Archive for the 'Science & Culture' category

The End of Nobel Week

Dec 13 2011 Published by under Academia, Astronomy & Physics, Big Bang & Cosmology, Cosmology, Personal Updates, Physics & Astronomy, Science, Science & Culture, science & society, Self, The Business of Astronomy

The Sunday (Dec. 11) after the Nobel Prize ceremony was a slow and quiet day. I slept in a bit (due to having gone to bed so late the night of the cermoney), but not as much as I had intended. That was fine, though, as late in the afternoon I fell asleep, to wake up briefly in the evening, only to fall asleep again. So, the day before yesterday, I slept a lot. (If only you could bank sleep.) The one fun thing I did on Sunday was head down to the Vasa Museum. The Vasa was a ship that was launched in the early 17th century, commissioned by the then-king of Sweden, Gustavus Adolphus II. Its trip didn't last long; on its first voyage, it tipped, took on water, and sank. In the mid-twentieth century, it was rasied again, and today forms the basis of a museum all about early 17th-century Swedish ships, shipbuilding, and life related to these things. The Vasa was a warship, loaded with cannon. At the time, Sweden was perenially at war with Poland (and sometimes Denmark as well). Ah, the Renaissance.

[Vasa]
The Vasa

On Monday, I did a bit more gratuitous walking about Stockholm, and then in the afternoon there was a symposium at the Albanova University Center. This is where SCP member Ariel Goobar is headquartered, along with the graduate students and post-docs who have worked with him and continue to work with him. The symposium was introduced by saying that we'd heard a lot from Saul, Adam, and Brian at the Nobel Lectures; for these two hours, we'd hear from other members of the team. The three laureates moderated, while four different panels representing four different eras of the whole supernova search business gave short talklets about the prehistory of the whole thing. That included Rich Muller talking about the LBL robotic search, as well as Rich's Nemesis idea that (if I am not mistaken) was the topic of Saul's thesis, and Bob Kirshner talking about supernova work "back in the day" when he was the thesis advisor for both Brian Schmidt and Adam Reiss. It also included Richard Ellis talking about the original Danish high-redshift supernova search (which wasn't really succesful; they found only one supernova, and after maximum light). Mark Phillips talked about the genesis of the Calan-Tololo supernova search, which established Type Ia supernovae as calibratable standard candles suitable cosmology, and whose supernovae served as the low-redshift comparison set for both high-redshift teams.

[Saul on the Phone]
Many people commented on Saul's propensity for calling people at observatories, as Richard Ellis does here

The second panel was about the early days of the project. Carl Pennypacker, Brian Boyle, Heidi Newberg, and Warrick Couch talked about the early days of the SCP, when the weather was extremely frustrating, and Heidi figured she'd get a thesis out of it even if they didn't manage to find even a single supernova. (The first supernova was found in 1992.) Nick Suntzeff talked about the genesis of the High-Z team.

The next batch of people included Alejandro Clocchiatti and Chris Smith from the High-Z team, and Peter Nugent and myself from the SCP. After Peter told a very funny story abuot observing at the CTIO and neary running over Brian Schmidt in a runaway CTIO volkswagon bug whose brakes had failed, it was difficult to follow myself. In the SCP, we'd only been told what the program was and what we were going to be talking about an hour or so before the thing began, and I had no idea what anybody else was going to say, so I didn't really plan anything. The result was that I just blathered a little bit about Moore's Law and computer (and network) technology having made it all possible, and I completely failed to make any of the two or three points I was hoping to make about what it was like to adopt the search software from Alex Kim and Ivan Small, and spend 40-hour days processing the data as it came in during a search run.

Next, Alex Filippenko, Isobel Hook, Chris Lidman, Ron Gilliland, Saurabh Jha, and Alex Kim talked about spectroscopy (showing off how much better an 8m telescope is than a 4m telescope for the more distant supernovae), using HST to observe supernovae, and some other things. Saurabh told an amusing story about performing the supernova photometry. Adam Reiss had been put in charge of the analysis that lead to the High-Z team's discovery paper by team leader Brian Schmidt. Adam, in turn, had farmed out the work of getting the photometric lightcurves to several team members. When the due date came, he sent out an e-mail to all of them saying (I paraphrase) "thank you! Everybody but one (you know who you are) have turned in your data." This made Saurabh, a young grad student at the time, feel terrible, because he was the one. He went nuts over the next 36 hours, and managed to get his data in. Only after that, running into Peter Garnevich and Ron Gilliland, did he figure out that in fact nobody had managed to get their data in, and Adam's message wasn't entirely serious.

Finally, Ariel Goobar, John Tonry, Peter Garnevich, and Craig Hogan talked about the cosmology analysis. Craig Hogan, the theorist, went last. He pointed out, as we all know, that while we've established that the Universe is accelerating, we don't know why. "Dark Energy" is the name we give to the phenomenon, but we don't know what it is, or even if it is stuff at all; it may in fact be that we're seeing the breakdown of General Relativity. Craig and John did, at the end during a Q&A period, rain a bit on everybody's parade by saying that this field is more or less a dead field. I've had similar feelings myself for a few years, but few would agree with me. There are parameters about Dark Energy that can be measured; my suspicion is that we're just going to keep narrowing the errorbars around the default, not-terribly-interesting answer. (If the values are even slightly different from that answer, it's extremely interesting. However, you can never prove that that answer is right, you can only shrink the error bars around it. There are arguments, however, why it's not a waste of time to do this, and I won't get into it here.)

