green crayon“.
In all seriousness, I understand the simple scheme, but it does seem like there’s a lot of potential here from a lot of eyes that won’t be realized with it. I wonder whether a lot of this won’t come from the classification statistics, though, i.e., probably many of the interested objects will have less consistent classifications than normal ellipticals or spirals.

To be honest, I think I have exactly the wrong amount of knowledge to do this task effectively as designed — I overanalyze it and think I must know what’s going on, but am clearly just a clueless theorist. Turns out we’re still trying to explain the two most basic parameters.

Anyways, go check it out. A Universe of galaxies awaits at your fingertips!

According to the Argus Leader, via the Science Journalism Tracker. The National Science Foundation has finally decided on a location for its Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory, which has been up in the air for years now. The winner is the place that had a head start on its various competitors: the Homestake Mine in the Black Hills.

The underground lab will be the site for a diverse array of experiments, from searches for dark matter and proton decay to investigations into biology and geology under extreme conditions. The Homestake site is already famous, of course, as the home of Ray Davis’s neutrino experiment, where the solar neutrino problem was first identified. The mine itself, the deepest and (until recently) oldest operating mine in the Western Hemisphere, was operational until 2001. The NSF immediately wanted to take it over to use as a lab, but the Barrick Mining Corporation demanded that the government also assume any future liability for problems arising the mine (not a stance that fills one with confidence), and if not, they would flood it. While negotiations dragged on, others jumped into the game, and eventually a competition was launched that ended up choosing Homestake anyway. I’m not expert enough to judge whether the effort expended on the competition was all just a waste of time, or whether the ultimate scientific capabilities of the facility were really improved by the process.

Brynn at Shakesville points to a study by Kristine Nowak and Christian Rauh of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Connecticut. The authors investigated the impact of the appearance of digital avatars on people’s perceptions of trustworthiness. (Here’s what appears to be an earlier version of the study.) They did a blind test, with participants chatting online via various sorts of avatars. Some looked recognizably human and gender-specific, others were cats or lizards or apples. They then asked the participants to rate the credibility of the people they had been talking to.

Everyone is talking about the fact that the participants rated androgynous avatars as less trustworthy. Images that were recognizably male or female were thought of as more credible than those sneaky in-between ones.

To me, the more important finding was that the ketchup bottle finished near the very bottom of the trustworthiness scale, only beating out a menacing-looking lizard beast. Even the cat was judged more trustworthy than the ketchup bottle; if you’ve ever met a cat, you’ll understand that that’s saying something. I’m happy to see that my long-standing distrust of ketchup has been scientifically vindicated.

(Others have suggested that the study’s authors are just dumb bitches. Happily, sexism has been eradicated, so that web page must be at least fifty years old.)

Now that I’ve been back from hunting dinosaurs with Project Exploration for a few days, I owe you all the report. I’m not going to go into all of the background, as that was covered pretty well in my blog posts about the 2004 trip, Dinosaur Report I and Dinosaur Report II. So this will just be a little photo-essay about the heavy lifting that was specific to this trip.

During the previous two trips I had been on with Project Exploration, the focus was on prospecting and the early stages of bringing fossils out of the ground. Clearing away the dirt, exposing bone, determining what we found, estimating the physical extent of the fossils. The eventual goal, of course, is to clear away everything but the bones and enough rock (called “matrix” in paleo-speak) to hold it together, wrap up the pieces snugly in wood and plaster (”jacketing”), and bring it all back home — in this case, Paul Sereno’s lab at the University of Chicago. But the process as a whole takes time, and three days of work by a crew of enthusiastic but untutored amateurs generally isn’t going to make it happen. But on this trip we were working on a site where most of the work had been done, and our task was to finish the job. In fact, we were back to the site I had gone to in 2005. In the meantime the locations of the various bones had been ascertained, many of them had been fully jacketed, and our task was primarily to finish off the biggest pieces. “Finishing off” means completing the jacketing process and transporting the jackets to Billings, Montana, where a freight company would carry them to Chicago.

The story is conveyed better by words than by pictures. Click to get hi-res versions in a new window.

Here is a view of our vans, as seen from the dig site. Each morning we’d get up bright and early to have breakfast at Dirty Annie’s (the finest dining establishment in all of Shell, Wyoming, featuring chokecherry pancakes the size of garbage-can lids). Afterwards we’d head out to the site in two rented vans, the backs of which were filled with all the paleontological necessities: burlap, plaster, water, picks, awls, hammers, GPS units, shovels, trowels, gloves, 2×4’s, buckets, tarps, brushes, kneepads, and sundry snack foods. The vans would bounce over dirt trails to the foot of the hill where the fossils were, and we would all jump out, eager to get our hands dirty. (On at least one occasion, unanticipated logistics forced the crew into drafting a theoretical physicist into van-driving duty. Thankfully, nobody was seriously injured.)

