Andrew Jaffe: Leaves on the Line

Poetry and Space

Wed, 12 Nov 2008 16:39:12 +0000

I'll be introducing this event tomorrow. Come on over for an evening of scientific poetry...


Inua Ellams is one of the UK's most talented performance poets. He is establishing a great reputation for the power and quality of his work. His live appearances have included the BBC Politics show (TV), The Royal Festival Hall, the Glastonbury Rock Festival and Latitude. As part of Generation Txt, an anthology of new talent in UK poetry, he has toured nationwide. His work is influenced by both Classic Literature & by Hip Hop.	Isobel Dixon - Born in South Africa, this wonderful poet is the daughter of a keen amateur astronomer. Her debut Weather Eye won the Olive Schreiner Prize and her latest collection A Fold in the Map was published by Salt in 2007. She will also bereading poems by Rebecca Elson, the distinguished astronomer and poet whose work focused on nebular clusters, and who died in 1999, aged only 39.	Diana Syder one of Britain's leading poets of science, is a writer who can cross the boundaries between disciplines, using ideas and vocabulary from cosmology and physics to inspire her work. Her poetry collections include Hubble, Maxwell's Rainbow and String, all published by Smith/Doorstop Books. In 2002 she received a Public Awareness of Science Award from the Institute of Physics.	Mario Petrucci is a well-known poet and educator. He is also a former research scientist, who has written widely about scientific issues. His recent poetry collections include Heavy Water: a poem for Chernobyl (2004), Flowers of Sulphur (2007). His new collection, Monte Cassino, will be published shortly.

Escaping the Matrix is a series of poetry events featuring contemporary poets and guest speakers, and forms part of Poet in the City's successful and innovative New Audiences initiative. The three events in the Imperial series have been programmed and managed by Daniel Macadam, Josephine Ivie and Lucy Clouting respectively. Thanks should also go to Ben Gwalchmai, the chair of New Audiences.

Poet in the City is a registered charity committed to attracting new audiences to poetry, making new connections for poetry, and raising money to support poetry education, in particular the placing of poets in schools. Charity Commission number 1117354, Company limited by guarantee registered number 05819413.

The series is being hosted by Imperial College London, South Kensington Campus, London SW7 2AZ.

The Escaping the Matrix events will be held at Imperial College London, South Kensington Campus, London SW7 2AZ.

Nearest tube stations are Gloucester Road or South Kensington (on the District and Circle line) or Knightsbridge (on the Piccadilly line)

Poetry and Work 9th October Clore Lecture Theatre, Huxley Building

Poetry and Space 13th November G16, Sir Alexander Fleming Building

Poetry and Maths 4th December Lecture Theatre 220, Mechanical Engineering

If you would like to see one or more of the events in the Escaping the Matrix series please
RSVP as soon as possible to Poet in the City.

Call Daniel Macadam on 07754 252212
Email dfamacadam@gmail.com

or Write to Poet in the City, c/o Dechert LLP, 160 Queen Victoria Street, London EC4V 4QQ.

Booking is essential!

Tags: Imperial, Poet In the City, poetry, space

Change

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 21:41:55 +0000

It is disconcerting to be moved by a website.

Might we really get openness, sunlight, transparency?

Tags: Biden, change.gov, Obama

The First Family

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 12:52:15 +0000

This is an even nicer picture:

(Courtesy The Guardian)

And a stirring speech. "Democracy, liberty, opportunity and unyielding hope."

Tags: Obama

History, County by County

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 09:43:12 +0000

What a joy to be able to show this map today:

So much better than last time. I wept with joy and relief, and pride.

(Courtesy The NY Times. Lots more very cool maps here.)

Tags: county, map, McCain, Obama

Travel Karma

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 15:41:41 +0000

I've just spent a quick 36 hours in Italy, taking the role of External Examiner for a PhD defense at SISSA in Italy. I was very happy indeed to "confer the degree of Doctor Philosophiae" on a very worthy young scientist. But getting to and from Trieste was less pleasant.

