Mechanical watches have a complicated history. The first pocketwatch appeared in the early 1500′s, and they became popular fashion accessories long before they were very good at telling time. The idea of putting a watch on a strap and wrapping it around your wrist was very slow to catch on, and it wasn’t until the idea became popular among pilots and military personnel (for whom functionality trumped fashion preference) that wristwatches really took off. The course of the 20th century witnessed the rise of finely crafted mechanical wristwatches (especially Swiss) as both indicators of status and genuine works of technological art.

This all came crashing down with the quartz crisis of the 1970′s, when Seiko and other companies started to produce electronic timepieces that were both much cheaper and more reliable than mechanicals. For the kids today, of course, with their smartphones and iThings, wristwatches are seemingly going the way of the cassette tape. The Swiss watchmaking industry nearly collapsed, before the surviving companies were able to re-position themselves by appealing to horological connoisseurs and elitist yuppies who would like to think they are.

As someone who thinks about time as a full-time occupation (as well as a bit of an elitist yuppie myself), it was inevitable that I would become fascinated by watches. I don’t have nearly the financial wherewithal to splurge on the latest masterpieces out of Geneva, and my watch-snob credentials are ruined by the fact that I don’t mind wearing a well-designed quartz. But there’s a fascinating little sub-culture there, which you can experience at the WatchUSeek or TimeZone watch forums.

A reasonable argument could be made that we the Golden Age of mechanical watches is right now. As a luxury niche market, watchmakers at the high end have some freedom to experiment and innovate. There are some hits and some misses, of course. At some point I may find the time and energy to post something substantive about watchmaking, but right now I’ll just offer up this cool video for the Urwerk UR-110. (If you can find one for under $80,000, consider it a bargain.) It features a clever design in which a series of rotating barrels display the hour, and move by a dial on the side to indicate the minutes. There’s no attempt to explain what’s going on — this is pure glitz. Still — pretty compelling glitz.

We here at Cosmic Variance have long been warning of the coming robot menace. Not only are they gaining consciousness, they keep developing new and creepy ways to move. Along those lines, here’s a new robot from Harvard that looks like an innocent piece of plastic, but is actually a silent ninja with a variety of interesting gaits. (Via Mariette DiChristina’s Twitter.)

Researchers at George Whiteside’s lab explain that the idea came from observing squid and worms. Well, that’s comforting.

I’ve been traveling like crazy, then hosting visitors, and now am laid up with a nasty cold. So not much energy for blogging. On the other hand — plenty of time for non-expert reflections on the nature of microscopic complex systems!

The thing is, I’m pretty sure that my body will eventually overcome this cold virus. That’s one of the great things about living organisms — they can, in a wide variety of circumstances, repair themselves. From fighting off germs to healing broken bones, the body is pretty darn resilient.

Which brings up something that has always worried me about nanotechnology — the fact that the tiny machines that have been heroically constructed by the scientists working in this field just seem so darn fragile. It’s amazingly impressive what modern nano-engineers can do by way of manipulating matter at the atomic and molecular level, creating new materials and tiny machines and motors. But surely one has to worry about the little buggers breaking down. My macroscopic car is also an impressive feat of engineering, but it’s no good if a crucial component breaks.

So what you really want is microscopic machinery that is robust enough to repair itself. Fortunately, this problem has already been solved at least once: it’s called “life.” Even at relatively tiny scales, living organisms are sufficiently loose and redundant to be able to fix themselves when something small goes wrong, greatly extending their useful lifespan.

This is why my utterly underinformed opinion is that the biggest advances will come not from nanotechnology, but from synthetic biology. Once we get to the point that we can truly create new organisms from scratch, not simply modifying existing stock, many of the biggest dreams of nanotech will become much more real.

Some time ago John von Neumann proposed the idea of self-replicating machines. Not everyone believed that such a thing was possible — after all, the machine would have to include blueprints for another version of itself, including the self-replication mechanism, and how do you fit a copy of a machine into itself? (You might think that living organisms are an obvious counterexample to this argument, but some people used it as an argument against the idea that organisms are “just” machines.) But von Neumann figured it out, and immediately proposed the obvious plan: sending self-replicating spacecraft to seed the galaxy.

But if the machine breaks, it defeats the whole purpose. So you really want a self-repairing self-replicating machine. Which is awfully close to a working definition of “life.” It might not be human beings who eventually fill up the galaxy, but my suspicion is that it will be life in some form or another.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around these parts we’ve been known to discuss whether it makes any sense to say that the universe is a computer. There’s little doubt, of course, that parts of the universe are computer-like. And in case you are wondering, you can now officially remove DNA from your personal list of “things I suspect are not computers.”