During the Q&A period, Hubble Space Telescope director Matt Mountain asked a leading question about "can't we all just get along?" He talked about repeated semesters where the HST time allocation committee would assign time to either Adam or to Saul; inevitably, he would then hear from the other one shortly thereafter. He suggested that with HST having only perhaps five years left, and nothing to follow it very soon, it was a crucial time for them to figure out ways in which the community as a whole could work together. Indeed, it sounded to me like he was inviting them to get together and put in a proposal to ask for a truly impressive amount of HST time, even more than the already-impressive amounts of time that has gone to supernova cosmology work. (This was what triggered Craig Hogan and John Tonry to caution that perhaps beating down the error bars on the two parameters we've identified, rather than trying to be more creative, might not be the best way to proceed.)

[Big Rodent]
For example, the human-sized rodent was pretty scary

After the symposium, both groups retired to the Junibcken museum, a museum dedicated to Swedish children's litrature, in particular the stories of Astrid Lindgren (the author of the Pippi Longstockings books). (I have to admit to being nearly compltely ignorant about those.) We all rode their Story Train (in little cars of 3), that took us through 15-minute tour of lovingly recreated dioramas of scenes from these stories... none of which I recognized. I was sitting with Shane and Stormy Burns as we made the trip, and we agreed that these would probably be delightful to kids who were fans of the books. We also thought that some of the scenes would be quite scary.

At the end of the train ride was a dinner, for both of the teams together. Of course, at the end of the dinner, there were some speeches, which were all quite nice. Alex Filippenko— who started collaborating with Saul on the SCP, but defected to the High-Z team in what I gather was a rather unpleasant falling-out— gave a nice speech crediting the two teams' differences with being strengths, as each team learned from the other. (And, of course, he mentioned, as did a man from the Royal Swedish Academy (whose name I didn't get) involved in the Nobel selection, that the fact that there were two different teams with the same result is part of why the world couldn't just dismiss it right away, as we so far have more or less done with the FTL neutrino result.) Several other peple told stories about various things, including Saul's father, and the woman from the Swedish diplomat service who had been appointed as Saul's liaison and shepherd during the whole process. She had only met Saul just this week, but said that she was impressed with how gracious he was talking to nearly everybody. Whether it was a 15-year-old or a colleague, he was always interested when talking to them.

[Santa Lucia]
Santa Lucia showed up to help banish the darkness; she brought with her a rather nice group of a capella singers who sang Christmas songs. At least, I think they were; but for "Deck the Halls", they were all in Swedish.

In the end, several people remarked that it was unusal for a group this large, especailly including collabortors, to come out to the Nobel Prize Ceremony. Brian, Adam, and Saul may be the ones with the glory, they may be the ones that history will remember, but they did a good job of sharing some part of the glory with the rest of us during this week. Somebody (I forget who, but it may also have been Alex Filippenko) commented that it's too bad that too many members of the public think that science is done by individuals working away all by themselves— antisocial individuals, even. For these groups that's certainly not the case, and indeed this science could never have been accomplished in such a mode. The fact that the Nobel Prize celebrates individuals only serves to cement this model in the public mind. However, as I said, Saul, Brian, and Adam were very generous with making it clear that there are a lot of people who share the credit for this discovery.

And now I'm on my way home; I've composed this post in fits and starts along my way home, and won't finish getting all the pictures embedded until after I'm home in Squamish. (I decided not to attend the Lucia Ball on the 13th, but to head home.)

This last evening, I also got what I think is the coolest souvenir of the trip. The Astrophysical Journal put out a special "Nobel" commemorative reprint of the Perlmutter '99 paper (as well as the corresponding Riess '98 paper, although I didn't see that one). We were all given copies of it. At the end of the night, those of us who were still there passed the copies around to each other to sign. A few signatures are missing, but I do have this Nobel commemorative reprint with the signatures of Saul and all the other authors (including myself). That's going to get framed and put on my office wall next to the Gruber prize!

[Signed Paper]
Perlmutter et al., 1999

I can't help but get a wee bit choked up when I think about this last week— when I think about the fact that I was a major contributor to one of the coolest discoveries in science in the last couple of decades, and that the world has now recognized that discovery with its highest honor. It's been quite a week.

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The Nobel Prize Ceremony and Banquet

Dec 11 2011 Published by under Astronomy & Physics, Big Bang & Cosmology, Cosmology, Personal Updates, Physics & Astronomy, Science, Science & Culture, science & society, Self, The Business of Astronomy

[chair]
Saul's, Brian's, and Adam's chair

On the morning of Saturday, December 11, I walked down to the Nobel Museum, planning to have lunch with Shane Burns (my college thesis advisor at Harvey Mudd, and later a collaborator when I was a post-doc at LBNL). Because the English "tour" (really, lecture with people standing around) was starting just as I got there, I went along on that. Among other things, I learned that while there are 800 some-odd Nobel Laureates, only just over 40 of them are women. The Nobel Museum is only 10 or 20 years old. They have a rotating exhibit; right now, there's one about Marie Curie. (Ironically, even though the fraction of female Nobel laureates is small, Marie Curie is probably the most iconic physics laureate.) When the museum opened, and some laureates first showed up, they realized that they ought to have a guest book; they hadn't planned to do that, so at the last minute they decided to make the cafe the guest book. Somebody grabbed a white paint-pen, and got the laureates to sign the bottom of a chair. Now, if you turn over a chair, you can find signatures of laureates. (At lunch, I sat on the chair signed by David Gross. I felt very asymptotically free, and very colorful.)

