Andrew Jaffe: Leaves on the Line

The latest act in the black comedy which is the running of the Science and Technology Funding Council is being played out. The Science Minister, Lord Drayson (which sounds, with “science”, “minister” and “lord” all in one title, to my US ears more like a character from bad science fiction than an actual member of the Government) has announced “new arrangements” for STFC (press-release version here or here) . Basically, the government will try to insulate grant funding from two big sources of uncertainty. First, BIS would [attempt to] protect STFC from fluctuations in international currency rates which impact the cost in pounds sterling of being a member of international organizations like CERN, ESO and ESA (although the latter would eventually be moved into the nascent UK Space Agency). Second, the costs of running “our large domestic facilities, Diamond, the Central Laser Facility and ISIS” would be separated from the grants — the money for doing physics. This is crucial since these facilities actually don’t themselves do very much physics at all — rather, they use physics to probe the properties of matter in order to do biology, materials science, chemistry and more. So we physicists shouldn’t be saddled with the costs of running these machines.

Alas, these changes, although positive, may be too little, too late, despite the cliché. The amount of money available for grants still seems to remain significantly below the level of a few years ago. There may be perfectly reasonable arguments for decreasing the amount of physics being done in the UK, but we have not had them. Rather, this entire process began with the creation of the STFC, before the financial crisis, with what seemed at the time to be a toxic combination of mistakes and mismanagement. Since then, we’ve been fire-fighting, dealing with sharp cuts without being told about the long-term financial strategy. There have been several “consultation exercises” and “programmatic reviews” but in the curious we-don’t-talk-about-money way that seems to pervade the UK, the community was never really given enough financial information (which, as far as I can tell, should be absolutely all of it) to give truly useful input. Instead, the community just gives “peer review” of the science, but all of the real decisions are made by the so-called Executive — whom, in so doing, have utterly and completely lost the confidence of their community. Indeed, today’s changes, welcome though they may be, seem to have come not because of the Executive, but despite them.

[As usual, Paul Crowther is the best clearinghouse of information; Peter Coles has already weighed in with similar sentiments; and Roger Highfield of New Scientist takes a slightly more positive view, as does the BBC.]

I’ve been in Geneva now for a couple of days. We spent yesterday visiting CERN, trying to inspire the artists, architects and scientists alike (I’ve collaborated with people here, but I’ve never visited before).

A mockup of a section of the CERN tunnels. More pictures here.

You can also check out Peter Coles’ blog for his tall tale of CERN’s history and impressions of the project. My Imperial colleagues Roberto Trotta, Amanda Chatten and Dave Clements are also participating (and Dave is blogging, too).

The second night, after our visit to CERN and a dinner of fondue and swiss music (possibly not the high point of the trip), all of the 24 participants (eight groups each of an architect, artist and a scientist) gave a few-minute presentation on their work and interests. I was, to use the cliché, blown away by the ambition and accomplishment of everyone else involved. In particular, I am lucky enough to be working with Budapest-based artist Attila Csorgo and architect Shin Egashira, who works out of the Architecture Association, the overall initiators and sponsors of the project. Both build amazing machines. Attila’s constructions seem to me to be about the interaction of the machine and the environment, or of the components of the machine itself, whereas Shin’s involve more effort on the part of the viewer/participant (but I am sure I will get to understand their work and their practice better as I spend more time with it and them).

We spent the next day in a lovely old Swiss building, brainstorming our projects — we’re meant to come up with a “prototype” to have in place for this summer’s Architecture Biennale in Venice. Our brief was to explore the concept of “Mechanical Energy”, and we found an area of convergence in the idea of cameras, in the process of taking pictures, areas that both Shin and Attila have explored in their work.

Right now, our first idea is to combine the Planck Surveyor’s method of scanning the sky with a microphone-based sensor and camera, to make sound and light pictures of the volume surrounding the apparatus. We’re looking forward to a weekend retreat into the wilds of Dorset, to Hooke Park, a site run by the AA.

Thanks, finally, to Stefano Rabolli Pansera, the brilliant, optimistic, and enthusiastic mind behind this project, as well as all of the other people from the Architecture Association doing the hard work.

I’m in Geneva for a few days as part of a project called “Beyond Entropy: When Entropy Becomes Form”, sponsored by the Architectural Association back in London, the brainchild of Stefano Rabolli Pansera and others at the AA. It brings together eight trios of architects, artists and scientists to produce works to be shown at the Venice Architecture Biennale later this year, and possibly the better-known Art Biennale in 2011. But beyond that broad outline, none of us know much about what we will be producing; that is the purpose of this very first gathering. I admit I am not quite sure why we are here in Geneva, visiting CERN, other than the fact that it is a cool place to talk about art, science and architecture (which is good enough for me).

Imperial is happily over-represented in the scientist column, with about half of the scientists, but otherwise, it’s a broadly-spread bunch, from all over the UK and Western Europe. One of the other scientists is my mate and fellow cosmologist-blogger Peter Coles, who has already beaten me to the blogging punch.

