Andrew Jaffe: Leaves on the Line

(Warning, scattershot blogging echo-chamber post follows.)

Last week I went to the Science Blogging Talkfest sponsored by the Biochemical Society and led by Alice Bell from Imperial’s excellent Science Communication program.

Partially because the event was mostly attended by science bloggers themselves, there was a bit of a preaching-to-the-converted sense to the proceedings. (I tried to engage in some good-natured tweaking, pointing out that probably the greatest influence of [supposedly] science blogging has been in absurdly dragged-out climategate saga, but I couldn’t get a rise out of the audience.) But it was heartening to see just how mainstream science blogging has become.

“Only” five years ago (scare-quotes denoting an eternity of internet-time), the academic-blogosphere chattered on about an anonymous article in the Chronicle of Higher Education which contended that bloggers were essentially unsuitable to be hired as faculty members, and a couple of years after that several of my colleagues felt the need to seriously restrict their blogging while searching for permanent positions. I was heartened to see that the question of whether blogging could actually hurt someone’s career seems to be less worrying. Although Petra Boynton said that one of her previous departments were less than enthusiastic about it, most of the panelists have found that, with an increased in impact and communication in general, blogging has taken its position as an effective way to engage with the public.

One of the more novel (to me) things going on at this meeting was the Twitter backchannel: the organizers projected a running stream of tweets marked with the #talkfest tag. It was a decent mix of jokes and apposite comments, especially including erstwhile MP Dr Evan Harris’ provocative comments about whether scientists should be forced to do public engagement at all. It’s certainly good that blogging and communication don’t hurt your career — but should they be requirements for scientific advancement? Not all scientists’ talents lie in that direction, and we shouldn’t expect them to. There was also a twitter discussion of the gender makeup of the panel, which was dishearteningly 1/6 female despite an audience of at least 50% women.

When science blogging started out as its own sub-genre in the middle of the decade, no one was quite sure what it would be for. Would it be used within science as an online lab notebook, or as a substitute or adjunct to papers? That doesn’t seem to have panned out — even in the post-’net open world, the structure of science encourages secrecy, at least until the work can be packaged into what are still more or less old-fashioned papers in what are still more or less old-fashioned journals (albeit with the important twist of pre-publication posting on the arXiv in many fields). Within collaborations, however, wikis, rather than blogs, have become ubiquitous as an easy way to communicate amongst scientists who are already expert — the easy ability to add small chunks of information is exactly what is needed. (Within the Planck Satellite collaboration, we actually use a wiki as a sort of blog — we keep a reverse-chronological list of “posts” discussing our latest results.)

Instead, blogs seem to be used almost exclusively as a window into the life, methods and results of scientists, directed at a knowledgeable but lay public. Indeed, it was suggested at the talkfest that someone could make a very useful living textbook from the scattered blog posts on a given subject. I’m not so sure — one of the advantages of a proper textbook is a single voice and, more prosaically, a single notation starting from scratch— but it’s probably worth trying if someone’s got the wherewithal to do the bit-work involved.

It was especially nice to meet several of my fellow Imperial College bloggers, including biophysicist Stephen Curry (whose own post on the Talkfest also has a list of other reactions to it), whom I was somewhat embarrassed to discover actually works in the same building as I do. As always at these sorts of events, much of the amusement was during the inevitable pub visit afterwards and especially the pre-panel milling about — thanks to the organizers for the excellent combination of cupcakes and beer.

Two crucial figures from outside the mainstream of American culture have died.

Tuli Kupferberg (1923-2010) has been hanging around, writing about and stirring up trouble in New York’s Greenwich Village since the 1950s as a writer, poet, occasional political activist and rock ‘n’ roller. First in the late 60s and early 70s and occasionally thereafter, he was one of the Fugs (named after the faux-expletive from Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead) singing both the poems of William Blake as well as “Slum Goddess of the Lower East Side”. Since then, he kept writing, occasionally reformed the Fugs with his partner Ed Sanders, but had suffered a series of strokes in the last year from which he never fully recovered.