It started promisingly. En route, they had overbooked the Munich-Trieste leg of my journey, so I gladly accepted Lufthansa's offer of €250 and €30 for an airport dinner (the airport actually has nice Bavarian food, at least if you like sausages). This got me in a couple of hours late, but, well, Trieste isn't that interesting anyway (although my hosts are wonderful people and great scientists).

Somehow, though, this threw off the karmic balance (of course I don't believe in that sort of thing, but stories are much more interesting with such metaphors to structure them) that keeps my world on its usually steady course. Indeed, everything was ticking along -- I was especially pleased with the QR code Lufthansa sent to my mobile phone in lieu of a paper boarding pass. But en route back through Munich to London, finally getting on the plane, they asked me, seeing my US passport, "How long will you be in London?" to which I responded, "I reside there". Unfortunately, although true, this set into motion an unfortunate series of events. My new passport, only renewed a couple of months ago, is missing its "Indefinite Leave to Remain" -- as I had, in classic absent-minded-professor mode, managed to lose the old passport with its visa stamp (a long story which I'll tell when the statute of limitations has passed...). I've travelled to and from the UK several times since then, each time entering using the science-fictiony IRIS system which means they don't actually need to see my passport, just (gulp) my eyes. But this time they explicitly asked, and, honest soul that I am, I, perhaps unwisely, told the truth. But that meant the airline couldn't be sure I was allowed in the UK, so they called immigration. Unfortunately, the flight was leaving about 5 minutes later, not long enough for the Home Office to check my claims. So I missed my flight, finally spoke to an immigration officer of some sort in the UK, who consented to my returning to the UK later in the evening. Adding the proverbial insult to injury, Lufthansa, seeing no fault of their own in the process, decided to charge me £35 to change flights.

Worst of all, this means I'll arrive late to see Neil Gaiman discuss artists' rights tonight, and have to cart my luggage across London.

Tags: Home Office, ILR, immigration, Lufthansa, SISSA, Trieste

Nobel 2008: Broken Symmetry

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 17:16:47 +0000

The 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to Nambu, Kobayashi and Maskawa. Nambu, although not exactly famous outside of physics circles, is one of the most influential theoretical particle physicists of the last half-century. He proposed the basis of quantum chromodynamics, which is the theory of how quarks interact to form subatomic particles like protons, neutrons and pions, helped found string theory, and discovered spontaneous symmetry breaking in field theory. Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking is the idea that a theory can have fundamental interactions which are much simpler than those that appear to actually be manifested in the particles which we actually observe. Indeed, this is the idea behind the Higgs Mechanism which gives mass to all of the particles that we see in the world, and whose eponymous particles is one of the main treasures being searched for by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

Kobayashi and Maskawa brought together several strands of field theory and helped lead to the standard model of particle physics. The first piece was the fact that particles seem to violated what is known as CP symmetry -- some aspects of the Universe would behave differently if you switched particles with antiparticles and simultaneously exchanged left and right. The second was the idea that different sorts of particles -- in this case quarks, could actually mix with one another depending on the circumstance. If you measure the mass of the particle, you have a different object than if you concentrate on the strength of its interactions. But the details of that mixing is limited by the constraints of quantum field theory. Kobayashi and Maskawa realized that the theory made a lot more sense if their were six quarks -- only three were known when they write their paper in 1972, but all six have since been observed.

And because this is a blog, and therefore really about me, I'll point out that my first paper on cosmology was called Cosmological constraints on pseudo Nambu-Goldstone bosons which examined some of the repercussions of a variant of Nambu's theory on the evolution of the Universe and the objects within it.

Update: There's been a bit of controversy over why Kobayashi and Maskawa didn't share the prize with Nicola Cabibbo, the Italian physicist who first wrote down the expression for mixing between two quarks, and whose name is always associated with the other two in the full CKM quark mixing matrix. Similarly, there's an argument for Nambu sharing the prize with Jeffery Goldstone; the two share recognition for one important repercussion of broken symmetry: the Nambu-Goldstone boson (as per my paper above, of course). Indeed, outside of Japan and the University of Chicago, it's often just the Goldstone Boson. The prize can only to go to three winners at a time, so the committee must have decided this was an adequate compromise (less so if you're Goldstone or Cabibbo, of course).

