Andrew Jaffe: Leaves on the Line

With the closure of University departments throughout England (Chemistry at Exeter and Architecture at Cambridge just announced this week), and the Science Minister called to the Parliamentary Science and Technology Committee today, UK science funding has been making headlines (or at least showing up on media radar) over the last couple of days. Currently, departmental funding comes from several sources: teaching funds come from HEFCE, the Higher Education Funding Council for England; research funding from HEFCE via a complicated formula depending on the number of students in the department, and also depending on the department's rating in the 'Research Assessment Exercise' (RAE); further research funding comes direct from organizations like the research councils (for example, my research is funded by PPARC, the Particle Physics and Astrophysics Research Council).

The recent row over university fees for students arises from the fact that, in many universities, research income is essentially covering for a lack of direct teaching income from the government. The perverse upshot of this, however, is that departments without the highest possible RAE ratings (5 or 5*) find it difficult to stay open, irrespective of their teaching quality. Ironically, this works against the government's (wrongheaded, I think) idea of concentrating research in a small group of universities with a wider range concentrating on teaching.

Other ideas for research funding are being considered, not just in the UK but throughout Europe, where a European Science Council is being funded, although if my experience of the interaction of individual nations within organizations like the European Space Agency is any guide, it's difficult to see how such a supranational body could be effective. From BBC News: Stakes high for EU science plans: Europe must make good on plans to set up an independent funding body for science or face an unprecedented brain drain, a leading scientist has warned. (See also this editorial in the Guardian over the weekend.)

Finally, organizations like Save British Science and Scientists for Global Responsibility are interested not only in the funding of Science, but equally important questions such as what science we pursue and the way we pursue it.

(First in a short series on Astro department Christmas parties)

Just back from the Oxford Astronomy Department (where I proudly count myself as a visitor) Christmas/Holiday party. Aside from a fairly staggering amount of booze, featured entertainment was "Big-Eyed Beans From Venus", a bluesy five-piece featuring students and postdocs from the astro group (and one ringer, providing the first pictures of the group here) thrashing out songs with an astro theme, from the Captain Beefheart song providing their name, to Lou Reed's "Satellite of Love" and The Only Ones' "Another Girl, Another Planet" (a personal favorite, up there with John Peel's choice of "Teenage Kicks" as the perfect rock 'n' roll song).

Pictures of the event will be posted when available...

According to National Public Radio: Report Discourages NASA Plan to Save Hubble

A confidential report commissioned by NASA has concluded that the space agency's plan to use a robot to save the Hubble telescope is highly risky.

The robot would install two new instruments and replace batteries and gyroscopes.

But the report suggests NASA should let the aging telescope die. It suggests that NASA send up the new instruments on a second, bare-bones telescope.

This sounds like a very good idea (depending on the cost, of course, and if NASA has to cancel anything else to make room for it).

NASA should repair it using a space shuttle mission, not a robotic one. The agency should consider launching the manned mission as early as possible after the space shuttle is deemed safe to fly again, because some of the telescope's components could degrade to the point where it would no longer be usable for science.

"I ♥ Huckabees," the new movie from David O. Russell, features Lily Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman as "Jaffe & Jaffe, Existential Investigators." (I'm always pleased to see my family name in lights.) Not a deeply philosophical movie, but entertaining and intelligent enough. Smarter than, say, this commentary from last weekend's Guardian by Mike Purton, "Physics and metaphysics":

A series of scientific experiments in the early 1980s changed forever our understanding of the nature of matter. It is likely that it will also prove to have been the greatest religious discovery of the 20th century.

Physicists call it entanglement, and it describes the state of two or more particles once they have interacted with one another. From then on, irrespective of time and space, a correlation will always exist between them. What happens to one will affect the other - even if they are now at opposite ends of the universe....

We are then reminded that it is this same matter which is both the physical manifestation of spirit and the means to redemptive action. This being so, then the correlation of all matter must also apply to all spirit. Our separateness is an illusion; the reality is an indivisible unity....

With new insights through a religion no longer dependent on blind trust, but grounded instead in knowledge, we are offered a higher purpose. Rather than seeing ourselves as separate individuals, we realise that we are aspects of a beautiful and indivisible whole.

This seems to me a fine sentiment, and could perhaps even lead us into moral action. But it's got nothing to do with physics, and certainly doesn't offer "a religion... grounded... in knowledge". We can choose to use ideas from science as metaphors for the conduct of human life, as was done with Newton's clockwork universe, with Einstein's relativity, with Darwin's natural selection (to sometimes horrible effect), and with Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. But really, the uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics doesn't mean that you can't observe something without changing it, not in the macroscopic world of human-sized objects. Similarly, entanglement, a related idea from quantum theory, doesn't have anything to say about spirit, about humanity, about the kinds of connections that we have with our fellow-beings. Those are up to us to forge, to recognize, and to ignore at our peril.

