Andrew Jaffe: Leaves on the Line

The power will be out to the server again this weekend, Friday evening through Monday morning (UK time). Get some fresh air!

The song for the weekend is the bittersweet "Fourth of July", written by Dave Alvin, performed by X on See How We Are (which seem to come up a lot around here).

(The server is back up; they say this is the last time… Stay tuned for a whole bunch of posts saved up over the weekend.)

Live 8: Normally I would be cynical, or at least pessimistic of the prospect of change, but then Geldof, after showing a film of the poverty-stricken children of Ethiopia in the 80s, brought out one of the starving infants we had just seen, Birhan Woldu, grown up into a beautiful, healthy and well-educated twenty-four-year-old. My cynicism washed away, replaced, I admit, by more than a trickle of tears.

Of course, for the cynicism to stay away, those G8 leaders, supposedly the target of the concert and the campaign, need to make some tough decisions, about aid, relief, trade and more. More importantly, we all need to be willing -- and let those leaders know we are willing -- to sacrifice some of our riches: yes, even though this means higher taxes; yes, no more subsidies for our own farmers; yes, we must learn to make the world a place all of us billions can share.

(Also, hats off to Lee for his non-stop blogging stream from Hyde Park…)

Finally, go have a barbecue and listen to Van Morrison's "Almost Indepdendence Day" (or, if you're in the UK like me, go to work).

With Live 8 on in the background, I was able to get a bit of work done: colleagues from Imperial and 13 other UK institutions are putting together a "Letter of Intent" to the European Space Agency for the analysis of data from the LISA satellite. ESA, as expected of a multi-governmental agency guiding the spending of billions of euros, is vaster than empires, and more slow -- with luck, it will be launched in 2014. But it's a fantastic idea (in the real sense of "fantastic"): three spacecraft, millions of kilometers apart from one another, shooting lasers at each other in order to measure their separation to an accuracy of 10^-10 meters! This will let us observe the passage of gravitational radiation -- ripples in space caused by the rapid movement of distant objects (such as black holes crashing into one another), one of the most exciting predictions of General Relativity, still to be directly observed. When we get it to work, it will be an extraordinary new way to look at the Universe -- waves of spacetime rather than the waves of light upon which we have always relied.

Today, alas, will see the end of The Centre of the Universe. Thanks, again, to Jem Finer for creating it, a work of thought and beauty. But I'm sure he's looking forward to sleeping in a warm bed, surrounded by his family, rather than a shed in the middle of a park surrounded by weird Oxonians and the not-quite-white noise of the cosmos.

For anyone who might be checking, everything is OK with me amidst the chaos in London. Now I have to work out how to get back to Oxford, where I live.

Echoing Gia's sentiments:

Londoners Rule.

We are not terrorised.
We are just annoyed.

Update: Made it home, finally. I need a beer.

On September 11, having just moved to the UK about 10 days before, I was on a train up to a meeting in Durham, in the North of England, when news started filtering in via mobile phones (I didn't have one myself at the time) and passengers coming on and off the train.

With only the slimmest of facts, most of my family in the New York area, my father working in Manhattan itself, I was beside myself, in a foreign country, moving towards an even-more-foreign city. Only after many hours could I learn that, luckily, my friends and family were spared that tragedy except by the same proximity of the rest of us.

Today, July 7, was similar. I was on a train again, only this time moving toward the chaos. And the flow of information was a little bit better -- I was able to reach some news through my mobile and learn that, well, no one knew quite what was going on. So I let myself be persuaded to continue on into London rather than turn around. Soon afterwards, Paddington Station was closed, and I was briefly trapped in London along with many, many others.

This time, of course, I had to be the one to reassure my friends and family that everything here was all right. My condolences to all those who were caught up in the tragedy.

It's impossible to avoid melodrama after events like this. In London, like New York, the attacks tested our mettle in the face of tragedy, and we stared down the chaos with equanimity, grumbling but unbowed.

