by Bill Nye Is Venus the forgotten planet, or just one that's hard to figure out? Absorbing the presentations at the Venus EXploration Advisory Group (VEXAG) meeting in Madison, Wisconsin in the U.S. this week, I can tell you Venus is both. Many people around our world of space explorers seldom think about Venus. This is evidenced by the relatively small number of missions that have made the trip to the hot acid planet, and by the exiguity of ....

Here's our monthly checkup with the Dawn mission, contributed by Marc Rayman, the mission's Project System Engineer. Thanks Marc! --ESLClick to enlarge >Marc RaymanBy Marc Rayman Dear Papardawnzzi, Dawn's journey ever-deeper into the asteroid belt continues to go well, as the spacecraft carries out its familiar routine of thrusting gently with its ion propulsion system. But the interplanetary traveler has changed some of its habits, ....

At the top you can see two different frames for visualizations of information during different times of a particular simulation. I’m not going to tell you the details of the simulation, nor what the graphs are going to represent (this is still in the ‘top secret’ category: it is work in progress and a lot of stuff can change before we decide to go public with this). In the meantime enjoy the pretty pictures. What I’m trying to figure out is which color scheme looks better. Warning: don’t expect to see graphs like this in any of my papers in the near future.

Here is the deal: coloring schemes produce emotions in the recipient. Different coloring schemes give people different feelings about information. For example, red is usually associated to hot, while blue is associated to cool. However, a blue star is hotter than a red star. The red/blue association is probably due to fire/ice. Fire tends to be reddish, and ice is kind of bluish, but when we see things according to the radiated energy at different frequencies we get a completely different picture.

When presenting scientific information, choices like this one often present themselves. And it makes a difference on how the recipient audiences perceive the quality of the work… or even better: the coolness factor of the work.

The big questions are: what emotions do the above graphs give you? Which one do you like best? Why?

In the end they are conveying sufficiently similar raw information, but though I know this is true, I feel different about it. They have a different artistic feel to them. I just thought I’d share some of these issues and maybe even get some feedback.

Filed under: Art, computers, Physics Tagged: Coloring schemes, Graphs, Physics

For years, the Britney Spears Guide to Semiconductor Physics has been floating around the Web intriguing, amusing, troubling, or infuriating different people. Doing one better, pop star Lady Gaga is now immortalized in the name of a published physics paper.

There is a struggle going on for NASA’s soul. Is NASA all about sending human beings into space? Or is NASA about elucidating the secrets of the cosmos? The former is, of course, best embodied by the Apollo missions: pure, unadulterated rocket science. The latter is probably best associated with the Hubble space telescope (although NASA’s contribution to our understanding of the Universe goes far beyond Hubble). Of course, spacewalks and science are not mutually exclusive (as Hubble has demonstrated). But a singleminded focus on the former has led to significant weakening of the latter.

At present, it looks like there will be two more space shuttle launches. That’s it. Within a year, our nation will no longer have the capability to launch humans into space. For some this is a sure sign that America is sliding into mediocrity. Both the first and the last man to step on the Moon testified before Congress last May, speaking out against the Obama plan to shut down the Constellation program (video). Their testimony was reminiscent of a past age, where we proved our worth by beating the Russians to the Moon, and the natural next step is to now prove our worth by beating the Chinese to the Red Planet. The jingoistic associations are unsettling, and these arguments gloss over the staggering costs involved. To quote none other than Neil Armstrong: “If the leadership we have acquired through our investment is allowed simply to fade away, other nations will surely step in where we have faltered. I do not believe that this would be in our best interests.”

It is certainly amazing that we’ve had continuous human “inhabitants” in low-Earth orbit. Rocket science is, indeed, rocket science, and this should never be taken for granted. Launching people into orbit is a massive endeavor, and having them survive in the incredibly inhospitable environment of space is even more impressive. But the simple truth is that the contributions to basic science from the space station have been entirely negligible (especially in comparison with the staggering costs). Furthermore, I would argue that the Hubble space telescope has done significantly more to awe and inspire the world than the International Space Station.