Today I went to a talk by Chris Rapley, a Professor at UCL and currently director of the Science Museum in London (across the quad from Imperial), “Climate Change: Who Should I Believe?”.

In a department full of academic scientists (including a few working on the climate, such as our head of department, Professor Jo Haigh) there was a sense of preaching to the converted: we’ve already evaluated the evidence, or, at least, done our best to evaluate those presenting the evidence — even scientists don’t have the time, inclination or expertise to go back to the original data in all cases.

Rapley reminded us of the basic cycles moving carbon around the planet, and transporting heat from the sun to the earth and, over time, back out to space (one important fact is that we need the greenhouse effect to make the Earth livable to begin with — the airless, carbon-dioxide-free moon is about 30 degrees colder than the earth) in a careful balance that we have adjusted our civilization over millennia to take advantage of — it may not be the best of all possible climates, but it is the one that many, many trillions of dollars and billions of lives depend on. (In 1997, Costanza et al, Nature 387, 256, estimated that the ecosystem was “worth” about $33 trillion per year, almost twice global GDP.)

To boil this down, the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme has created a unified “Climate Change Index” which attempts to summarize the climate in the same manner as the Dow Jones or FTSE indices do for the stock market, combining global average temperatures, sea level, and arctic ice cover (physicists will complain that these each have very different units, so that there is some arbitrariness to the combination, but it does reduce the noise inherent in any one of these indicators).

Meanwhile, The NY Times argues that climate change is real, despite isolated mistakes in the IPCC report, and despite the evidence from the (possibly illegally hacked) University of East Anglia emails that scientists are, indeed human. (As Rapley put it, it would likely be illuminating to trawl 10,000 emails from the climate-change deniers.) Unfortunately, the upshot seems to be that we scientists must be “above reproach” whereas the deniers can lie through their teeth (or at least misrepresent the facts, seemingly wilfully or not).

Finally, leaving my office this evening, I noticed this poster:

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

Luckily, not all the astrophysics news this week was so bad.

First, and most important, two of our Imperial College Astrophysics postgraduate students, Stuart Sale and Paniez Paykari, passed their PhD viva exams, and so are on their ways to officially being Doctors of Philosophy. Congratulations to both, especially (if I may say so) to Dr Paykari, who I had the pleasure and fortune to supervise and collaborate with. Both are on their way to continue their careers as postdocs in far-flung lands.

Second, the first major results from the Herschel Space Telescope, Planck’s sister satellite, were released. There are impressive pictures dwarf planets in the outer regions of our solar system, of star-forming regions in the Milky Way galaxy, of the vary massive Virgo Cluster of galaxies, and of the so-called “GOODS” (Great Observatory Origins Deep Survey) field, one of the most well-studied areas of sky. All of these open new windows into these areas of astrophysics, with Herschel’s amazing sensitivity.

Finally, tantalisingly, the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS) released the results of its latest (and final) effort to search for the Dark Matter that seems to make up most of the matter in the Universe, but doesn’t seem to be the same stuff as the normal atoms that we’re made of. Under some theories, the dark matter would interact weakly with normal matter, and in such a way that it could possibly be distinguished from all the possible sources of background. These experiments are therefore done deep underground — to shield from cosmic rays which stream through us all the time — and with the cleanest and purest possible materials — to avoid contamination with both both naturally-occurring radioactivity and the man-made kind which has plagued us since the late 1940s.

With all of these precautions, CDMS expected to see a background rate of about 0.8 events during the time they were observing. And they saw (wait for it) two events! This is on the one hand more than a factor of two greater than the expected number, but on the other is only one extra count. To put this in perspective, I’ve made a couple of graphs where I try to approximate their results (for aficionados, these are just simple plots of the Poisson distribution). The first shows the expected number of counts from the background alone:

(I should point out a few caveats in my micro-analysis of their data. First, I don’t take into account the uncertainty in their background rate, which they say is really 0.8±0.1±0.2, where the first uncertainty, ±0.1 is “statistical”, because they only had a limited number of background measurements, and the second, ±0.2, is “systematic”, due to the way they collect and analyse their data. Eventually, one could take this into account via Bayesian marginalization, although ideally we’d need some more information about their experimental setup. Second, I’ve only plotted the likelihood above, but true Bayesians will want to apply a prior probability and plot the posterior distribution. The most sensible choice (the so-called Jeffreys prior) for this case would in fact make the probability peak at zero signal. Finally, one would really like to formally compare the no-signal model with a signal-greater-than-zero model, and the best way to do this would be using the tool of Bayesian model comparison.)

Nonetheless, in their paper they go on to interpret these results in the context of particle physics, which can eventually be used to put limits on the parameters of supersymmetric theories which may be tested further at the LHC accelerator over the next couple of years.

I should bring this back to the aforementioned bad news. The UK has its own dark matter direct detection experiments as well. In particular, Imperial leads the ZEPLIN-III experiment which has, at times, had the world’s best limits on dark matter, and is poised to possibly confirm this possible detection — this will be funded for the next couple of years. Unfortunately, STFC has decided that the next generation of dark matter experiments, EURECA and LUX-ZEPLIN, needed to make convincing statements about these results, weren’t possible to fund.

