Andrew Jaffe: Leaves on the Line

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.

I feel a bit guilty about using the blog for this sort of thing, but… if you’re one of the lucky people feeling flush this season, and not otherwise philosophically opposed, you might want to consider donating to the UK Blue Cross (“Britain’s Pet Charity”) in support of my attempt to run the London Royal Parks Half Marathon this weekend. Be nice to teh kittehs…

While I’ve been galavanting across Europe and the USA, the ongoing UK science-funding crisis has entered a new, possibly even grimmer, phase. The STFC itself is so strapped for cash it will only be issuing grants lasting until October 2010, instead of the usual two or three years. This is rumored to be engendered by a new £40 million shortfall and related to the ongoing reviews of STFC science and facilities such as big telescopes and membership in international collaborations like CERN and the European Space Agency. The results of these reviews and consultations have started to come in, and they will be digested in a likely mysterious and political process to give the STFC executive cover for its decisions input from the scientific community as it forms its strategy for the coming years.

Meanwhile, even those applying for these underfunded grants are being increasingly pressed to prove their economic worth, possibly over and above the scientific merit of their proposals. The Guardian discusses this in the context of the search for the next Lucasian Professor at Cambridge (a lineage which stretches from Isaac Newton to Stephen Hawking) and asks whether the UK can continue to maintain its leadership in blue-skies (but perhaps manifestly “useless”) science like cosmology and general relativity. My colleague Peter Coles reminds us that this is exactly the sort of things that Universities should be doing, of course.

Looking towards next year’s election, Nature Magazine examines the science policies of the likely Conservative Government, which would unsurprisingly take this economic stance even further.

Trying to digest all of this, Andy Lawrence and Peter Coles — with lots of input from informed commenters — have decided that it may, in fact, be time to panic.

Still, I suppose it might be better than being at the University of California, where academics are being furloughed to save money — although grants from the Federal government are still flowing (and can often be used to top-up salaries cut by the furloughs). Things, as they say, are tough all over. (And yes, of course, we supposedly but not certainly employed-for-life academics have it pretty good despite these cuts.)

In further London-based excitement, I was forced into something that most Londoners never get the chance to do: walking in a Tube tunnel. I was taking the Picadilly Line train down to Kings Cross, and, just after leaving the Caledonian Road station, the lights in the car dimmed and the train stopped — nothing particularly unusual. But a couple of minutes later the driver got on the loudspeaker and told us that there had been “a person under the train” (a euphemism that isn’t quite a euphemism) at Kings Cross. After a few more minutes he told us that we may have to “de-train” but that he’d let us know when authorization came. He implied that if the unfortunate victim were still alive it could take up to a couple of hours.

Given those circumstances, we were not too unhappy that things took a while. Eventually, the staff from Caledonian Road station showed up, and started leading us off the train, giving us the unfortunate chance for a rare London experience:

We finally emerged, many of us snapping pictures with cameras and phones, into the station:

We got loaded onto buses and made it into central London. On the way, I passed Kings X station itself, to find the (Virgin!) Air Ambulance ready to rescue the “person under the train”:

If nothing else, the British (and, I think, even we foreigners who happen to have found ourselves here) tend to be pretty relaxed in a crisis, and so we were. Given that this was on Sunday in July, we were lucky that the train wasn’t much hotter and more crowded with people commuting to work, so we could manage to be more amused by the situation than anything else. Damped, to be sure, by the sad circumstances that had caused all of this. But still: blitz spirit, Keep Calm and Carry On, and all that.

Central London featured two important events this past weekend. First was the annual Gay Pride Parade, a riotous and joyful procession of rainbow flags, pink clothing, and (mostly) ill-fitting dresses on very large people.

Sadly, the only thing that marred the good-natured, family-friendly event were the stupid protesters. But it was wonderful to see that they were just ignored, or occasionally people would point at their sad and pathetic group and just laugh (there was also a much smaller, and yet more pathetic, group of National Front protesters who deserved and received even less attention).

At the same time, the Royal Society, right down the road from Piccadilly Circus, hosted the annual Summer Science Exhibition, and I visited my colleagues (Stuart Lowe and Michael Bridges, here) talking Planck Surveyor science, taking infrared pictures of the visitors and handing out lots of great Planck swag.

In fact, this weekend, Planck has cooled down to just about its final temperature of 100mK (that is 0.1 degrees above absolute zero!) and has made it to its final orbit at the L2 point. So we are starting to get ready to take real data, after we spend the next month or so kicking the tires and checking her out.

One of the perks of the project. (Don’t worry, not paid for by your tax dollars.)