A year ago we discussed an Academy report which criticized the direction of the manned space program, and recommended profound changes. Subsequently the Academy released a separate report sharply criticizing the scientific underpinning of NASA, and recommending similar changes. Two months ago the Obama administration outlined a new vision for NASA, in line with these reports, including the cancellation of the Constellation program (which was the new and improved version of the Apollo program). Given the immense sums of money involved, especially to influential states such as Florida and Texas, Congress has taken the liberty of trying to do an end-run around the White House, and fund Constellation despite the lack of a request for funding. In a triumph of politics over common-sense, money will be poured into building more rockets, rather than funding a broad portfolio of technological development (including better ways to get humans into orbit and beyond) and basic research (including unmanned probes and satellites elucidating the mysteries of the Universe). In the latest salvo, fourteen Nobel laureates, and a few astronauts for good measure, issued an open letter supporting Obama’s strategy, and advising Congress against throwing all of NASA’s eggs in the “heavy lift rocket” basket.

One thing is clear: for better or worse, the shuttle program is at an end. There is no clear successor, and it will likely be many years before another astronaut is launched into orbit by the United States. If you want to experience the thrill of sending humans into space (and it is an incredible, indescribable rush), you’d better hustle on down to the Kennedy Space Flight Center. The next-to-last launch is currently scheduled for November 1, 2010.

(But only very briefly…)

Monday morning, I woke up in the hospital with an IV-drip in one arm and a nurse taking my blood pressure on the other arm.

What happened?

Sunday, I was about to fly back to Stockholm. I hadn’t been feeling too great, but then I generally haven’t been feeling great lately. My blood pressure has been at the lower end of healthy since I was a teenager. It runs in the family. People like to tell me low blood pressure is good. I usually ask them to try to go to work when you can hardly stand upright, let alone speak.

I would have classically fainted and dropped to the floor, except that the moment my circulatory system decided to shut down all non-essential functions I was on board of an airbus, seatbelt fastened, tray table securely stored. In fact, we were headed for the runway already. So there was no dropping. When I could see again through the black clouds, I was lying on several seats. Somebody was pushing an oxygen mask on my face, somebody else was taking blood pressure. They later told me it read 70 to 30. 150 people had to wait while I was carried back out of the plane. An ambulance brought me to the airport hospital.

Several people poked holes into my arms before they found a vein to put me on an IV drip. They measured blood sugar; it came out to be low but still normal. Blood pressure went up some twenty points or so. I was told they’d keep me there for some hours and pump half a liter isotonic fluid into my blood stream, confident I’d be labeled “fit to fly” after this and be able to take the next flight to Stockholm. What happened instead was that my blood pressure hit bottom again. They put me on a glucose drip, back into the ambulance and brought me to the next hospital, suspecting inner bleeding or pulmonary embolism. I had hold onto my hand baggage, but my checked-in bag was meanwhile on the way to Stockholm.

In the hospital, I was handed over to a doctor who took me off the glucose drip and did a few exams. She found nothing of concern, then poked more holes into my arms trying to take blood. Eventually she used a butterfly-needle (a tiny needle commonly used for children) and managed to extract some drops. Having done that, she went to get some forms to note down my medical history. The second she left the room, I got sick and my blood pressure plummeted again. They hastily put me back onto the drip, blood pressure down to 62 to 35, body temperature plummeted to 34C (93 F). “Centralized,” somebody mumbled, schemes in white coats around my bed. An internist pushed electrodes on my chest to take an EKG. They gave me some injection which remarkably enough raised the blood pressure within a matter of a minute back to 100 to 70. The EKG turned out to be normal.

I had to stay for the night with blood pressure being monitored, not even allowed to go to the restroom without a nurse because they were afraid I might faint. Blood pressure finally stabilized around 90 to 50something. The blood picture came out with some minor aberrations; I was prescribed a stack of mineral pills. They asked me a lot of questions: Has this happened before? Did I not drink enough during the day? Maybe eaten something funny? Ever had problems with the thyroid glands? Afraid of flying? No to all of the above.

I am still in the hospital. The last days, they’ve done numerous tests and collected a seemingly endless amount of numbers, notes and graphs in a large folder with my name on it. They checked my heart and lungs and found nothing of concern. I am sharing the room with a women who is here for hypertension – her blood pressure is more than twice as high as mine.