Harvey Pekar (1939-2010) was a bit better known. For the last few decades, he had been writing a series of autobiographical comics, “American Splendor”, illustrated by some of the best comics artists of the last few decades, from R. Crumb and Alan Moore to Gilbert Hernandez, Chester Brown and Joe Sacco.They chronicled his life in Cleveland, Ohio, from the tedium of his day job as a hospital clerk, a bout with cancer (in the excellent graphic novel “Our Cancer Year”), and his occasional run-ins with fame — in the 80s, he was occasional guest on David Letterman’s late-night talk show (until he famously decided to use his slot to lambaste GE, the owner of the NBC television network), and in this decade was memorably played by Paul Giamatti in a movie, also called “American Splendor”, based on the comics. Only a couple of weeks ago, I discovered The Pekar Project, devoted to getting and keeping his newest works online. He was always surly, too high-maintenance for his own good, dependably dissatisfied with whatever his life threw at him. And will nonetheless be missed.

The Planck Satellite was launched in May 2009, and started regular operations late last summer. This spring, we achieved an important milestone: the satellite has observed the whole sky.

To celebrate, the Planck team have released an image of the full sky. The telescope has detectors which can see the sky with 9 bands at wavelengths ranging from 0.3 millimeters up to nearly a centimeter, out of which we have made this false-color image. The center of the picture is toward the center of the Galaxy, with the rest of the sphere unwrapped into an ellipse so that we can put it onto a computer screen (so the left and right edges are really both the same points).

At the longest and shortest wavelengths, our view is dominated by matter in our own Milky Way galaxy — this is the purple-blue cloud, mostly so-called galactic “cirrus” gas and dust, largely  concentrated in a thin band running through the center which is the disk of our galaxy viewed from within.

In addition to this so-called diffuse emission, we can also see individual, bright blue-white objects. Some of these are within our galaxy, but many are themselves whole distant galaxies viewed from many thousands or millions of light years distance. Here’s a version of the picture with some objects highlighted:

Even though Planck is largely a cosmology mission, we expect these galactic and extragalactic data to be invaluable to astrophysicists of all stripes. Buried in these pictures we hope to find information on the structure and formation of galaxies, on the evolution of very faint magnetic fields, and on the evolution of the most massive objects in the Universe, clusters of galaxies.

But there is plenty of cosmology to be done: we see the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) in the red and yellow splotches at the top and bottom — out of the galactic plane. We on the Planck team will be spending much of the next two years separating the galactic and extragalactic “foreground” emission from the CMB, and characterizing its properties in as much detail as we can. Stay tuned.

I admit that I was somewhat taken aback by the level of interest in these pictures: we haven’t released any data to the community, or written any papers. Indeed, we’ve really said nothing at all about science. Yet we’ve made it onto the front page of the Independent and even the Financial Times, and yours truly was quoted on the BBC’s website. I hope this is just a precursor to the excitement we’ll generate when we can actually talk about science, first early next year when we release a catalog of sources on the sky for the community to observe with other telescopes, and then in a couple of years time when we will finally drop the real CMB cosmology results.

We get most of the official feedback on our teaching through a mechanism called SOLE — Student On-Line Evaluations — which asks a bunch of questions on the typical “Very Poor” … “Very Good” scale. I’ve written about my results before — they are useful, and there is even some space for ad-hoc comments, but the questionnaire format is a bit antiseptic.

On some occasions, however, students make an extra effort to let you know how they feel. Last year, I received an anonymous paper letter in the old-fashioned snail-mail post from a student in my cosmology course which said, among other statements, that I should “show appropriate humility and shame by not teaching any undergraduate courses at all this coming year.” Well, that year has come and gone, and I was not absolved of teaching responsibilities, so I soldiered on.

Today, I received another anonymous letter, from a most assuredly different student, who said that this year’s cosmology course “is without a doubt the most interesting undergraduate course I have taken at Imperial.” This would have left me ecstatic, except that this otherwise well-intentioned and obviously smart student managed to put the envelope in the mailbox with insufficient postage, which meant that I had to trudge across to the local mail facility and pay the missing 10p, along with a full £1 fee/fine! (If the author of the letter happens to read this, please consider a donation of £1.10 plus appropriate interest to the charity of your choice!).

It would be self-serving of me to make too much of this, beyond noting that, although I did make some significant changes in this year’s course, these letters more likely indicate the very different reactions that a given course can engender, rather than a vast improvement in my teaching.

My apologies to both students if they would have preferred I not quote them on-line, but such is the price of anonymity.

My colleagues and I spend what is probably an inordinate amount of time complaining about the occasional lapses of the basic skills of our students, their inability to take notes, their obsession with marks and what’s going to be on the exams. Because, like everyone else, we like to complain.