Caltech researchers Lulu Qian and Erik Winfree have managed to coax 130 strands of DNA into performing what is unquestionably a calculation: taking the square root of a number. (Ars Technica post; Science paper behind paywall; open-access background paper.) Not a big number: we’re talking about four-digit binary numbers, so 15 at the biggest. And not very efficiently: with prodding, the calculation took eight hours. Moore’s Law isn’t really in danger here.

Still, pretty cool stuff. Mostly it’s interesting because it seems scalable: the authors claim that this kind of circuit architecture could be made much larger. It’s not the first biochemical circuit; RNA and bacterial colonies have been made into logic gates. But it’s the first to do something as elaborate as taking a square root.

Best of all, the authors decided to illustrate their method for a wide audience by means of a … whimsical YouTube video! Let’s hope this idea catches on.

[Note: this post was published prematurely, then deleted, and is now back.]

Michael Nielsen gave a great talk at TEDxWaterloo about the idea of “open science”:

There’s a great deal of buzz about “openness” in certain sectors of the science community; largely this has passed physics and astronomy by, because we’re already pretty darn open. It’s hard to image something more open than arxiv, where everyone puts their papers up for free even before they’re published in a journal.

But Michael’s talking about something much more ambitious: opening the process of creating science, not just publishing it. For experimentalists this would be difficult, for obvious reasons. (You think people who sweat to build an experiment are going to invite the public in to take a whirl?) For theory it is also hard, but the reasons are more subtle.

The point is that credit in science is given out on the basis of getting your name on published papers. In the arxiv era, the papers don’t necessarily have to appear in a traditional journal — but that’s a topic for another day. The model is set in stone: you have an idea, you work out its consequences to the point where it’s publishable, and you write a paper. Without that last step, you’re not going to get any credit. (Very occasionally you will see references to “unpublished work” or “private communication,” but it’s rare and not really for big-ticket ideas.)

So if I had an idea, I would either work it out myself or start working with students or collaborators. I certainly would not go around publicizing an undeveloped idea; I wouldn’t get any credit for it, and someone else could take it and develop it themselves. I might give seminars in which I mention the idea, but that’s only recommended once it’s to the point where a paper is on the horizon.

Michael and others want to overthrow that model. Their shining example is this blog post by Tim Gowers. Gowers is a mathematician who proposed attacking an open math problem right there on his blog, by asking for comments from the crowd. If they succeeded, they could publish a paper under a collective pseudonym. He next chose a problem — developing a combinatorial approach to the Hales-Jewett theorem — and, several hundred comments later, announced that they had succeeded. Here’s the paper. Buoyed by this success, people have set up a Polymath Wiki to expedite tackling other problems in this way.

Could this work for theoretical physics? I don’t see why not. But note that Michael spends a lot of his time in the talk pointing out the obvious — crowdsourcing doesn’t always work. I could easily imagine ways in which such a project could fail; too much noise and not enough signal, everyone with good ideas deciding they would rather work on them by themselves rather than sharing openly, etc.

Might be worth a shot, though. I’m thinking of suggesting some ideas here on this blog and seeing whether we get any useful input. Let me sleep on it.

Let’s just round up and say “everything.” In Germany they are currently debating rules on what data companies can keep and analyze, vs. what they must throw away. To make a point, Green Party politician Malte Spitz went to court to force Deutsche Telekom to share the data they had collected about him, just from his mobile phone. What is revealed, basically, is where he was essentially at every moment of the day. Spitz handed the information over to Zeit Online, who combined it with information he revealed himself via Twitter and his blog, to make a scarily detailed chronological map of his daily activities. (Via FlowingData.com.)

Check it out, they have a great animated reconstruction of Spitz’s daily movings, combined with a sidebar display saying how many phone conversations he was having and how many text messages. There’s even a spreadsheet so you can play with the data yourself if you are so inclined. They removed the actual phone numbers with which he was communicating, but of course the phone company has those.

People can decide for themselves whether this is intrusive or benign; more than a few people put nearly as much information online anyway, without thinking twice. But you should know that it’s out there.

At every point in space, there is something we call the “electric field.” It’s a tiny vector, a quantity with a magnitude and a direction. If you want to measure it, just put an electron at rest at that point, and watch it start moving. The direction and size of its acceleration (over and above what we get from gravity) is proportional to the electric field. Typically, if you watch closely enough, you’ll see our little electron jiggle back and forth like mad. That’s because the electric field doesn’t just sit there; we are surrounded by an extraordinary superposition of all kinds of electromagnetic waves, pushing by us with different amplitudes and directions and frequencies. If you build the right type of gizmo with an appropriate collection of electrons, you can pick out just a single wavelength from amidst the cacophony. Voila! You are listening in on the electromagnetic spectrum.

