Andrew Jaffe: Leaves on the Line

Came home last night to the pop music punditry of "Classic Albums: Nevermind" on BBC2, a reverent eulogizing of Nirvana's Nevermind. It reminded me of my own rock critic prehistory, when I actually wrote one of the first ever reviews:

Nirvana recently did an all-ages show here in Chicago, which I guess means I’m supposed to be too old to like this sludge. Unlike the rest of their Sub Pop labelmates (although Nevermind is being released as a joint venture with Geffen’s DGC), Nirvana is less a continuation of the boring revalorization of Led Zeppelin than a vision of Hollywood-style popmetal from Poison to the Crüe redone by dudes with brains and balls instead of hairspray. Nirvana’s simple three-piece sound thuds along without instrumental pyrotechincs. In fact, their obvious lack of technique pegs them as indie rockers rather than metalheads, if such distinctions matter. This is the kind of rock ’n’ roll that makes you (well, me at least) want to jump around your room and play air guitar—so don’t be ashamed.

None of Nirvana’s new Nevermind is quite as groovy as their last single, “Sliver,” but it grinds its way into my twenty-five year old heart better than the new Guns ’n Roses singles. Most of the album stays wild and raw and most of all fun. “Smells Like Teen Spirit”—which is a good description of the album as well—becomes Nirvana’s anti-manifesto: “Here we are now, entertain us/ a mulatto, an albino, a mosquito, my libido, a denial” wrapped up in abrasive guitar chords catchy enough to hum if you could attach a distortion pedal to your lips. I don’t know how old Nirvana are, but they seem a better depiction of teen-age than the New Kids: confused, loud, and smarter than you want to give them credit for. Kinda like the Stooges—these guys have gotten together to make a loud, raunchy noise at the world.

(From Chicago's free weekly newspaper, New City, 1991 -- so it might not make a lot of sense nearly a decade and a half later, and six thousand miles away.) I was ahead of the curve, but didn't quite get the significance... Since then grunge has come and gone, and the world has shattered and reassembled itself several times. Kurt has become late and much-lamented, and attained his place in the rock'n'roll canon, while bassist Krist Novosoelic looks straighter even than his forty years would suggest, but is pursuing the truly rock'n'roll career of actually trying to change the world through political action.

The New York Times had an article this week on the future of Physics, curiously posing the issue as The Next Einstein? Applicants Welcome (by Dennis Overbye). Most striking was that every single one of the eight or so physicists interviewed for the article was an over-fifty male from the USA, Canada, or the UK, even though they all mostly claimed that the quest for a 'Next Einstein' was meaningless (like rock'n'roll's perennial failure to find a next Dylan).

Anyway, by now most of you know that this is the "Einstein Year", the centenary of Einstein's annus miraculis when he discovered special relativity, explained the Brownian motion, and teased out the processes underlying the photoelectric effect. You can follow the festivities, such as they are, in the blog series Quantum Diaries. Mostly I am jealous I didn't rate selection as a physicist-blogger, so you'll just have to come here to read about my exploits. (Update: OK, I'm not really jealous, since most of what I write about isn't physics, anyway.)

Alternately, the professionals among you should check out Physics 2005: a Century After Einstein, a meeting sponsored by the Institute of Physics, where I'll be talking about the detection of Gravity Waves using the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation. (And I promise I will someday blog about my research, too, but for now you can read a little about it on my extremely out-of-date home page, or otherwise follow my exploits using NASA's ADS.)

Who owns my ideas? After listening to Stanford law prof and internet pundit Lawrence Lessig, I've decided that my words, meager though they are, should be officially free to all. Right now, this blog is hosted by Imperial College, and I've done my best to find out if they impose any of their own restrictions on its contents or use, but without success. So, on the theory that forgiveness is easier to get than permission, I've licensed all the material on this blog under the Creative Commons: you are free to use anything I've written here for non-commercial use, modify it in any way you like, and redistribute as you see fit. (Not that I think anyone will want to.)

(If anyone from Imperial's administration is reading this, please let me know whether I'm violating College policy!... Or where to at least find out what the policy is.)

In honor of National Science Week, the UK Governmental Office of Science and Technology has commisioned this MORI poll from which we learn that the great British public approves of science and scientists.

Never having really looked at an official poll before, I was amazed to find that the official publication (PDF) runs to 186 pages, dense with statistical analyses. So it's no surprise that the press coverage so far has essentially parroted the summary of results from the press release: most people think science makes a positive contribution to society, and most people trust scientists (more than they do the government or the media). On the other hand, they want us scientists to communicate our results more -- many people "say they receive too little information on the subject... despite the fact that science is now getting more media coverage, and (general) news can now be obtained around the clock." Perhaps if they heard more from us, they might trust us less -- like the politicians and journalists!

The pollsters also asked about funding: "there is widespread feeling that the independence of scientists is often put at risk by the interests of their funders." There's also some techie stuff on a "cluster analysis," where they show that most respondents' attitudes and backgrounds put them into one of six distinct groups (for example, if you're 35-44 and have kids in the house, you're likely to feel "that science communication and consultation with the public is not important or necessary"!) More on this when I get the time to digest the results.

I'm feeling... I'm feeling all rock'n'roll and shit.

-Jeff Tweedy, Wilco, London Hammersmith Apollo, 14 March 2005.