And here is the dig site, as seen from where we parked the vans. Just to the left of center there you can see the plaster around the main group of fossils — jacketing that bad boy and trucking it to Billings was our primary challenge for this trip.

For some reason (too excited by the goings-on, probably) I neglected to take a close-up photo of the main fossil group before we covered it with plaster. But to get the idea, here is a smaller group, this one a collection of vertebrae. In the field, the main goal is to roughly carve out the bone and get it back to the lab in workable condition. On the other hand, you don’t want to make it heavier than it needs to be, so you try to remove as much matrix as you can without sacrificing the structural integrity of the fossil. Once the bone is exposed, you cover it with tinfoil, then wrap it with burlap strips dipped in plaster. Delicate soul that I am, I resisted participating in the plastering at first, but ultimately I realized that everyone else was right, it really was the most fun part of the whole procedure. To make the jacket a bit stronger you can plaster pieces of wood to the whole collection, as seen in the bottom part of the picture.

Here is Paul on the first day, explaining to our intrepid crew of newcomers what we’ll be doing out here. The part of the process for which I was best suited was the delicate work with an awl and a brush, clearing away bits of matrix right up against the bone. Probably I’d be even better suited for the close-up work performed by the preparators back in the lab, who work under microscopes to remove things at the grain-of-sand level and reconstruct the bones. Actually, come to think of it, I’d be best suited to be sequestered in a room far away from any fossils, left with a pen and paper to think about the universe. So that all worked out for the best.

Paul, eager to get going, burns off nervous energy by doing push-ups. (He was the only one to employ that strategy.)

Here is the main collection of fossils, separated out from the surroundings and covered on the top with plaster. It consisted of vertebrae, ribs, and sundry other bones that I won’t pretend I could identify. Paul figured that it was a sort of Diplodocus, one of those lumbering herbivores with giant necks and tails that roamed North America during the Jurassic. But the structure of the hip bones differed from that of the ordinary Diplodocus, so Paul judged that it was a new species. By the second day he had promoted it to a new genus — apparently the rules for whether a new species is in a distinct genus or an entirely new one are a little fuzzy. In any event, our job was to hack away at the underpinnings of this rock, and eventually to bring it home.

And away we go!

(more…)

Today is the last day left in the FDA’s public comment period regarding changes to the labeling rules for irradiated food. Given the other problems in the world, this may or may not have been on your radar screen, but if you eat meat it certainly should.

Imagine if there were a product, say a soft drink, that sickened upwards of 200,000 people every year, and killed thousands. How would the public react? Clearly there would be outrage on a truly massive scale, legislation, regulation, whatever it took to end the scourge. Just look at the outrage ensuing after the spinach crisis last year.

We have such a product in this country: meat. It is produced in conditions such that the main processing challenge in bringing it to market is simply keeping “filth” – the animals’ own excrement – from infecting the final product. The public has simply accepted the sickness and death as collateral damage, not a problem to be solved. Nothing must get in the way of the steady stream of 99 cent burgers!

The meat industry has a “solution” which I put in quotes because it may be worse than the problem itself: food irradiation. The minute most people hear that their hamburger is made from meat that was irradiated, they don’t want it. And if more read the label that is presently required (but proposed by the meat industry to be removed) then they might not buy it.

Food irradiation kills bacteria, but not all of them. The meat industry wants to irradiate food so as not to have to spend more money making meat processing safer at the slaughterhouse, which would raise the cost to consumers.

The real problem, though, is how radiation kills bacteria. Often the irradiation is performed using an isotope of cobalt which emits gamma rays – very energetic photons, more energetic than x-rays, which are also used for this purpose. These photons travel a long way through most materials and lose their energy by knocking electrons off the atoms of the material. The emitted electrons have a great deal of energy and knock off other electrons, sometimes resulting in breaking up the molecules of the material. These molecular fragments are called radiolytic byproducts. The radiation does not just kill bacteria, but produces new molecules in the meat itself never encountered in nature, some of which may be harmful. We actually don’t know very much about this possibility.

We do know that for irradiated fats, long-chain carbon based molecules, the radiolytic byproducts include 2-ACB, a chemical shown to cause colon cancer in mice. But that is just one of potentially thousands of different radiolytic byproducts of irradtiation. In effect, we are performing an enormous, uncontrolled experiment on millions of human beings – us – for the sole purpose of saving the already heavily subsidized meat industry a few pennies on the dollar. The effects could be devastating, healthwise, or maybe not. Is it worth the risk?