Tags: Kobayashi, Maskawa, Nambu, Nobel, particle, QCD, symmetry

iCosmo

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 07:16:31 +0000

A quick pointer to Initiative for Cosmology (iCosmo). The website brings together a bunch of useful calculations for physical cosmology -- relatively simple quantities like the relationship between redshift and distance, and also more complicated ones like the power spectrum of density perturbations (which tells us the distribution of galaxies on the largest scales in the Universe) and quantities derived from that like the distortions in the shapes of galaxies due to gravitational lensing, when the path of light from galaxies is perturbed by intervening mass in the Universe. Combined with good documentation and tutorials (and downloadable source), it makes a good companion to sites such as LAMBDA's CMB toolbox, which provides similar services targeted specifically at Cosmic Microwave Background science. iCosmo looks like it will be useful for researchers in the field as well as students, so thanks and congratulations to its creators (I'd like to point directly at the page listing them, but that doesn't seem to be possible... instead, there's a discussion forum at CosmoCoffee.).

Tags: CMB, cosmology, iCosmo, web, web2.0

The State of UK Physics (Wakeham)

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 22:26:23 +0000

The Wakeham Review on the state of UK Physics has been released. Andy Lawrence has a good executive summary and The Guardian an overview. It seems to be positive about the state of physics overall, but perhaps lacks the rage and invective the community was hoping for. I am travelling but will try to digest it; let this serve as a placeholder until then.

Tags: physics, RCUK, UK, Wakeham

Playing catch-up

Sun, 28 Sep 2008 14:06:39 +0000

So, apologies for taking so long between posts. For now, I'll blame twitter and its ADD version of blogging, because that at least lets me point to an interesting meeting that went on last week: the .Astronomy Conference on Networked Astronomy and the New Media. the conference brought together several related strands of astronomical computing, from the grid (the Virtual Observatory), to "citizen astronomy" (Galaxy Zoo, which is apparently being upgraded to "Universe Zoo", Google Sky, and blogs and podcasts), to hacks and mashups built on top of current bits of distributed infrastructure, not to mention twitter itself. (Connectivity is terrible here, but much of the material from the conference is available from the conference site.)

Unfortunately, I spent that time in a meeting room doing my part on STFC committees to keep the UK physics funding process moving along as well as possible during these still-troubled times.

Now, I'm in the ~~Macedonian~~ Greek city of Thessalonika, lucky enough to have been invited to give a talk at From the Antikythera Mechanism to Herschel and Planck: 2500 Years of Observational Astronomy, organized by one of Imperial's postdocs. I won't let it go to my head, but it's nice being treated as someone vaguely important: lunch with the vice-mayor, nice hotel, and amusing Thessaloniki swag to cart home (although when Ute Lemper came to sing she had lunch with the Mayor himself...). My talk is this evening, but the rain outside is precluding much local exploration, but at least I have some time to finish my talk (and write this).

For me, home for about 12 hours tomorrow night, and then off to a Planck meeting in Rome and then Palermo.

Finally let me also welcome Peter Coles to the astro blogosphere. His current prolixity is putting me to shame.

Tags: .astronomy, Greece, Rome, STFC, Thessalonika, twitter

Blogging the LHC

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 08:55:41 +0000

I'm at a meeting in Cambridge this week, discussing details of the way matter is arranged in the Universe, and the insight that gives us into the fundamental physics of the Universe. Many of us have got up a bit early to watch the BBC coverage of the first beams at the LHC, since CERN's own coverage is overloaded. (It so happens that I'm at DAMTP, Stephen Hawking's home base, but he has probably wisely decided to stay in bed.)

So far they've got the beam half-way around.

We cosmologists are always pleased that almost all of the PR descriptions are about the kind of work that we do: recreating the conditions of the early Universe and finding dark matter.

First mention of the Higgs Boson... but very quickly followed by more cosmology: how will the Universe end?