After 3 days, I asked the nurse if there’s any internet connection available in the building. She stared at me in disbelieve. “Internet?” she asked, as if nobody had ever dared before to have such an outlandish question. Luckily I have my BlackBerry with me. Stefan, who came to bring me clothes and sweets, told me the main entrance is cluttered with signs prohibiting cell phone use. Well, I said, I didn’t come in through the main entrance and nobody told me. After 4 days I sneaked out of the hospital with an IV needle on my arm and a device on my chest recording the heart rate, and bought an USB internet stick. (Thanks to Phil for the suggestion!) So here I am again, hitting “mark all as read” on my Google reader which announced 1000+ unread items.

Reason I’m telling you this is that last night, listening to my roommate snoring, I decided I’ll put this blog on a break. I feel like I need some time to find equilibrium. As you probably know, I live alone in Stockholm and of course I’m wondering what might have happened had I not been around people. While it’s a relieve the docs didn’t find a serious problem, not knowing why it happened means to me it can happen again. Comments on this blog will remain open, and I encourage you to have a look at our archives, but you might not hear much from me for a while. I hope you understand. I’ll be back.

If the result of yesterday’s test comes out okay the docs say I can go this afternoon. I hope I’ll be able to make it back to Stockholm and find my bag. And that the health insurance will cover…

The biggest and major criticism against string theory is that it is untestable, or make predictions that is beyond the capability of it being tested. For a theory that has existed for this long, and grown this popular, not being able to test any part of its development is a serious shortcoming. No other theory in the history of physics has gone this long without producing a shred of empirical verification. Because of that, string theory comes in multiple different flavors, each one vying for attention and being accepted or rejected simply based on a matter of taste.

However, now comes a rather interesting proposal. A team out of Imperial College and Stanford has proposed a way to test an aspect of string theory using 4-qubit entangled particles. The paper is reported to appear in Phys. Rev. Lett. this week, but you can get a preprint at the link above.

Professor Duff recalled sitting in a conference in Tasmania where a colleague was presenting the mathematical formulae that describe quantum entanglement: “I suddenly recognised his formulae as similar to some I had developed a few years earlier while using string theory to describe black holes. When I returned to the UK I checked my notebooks and confirmed that the maths from these very different areas was indeed identical.”

The discovery that string theory seems to make predictions about quantum entanglement is completely unexpected, but because quantum entanglement can be measured in the lab, it does mean that at last researchers can test predictions based on string theory. There is no obvious connection to explain why a theory that is being developed to describe the fundamental workings of our universe is useful for predicting the behaviour of entangled quantum systems. “This may be telling us something very deep about the world we live in, or it may be no more than a quirky coincidence”, concluded Professor Duff. “Either way, it’s useful."

Hum... let's see if the many different labs that are doing Bell-type experiments might jump into this.

Zz.

In my entry discussing the misconception of the HUP, I tried to illustrate it using a single-slit diffraction. Many people do not realize that this single-slit diffraction is the HUP effect staring right in their faces. So this phenomenon can certainly be observed at the macroscopic scale.

A new paper in Eur. J. Phys. tries to do the same thing, but this time, using electron diffraction from a circular opening.[1]

Abstract: An experiment analogous to the classical diffraction of light from a circular aperture has been realized with electrons. The results are used to introduce undergraduate students to the wave behaviour of electrons. The diffraction fringes produced by the circular aperture are compared to those predicted by quantum mechanics and are exploited to present and discuss the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

The discussion in the paper is very similar to what I tried to convey. Hopefully, people will have a clearer understanding of the HUP from this.

Zz.

[1] G. Matteucci et al., Eur. J. Phys. v.31, p.1287 (2010). You may also obtain the paper for free during the first 30 days of online publication at this link.

A new way of excavating the past structure of networks reveals important information about their evolution

by Bill Nye It can't be easy to bring Nobel Prize laureates and high government officials together over the same issue. But two Planetary Society board members, Scott Hubbard and John Logsdon, have done it – and produced a letter to Rep. Bart Gordon, chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Science Committee, expressing concern about that committee's proposed budget for NASA that is signed by 14 Nobel winners and 14 former NASA ....