From the Times Higher Education Supplement: Brian Eno "said that art schools should model themselves on the physics department at Imperial College London. This would see art school academics lead projects with students as apprentices or co-workers." Yes, that Brian Eno: "Mr Eno, 57, has produced five U2 albums and co-written three David Bowie albums. He is a graduate of Ipswich Art School and visiting professor at the Royal College of Art."

It must have been a slow news day, because I'm quoted in The Guardian: Scientists create 'black holes' on Earth, by Alok Jha. (Also, if you're at Imperial's Blackett Lab today, you can see an excerpt on the plasma screen by the lifts.)

The story is about a paper by Horatiu Nastase of Brown University, discussing recent experiments using the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at the Brookhaven National Lab in New York. These experiments take heavy nuclei, made up of neutrons and protons (themselves made of quarks and gluons) and throw them at each other at close to the speed of light. In his paper, Nastase uses some of the mathematical technology of String Theory to try to show that the resulting so-called "fireball" has some of the same quantum-mechanical properties as a black hole. (A bit more info from someone who actually works on this here.)

Unfortunately my own understanding of the subject is meager at best, so my quotes are not too enlightening: "A black hole that can do interesting or scary things has to be quite large" and, even worse, "A few particles that you can push together in an accelerator ain't going to hurt anybody". Yes, I really did say "ain't", although my recollection is that it was actually "ain't gonna" which is even worse grammar but sounds a bit better.

Actually, the most interesting thing about RHIC to me is not that it could possibly make a black hole, but that it could duplicate the properties of the early universe, the so-called "quark-gluon plasma", just a microsecond after the Big Bang, when conditions were so hot and dense that individual nuclei couldn't exist, but were kept broken up into a soup of their constituent quarks and the gluons that usually bind them together. If we could understand matter in these conditions, we might be able to understand some fundamental questions about the Universe, such as why it's filled with matter instead of anti-matter.

The RHIC experiment had been the subject of controversy before, when some physicist suggested that, in its quest to create the quark-gluon plasma, it might create matter in a state not normally present in today's comparatively cold Universe, creating particles that could catalyze a reaction converting all of the matter around into a soup of quarks. The consensus was that, actually, this is nonsense (or at least extraordinarily unlikely!) and, in the event, we're still here.

In 1987, at the height of the Reagan era, LA's greatest punk (?) band, X, released what even then we knew would be their swan song, See How We Are. X were never ashamed of the poetry in their rock'n'roll, and in the title track they use it to remind us that the political is always personal. Now, The American Street uses See How We Are to remind us that things haven't changed much in nearly 20 years.

I'm in the midst of four weeks which I'll have spent mostly on the road, and as a working trip, it's a good opportunity to discuss some of the science I'm doing, for a change.

I spent last week at Lancaster University, at Origins 2005: The Origin of the Primordial Density Perturbation. Despite its location in the grey and damp North of England, the meeting was lots of fun, and sufficiently outside of my area of expertise that I actually learned quite a bit. We know that the Universe today is filled with massive galaxies, each made of billions of stars and, we think, even more dark matter. Tracing these galaxies backwards in time, we know that these huge lumps must have once been tiny fluctuations in a nearly uniform universe, and we see these tiny fluctuations reflected in the Cosmic Microwave Background (the CMB, the main subject of my research). The meeting addressed some fundamental questions about these fluctuations: Where did they come from? How did they evolve? I was happy to get to talk about some work by my smart and energetic students, looking at some of the work they've done examining the pattern of CMB fluctations on the largest scales and other topics on the generation and evolution of these perturbations and how they're reflected in the CMB.

This week I'm at Berkeley and the Computational Research Division at LBL, where I'm visiting my colleagues Julian Borrill, Radek Stompor, and Chris Cantalupo, mostly to finish a paper on a software package called Microwave Anisotropy Dataset Computational Analysis Package (MADCAP). We developed MADCAP to analyze data from experiments probing the fluctuations in the CMB. More properly, the others developed it, while I provided some background theorizing, a very early version of some of the algorithms, and moral support. MADCAP has been used to analyze data from the MAXIMA and BOOMERANG experiments -- which gave the first high precision measurements of the geometry of the Universe -- and is currently being used to analyze the successors to those experiments (MAXIPOL and B2K -- not the rappers), as well as in the planning for the upcoming Planck Surveyor mission to be launched by ESA in about 2007.

Having lived in the Bay Area for five years, I also plan on spending time with lots of old friends and eating Mexican food, dim sum, and 'dem fantastic ribs from Betelnut in San Francisco.

Finally, next week it's back to the UK for a quick stop at home before I head off to Warwick for Physics 2005: a Century After Einstein, a meeting sponsored by the Institute of Physics, where I'll be talking about the detection of Gravity Waves using the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation. These gravity waves, if they exist, are expected to be yet another relic of the early universe, one of the hallmarks of an early epoch of Inflation, a mechanism invented in the early 80s thought to be responsible for the flat geometry of the Universe, the overall uniform temperature of the CMB (about three degrees Kelvin) as well as the tiny primordial perturbations observed by the CMB experiments and discussed at the meeting in Lancaster last week. With luck, I'll also get a chance to discuss work I'm doing with yet another smart and energetic student on gravity waves generated by supermassive black holes (millions or billions times the mass of the sun!) which in the last few years we've learned live at the centers of many galaxies.