At lunch, I chatted with Shane, sharing war stories about teaching on the block system, and telling him a little more about Quest. Shane teaches at Colorado College, the school that (decades ago) pioneered the idea of the block system, and the place Quest got the idea from. We also shared some stories about being bitter about tenure denials of years past. Shane was denied tenure at Harvey Mudd. I asked him if he was still bitter; he said he had been, but when he started at CC, he got over it. He's much happier at CC (among other things, he and his wife would much rather live in Colorado than Southern California), and it's where he always wanted to be. I feel similarly about Quest. I wouldn't say I'm over my bitterness from Vanderbilt (the experience of which provided so much great fodder for this blog during its glory days), but Quest is much more the sort of place that I've always wanted to be. (I just hope that stupid Canadian immigration doesn't prevent me from staying there long-term.)

[Shane & I]
Shane and I in front of a Marie Curie quote

After lunch, I hoofed it back to the hotel to put on my tails, and my way-too-tight shoes. I have a pair of shiny black shoes that I wear with my tux... although my use of the present tense is perhaps somewhat deceitful. While I've worn my tux recently, I'm not sure I've worn these shoes in over 10 years. And, just like the Universe, I've expanded in the last 10 years. Yes, most of that's at the waist, but when you get fat, you get fat everywhere. (This can lead to sleep apnea, it turns out, as you get fat on the inside of your windpipe.) What's more, I brought thick black socks, for very rational reasons. (Sweden, winter, ergo thick socks.) My feet were crushed in them, and I was in intense pain throughout much of the evening, especially when I had to stand up. At dinner, I took off my shoes (my feet were under the table, and nobody knew, so I didn't get ejected), which was quite nice.

From there, I went down to the Grand Hotel to pick up the bus for the Nobel Ceremony. It was quite nice. There were a lot of very well-dressed people about. Down on stage, there were chairs on one side for the Swedish Royal party, and chairs on the other side for the laureates. (That is, except for the three Peace laureates, who are three women from Africa and the Middle East, honored for their work in improving womens' rights. The Nobel Peace Prize is presented in Oslo, Norway, each year, as it's a committee formed by the Norwegian Parliament that chooses the Peace laureates.) Behind them were chairs for what I assume were members of the committees that choose all of the Nobel prizes.

[Nobel Ceremony]
Left, front: a bunch of white guys about to get their Nobel Prizes. Right: front: the Swedish Queen, King, and Crown Princess.

I have to admit that I wanted to jump up and down and cheer and shout when Saul got his Nobel. Not only was it personally very exciting, what with my having been one of the core members of the team when we were doing the supernova searches and the analysis the last year or so before the announcement, but the man really deserved it. Yeah, in a sense, we all deserved it, and indeed we all got some recognition four years ago with the Gruber Prize. But, it was Saul who created this field. Adam and Brian, the two from the other team who shared the prize with Saul, also deserved it. They made an independent measurement of the acceleration, and the fact that there were two teams that came out with the measurement at the same time is the reason that people took the measurement as seriously as they did when it first came out. However, Saul was the one who was pushing it in the early days, back in 1988, and who persevered in pushing it through what sounded like several very early trying years. He kept pushing it, cajoling observatory time allocation committees to allow him to schedule the time the way he needed, even as some members of what would become the other team were still swearing up and down that it couldn't be done. I seriously doubt I would have had the perseverance to stick with the program for so long, taking four years before even one supernova was discovered, and another two before a batch of a mere 7 were discovered, and another three after that before the answer that he'd been looking for all along came out. But Saul is extremely optimistic, and extremely perseverant.

[Saul Getting the Nobel Prize]
Saul Perlmutter getting his Nobel Prize from the King of Sweden

I do have to admit, I took the opportunity to give in to my jetlag during the ceremony. Except for the first speech, all of the rest were in Swedish. My knowledge of Swedish is less than my knowledge of Klingon, for at least I know one word in Klingon. ("Kaplah!") We did have booklets with translations of the speeches. However, I could read those faster than those giving the speeches could say them, so I had a bit of time after each one to doze off.... As I write this, it sounds pretty horrifying to say that I napped during the Nobel prize ceremony, but, well, it was practical! I was always awake as the King gave each prize. (Everybody in the room stood up when the King stood up. I would hate to be King.)

After that was the Nobel Banquet, which was quite an exercise in pomp and circumstance. The banquet was in this huge hall at City Hall, which is nicely designed to look like an outdoor venue. The (very high) ceiling is a projection screen, on which are projected vaguely cloudy-looking things, and the inner walls look like outside walls of Swedish buildings, so the illusion is quite effective. (Yes, I couldn't help making a comparison to the ceiling at Hogwarts.)

[Banquet Room]
The room where we had the Nobel Banquet (after it was over)
[Banquet Ceiling]
The Hogwarts-style ceiling

During the three-course meal, there were some ballet/theater/music numbers, where performers would move through the room and do... something. I didn't completely follow what was going on, but it was fun. As they were finishing, an extremely efficient regiment of waiters would come, stand by every table, and then, all at once, serve everybody. I've been at many big events where the head table is served... and by the time the last table is served, the people at the head table have already finished, gone home, had a full-night's sleep, started their next day, quit their job, and moved to another city. Not here. Everything was very efficient, very synchronized, and very well managed by the professional cadre of waiters.

[Dessert]
Dessert had red hair

The dinner was quite good. Others at the table who I guess are much more into gourmet food than I was were poo-pooing it ("only a three course meal"), but hey, it was way better than I usually eat!

