Andrew Jaffe: Leaves on the Line

Last year, I ran for cats and dogs. This year, it’s a different half-marathon, Run to the Beat on September 26 (“London’s Music Half-Marathon”), with a less conveniently located course in East London, and I’ve shifted Kingdoms in my charitable support: I will run for “Trees for Cities”, “an independent charity working to improve the environment in urban areas by involving local people in community tree planting, training and landscaping projects”, in London, throughout the UK, and internationally. So if you like trees, and would like to keep me on the road for 13 miles, please give!

Two crucial figures from outside the mainstream of American culture have died.

Tuli Kupferberg (1923-2010) has been hanging around, writing about and stirring up trouble in New York’s Greenwich Village since the 1950s as a writer, poet, occasional political activist and rock ‘n’ roller. First in the late 60s and early 70s and occasionally thereafter, he was one of the Fugs (named after the faux-expletive from Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead) singing both the poems of William Blake as well as “Slum Goddess of the Lower East Side”. Since then, he kept writing, occasionally reformed the Fugs with his partner Ed Sanders, but had suffered a series of strokes in the last year from which he never fully recovered.

Harvey Pekar (1939-2010) was a bit better known. For the last few decades, he had been writing a series of autobiographical comics, “American Splendor”, illustrated by some of the best comics artists of the last few decades, from R. Crumb and Alan Moore to Gilbert Hernandez, Chester Brown and Joe Sacco.They chronicled his life in Cleveland, Ohio, from the tedium of his day job as a hospital clerk, a bout with cancer (in the excellent graphic novel “Our Cancer Year”), and his occasional run-ins with fame — in the 80s, he was occasional guest on David Letterman’s late-night talk show (until he famously decided to use his slot to lambaste GE, the owner of the NBC television network), and in this decade was memorably played by Paul Giamatti in a movie, also called “American Splendor”, based on the comics. Only a couple of weeks ago, I discovered The Pekar Project, devoted to getting and keeping his newest works online. He was always surly, too high-maintenance for his own good, dependably dissatisfied with whatever his life threw at him. And will nonetheless be missed.

I’ve just finished marking this year’s Cosmology exams — I’m quite pleased with the outcome. But that’s meant that I’ve rewarded myself with some happily lowbrow (meant as a descriptive, not normative, term) entertainment:

• I finally got around to the finale of Lost. Watching it, I was disappointed with the purgatorial explanation for this season’s “flash-sideways”; I would have preferred a less faux-spiritual device. But on reflection, considered purely as a fictional device for letting the creators illuminate their characters — seeing them act, react and interact in new situations — it worked (and, yes, jerked the odd tear on the way).
• I bought an iPad. This will undoubtedly engender both jealousy and derision, so no one will be happy. It is a pretty, erm, magical piece of hardware. Somewhere between a toy and an appliance for now, but not yet a work necessity, like my laptop, nor a real-life one, as I admit my iPhone has become. But I could see it encroaching on the role of both of those, especially as I become less wary of taking it out — and as it becomes more powerful.
• Although I missed some of the episodes along the way, I’ve been enjoying the BBC’s Luther. The melodrama was a bit much, but Idris Elba was fun to watch in the Columbo/Holmes/McNulty title roll, and Ruth Wilson was embarrassingly compelling as his gorgeous and psychopathic astrophysicist (!) nemesis-cum-sidecick. But even more exciting were the weird pop culture references that kept cropping up. There was Johnny Rotten’s “ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?”, and Faulkner’s “the past isn’t dead; it’s not even past” within a few minutes of each other in episode two. And last week we found London’s DCIs calling New York City Detective Munch (Richard Belzer’s character from Homicide, various versions of Law and Order, and a few other series along the way). What have I missed?
• And of course there’s Hitch’s acknowledgement that galaxy formation may be a harder problem than the existence of god (about which I am considerably more than 95% against) or the invasion of Iraq (on which I am somewhat more equivocal, I admit).

I’ve volunteered at the last minute to appear on a panel following a screening of Monsters from the Id, a documentary about 50s Sci-Fi movies and, apparently, their influence on science itself.

The filmmaker is Homer Hickam, an engineer and novelist, author of Rocket Boys, the “novelized” memoir of his rocket-obsessed post-Sputnik childhood in the West Virginia mining country. (I haven’t read it or seen the movie, October Sky, based on it, although it’s been recommended to me several times.)

So if you’re in London and pre-cgi special effects, giant irradiated insects, aliens with ray-guns and the over-arching fear of destruction raining down from above were a big part of your childhood (or maybe your parents’), come along to the Barbican on May 26th.

Let me publicly wish a very Happy Birthday and much love to my wonderful grandmother, Dora Jaffe, born 99 years ago today in Shepetovka, then Russia, now Ukraine, on the eve of the First World War. Moving to New York City just after the war, she has outlasted the century, mothering my father and his two brothers and, especially, doting on her seven grandchildren. After a few decades in the obligatory Florida sun, she is back in New York, only a few miles from most of her brood. I am far away, but proud to be counted among them.