But pretty often I get the chance to see them at their best. In the Physics department at Imperial, we interview students who are on the boundaries between final “degree classifications”, the British system of awarding degrees as First Class, 2.1, 2.2, etc. Last week, I was on the panel for this year’s cohort. And it was a pleasure to sit in front of a few of our students and watch them, in real time, thinking like physicists. Of course this means making the occasional mistake, but it also means that delicious “aha!” moment when they figure something out and (this is the best part) they know that they have, whether it’s finding a sign error in their derivation of the motion of a pendulum, or a thought experiment explaining why Einstein’s relativity makes sense.

For the interviews, I was paired with one of our external examiners, UCL particle physicist and fellow-blogger Jon Butterworth. On the same day as our interview, the Guardian published Simon Jenkins’ latest in a series of risible anti-science screeds, and Jon decided to take him to task neither with reasoned argumentation nor with a counter-polemic, but with parody. As with many great ideas on the internet, this one got picked up and built upon, so that the Guardian, to its credit, eventually gave Jon his own space to reply. Jenkins likely thinks we’re producing too many scientists (Imperial only trains scientists, doctors, and engineers, after all!) but I hope that Jon was pleased with the ones he saw.

So my congratulations to this year’s graduating students, and the best of luck to them whatever they go on to do. Pace Jenkins, the world needs more well-trained scientists like them, not fewer.

I’ve just finished marking this year’s Cosmology exams — I’m quite pleased with the outcome. But that’s meant that I’ve rewarded myself with some happily lowbrow (meant as a descriptive, not normative, term) entertainment:

• I finally got around to the finale of Lost. Watching it, I was disappointed with the purgatorial explanation for this season’s “flash-sideways”; I would have preferred a less faux-spiritual device. But on reflection, considered purely as a fictional device for letting the creators illuminate their characters — seeing them act, react and interact in new situations — it worked (and, yes, jerked the odd tear on the way).
• I bought an iPad. This will undoubtedly engender both jealousy and derision, so no one will be happy. It is a pretty, erm, magical piece of hardware. Somewhere between a toy and an appliance for now, but not yet a work necessity, like my laptop, nor a real-life one, as I admit my iPhone has become. But I could see it encroaching on the role of both of those, especially as I become less wary of taking it out — and as it becomes more powerful.
• Although I missed some of the episodes along the way, I’ve been enjoying the BBC’s Luther. The melodrama was a bit much, but Idris Elba was fun to watch in the Columbo/Holmes/McNulty title roll, and Ruth Wilson was embarrassingly compelling as his gorgeous and psychopathic astrophysicist (!) nemesis-cum-sidecick. But even more exciting were the weird pop culture references that kept cropping up. There was Johnny Rotten’s “ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?”, and Faulkner’s “the past isn’t dead; it’s not even past” within a few minutes of each other in episode two. And last week we found London’s DCIs calling New York City Detective Munch (Richard Belzer’s character from Homicide, various versions of Law and Order, and a few other series along the way). What have I missed?
• And of course there’s Hitch’s acknowledgement that galaxy formation may be a harder problem than the existence of god (about which I am considerably more than 95% against) or the invasion of Iraq (on which I am somewhat more equivocal, I admit).

I’ve volunteered at the last minute to appear on a panel following a screening of Monsters from the Id, a documentary about 50s Sci-Fi movies and, apparently, their influence on science itself.

The filmmaker is Homer Hickam, an engineer and novelist, author of Rocket Boys, the “novelized” memoir of his rocket-obsessed post-Sputnik childhood in the West Virginia mining country. (I haven’t read it or seen the movie, October Sky, based on it, although it’s been recommended to me several times.)

So if you’re in London and pre-cgi special effects, giant irradiated insects, aliens with ray-guns and the over-arching fear of destruction raining down from above were a big part of your childhood (or maybe your parents’), come along to the Barbican on May 26th.

A few weeks ago I wrote about my visit to Geneva as part of the Beyond Entropy art/architecture/science collaboration sponsored by the Architecture Association. We continued our work last weekend in the Dorset woods visiting the AA’s Hooke Park site, a 350-acre forest with a bit more space for workshops than their Bedford Square buildings in central London.

Our group’s brief was to explore the concept of “mechanical energy” and we took as our starting point “How To Build A Time Machine”, by the French pre-absurdist Alfred Jarry (who I remember first encountering as the inspiration behind the name of Cleveland proto-punks Pere Ubu and as an occasional character in Zippy the Pinhead). Like Wells’ Time Machine from the same period, Jarry envisions time as a fourth dimension, and equips a massive cube with giant flywheels. Conservation of angular momentum (real physics) keeps the machine from moving in space, and also in time (that’s the absurdity).