In the modern world, there are an awful lot of devices out there communicating by shooting electromagnetic waves at each other. In particular in the radio frequency range (roughly between 10 kHz and 300 GHz), which has the nice property that its waves aren’t blocked by annoying things like walls or air. This means that everyone building such devices wants to produce waves at some part of the spectrum, and that in turn means that the right to do so is an extraordinarily valuable commodity. In the US, the Federal Communications Commission gets to decide who can do what at various different radio frequencies.

This state of affairs has come into the news once again, as wireless carrier AT&T has swallowed competitor T-Mobile; many people would be unsurprised if Verizon counters by swallowing Sprint, leaving us with a duopoly and possibly giving consumers the squeeze. Currently big chunk of spectrum is allocated to broadcast TV, which some are arguing is a waste, since you could stick a lot of mobile data devices in there and everyone has cable anyway.

All very fascinating, but somewhat over my head. I’m more of a theoretical kind of guy. I just wanted an excuse to link to this gorgeous chart (pdf), showing how the spectrum is currently allocated.

Click for much bigger and more legible pdf version. There’s a lot going on here; see the zoom-in of a tiny region near 30 GHz:

Nice to see that there is space carved out for scientific research, including radio astronomy. Those jiggling electrons have a lot of work to do, let’s hope they can keep everything straight.

Japan is in the midst of a slow-motion nuclear meltdown. Each new day brings word of further problems. At this point three reactors have been flooded with seawater, and appear contained (at least for the time being). The news reports are incoherent and conflicting, and nobody seems to really know what’s happening. This may be because the information is not public. Or it could be because the situation on the ground is fundamentally incoherent. You can’t exactly walk up to reactor #2, open the door, and take a peek inside. Amazingly, the best up-to-date resource appears to be wikipedia (which incorporates the useful summary tables from the Japan Atomic Industrial Forum).

The earthquake happened at 2:26pm. Two minutes later, the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear plant went into SCRAM mode, and shut down. The control rods were inserted. The diesel generators fired up. Everything worked to plan.

The Fukushima-Daiichi plants are boiling water reactors. In simplest terms, this is just a pile of radioactive material (generally uranium) which gets hot (literally hot, not just radioactive). You run water over it, generate superheated water and steam, drive a turbine, and produce electricity. Instead of burning coal, you use radioactive decay as the source of heat, but otherwise the basic mechanism is surprisingly similar to a conventional power plant. You turn off a nuclear reactor by inserting control rods, which absorb a lot of the neutrons, and inhibit further fission reactions. So, two minutes after the quake, the control rods were inserted, and the reactors were no longer undergoing nuclear fission. However, one of the peculiarities of nuclear power is that even after the reactor is shut “off” there is still a significant amount of residual radioactive material. This material continues to decay, generating significant heat (>10 megawatt; by now [almost a week later] it’s ~1 megawatt, enough to power a thousand homes). Thus, even after turning a reactor off, it still generates significant power for a few weeks, and the resulting heat needs to be removed and the radioactive core kept cool . And to do this, you need to pump in a lot of water (ideally thousands of gallons/min) at high pressure. And this requires a fair amount of power.

The plant was working perfectly for roughly 30 minutes after the earthquake. The tsunami was on its way, but the plant operators were blind to it. Had they known, they could have depressurized the nuclear cores in anticipation. But they were focused on riding out the earthquake, which they did admirably. And then the tsunami hit. Just a few years ago, after the tsunami in the Indian Ocean, the Fukushima-Daiichi plant was upgraded to deal with a worst-case, 5.3 meter tsunami. The wave that hit the plant last Friday was roughly 10 meters high. It swamped the diesel generators, as well as the fuel tanks and the switching station. The system was “live” because of the SCRAM, and the local electrical grid got fried. Fortunately there were backup batteries, which lasted another 9.5 hours. At around midnight the batteries ran out of power, and the plant was no longer able to cool its reactor cores. At this point, the Troubles began.

As the core starts to heat up, it boils off the surrounding water. Eventually the fuel rods are exposed to the air. This causes the core to heat up even faster, and also causes a reaction with the zirconium cladding (which holds the uranium fuel pellets in place), generating hydrogen gas. Without any cooling, the fuel gets hot (> 1500 K/2200 F), and starts to melt. The hydrogen gas collects, and eventually explodes (think Hindenberg). This happened in reactor #1 on Saturday, blowing the roof off of the reactor building, but leaving the containment vessel (which is ~1 meter thick steel) intact. On Monday a similar explosion happened to #3, and on Tuesday there was an explosion at #2. Both of their containment vessels were probably compromised. Rupturing a containment vessel is very bad. So long as most of the radioactive material is contained, the damage to the outside world is similarly contained (modulo venting of various radioactive gas, which has been happening, but not at profoundly dangerous levels). Once a containment vessel is ruptured, the radioactive material can end up anywhere; the sky’s the limit. Chernobyl did not have a containment vessel.