After that was over, there was "dancing in the Golden ballroom". On display were the medals and individually customized diplomas for the laureates. Had security not been watching, I would have grabbed a snapshot of it. (Indeed, we were not supposed to take pictures at all during the banquet, but I figure, what's the point of being an iconoclast if you can't take pictures when you aren't supposed to?)

From there, we retired to the University of Stockholm, where the students there put on the nightcap ball. This was a huge party and masquerade, attended it seemed mostly by undergraduates. Some people were in quite interesting costumes. There was a huge array of themed rooms, with different things going on in different rooms. Because my feet were utterly killing me, I spent a bit of time sitting in one place listening to a nice jazz combo. Later on, in another room, I found a stage where a string quartet plus a clarinetist (all with painted-on masks on their face) started playing the Mozart Clarinet Quintet. They were really quite good, but alas being in a party room where everybody was talking, I was able to sort of hear them standing right next to the stage. Saul, a violinist himself, was elsewhere in the same room; he didn't even realize that the chamber group was there playing. Sadly, I didn't get to stay to hear them complete even the first movement, because the SCP had planned to take more group photos at 1:15 AM.

[Quintet]
Masqued Swedish students playing the Mozart Clarinet Quintet
[The SCP]
A Well-Dressed SCP Staircase Photo in need of some image processing to balance the contrast in the front and back

Next followed group photos. We started with what is a bit of an unofficial occasional SCP tradition: the staircase photo. We then did photos standing around, and then every conceivable combination of people had their picture taken with Saul. (I told Saul he was going to have to sign each and every one of the photos later.)

At 2AM, I took a taxi home, and took off my shoes, and then goofed off a bit on the computer to unwind. Ufda. My feet still hurt the next day. Excedrin helped me sleep through the night... that is, insofar as sleeping from 4AM to 8:30AM is "through the night". I sense a nap coming on.

A month ago, when I was in the throes of my third block in a row and reaching the burnout stage that all professors who teach on the block seem to at the very least flirt with when that happens, I was considering not coming. I'm not somebody who loves to travel, and having to deal with getting (and paying for...) the formal wear and all of that made the thing seem a bit like a pain. But, I'm extremely happy that I've come. It's been great catching up with members of the SCP (including chatting with Brad Schaefer about our mutual student, Andrew Collazzi, who did research with me as an undergraduate at Vanderbilt and just recently finished his PhD with Brad at LSU). The pomp and circumstance surrounding all of this is, really, a little bit silly (much as the Academy Awards in the USA are silly, or even for that matter the Presidential Inauguration), but it's a good kind of silly. It's celebrating the furthering of human knowledge, which is a great thing to celebrate. And, it's all a very classy kind of silly. Except for my still-tingling feet, I thoroughly enjoyed it, and although it's barely over 12 hours later, watching Saul being given that Nobel Prize is one of those life events I wouldn't want to have missed.

[SCPers from the Late-1997 Berkeley Analysis Team]
(Some of the) people who were in Berkeley during the 1997 push to complete the analysis that led to the discovery of the accelerating Unvierse. Front, L to R: Patricia Castro, me, Saul Perlmutter, Nelson Nunes. Back, L to R: Peter Nugent, Sabastien Fabbro, Robert Quimby, and Greg Aldering either completely wasted, or just facpalming at it all.
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Nobel Week Festivities Part 1

Dec 10 2011 Published by under Astronomy & Physics, Big Bang & Cosmology, Cosmology, Personal Updates, Physics & Astronomy, Science, Science & Culture, science & society, Self, The Business of Astronomy

I'm out here in Stockholm for the ceremonies surrounding Saul Perlmutter's Nobel Prize. Most of the members of the group who were on the 1999 paper are here.

The Big Event (not to be confused with the Bang) comes tonight, when the prizes themselves are presented. However, there's been a fair number of festivities already. I arrived on Wednesday afternoon terribly jetlagged. It seemed odd that it was Wednesday to me, what with my having left early Tuesday morning. The flights were very long, but not that long. From this, I'm concluding that the Earth must be round, and that there must have been a 9 hour change in the clock time to account for the position of the Sun relative to my position on the planet. That it was already dark at 3PM didn't help much.... We're so far North that the Sun never gets very high in the sky in the winter, and it doesn't stay up very long. It was also cloudy when I arrived, so the deep twilight was even deeper.

I went to my room and crashed for a 1-hour power nap before putting on my jacket and tie and the shoes in which I'm not as happy walking as I am in my Birkenstocks, and, with Don Groom, wandered in the vague direction of the Grand Hotel, eventually finding it through not the most efficient route. From there, we went over to a reception at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. I foolishly forgot to bring my camera, and also didn't take any pictures with my phone, so no snaps from that night.


Susana Deustua before the Nobel Lecture

The next morning (Thursday, 8-December) was the Nobel lectures at the University of Stockholm. The physics lectures lasted about two hours. They started with Brian Schmidt, went through Adam Riess, and ended with Saul's. For the last 15 minutes of Saul's lecture, he made a point of describing how the whole team worked together. It evolved over time. Different members of the team were active in different eras. When he got to the era of the couple of years before the discovery, he was describing the distributed effort with people at telescopes all over the world, and the team in Berkeley working on a variety of things. What he said when my picture popped up was: "Rob Knop, who thinks, types, and programs faster than I talk." (Saul talks pretty fast, so this was a nice complement.)