I presume that anyone reading this blog knows that today is the day when the great unwashed masses of UK Astronomers heard about our financial fate from the STFC, the small arm of the UK government responsible for Astrophysics, Particle Physics and Nuclear Physics.

For various reasons, some clear and others manifestly not, STFC is something like £70 million in the red. When all this started about two years ago, one of the main criticisms of the STFC management (beyond wondering how they could have got themselves — and us — into this predicament to begin with) was that they started to impose solutions that seemed to bear little resemblance to what the scientists themselves wanted. Trying to either genuinely ameliorate this, or at least give themselves good cover, they’ve spent much of the last year gathering input from various groups of physicists and astronomers, through a series of reports produced by scientist-led panels. These panels released their results this autumn, and STFC has supposedly used them to make decisions about the next five or so years of funding.

I was selfishly relieved to see that our work with the Planck Surveyor Satellite is rated “alpha 5”, and that our other local grants don’t appear directly affected (i.e., we weren’t drastically cut). However, STFC has “requested” (not sure what that means in this context) that even these projects reduce their costs by 15%. Other programs were not even this lucky — a not-quite-complete list of the cuts is on the STFC site. The cuts (a.k.a. “managed withdrawal”) include the UKIRT telescope, the LOFAR array, future work at the low-background facility at the Boulby mine, and future science exploitation of the XMM and Cassini missions (among many others). Alongside this, there will be a 25% cut in studentships and fellowships, although the details of this have not been revealed.

In his independent response, the Science Minister, Lord Drayson, says “we are investing record amounts into scientific research, but it is absolutely right that it is the scientists themselves, through the Research Councils, that decide how best to spend this money.” Of course we scientists don’t necessarily feel that our voices have been heard. The prioritized list of projects is available from STFC, and although it generally correlates with both the inputs from the various sub-panels and the financial outcome (in particular, many of us were pleased and relieved to see the much-criticised MoonLITE project at the bottom of the heap), there are some striking differences from at least my understanding of the panel recommendations, such as the “alpha 4” grade given to the Aurora human spaceflight program.

However, Drayson does seem to understand some of the issues: “…there are real tensions in having international science projects, large scientific facilities and UK grant giving roles within a single Research Council. It leads to grants being squeezed by increases in costs of the large international projects which are not solely within their control. I will work urgently with Professor Sterling, the STFC and the wider research community to find a better solution by the end of February 2010.” Not sure what this means, but even if we are grasping at straws, it’s the only promising news of the day.

I’ve got 11 browser tabs open just to get myself up-to-date. Here are some of them:

• An excellent summary of the situation before the announcement is at To the Left of Centre.
• Paul Crowther’s page has become the canonical clearing-house for information on the astronomy side of the “STFC Funding Crisis”.
• Blogs from Andy Lawrence and Peter Coles are both well-wrought and likely feature commentary from the opinionated luminaries of UK astronomy.
• The Institute of Physics and the Royal Astronomical Society respond.
• The BBC talks about the cuts with Lord Drayson.
• Physics World summarizes the situation as “savage cuts”.
• Our US counterparts get in on the commentary at Science magazine.
• There’s a web campaign to help save astronomy in the UK.

When I’m traveling I try to read the New Yorker — a transatlantic flight usually gets me through most of an issue. I was even more interested than usual when I picked up the issue at Heathrow and found the front-cover blurb, “Physics vs Poetry: New fiction by Ian McEwan”. McEwan is thought of as a “science-friendly” writer and has often populated his fiction with scientists and scientific ideas (usually doctors and medicine, as in Enduring Love and Saturday). His new story is called “The Use of Poetry”, but doesn’t quite manage to escape stereotyping his protagonist, the made-up physics Nobelist Michael Beard. McEwan’s Beard doesn’t really get poetry for its own sake; for him, “The Use of Poetry” is mostly for seducing his wife-to-be. At least McEwan is smart enough, and a good enough writer, that his stereotype isn’t quite so simple: his Beard is so smart that he can fake his way into smart opinions about Milton. He doesn’t really get it, it seems, but he can mouth the words at least as well as the supposed literary scholars (who, needless to say, neither try nor succeed at understanding his physics).

And — I’m not sure if this is to McEwan’s credit or otherwise — he stereotypes Beard’s counterpart, his future wife Maisie Farmer, studying English at Oxford when Beard is doing Physics, even more. After University, she becomes a hackneyed post-sixties feminist figure, attending “a group run by a collective Californian women…. Her consciousness was raised.”

McEwan, I think, prefers rationalists to literary types, but draws the divide too sharply. As Peter Coles has been talking about lately, that stereotypical distinction is just wrong. Most of my physicist friends love art, novels, poetry, music — and quite a few of them make it themselves, usually quite proudly if with varying degrees of emotional and aesthetic success.

What makes McEwan’s portrayal of Beard so unappealing is the backhandedness of the compliment behind it: yes, he’s smarter than everyone around him. But somehow even he doesn’t quite get the poetry, even if that’s almost a distinction that doesn’t make much of a difference.

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