We started by playing with some store-bought gyroscopes, trying to fix them to the faces of a cube, but soon realized that it was difficult to connect the edges of the cube to the axes of the spinning disks, although we did make this lovely machine out of small electric motors, rotors from tape decks, and machined metal disks (where by “we” I must admit that my mechanical prowess doesn’t quite rate much beyond kibbitzing on my part).

But we wanted something more substantial, and more symmetric. The design breakthrough, and my only major contribution, came with the realization that we could join the axes of the flywheels and the corners of the faces of cube with a triangle — a simpler and more stable shape than the cube itself. Shin Egashira, the architectural side of our triangular collaboration, took this forward to an actual design. We cut it from thick plywood with a magnificent CNC machine…

…which we then put together to make this:

The flywheels spin on bearings, and can actually generate quite a bit of angular momentum. We couldn’t yet work out an efficient way to get and keep all three wheels spinning at once, but the whole mechanism is stable (and well-built!) enough to spin around rather amazingly on the ground:

Next, the work of our collaboration and the others in the Beyond Entropy “cluster” will be presented at the Festival dell’energia in Lecce, and then this summer in Venice for the Architecture Biennale. Sadly, we weren’t able to travel in time any faster (or slower) than the usual one second per second, so these events are approaching fast.

A couple of my friends have got into a bit of a spat on the internet. Megan McArdle, a writer for the Atlantic Monthly, wrote “The Freeloaders”, arguing that file sharing, as practiced by today’s 20-something young adults, is destroying the music industry.

Marc Weidenbaum, who writes the wonderful disquiet blog, first first answered in prose. Marc argues, mostly correctly I think, that Megan’s argument conflates the major-label recording industry with the music industry as a whole. Despite the illegality (and let’s not be coy about it, there is plenty of theft involved), the more general ethos of free culture has spawned plenty of great art that flourishes outside of the stranglehold of that same recording industry.

He then realized a better rejoinder would be in the great tradition of answer records: he invited some musicians to comment, musically, on the article (and its accompanying illustration): the result is Despite The Downturn, freely available (free as in beer and as in freedom), mostly electronica, an amazing turnaround of just a couple of days from thought to expression. So at least something good has come out of this disagreement.

Results from the first major science papers from the Herschel Satellite were released this week at a conference in Holland. Launched almost a year ago on the same rocket as Planck, Herschel is an infrared and sub-millimeter telescope, which lets it see not only the stars that generate the visible light we see with our eyes and ordinary cameras, but also the gas and dust that absorb and re-radiate that light. That gas and dust carries information about both the birth and death of stars: the detritus of exploding stars pollutes the interstellar medium, which eventually condenses out to form new generations of stars. On larger scales, Herschel’s observations let us trace the evolution of entire galaxies, the most important tracers of large-scale structure, formed from seeds laid down somehow in the first instants of the Universe (and, bringing it all back to cosmology, which are viewed by Planck in a much earlier form).

My Imperial colleagues and Herschel scientists Dave Clements and Brian O’Halloran discuss the results in much more detail over on the Herschel mission blog,  or you can keep more up to date on twitter. But I’ll just steal some of their bandwidth and show some pretty pictures.

Most of the dots in this picture are one of those distant galaxies, lit up in the infrared due to its once and future stars:

Image courtesy ESA/ATLAS Consortium

Closer to home, this is selection of star-forming regions, turbulent filaments of gas and dust:

Image courtesy ESA/Hi-GAL Consortium

Not coincidentally, Imperial’s Michael Rowan-Robinson, who has been doing infrared astronomy for several decades, appeared on BBC radio 4’s wonderful In Our Time this morning to discuss “The Cool Universe”: covering a century or so of infrared astronomy in forty-five minutes.

We on Planck won’t be coming out with any papers for quite a while. However, many members of the team gathered in Orsay, outside of Paris, this week, to discuss the progress of the observations (and our analyses) and, crucially, to start talking in more detail about the actual papers that we’ll be writing over the next few years. More generally, Planck is doing pretty well. It came out first in NASA’s latest round of evaluations (which is a significant achievement for a mission primarily run by ESA), and which we hope will also give further impetus to keep funds flowing in the UK. This is especially important as the length of the Planck mission is likely to be almost doubled, allowing us to extract even more science than we originally hoped.

I can’t say much more, except that we’ve got a lot of — very exciting — work ahead of us.