Saul giving the Nobel Lecture

After the physics lecture, our team snuck out of the hall. (All due apologies to the Chemistry and Economics laureates.) We had scheduled a team lunch for the SCP at a smorgasbord restaurant. Where was it? I don't know... we got on a bus, and then on a boat to make our way over to the restaurant. The boat ride was nice, although up on the top deck it really was rather cold. Yesterday, I posted a group photo of the members of the SCP who were present at the lunch. There were a few people who were on the discovery paper who weren't there, because they hadn't arrived yet (I'm presuming), including Patricia Castro, Isobel Hook, and Matthew Kim. (Also on that paper was Alex Filippenko, but in 1996 he defected to the other team, so he hasn't been going to SCP team meetings for a decade and a half now.) Standing in for Gerson Goldhaber is his daughter, three from the right; Gerson died in 2010.


On the boat after lunch. Left to Right: Saul Perlmutter Alex Kim, Ivan Small, Julia Lee, Julia's Husband (Andrew, I think), and me

Joseph Calleja and the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra at the 2011 Nobel Prize Concert

Finally, on the evening of December 8, I went to the Nobel concert. It's much easier to buy extremely expensive concert tickets when they're in a foreign currency, and you don't know the exchange rate. I blithely put down my credit card and was charged 1,500SEK, not realizing until later that that was in the neighborhood of $250...! I don't know if I've ever spent that much to go to a single concert before. The concert was good; I've been to other concerts that cost a quarter as much that were just as good, but you don't get the opportunity to go to the Nobel Concert very often, so what the heck. Tenor Joseph Calleja was the soloist, and he was quite good. I must admit, though, as a violinist myself, my favorite piece on the program was Dance Macabre by Saint-Saens. At the concert, I was sitting next to Rich Muller, about whom there's been a buzz in the science blogosphere recently because of his coming out and saying that, yeah, when he reanalyzed the data, it turns out that climate change is real just like all the people in the field who were working on it all along had said. I didn't talk to him about climate change, but I did talk about my general sense of despair about the world in general. (I feel more like we're screwed now than I did in the Cold War 1980s.) He doesn't share it at all; he thinks 2011 is the best time to be alive of all of human history. I must admit myself that I'm in a teaching job now that's more like the job I'm supposed to be in (and that I've always wanted) than any other job I've ever had, so perhaps 2011 is the best year for Rob Knop... but for the world at large? I honestly think that the world was a better place before Sep 11, 2001; not because of the terrorists directly, but because of how the world (mostly the USA) responded to it. But, enough gratuitous philosophizing.

Yesterday (Friday December 9) was a quiet day for me. There were events, but I didn't have tickets to any of them. There are finite tickets to each event, so Saul has been parceling them out. There was a reception at the Nordic Museum last night, but because I went to the December 7 reception, I sat out last night's. A bunch of team members also went to their national embassies for some sort of celebration or another. I'm not sure if I would have been sent to the USA or Canadian embassy... and, in any event, I spend too much time criticizing the government on microblogging platforms for them to want to be seen with me. I took the opportunity of the free day to sleep a lot...! Also, I had lunch with MICA director and Caltech astronomer George Djorgovski and his wife Leslie Maxfield (with whom I was in a production of Hello Dolly at Caltech a bit under 20 years ago); they were randomly in Stockholm for a conference.


George, Leslie, and myself

As an afterthought, I do need to read my camera's manual and figure out how to use it better. I've got blurry pictures of Saul and others from a great distance giving the Nobel lectures, and blurry pictures from the Nobel concert. It's not the world's most expensive camera, and it's already better than my skill with a camera for normal snapshot situations. However, I do know enough to be able to take advantage of some of its low-light tweaks, and to be able to take advantage of "focusing at infinity", so I should figure out what all the mysterious icons on the screen really mean when you're futzing with the settings.

Today (Saturday December 10) is the big event. Mid-afternoon, I'll start putting on my formal outfit. Once those two hours are done, I'll head down to the Grand Hotel, where we'll all get on the bus to go to the Nobel Banquet. After that is the midnight ball. I'm not sure exactly what that means, but I'm sure it has something to do with "rolling without slipping down a plane inclined at angle ϑ". That's how I usually encounter a ball.

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The SCP during Nobel Week in Stockholm

Dec 09 2011 Published by under Astronomy & Physics, Big Bang & Cosmology, Cosmology, Personal Updates, Physics & Astronomy, Science, Science & Culture, Self, The Business of Astronomy

Much pomp and circumstance in Stockholm this week. I'll blog a bit more about it when I get a chance, but for now, here's a photo of the group that was taken yesterday during an enormous smorgasbord lunch.

Front, L to R: Alex Kim, Pilar Ruiz-Lapuente, Andy Fruchter, Richard Ellis, Julia Lee, Susana Deustua, Saul Perlmutter, Warrick Couch, Heidi Newberg, Silvia Gabi, Chris Lidman, Don Groom.

Middle: Nelson Nunes

Back, L to R: Ivan Small, Sebastien Fabbro, Greg Aldering, Robert Quimby, Brad Schaefer, Rob Knop, Reynald Pain, Carl Pennypacker, Shane Burns, Rich Muller, Ariel Goobar, Peter Nugent

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Online Talk Tomorrow (12-03) About FTL Neutrinos

Dec 02 2011 Published by under Astronomy & Physics, General Relativity, Physics & Astronomy, Science, Science & Culture, science & society, Second Life, Second Life Events

Tomorrow morning, December 3, at 10:00AM pacific time (18:00 UT), I'll be giving the MICA public outreach talk about the faster-than-light neutrino results from CERN and Grand Sasso. The talk will include an overview of the OPERA experiment that has led to the result, a summary of the result, my own headscratching about whether or not it's real, and some notes about what this does (and, more importantly, does not) imply about our confidence in the theory of Relativity.

