Andrew Jaffe: Leaves on the Line

I’ve been busy the last few weeks, writing documents for the Planck SGS RR, grant proposals, getting ready for the exam season, and (I know I can’t complain), travelling to the Aegean.

But this afternoon I took a few hours off and attended the Imperial College postgraduate degree ceremony. In and amongst the several hundred students received their degrees were all three of my first students (I celebrated their successful PhD vivas here, here and here). There were a couple of short speeches, and a few honorary degrees awarded (the morning ceremony gave one to F1 head and infamous labour donor Bernie Ecclestone), but most of the time was taken up by the students marching up one at a time and shaking the hand of an Imperial luminary. In addition to my students, their were a few other astrophysics PhDs awarded, including to Dr Brian May, who got (by far) the biggest cheer of the day. Me, I got the rare honor of sitting on the stage of the Royal Albert Hall, in my academic regalia (American PhDs robes are heavier than those from the UK, for reasons that escape me, not ideal for a couple of hours under stage lights — and it now appears that my hood wasn’t even the proper maroon and black combo that my Chicago degree apparently calls for).

I admit I was inordinately proud of my students, in my meagre supervisory role as Doktorvater (to use the excellent Germanic term for supervisor): they’ve all done fantastic theses, important science, and most importantly by the end I was able to just get out of the way while they did the hard work. Congratulations again to each of them.

Congratulations to Joe Zuntz, recipient of Imperial Astrophysics’ latest Doctorate for successfully defending his entertainingly-titled Ph.D. Thesis, “Cosmic Microwave Background Power Spectrum Estimation and Prediction with Curious Methods and Theories”. Joe had been my student since 2004, working on topics from hard-core data analysis with the MAXIPOL team to exploring the repercussions of exotic theories such as the Causal Set idea for unifying quantum mechanics with relativity (which, alas, he has shown is unlikely to be able to match our current observations). Joe has already moved over to a postdoctoral fellowship at Oxford where he is sure to (continue to) prosper. Congratulations, Dr. Z!

I gave the last lecture in my Fourier class today. I think the course started alright, but I seemed to be losing the students for the last few lectures (not helped by the fact that three of the ten hours of the course were 5-6pm on Fridays, but a good workman doesn’t blame his tools…). Trying to get some immediate feedback (although still too late to do this year’s cohort any good) I handed out sheets of paper and asked them to write down, anonymously, something they understood, something they didn’t understand (a request greeted with an uncomfortably loud giggle) and any other comments. Although I only got about a dozen responses, there were some commonalities: indeed the first half of the course (Fourier Series) seemed well-understood, and the second half (Fourier Transforms) much less so; I should try to include more examples of the use of the methods (which will require changing the syllabus a bit), and more explanation of what the mathematics mean.

But one remark stood out: “Your handwriting is really bad. And you smell. Sorry.” Further comments — perhaps from readers who might have some knowledge of the subject — welcome.

Too busy for much blogging for the next few weeks. In the meantime:

First, my grad students: Goodbye to one just finishing, hello to my new one, congratulations to the one who just transferred to official PhD-student status, and, finally, to the one staying on as a postdoc! I’m excited that I’m able to still work with all of them on various projects, all concentrating on understanding the state of the Universe at its very earliest moments.

Second, to the undergrads: I hope that my teaching is going better than last year.

Third, the new record from my homestate boy, Bruce Springsteen, is better than you might expect from a still-left-wing pro-Union old-fashioned rock’n’roller. And “Girls in Their Summer Clothes” sounds like it could have been written and performed by Stephen Merritt and his Magnetic Fields (this is intended as a huge compliment!).

Next time, an update on the odd combination of Philip Glass’s versions of Leonard Cohen’s poems. And maybe that 16-solar-mass Black Hole (technical paper here). Conversely, I am unlikely to usefully comment on race relations as seen through the eyes James Watson or Sasha Frere-Jones. But the rest of the blogosphere has those well in hand.

Well, Summer break is over, the days are surprisingly short already, the sky is rarely clear, and the students are back.

Warm-weather highlights ranged from the intellectual pleasures of my visits to Portugal and Chicago, to the rather more visceral ones of Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation at the Roundhouse, The Hold Steady at Shepherds Bush, and the diminutive Prince somehow filling up the massive O2 arena formerly known as The Dome. I also let my PhD Alma Mater pimp me to promote themselves, but I got lunch with the writer of Freakonomics out of it, and a surprisingly wonderful cocktail party at the residence of the used-car-salesman-cum-American Ambassador in London.

But now, back to real work. I’ve spent the day in front of my computer, more even than usual, dealing with the repercussions of our having decided to give the returning second-year students a test to get them to flex their mathematical muscles in preparation for the year — during which they’re liable to see lots of new mathematical and physical concepts for the very first time. We’ve decided to run the test through our online learning system, and, unfortunately, new technology almost always has its quirks: we had some fires to quench in the early hours of the day, but things seem to be running smoothly now. My proverbial and actual fingers are all crossed.

I’ll be covering quite a few of those new concepts in my second attempt at teaching our course on Fourier Methods; it didn’t go very well, last time, I must admit, and I’m hoping that the changes I’ve made in both the form and the content of the course — and the test they’re taking now — will make it better for the students. Feedback, positive, negative, or even ranting, is appreciated, from any present or past students.

Sean Carroll over in Cosmic Variance has some excellent “Unsolicited Advice” on “How to be a Good Graduate Student”.