(Somehow I never realized that this date is doubly auspicious, with my grandmother sharing a birthday with Albert Einstein.)

I was saddened, and, I admit, a little freaked out, to learn that a namesake, one of the several other Andrew Jaffes out there, has died. This Andrew Jaffe was a journalist who covered the advertising business: he was an executive and editor at AdWeek magazine, from where he also ran the Clio advertising awards. His obituary in the NY Times is here. I never met him, but I was once confused with him at a restaurant in San Francisco a decade ago, when the staff expected him but got me instead.

My condolences to his family and friends.

The cosmology community has had a terrible few months.

I am saddened to report the passing of Andrew Lange, a physicist from CalTech and one of the world’s preeminent experimental cosmologists. Among many other accomplishments, Andrew was one of the leaders of the Boomerang experiment, which made the first large-scale map of the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation with a resolution of less than one degree, sufficient to see the opposing action of gravity and pressure in the gas of the early Universe, and to use that to measure the overall density of matter, among many other cosmological properties. He has since been an important leader in a number of other experiments, notably the Planck Surveyor satellite and the Spider balloon-borne telescope, currently being developed to become one of the most sensitive CMB experiments ever built.

I learned about this tragedy on the same day that people are gathering in Berkeley, California, to mourn the passing of another experimental cosmologist, Huan Tran of Berkeley. Huan was an excellent young scientist, most recently deeply involved in the development of PolarBear, another one of the current generation of ultra-sensitive CMB experiments. Huan lead the development of the PolarBear telescope itself, currently being tested in the mountains of California, but to be deployed for real science on the Atacama plane in Chile. We on the PolarBear team are proud to name the PolarBear telescope after Huan Tran, a token of our esteem for him, and a small tribute to his memory.

My thoughts go out to the friends and family of both Huan and Andrew. I, and many others, will miss them both.

One of my holiday treks this year was across town to visit Bunhill Fields, final resting place of two of my favorite Londoners: William Blake and Thomas Bayes.

Blake is of course one of the most famous poets in the English language, but most people know him only from short poems like The Tiger [sic] (“Tyger, Tyger burning bright/ In the forests of the night/ What immortal hand or eye/ Could frame thy fearful symmetry”) and Jerusalem, sung in Anglican churches each week. But most of Blake’s work is much too weird to make it into church. It is peopled by gods and monsters, illuminated by Blake’s own wonderful over-the-top illustrations. (For example, America: A Prophecy, his poetic interpretation of the American Revolutionary War, begins “The shadowy Daughter of Urthona stood before red Orc/When fourteen suns had faintly journey’d o’er his dark abode” — George Washington and Thomas Jefferson don’t make Blake’s version.)

Blake’s gravestone sits right on the pavement in the middle of Bunhill Fields, and as such unfortunately has been slightly damaged.

I don’t read Blake every day or even every week, but I probably do use Bayes’s famous theorem at least that often. As I and other bloggers have gone on and on about, Bayes’s theorem is the mathematical statement of how we ought to rigorously and consistently incorporate new information into our model of the world. Bayes himself wrote down only a version appropriate for a restricted version of this problem, and used words, rather than mathematica symbols. Nowadays, we usually write it mathematically, and in a completely general form, as

I was saddened to hear this morning that Lev Kofman, a friend and fellow-cosmologist, died yesterday. Lev has been at CITA in Toronto for a decade, and has had a huge impact on the field, scientifically and personally. He will be missed. He is already.

I’m sure there will be more remembrances to come, but here is just the first, from his family and colleagues in Toronto. Our thoughts are with them.

Lev Kofman: June 17, 1957 - November 12, 2009

We are deeply saddened to inform you that the fabulous Lev Kofman, husband of Anna, father of Sergei 13 and Maria 15, brother of Svetlana, and our great friend, died in the early morning of November 12 from cancer. Many of you were able to commune with Lev as the situation deteriorated over the past weeks, by visits, phone calls, and emails read to him. We are deeply grateful for that: and it provided some solace for Lev to know the tremendous impact he has had on the lives of so many of you.

He bravely kept the physics going strong throughout his illness, characteristic of Lev. His scientific outpourings and influence will transcend this passage. As you know, he made fundamental contributions to Lambda cosmology and dark energy, structure in the cosmic web, inflationary theory, its Gaussian and non-Gaussian aspects, and gravitational waves. He initiated and developed the theory of preheating, showing how all matter could arise from a coherent vacuum energy at the end of inflation, his cosmic baby. And much more besides. He was the quintessential leader, for CITA and CIFAR as a whole, and for the vibrant early universe group he established, providing inspirational guidance to a generation of young researchers.

He felt the physics to his very core. Beyond this, it is the indomitable, fun-loving, deeply philosophical spirit, a gourmand of life in all its manifestations, that we will miss so much.

With our best wishes in these sad times,

Anna Chandarina (Kofman)
Svetlana Kofman
Dick Bond
Andrei Linde
Renata Kallosh

I’ll be back online soon, promise.