The talk will be at the MICA Large Ampitheater, and all are welcome. Remember, a Second Life account is free!

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In Which I Compare the Slashdot Commentariat to the 17th-Century Catholic Church

Aug 14 2011 Published by under Astronomy & Physics, Big Bang & Cosmology, Cosmology, Physics & Astronomy, Science, science & society, Science Education & Outreach

I am regularly struck, when giving public outreach talks, or when hearing the topic of Dark Matter discussed amongst the general non-Astronomer public, at the separation between acceptance of Dark Matter between astronomers and the general (informed) public. (The general public at large probably doesn't have enough of a clue about Dark Matter even to have a wrong opinion, alas!) Most astronomers know the evidence, and accept that non-baryonic dark matter is a real component of our Universe. Many in the public, however, seem to view Dark Matter as a horrible kludge, an ex-rectum fudge factor that astronomers have invoked in order to explain discrepancies between observation and theory. Indeed, topics related to this will be the subject of my upcoming August 16 365 Days of Astronomy podcast.

For a popular level discourse on the evidence for dark matter, I shall point you to two sources:

And now I can get to the snarky bits of this post. Yesterday, on Slashdot there showed up a post entitled CERN Physicists Says Dark Matter May Be An Illusion. In the paper indirectly referenced by the Slashdot article, a theoretical physicists explores the idea of negative gravitationally charged antimatter and the polarization of the vacuum as an explanation for the rotation speeds of galaxies (the mainstream explanation for which is, yes, Dark Matter).

What's interesting is the tone of the Slashdot comments. Some are informative, and ask exactly what I ask: what about the Bullet Cluster? However, a fair number of the comments show the same tenor as these excerpts:

I hope so. Dark matter is the ugliest kludge to the standard model ever.

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Agreed. I have always had a hard time stomaching the theory that dark matter and dark energy exist. It seems far too much like aether, i.e. something made up to fill a gap in knowledge without much evidence backing it up.

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Yay for phlogiston [wikipedia.org] and aether [wikipedia.org]. Dark matter might end up on the list of ideas that physcists turned to in order to explain things that had other explanations. La plus ca change

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Dark matter, too, has never been observed, and possesses properties of matter previous unseen or indeed thought impossible, and exists solely to bridge a gap between our model of how things should behave, and how things actually behave. This does not bode well for it.

There is a strong general sense among a large (majority? hard to tell) subset of the Slashdot commentariat that astronomers are all on the wrong track and propping up a failing theory, and that dark matter is a kludge that just can't be right.

The thing is, they're wrong. They just know that Dark Matter can't be real, because they are not comfortable with the idea that a substantial fraction of the Universe is made up with stuff that we can't see, that doesn't even interact with light. Much as... the 17th century Catholic church just knew that Galileo (and others) were wrong about Heliocentrism, because it's obvious to everyday observation that the Earth is still and the Sun is going around it. (Also, the Bible says so.) And, just as the leaders of the Catholic church completely discounted (and indeed refused to look at) Galileo's observation of Jupiter's moons orbiting Jupiter (and, crucially, not the Earth), armchair pundits completely ignore (probably mostly through ignorance!) the wide range of evidence for Dark Matter that goes beyond the "accounting error" represented by the motion of stars in galaxies, and galaxies in galaxy clusters. (Those motions are indeed one part of the evidence for Dark Matter, and historically formed the first evidence for it, but they're far from all of the evidence nowadays.) They cling to notions of how science ought to work, and how the Universe ought to be made up in a familiar way that seems natural to us humans, and use this to assert that an entire field full of scientists must all be on the wrong track for having a different model.

Specifically with regard to comparisons to the luminiferous aether, I would point you to my June 2010 podcast: "Dark Matter: Not Like the Luminiferous Ether". (And, yes, I'm conscious that I've spelled aether two different ways in this paragraph!)

Indeed, I would say that the comparison between denial of Dark Matter and denial of Heliocentrism goes deeper than that. The Copernican Principle is that the Sun, not the Earth, is at the center of... well, today we would say the Solar System, but in Copernicus' day that was also what was thought to be the whole Universe (the stars not at the time being understood to be things like the Sun). An extension of this is the Cosmological Principle, which stated succinctly says "you are nowhere special". We're not at a special center of the Universe, we're just at a typical random place in the Universe pretty much like any other. Observations (of galaxy distributions, of the Cosmic Microwave Background, and so forth) bear up this assumption or postulate, which is why we call it a principle. Think about it in broader terms, though. We are made up of "baryonic matter", which is Physicist for "stuff made of protons, neutrons, and electrons". In light of the Cosmological Principle, however, why should we expect that most of the Universe is made up of the same general kind of stuff as we are? In the face of evidence otherwise, many still insist that most of the Universe must be made up of baryonic stuff that interacts with other baryons and our familiar photons. Is this not just as much hubris as insisting that the Earth, where we live, must be the center about which all the other Solar System bodies orbit?

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"Galaxies in Collision" : public online talk today at 10:00AM PDT

May 21 2011 Published by under Astronomy & Physics, Science Education & Outreach, Second Life, Second Life Events, Technology and Society

As of this writing, in just over an hour I'll be giving a talk in Second Life on the topic "Galaxies in Collision".