Some of it is more appropriate for American grad students with their longer periods and higher courseloads (and of course they’re called “graduate students” rather than “postgraduate students” as they are here in the UK), but, coming from another astrophysicist/cosmologist, most of the advice is right on and I certainly will commend it to my own students.

I’ll point out that one of the pieces of advice isn’t to please your supervisor. Our job as a supervisor is to turn students into good scientists, and that means that, especially by the end of your PhD, you ought to be working with us rather than for us. Of course, the hard part is to make sure that you have a good enough relationship with your supervisor that you feel comfortable disagreeing with him or her. This is probably easier in my sort of small-group one-on-one science than in big laboratory-based work in which you’re all working together towards a very specific goal. But even there, your project is your project and you should “own” it, as they say on talk shows and self-help books.

(Julianne Dalcanton also has some excellent advice on applying for faculty jobs once you’ve moved a couple of steps down the line from being a student.)

Most of us male academics acknowledge that it’s hard being a female in the male-dominated world of physics, with our own academic sort of testosterone and structural prejudices. Imagine what it’s like as a superhero:

[Via Bedazzled, which also points to a campy Batgirl trailer (not to mention an unrelated weird clip of Astrud Gilberto singing “The Girl from Ipanema”).]

Once again, my Union, the University and College Union, has sort-of voted to boycott Israeli academics. It’s only “sort of”, because, like last time, the decision comes about from a vote of activists present at the UCU annual conference, not of the membership at large. Indeed, the vote has been opposed by the General Secretary of the Union, not to mention the British and Israeli governments, the not particularly pro-Israel Observer newspaper, and even the New York Times. No matter what your feelings about the present Israeli government and its actions with respect to the Palestinians, such a boycott is, at best, an empty gesture. At worst, it actively works against progressive causes espoused by the many Israeli academics who are among the vocal critics of their own government. And, of course, it is bad for scholarship, which, we often say, should at least endeavor to rise above politics.

A few weeks ago, the UK’s National Union of Journalists made a similar gesture, one that will likely have even more repercussions for me and other physicists. Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg was slated to give a plenary address at the coming PASCOS meeting at Imperial next month. Unfortunately, and rather bizarrely, Weinberg has decided to use the NUJ’s decision (this was before the UCU’s meetings) as a reason to back out of his engagement, citing this as an example of “a widespread anti-Israel and anti-Semitic current of British opinion, especially in the intellectual establishment.” The crucial word in that sentence is, of course, that meek connective “and”. An anti-Israel bias is pretty evident here, but whether or not this translates into actual anti-semitism remains unclear. (The US, for example, has plenty of pro-Israel anti-semitism in the form of fundamentalist Christians hastening the coming of their rapture/apocalypse, for which a strong Israel seems to be required in a perverse reading of Revelations.) Alas, Weinberg’s not-quite-empty gesture is certainly bad for scholarship at best, and at worst deprives him of an actual pulpit from which he could have propounded his views.

In the last couple of weeks, the UK Government has announced that the Department of Trade and Industry is so far in the red that it has cut £68 million from the science budget.

Usually, government finance isn’t a zero-sum game. But this year, to pay for payouts having to do with the collapse of the Rover car company and “the unexpected increase in support needed to cover British Energy’s nuclear liabilities” (does “nuclear” signify “science” somehow?). A few weeks ago, the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC) announced that its share of the shortfall would be £3.1 million, which would result in a 2.5% cut in astronomy grants, and a 5% cut in ongoing projects.

The heads of the research councils have, naturally, complained, citing the usual ring-fencing of the science budget against such machinations, and the ongoing effect this will have on UK investment in science research and development over the long term. To those of us actually working in the well-appointed trenches of science, the real problem isn’t that our budget is being cut, but the uncertainty generated by these late decisions. We’ve been waiting since mid-December for the announcement of this year’s grant funding. Instead, they claim they’re going to delay new hires by six months. The councils often act as if academic jobs are just like in the so-called “real world”, where you can hire someone all year long, whereas we have to stick to the academic calendar, along with competing with our better-funded colleagues (mostly in the USA). Ironically, however, this delay may have the positive effect of putting us on the same schedule as those US competitors, who usually announce positions in the winter that will only start in the following autumn. (So any young cosmologists looking to come to London may want to get in touch, once PPARC lets us know about our funding…)

Neil Tyson of New York’s Museum of Natural History had an excellent appearance on The Daily Show where he reminds us that “Astrophysicists are a simple people”. John Stewart flipped between slack-jawed incomprehension and good jokes. Better science than most of the real news.

Speaking of the media and science, I spent Tuesday night boozing it up at the Royal Society’s annual “Scientists Meet the Media” party, sponsored by Novartis and the Daily Telegraph. Martin Rees, astrophysicist and Royal Society president, couldn’t help but dis the editor of the (famously right-wing) Telegraph for its politics in a room full of (mostly lefty) Guardian readers for its somehow managing passable science coverage despite its dodgy politics. Scientists and journalists both manage a healthy egotism, and it was amusing to see both groups hawking their wares while pouring free champagne down their throats. OK, our throats — I certainly can’t claim disinterest. If my own experience is a guide, I expect that the supposedly high-powered corridors of scientific power were a bit wobbly in the aftermath.

Update: The Telegraph has got a long article covering the party, studded with science-celebrity gossip (and not much else).