Pointing out that we'll have to wait for December or so until we actually get two-beam collisions at full energy.

But now it's time to go back to my meeting...

And now they've apparently had beams going both directions...

Tags: CERN, LHC

Stealing data?

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 21:46:43 +0000

PAMELA (Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics) is a Russian-Italian satellite measuring the composition of cosmic rays. One of the motivations for the measurements is the indirect detection of dark matter -- the very-weakly-interacting particles that make up about 25% of the matter in the Universe (with, as I'm sure you all know by now) normal matter about 5% and the so-called Dark Energy the remaining 70%. By observing the decay products of the dark matter -- with more decay occurring in the densest locations -- we can probe the properties of the dark particles. So far, these decays haven't yet been unequivocally observed. Recently, however, members of the PAMELA collaboration have been out giving talks, carefully labelled "preliminary", showing the kind of excess cosmic ray flux that dark matter might be expected to produce.

But preliminary data is just that, and there's a (usually) unwritten rule that the audience certainly shouldn't rely on the numerical details in talks like these. Cirelli & Strumia have written a paper based on those numbers, "Minimal Dark Matter predictions and the PAMELA positron excess" (arXiv:0808.3867), arguing that the data fits their pet dark-matter model, so-called minimal dark matter (MDM). MDM adds just a single type of particle to those we know about, compared to the generally-favored supersymmetric (SUSY) dark matter model which doubles the number of particle types in the Universe (but has other motivations as well). What do the authors base their results on? As they say in a footnote, "the preliminary data points for positron and antiproton fluxes plotted in our figures have been extracted from a photo of the slides taken during the talk, and can thereby slightly differ from the data that the PAMELA collaboration will officially publish" (originally pointed out to me in the physics arXiv blog).

This makes me very uncomfortable. It would be one thing to write a paper saying that recent presentations from the PAMELA team have hinted at an excess -- that's public knowledge. But a photograph of the slides sounds more like amateur spycraft than legitimate scientific data-sharing.

Indeed, it's to avoid such inadvertent data-sharing (which has happened in the CMB community in the past) that the Planck Satellite team has come up with its rather draconian communication policy (which is itself located in a password-protected site): essentially, the first rule of Planck is you do not talk about Planck. The second rule of Planck is you do not talk about Planck. And you don't leave paper in the printer, or plots on your screen. Not always easy in our hot-house academic environments.

Update: Bergstrom, Bringmann, & Edsjo, "New Positron Spectral Features from Supersymmetric Dark Matter - a Way to Explain the PAMELA Data?" (arXiv: 0808.3725) also refers to the unpublished data, but presents a blue swathe in a plot rather than individual points. This seems a slightly more legitimate way to discuss unpublished data. Or am I just quibbling?

Update 2: One of the authors of the MDM paper comments below. He makes one very important point, which I didn't know about: "Before doing anything with those points we asked the spokeperson of the collaboration at the Conference, who agreed and said that there was no problem". Essentially, I think that absolves them of any "wrongdoing" -- if the owners of the data don't have a problem with it, then we shouldn't, either (although absent that I think the situation would still be dicey, despite the arguments below and elsewhere). And so now we should get onto the really interesting question: is this evidence for dark matter, and, if so, for this particular model. (An opportunity for Bayesian model comparison!?)

Tags: cosmic rays, dark matter, ethics, PAMELA

Blog life

Mon, 01 Sep 2008 18:17:08 +0000

Welcome to anyone one led here from Physics World's Blog life column. This is a blog -- so comments are encouraged (or you could click on the advertisements)!

Tags: Blog Life, Physics World

Science Debate 2008

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 22:43:21 +0000

It's making the science-blogging rounds today that Obama has answered the questions posed as Science Debate 2008, questions on education, health care, stem cells and, of course, climate. He supports all the right scientific positions, and says several times that he will increase funding for basic research overall, but most importantly acknowledges and condemns the ideological and political interference that has plagued US research during the Bush administration.

McCain will, apparently, follow with his answers soon.