Second Life is an online virtual world. Basic accounts in Second Life are free. I regularly give these talks as a part of MICA, the Meta-Institution of Computational Astronomy. Most Saturday mornings at 10AM pacific time (17:00 UT if we're during Daylight Savings), MICA has a public outreach astronomy talk. (However, like many academic institutions, we tend to slow down and get spotty over the summer.)

This talk will be at the MICA Large Amphitheater.

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"More Things in Heaven and Earth" -- the interaction of physics and astronomy

Feb 23 2011 Published by under Astronomy & Physics, Science Education & Outreach

365 Days of Astronomy is a daily podcast about astronomy, entirely recorded by volunteers. The topics are all over the place; some are about amateur astronomy, some are about the history of astronomy, some are about recent discoveries in astronomy. I've done a number of these over the last couple of years, and am doing more this year.

I recorded today's podcast— and, if I am to be perfectly honest, I have to admit I recorded yesterday, way after when I was supposed to get it in. The topic is the interaction between fundamental physics and astronomy. I talk a little about ancient physics, where the realm outside the sky and the Earth were viewed to be separate realms. Newton's universal gravitation unified those two realms. Some chemical elements were discovered originally in astronomical objects, and it was from observations of astronomical objects that we learned about neutrino oscillations.

You can check out today's entry if you want to hear more.

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Online talk tomorrow morning : "Neutrino: Placeholder Particle"

Feb 05 2011 Published by under Astronomy & Physics, Science Education & Outreach, Second Life

I'll be giving a talk in Second Life tomorrow morning at 10AM pacific time. (That's Saturday, Feb 5, at 18:00 UT.) This is part of a regular talk series; follow that link to find the slides and audio recordings from most of the previous talks I've given in the series. Remember that a Second Life account is free! Come and hear the talk. You can also ask questions in text chat, which I generally try to respond to as the talk is ongoing.

Tomorrow's talk is entitled "Neutrino: Placeholder Particle". I'll talk about the history of the discovery of the neutrino. Even Pauli, the guy who proposed the neutrino, was uncomfortable with making up a new particle that nobody had seen to explain things that seemed to be missing from other observations. There are clear parallels to Dark Matter today, with many being uncomfortable that we've got most of the Universe made out of stuff that we can't identify. I'll also talk about our current state of knowledge of the neutrino, and I hope to get into the issue of how the "mass neutrinos" are not the same as the "flavor neutrinos", and even though there are three of each, there are still only three total neutrinos. (It's a Schrödingers Cat sort of thing.)

Here's the abstract I sent to Paradox Olbers, the organizer of the MICA talks:

Sometimes critics of nonbaryonic dark matter will characterize it as a "placeholder particle"-- the name we give to the fact that we can't find particles doing the things that we see happening gravitationally. Of course, dark matter is not new in astronomy; Uranus, for instance, was originally detected indirectly. Nor are palceholder particles new in particle physics. The neutrino was originally proposed more than 20 years before it was first observed. In this talk, I'll go over the history of our discovery of the neutrino, and how it was in fact astronomy that led to some relatively recent important discoveries about these elusive little particles.

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Why I don't like the term "Gnu Atheist"

Feb 03 2011 Published by under Computers & Society, Free Software, Science & Culture, Science & Religion

You will say that a group has the right to call themselves whatever they want, and you will be right. I just wish they hadn't chosen that term. It extends this group's screwing up cultural battles that don't need to be fought into yet another realm I care deeply about, and as with the first, it can only make things harder and more complicated.

Who are the "gnu atheists"? Well, first, a word of warning. If you try to define them, they show up and accuse you of choosing a definition for purposes of setting up a straw man. However, most of those in the movement formerly known as "New Atheism" seem to share the following characteristics. They are atheists. They believe the world would be a better place if religion would go away, becoming nothing more than cultural history and cultural tradition. They think that any religion that claims to be anything other than just cultural tradition is incompatible with science and the scientific world view. They believe that if somebody aims to accept science and is intellectually honest and consistent, the success of modern science must necessarily lead that person to accept philosophical materialism. They use the word "reason" as a synonym for "application of scientific reasoning", thereby making anybody who is religious by definition guilty of thinking without reason. (As well as a lot of other people, for instance all faculty at a University who aren't in a science or engineering department, but they tend either not to realize that they're doing it, or to downplay that.)

Beyond that, a subset of them are incredibly strident and combative. They think that any religion at all is a threat to science. They do not hesitate to call non-atheists idiots or childish. They will crap the comment threads of posts like this one with all sorts of (frankly) bigotry hiding under the clothing of assumed "reason", citing the names of logical fallacies the way fundamentalists cite scripture. They will assert that they know the Truth and that therefore it's perfectly justified for them to say frankly insulting things, and then say that others shouldn't be offended by the Truth. They seem to think that non-fundamentalist theists are prevaricators who "pick and choose" from their religion, and thus are somehow misrepresenting their own religious beliefs. I generally think that this is because they'd prefer to argue against fundamentalists, for it's extremely easy to show how fundamentalists are at odds with science. But, it's very disheartening to see somebody who wants people to accept science then criticizing a theist for not being a fundamentalist. It is the behavior of this subset that leads me to the conclusion that "fundamentalist atheist" is the best term for this sort of atheist. Most atheists, thankfully, are not like this, but there is the subset that argues that their philosophy is the only philosophy that can be accepted by reasonable people who accept science— much as fundamentalist Christians argue that their philosophy is the only philosophy that can be accepted by people who are good and "saved".