We scientists had somehow managed to fool ourselves into believing that, since John Paul II said that evolution was "more than just a hypothesis", since they admitted some wrongdoing in the persecution of Galileo, that the Catholic Church was on the side of science.

Sadly, perhaps inevitably, we were wrong. In an Op-Ed in yesterday's New York Times, Christoph Schönborn, the cardinal archbishop of Vienna, writes:

Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense - an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection - is not. Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science.

Of course, this is completely backwards: the ideology lies in this tacit alliance with the (still crackpot, even with the imprimatur of the church) Intelligent Design movement and its lobbyists and pseudoscientists at the Discovery Institute, which, according to an article today in the Times, explicitly encouraged Schönborn to write the Op-Ed, in response to an article (reprinted here) by my fellow cosmologist Lawrence Krauss back in May. Krauss's article pointed out that, of course, there isn't any controversy at all: reputable scientists all agree -- because of evidence, not ideology -- that Darwinian evolution via random natural selection is responsible for all the fantastic variety of life we see around us.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an offensive article on the pseudonymous Ivan Tribble's experience on a (reactionary, shortsighted, but perhaps not unusual) faculty search committee which rejected all the bloggers who applied. Aside from the obvious "don't blog", the lessons don't seem to be restricted to the internet:

• Don't have any interests outside of academia.
• Don't ever mention your personal life where anyone might overhear.
• Don't ever talk about your research unless it's been refereed.
• Don't ever talk about your department or university. At least, only say nice things (i.e., lie).
• In fact, it's better never to talk at all. Just publish.
• Unless, like Ivan, it's anonymous.

Scoble -- not an academic -- doesn't get it when he says "It sounds like blogs helped keep him from making a bad hiring decision": they were using the blogs to reject candidates for reasons having nothing to do with their suitability for the job.

That the Chronicle titled this drivel "Bloggers Need Not Apply" implies that perhaps they understood its ridiculousness; I hope they will solicit a response from the academic blogging community. But you can already find much more commentary here, here, here, here, here, here, here and everywhere else in the blogosphere.

P.S. It turns out that yesterday was the first anniversary of this blog. Should I celebrate, or just take Ivan's advice and shut down?

The buzz has died down, but I thought I'd respond to some comments on the last post about the perils of academic blogging.

First, I should probably point out that I'm in a safe situation, with a permanent position in a good University (which I got well before I started this blog).

Finally, Jerry correctly points out that "Academic Freedom" doesn't imply that we get to say anything we want -- it is incumbent upon us to show "appropriate restraint". Indeed, the problem with Tribble's hiring committee is not that they used the candidates' blogs as part of the vetting process -- of course our public words should indeed be considered. No, the problem is that, on the scant evidence given in the article, the bloggers were rejected for things they hadn't done, but might, or just for speaking out at all. This is exactly the opposite of academic freedom.

So now, blogging is just yet another supposedly irrelevant piece of information (like, say, being female, or not getting your PhD from a prestigious University) that can actively work against you

Joe asks 'what exactly is a "liberal arts college" (the writer [Ivan Tribble] works at one, it says)?'. According to the wikipedia

A liberal arts college is an institution of higher education found [mostly] in the United States, offering programs in the liberal arts at the post-secondary level. They encourage — and often require — their students to take a substantial number of classes in topics which may not directly relate to their vocational goals, in an effort to provide a "well-rounded" education. They may be distinguished from colleges offering programs primarily in business, engineering and technology, the trades, the fine arts, theology, or other specialized subjects.