I'm up in beautiful Edinburgh (perhaps my favorite city in the UK, even at this very dark time of year) fulfilling my duties as the chair of the Astrogrid Science Advisory group, at their latest project meeting. Astrogrid is part of the world wide effort to create a virtual observatory, a way for astronomers to access any and all data about objects in the sky.

Walking into the second day of the meeting this morning, a few minutes before it was due to start, the auditorium was filled with fifty-odd astronomers and IT specialists, almost all of them sitting silently, staring at their wifi-connected laptops, each in their own internet cocoon. Is this the modern condition, or just a lack of social skills? (Needless to say, after at least attempting some light commentary with the person next to me, I joined the sad, silent majority.)

Apparently, I wasn't the only person blogging this meeting!

Channel 4 in the UK just finished showing What We Still Don't Know, a new science show presented by Sir Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal. The aim was admirable, discussing science's open questions, rather than presenting the usual heroic fait accompli of pop-science.

Somehow, the series got hijacked over the course of the episodes, becoming instead a bizarre (and false!) claim that science was pointing us toward believing in a creator. One of the participants, Max Tegmark, said "It is only life that gives the Universe meaning", but this, and many other comments by him and others, seemed to be willfully over- (or mis-) interpreted as statements about a creator. The narrator said "their own discoveries were pointing them toward an intelligent designer" but none of the participants claimed anything like that (and, reiterating, there is nothing at all in contemporary physics arguing that); especially galling, and perhaps revealing, is the use of the term "intelligent design," claimed by crypto-creationists attempting to get pseudoscientific cover for their ridiculous ideas.

The show went over the top toward the end, featuring Philosopher Nicholas Bostrom who seems not entirely unreasonable, but blathered on about the so-called "simulation hypothesis" -- basically the not at all new idea that we don't really exist, that we're just a brain in a vat, or a simulation in some super-duper computer somewhere. If this sounds familiar, it is of course the plot of The Matrix, a fun film but a bad basis for a world-view.

As an irrelevant aside, contrary to the the narrator's claim in What We Still Don't Know, Astronomer Royal Sir Martin Rees certainly did not coin the term "multiverse" (the idea that what we call the whole Universe is just one among many, perhaps each with its own properties); it was used in superhero comics in the 70s and 80s, and probably in science fiction well before then.

Thanks to the help of the aforementioned ringer, we went to see the Pogues play in Birmingham last weekend. For the most part, they've worn their age well; lead singer Shane MacGowan may be the exception, beginning to look more like Johnny Vegas, but sounding even more like the drunks and hustlers in his songs. The fake snow during "Fairytale of New York" completed the translation of a grim story into a kitsch holiday classic, but the Pogues have always tread a line between the seedy and sublime. The aging lads spewing beer all over the dance floor while singing along to "Dirty Old Town" and chanting Shane's name knew which side they were on. When I first saw the Pogues, nearly two decades ago at Toad's Place in the US, I was a slender-shouldered wannabe rock critic (the Pogues were only critics' darlings there, never as popular as they became here), buffeted on the dance floor by the local equivalent of the tattooed lads, and I just hope that I've aged as gracefully as they have.

See you in a week or so.

Courtesy The New York Times (2004).

As the horrid death toll from the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami continues to rise, we are confronted with a barrage of numbers: many tens or even a hundred thousand dead, nine on the Richter scale, ten-meter waves. Do we really know what these figures mean? Part of the problem is simply definitions: who knows what the Richter scale is? Crucially, it's a logarithmic scale measuring the "size" of an earthquake, which means that an earthquake at 9.0 on the Richter scale is more than a hundred times more powerful than the magnitude 6.8 Loma Prieta quake in the San Francisco Bay area in 1989. The best description I've heard in the media is that this quake is as powerful as all the quakes in the last five years put together. And it's certainly a strain on our minds to comprehend the idea that 100,000 people may have perished in the disaster -- it was already difficult enough at the initial estimates of what we can now call "only" 10,000.

And on the off chance that there are readers who haven't seen this sort of thing (via Crooked Timber):

Red Cross/Red Crescent Donations: If you’re so moved, there’s information on making donations to the American Red Cross here (including a link for secure on-line donations). The British Red Cross page is here. Also: CNN’s list of organizations accepting donations. And here’s the link for Oxfam UK’s appeal .

Also, you can donate directly through amazon.com in the US, and the BBC is organizing an appeal in the UK