What is the first cultural battle that these "gnu atheists" make more difficult? Well, obviously, the whole religion/science debate. Given that a substantial fraction of the USA is religious and values their religion, it should be pretty bloody obvious that if self-styled defenders of science are out there saying that science is incompatible with religion, it is only going to put up more barriers against the bulk of the population accepting science. Of course, sometimes obvious things are wrong— quantum mechanics is full of examples. And the new atheists are fond of pointing this out, arguing that there is no evidence that what they're doing is harmful. Of course, there's also no evidence that what they're doing is helpful... but they don't seem to think that a lack of evidence coupled with what is obvious disrespect and very plausibe harm is enough for them to question their behavior. What's more, when you do present evidence, they will often dismiss it as anecdotal, or not clear statistical evidence, or not enough evidence, in a manner that frankly reminds me of this comment on Phil Plait's blog by a creationist who insists that without complete timeline of all mutations in evolution, one shouldn't accept evolution. (Aside: despite having the same first name, I did not write that comment!)

These "gnu atheists" will attack defenders of science such as the Chris Mooney & Sheril Kirshbaum, or Josh Rosenau, for pointing out the obvious harm that their tactics could do to our shared cause. They will argue that the National Center for Science Education shouldn't be saying that science and religion are compatible, because if they're really about "science" they shouldn't be saying anything about religion at all. This last tactic is particularly annoying, because of course they themselves will not hesitate to go out and say that science is incompatible with religion. After all, the way that they've defined things, they're just telling the truth, and anybody who claims to defend science and says that religion might be OK is venturing into off-limits territory. They will reject empirical evidence that religion and science are compatible— specifically, that huge numbers of working scientists are themselves religious— on the basis that it is incompatible with their philosophy, and therefore non-atheist scientists have something wrong with them (they're "compartmentalizing", or "intellectually dishonest", or some such).

So. We've got a cause that a lot of us care deeply about— mainstream acceptance of science, scientific reasoning, and the scientific method. We have those out there— fundamentalists of various religions, most obviously— who want to reject much of science, and who have a distressingly powerful voice in public political discourse. And, we've got a broad population who are religious and care about their religion, but who are capable of accepting science. Then, we have a subset of those arguing for science who also argue that accepting science means having to reject religion... which of course provides direct support for the fundamentalists who argue that scientists are cultural warriors trying to take away everybody's religion. That's not true, but the fact that some scientists are out there saying that makes it much harder for people like the NCSE to argue that the scientific establishment really doesn't want to destroy religion.

In other words, I'm annoyed at the "gnu atheists" in the first place; not just because many are so blinded by their love for their own philosophy that they can't see that it isn't necessarily objective truth, and not just because many are frankly rude and insulting while thinking there must be something wrong with me if I find them rude and insulting. I'm annoyed at them also because they're getting in the way of a cause I care about, mainstream acceptance of good science and scientific reasoning. There are a lot of religious people out there who have no problem with evolution or the Big Bang, and there are a lot more who wouldn't have any problem with it if they really learned about it and learned how Christians like myself are still Christian while accepting all of science. Those people are people we should reach out to. Telling them that religion is idiotic, or intellectually dishonest, and that the real people who accept science must all be atheists, isn't going to help.

What's the second issue? Open source and free software. "Huh?" you may say? To be honest, I don't know the etymology of the recently-arisen term "gnu atheism", but I'd wager that it's taking the term "new atheism" (which caused all sorts of boring pedantic and semantic arguments) and riffing it together with Gnu of the Gnu project. The Gnu project is one of the original projects that pushed the notion of open source and free software, long before the term "open source" was coined. Much of that movement today would not exist without what the Gnu project had done. A lot of the core software you use on your Linux system was written under their auspices. But, more importantly, the Gnu project gave people like me, people who have a strong ethical attachment to the notion of free software, a central place to rally around. And, crucially, they provided the Gnu Public Licence, or GPL, one of the most important and most widely used free-software licenses.

Of course, there are some in the business world who see free software as a threat. So, there have been, and will continue to be, disinformation campaigns that try to link free and open source software to other dubious and/or Unamerican things, such as communism, computer crime/hackers, rampant disrespect for copyrights, etc. It's a complete misrepresentation to say that there is a conflict between "the interests of business" and free software, but that is a narrative that's out there floating about. What's more, those who tend to care about "the interests of business" are likely to be, at least in the USA, on the "right" side of the political spectrum in the common but flawed one-dimensional model of political opinion. Those who are religious and worried, or potentially worried, that the scary scientific mainstream is trying to destroy religion are also more likely to be on the right side of the spectrum.

Put it together. You have this movement out there, the subset of atheists whose stated goal is to destroy religion and who assert that complete and intellectual consistent acceptance of science requires a rejection of religion. That is a movement that people who aren't already atheists are likely to view with suspicion. Now, they've taken a name that seems to link them to something that is completely separate, open source and free software. It bugs me already for aesthetic that these guys have hijacked the term "Gnu". But it can't help but create a link in some folks' minds between this crazy hippy dubious philosophy about sharing software you've written to attacks on religion. In sort, free software may now be perceived as having something to do with yet another cultural assault that, frankly, has nothing whatsoever to do with free software. "GNU public licence? Isn't that related to those scientists who want to destroy all religion?" Sigh.

Life is hard enough for those of us who want the world to accept science, and for those of us who want the world to at least be compatible with free software. It only gets harder when some act in a way that is basically the caricature of what our opponents already claim we are.

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