Even more interesting is a study of the change in flavor of irradiated meat products. The irradiated meat was descibred as tasting like “wet dog” or “singed hair”. Yum.

Food irradiation is banned in Europe, largely due to the above concerns. At a minimum, the labelling requirements should stay in place. The meat industry has lobbied to change the label to say “cold pasteurized” or remove it altogether. But we ought to be considering an outright ban on this very questionable practice.

I am not a vegetarian, but I used to be for about eight years, partly for reasons like this. I buy organic meat now whenever possible, and avoid fast food. I want to know what I am getting, and the meat industry doesn’t want us to know! Why don’t we let an informed market decide this one?

Here is a link to the FDA proposed rule change and public comment info.

I’m writing this from Berlin, in my room at Harnack-Haus, a meeting center and guest house owned by the Max Planck Society. The institute itself has a fascinating history, of which I just found the following spellbinding

Immediately upon opening its doors, the Harnack-House began to feed the “Dahlem Legend.” Nobel Prize winners and their students met here in social exchange and for academic discussion, holding lectures and colloquia. The House served as a club for members of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. Here they could lunch, read the international press, drink coffee in the garden, engage in sports, and play music. Foreign scholars were lodged in the guest apartments. The list of guests and lecturers reads like a “Who’s Who of Science”: Albert Einstein, Peter Deybe, Werner Heisenberg, Fritz Haber, Adolf Butenandt, Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner, Otto Meyerhof, Max Planck, Max von Laue and Otto Warburg. One Nobel Prize winner, the biologist Hans Fischer, even received the news of his award during his stay at the Harnack-House.

I’m here on an extremely short visit (arrived in Berlin around 1pm yesterday and fly out early tomorrow morning) for the annual meeting of the editorial board of New Journal of Physics (NJP). While quite a trek, and a not inconsequential amount of work, this is nevertheless a fun meeting (even though I didn’t get to watch World cup games in London, like last year.)

One thing that NJP likes to do is publish a number of focus issues each year. These involve enlisting one or more guest editors and getting them to corral a group of experts to contribute original research to a volume tightly concentrated on a particular topic. Sean and I (and our students) contributed a paper to one last year (for which Sean was the guest editor), but there are many others across all fields (which is what NJP covers). A full list, going back to 2000, when focus issues began is

• Focus on Measurement-Based Quantum Information Processing
• Focus on Complex Networked Systems: Theory and Application
• Focus on Interference in Mesoscopic Systems
• Focus on Dark Energy
• Focus on Accelerator and Beam Physics
• Focus on Casimir Forces
• Focus on Nanophotonics
• Focus on Correlated Electrons, Magnetism and Superconductivity in High Magnetic Fields
• Focus on Cold Atoms in Optical Lattices
• Focus on Gamma-Ray Bursts in the Swift Era
• Focus on Nano-electromechanical Systems
• Focus on Spacetime 100 Years Later
• Focus on Solid State Quantum Information
• Focus on Negative Refraction
• Focus on Photoemission and Electronic Structure
• Focus on Brownian Motion and Diffusion in the 21st Century
• Focus on Ultrafast Optics
• Focus on Orbital Physics
• Focus on Single Photons on Demand
• Focus on Turbulence
• Focus on Neutrino Physics
• Focus on Nanostructured Soft Matter
• Focus on Carbon Nanotubes
• Focus on Pattern Formation
• Focus on Quantum Gases
• Focus on Complex (Dusty) Plasmas
• Focus on Clusters at Surfaces
• Focus on Quantum Cryptography
• Focus on Turbulence in Magnetized Plasmas
• Focus on Supersymmetry in Physics
• Focus on Quark Gluon Plasma Searches in Heavy Ion Collisions
• Focus on Microlaser and Cavity QED
• Focus on Dark Matter

You can find links to all these at the focus issues site, and I hope you’ll take a look if interested, because anyone can read them, since open access is one of NJP’s raisons d’être.

I particularly enjoy the part of our meeting in which we brainstorm about possible future focus issues, and there are a couple coming out relatively soon that I am quite proud to have been either the originator or co-originator of. And, at today’s meeting, I suggested one specific focus issue to be initiated that was well received and which I think, when it comes out, will be of particular interest to many of our readers. It wouldn’t be right to go into details here (and I won’t in the comments), but I really hope it works out, and assuming it does, I’ll link to it here with a covering discussion.

Anyway, time for bed – my taxi will arrive ridiculously early tomorrow.