Ostensibly, these are distinct from larger universities, but in fact the undergraduate curriculum in almost every US university you've ever heard of such as Harvard, Yale and Berkeley, for example, and to some extent even MIT and Caltech, is designed this way. Partly, this is because American high school isn't quite as rigourous, nor as specialized, as its counterparts elsewhere. But partly this denotes a philosophical distinction about the purpose of a University education: in the UK, universities are to some extent vocational, even if the vocation is physics or English Literature -- so why study anything else? In the US, the university is -- to use a voguish term -- aspirational: attending one of these places is supposed to make you a better, more well-rounded, person (in addition to making you a physicist, or English scholar). Having gone through that system, I'm quite happy to have been "forced" to take courses in literature, philosophy and economics (this despite US students mostly being fee-paying "customers"). Nowadays, of course, even in the UK, the vocational argument doesn't quite work anymore; a relatively small number of our graduates go on to do physics (anecdotally, of the eight undergrads entering in 2001 for whom I was the personal tutor, only one has gone on to do more physics). Unfortunately, my one-man crusade to change the UK educational system isn't going anywhere, but feel free to let me know if you agree.

Let me welcome to the scientific blogosphere Cosmic Variance, a new group blog featuring Clifford Johnson, a string theorist from USC; JoAnne Hewett, a particle theorist from SLAC at Stanford; Risa Wechsler & Sean Carroll, both cosmologists from the University of Chicago; and Mark Trodden from Syracuse University. Mark and Sean have already been blogging for "a while" (which means more than a few months) but they're all excellent and engaging physicists, and the new blog promises to reflect their excitement.

Thanks, especially, for linking to me and multiplying my traffic by a factor of a few! (And to all my new readers -- leave some comments and let me know what you think.)

Greetings en route from State College, Pennsylvania, home of Penn State University, the only University of which I am aware with a library named after its football coach, Joe Paterno. More relevant to me, Penn State is also the home of the Center for Gravitational Wave Physics, which has been hosting a workshop, "The Pulsar Timing Array -- A Nanohertz Gravitational Wave Telescope". Since I've just been accused of not having enough science in this blog:

First, "pulsars" are thought to be spinning neutron stars (a super-dense object that a star can become after it's run out of fuel), with a lighthouse-like beam that we can detect using radio telescopes -- when it happens to be pointed at the earth. The fastest of these rotate almost 1,000 times a second -- the millisecond pulsars, discovered in the early 80s by Don Backer and colleagues. Amazingly, the rotation rate is so stable that pulsars can be better timekeepers than the best atomic clocks on the earth.

Next, "gravitational waves," predicted by Einstein's General Relativity, are ripples in space and time, actually stretching or compressing the distance between objects as they propagate through the Universe. Gravitational waves are created by the movement of very massive objects like Black Holes (or, indeed, neutron stars: the best indirect evidence for the existence of gravitational waves comes from a pair of pulsars in orbit around one another, speeding up in their orbits as they emit gravitational waves just as predicted by Einstein's theory).

So, what do these things have to do with one another? If a gravitational wave traverses the space between our radio telescope and a pulsar, it changes the amount of space along the way -- so the arrival of the pulsar's signal is accelerated or delayed by just the amount of time given by the speed of light multiplied by the change in distance -- which we can observe through these very small changes in the pulses' arrival times. The challenge is doing this measurement well enough -- we expect the delay to be a few nanoseconds (one billionth of a second), compared to the milliseconds (one thousandth of a second) between pulses.

For three days, we talked about ways of generating gravitational waves, about atomic clocks, about all the other physical processes that can distort a pulsar's signal, and all the great new technology that we hope to be able to use to observe these objects.

Let me also thank the locals for the fact that State College is also the home of lots of free WiFi access points...

For some reason, this blog (along with many others) is being mirrored at Physics and Math Planet. Given the Creative Commons License down at the lower right, this is perfectly legal, if a bit perverse. There's no such thing as bad publicity, but please, readers, be sure to link directly to the original blog and not the copy!

A shameless plug for a very talented friend: go listen to the fine music at Warren Malone's site, and when you like it as much as I do, buy his CDs. And if you're in New York (or in Oxford, UK, in October), catch one of his gigs.