The current situation seems to be that seawater is being pumped into all three broken reactors (#1–3), and they are in thermal control. It seems likely that all three sets of fuel rods are partially melted and damaged. It also seems likely that the containment vessels in #2 and #3 have been compromised, although probably not severely. There are some concerns about spent fuel rods in pools near reactors #3 and #4. So long as the rods are covered in sufficient water, they are stable. If the rods are exposed, they heat up. And when they get hot, they start to burn through their cladding, and emit radioactive material. These pools are not within containment vessels, and therefore they are potentially even more dangerous than the cores of active reactors. Their radioactive emission goes directly into the surroundings. But so long as there is water in the pools, they should be fine. The latest claim (by the Chairman of the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission) is that the storage pool at the #4 reactor has little to no water. If true, this is a very ominous development.

This is by far the most dire situation on the planet at the moment. It has the world’s attention. We’ve had almost a week. Why can’t we just fix it? There are a number of serious complications. First, there’s the issue of radiation. People are unable to walk up to most of the buildings and see what’s going on, lest they get immediate and severe radiation poisoning. There are remote sensors and cameras, but fundamentally everyone is guessing as to what’s happening inside. Even if we knew exactly how things looked, it’s still a major engineering feat to get the appropriate amount of water running through these highly complex systems to do the cooling. There have been explosions, there are stuck valves, there are broken pumps, there are ongoing fires. The world’s resources are focused on this problem. Millions of lives potentially depend upon the outcome. And, thus far, progress has been haphazard and halting, despite heroic efforts on the part of the Japanese crew. The engineering challenges may simply be too great.

The worst-case scenario for the Daiichi reactors plays out something like this: 1. the storage pool at #4 is indeed dry. Because it’s uncontained, the radiation levels in the area get very high. Everyone needs to evacuate the complex. 2. Without anyone manning the cooling systems, the cooling stops. Everything overheats. 3. There are various explosions, resulting in a breach to a containment vessel. 4. There is a subsequent steam explosion, and a plume of radioactive material is generated. 5. Wind carries the plume in the direction of Tokyo (world’s largest metropolis), a mere 140 miles (225 km) away. We can’t even contemplate trying to evacuate and treat a city of 35 million people. As far as I can tell, things do not appear to be headed in this direction. But such an outcome is unfortunately not outside the realm of possibility, and just contemplating this should freak you out. But, to reiterate, it’s very unlikely, and a lot of things would have to go catastrophically wrong. I’d love to quantify just how unlikely, but cannot. My guess is that nobody can, since there are too many uncertainties, and we’re fundamentally in uncharted territory.

The best-case scenario, and probably most likely, is that the Fukushima-Daiichi plant will limp along, but without any catastrophic events (such as a major Chernobyl-style radioactive explosion and fire). The fuel will continue to cool, the fires will be put out, the amount of radiation will subside, and eventually the entire site will be entombed and become a testament to human hubris.

It’s the beginning of the end for the Tevatron at Fermilab. In the fall, the Department of Energy’s High Energy Physics Advisory Panel recommended that the Tevatron be funded to run for three years beyond the planned end in September of 2011, largely in order to provide additional information in the search for the Higgs boson. The recommendation was contingent on there being new funds, about 5% above current levels, in order to staff and operate the machine and the experiments. But in a letter to day to the chair of HEPAP, the head of the Office of Science at the Department of Energy, William Brinkman, wrote that “Unfortunately, the current budgetary climate is very challenging, and additional funding has not been identified. Therefore…operation of the Tevatron will end in FY2011, as originally scheduled.”

The dream for a superconducting proton synchrotron at Fermilab goes back to at least 1976, when it began to become clear that the interesting mass range to explore in order to understand the weak interaction would be around 100 GeV. The lab was engaged in a wide range of fixed target experiments, using the Fermilab Main Ring proton synchrotron as its workhorse, and in 1977 the b (or bottom) quark was discovered there. This meant there had to be a top quark, as well as very massive (80-100 GeV) W and Z bosons.

But Europe pulled ahead – it already had the Super Proton Synchrotron, and plans to convert it into a proton-antiproton collider. Whoever did so first would have the energy to produce W’s and Z’s directly, and nail down their masses. And maybe, whoever managed to create the first high energy proton-antiproton collider would be able to find the top quark, whose mass could be, well, just about anything above the b quark mass of 5 GeV, but probably at least 20 GeV.

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