Meanwhile, here in the UK, the lengthily-named Department for Innovation, University and Skills (DIUS) is holding a consultation on Science and Society where you can answer questions like "How should scientists be rewarded for their efforts to communicate science to the public?" (I'm thinking big wads of cash.)

Tags: DIUS, McCain, Obama, Science Debate

The Fermi Telescope

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 22:44:26 +0000

NASA's latest space-based telescope has, until now, been known as the Gamma-Ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST). Today, they announced the very first results, and renamed it the Fermi Space Telescope, after physicist Enrico Fermi. Fermi was one of the pioneers of modern particle physics, part of the Manhattan Project generation that created the fundamental theories and techniques that we still use today, although he died sadly young before he could see the fruition of his work in today's standard model of particle physics. He also thought hard about a number of more speculative issues, including wondering why, if life is common in the Universe, we haven't met any other sentient creatures yet (a question known in fact as the Fermi Paradox) -- and worried that the answer might be that civilizations tend to blow themselves up.

Today's results came in the form of an all-sky map. The band in the center is gamma-ray emission from the Milky Way galaxy, and three of the four bright spots are pulsars -- fast-spinning, magnetized neutron stars, and the fourth is a kind of distant active galaxy known as a "Blazar".

I wonder how long before someone will compare the GLAST (Fermi) maps with the microwave-band maps from WMAP like this one:

The way gamma rays are created is very different from the emission microwaves, but any soup of gas, dust, stars and magnetic fields is likely to produce both.

Just as exciting as these maps is GLAST's ability to find Gamma-Ray Bursts, some of the most energetic objects in the Universe, whose mechanisms are still poorly understood, and which may let us peer to the epoch of the formation of the very first objects.

(All images courtesy NASA.)

Tags: Fermi, gamma rays, GLAST, pulsars, WMAP

Writing about dancing about architecture

Sat, 23 Aug 2008 12:09:56 +0000

For some reason a lot of music books have percolated to the top of my bedstand pile recently. I just finished Alex Ross' magisterial and definitive The Rest is Noise, a history of 20th Century "Western Classical" music. (Let's pause for a moment and praise the genius of that title, by the way.) The book starts with Strauss, Mahler and Debussy and ends with John Adams and some of my recent obsessions: Arvo Pärt, Steve Reich and Olivier Messiaen, whose Quartet for the End of the Time is at the Proms next week. (For me, really a neophyte with this kind of music, the book was an ideal companion to Paul Morley's Words and Music, which turned me onto this music by reimagining the history of rock'n'roll as if driven not by the blues but by the resolutely white-boy classical tradition: it starts and ends with Alvin Lucier's minimalist "I am Sitting in a Room" and Kylie's "Can't Get You Out of My Head".)

But the centerpiece of Ross's book is three chapters on the way politics drove the musical agenda (or at least tried to) in mid-century Germany, America and the Soviet Union. The unspoken but eventually obvious point comes through, that the music can't help be of its place and time, a product of the world around it, but that our duty is just to listen, not forgetting the history, but not paying it too much attention, either.

I've also been reading Love is a Mix Tape, Rob Sheffield's music-tinged memoir, concentrating on the loss of his first wife, Renée, far too young. I'm lucky enough to have known Rob for more than 20 years, and that made the book both hard to put down and, when the going got tough, recalling for me the day when Rob phoned to tell me the terrible news about Renée, hard to pick up. But it's a lovely, moving, book, managing to set down the emotional pull of music's private meaning and the way it connects to the people listening with us, even on an iPod hundreds or thousands of miles away. (You can hear Rob reading some excerpts at the book's site.; there's a wonderful NPR interview with Rob, too.)

Now, I'm on to Simon Armitage's Gig, also a memoir, this time by a music-obsessed British poet.

(By the way, does anyone have a definitive attribution for "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture"? I've mostly heard Elvis Costello, but also Steve Martin.)

Tags: Alex Ross, book, classical, Gig, Love is a Mix Tape, pop, Rob Sheffield, rock, Simon Armitage, The Rest is Noise