Icelandic amateur image processor Björn Jónsson just posted this to unmannedspaceflight.com and I thought it was so spectacular that I had to post it -- and his explanation -- here directly. It never ceases to amaze me what can be pulled out of this 30-year-old data. --ESLby Björn Jónsson This is a new, big mosaic of Voyager 1 images, this time showing the Great Red Spot at high resolution. The contrast and sharpness ....

If I have to, I will drag reluctant people one at a time to plunge into NASA's Planetary Data System. The PDS, as I've mentioned before, is the repository for space missions' science data; it's the public clearinghouse, the Library of Congress for data, into which every person on Earth is invited to explore the solar system. Few people on Earth do so, however, because the PDS is designed for scientists' use and so is intimidating and sometimes ....

The excitement is growing: After I saw the first pieces for the absorber structure for our test beam in the fall during my last trip to CERN, photographic proof is now circulating that the mechanics are completely assembled: Several tons of Tungsten, all arranged in 30 vertical plates. Behind it all will go a special setup we are developing in Munich to make a first measurement of the time structure of the hadronic showers in this new calorimeter. This is one of the key open question for the hadron calorimeter at CLIC: Since many unwanted reactions will take place due to the extremely high energy of the collider, it is important to be able to determine exactly at which time a certain reaction took place. And for this it is important to know how long the detector itself takes to react to the passage of the particles.

To study this, we prepared 15 scintillator tiles that we read out with special oscilloscopes with a time resolution of better than 1 nanosecond. Now things are coming together: The scintillator tiles are wrapped in reflective foil, the support frame that will go into the calorimeter at CERN is prepared, and the lights are on on our data acquisition. Two of my PhD students are now very busy to write the code to control all this and read out the data. Just a few hours ago, we saw first signs of life: Test pulses recorded all the way through our electronics chain!

On Sunday, all of this will go to CERN, for a first integration test and some first exposure to muons from the accelerator. That is the first real stress test, and so far things are looking good. Exciting times ahead, and we are looking forward to successful data taking this fall…

If you’ve read my blog for any length of time, you’ve read about my friend Nicole, aka Noisy Astronomer. She’s a young grad student studying radio astronomy at the University of Virginia (my alma mater!), and she’s very gung ho about astronomy outreach.

In a recent post about comets, I mentioned her and a project she and a bunch of other grads are working on: Dark Skies, Bright Kids. This is a terrific project that is doing a lot to bring the joy and wonder of astronomy to third graders in Albemarle County, the home of UVa (if you saw my show "Bad Universe" where I made the comet, I got that recipe from Nicole and DSBK!). One of their efforts is a bilingual book designed to make astronomy fun for the kids — I have a copy, and it’s very cute; as someone who has worked on astronomy education I know kids that age will love it. Nicole and her group have a big goal for the book, too: they’re looking to get a copy of it into the hands of every single third-grader in the county.

To do this, they applied for a Pepsi Refresh Grant, which, if they win, will get them $25,000! And you can help: all you have to do is go to the page and click a link to vote for them. To be fair, surf around and look at the other applicants if you want; there are other worthy efforts. But I’m voting for DSBK because I know how important it is to get kids to look up and have a sense of wonder about the Universe around them.

They also put together a short video of the children having fun while learning science:

Voting is open now, closes September 30, and once you sign up you can vote once per day. Thanks!

As of today you can see and download the latest print issue of symmetry. This issue looks at many of the varied uses of accelerators in society. Although accelerators were typically created for basic physics research, they are key components of many medical and industrial applications now.

I have, from time to time, made a point that astronomers rarely if ever report UFOs. If UFOs really were buzzing us as much as the media and UFO proponents would have us believe, then astronomers would overwhelmingly report the majority of them: we spend far more time outside looking up than pretty much any other group of people.

So why don’t we see all these alien spacecraft? I think this is because we almost always understand what we’re seeing in the sky, so we know not to mistake Venus, the Moon, a satellite, or other mundane things for flying saucers.

While UFO believers love to make hay of this — showing me the extremely rare time when an astronomer has reported a UFO, thus proving my point, or falsely saying astronomers spend too much time at the eyepiece to note the broader sky (which is ridiculous) — the fact is, astronomers are familiar with the sky, so we know what’s going on.

Well, almost always know. John Woolley of the Greater Edmonton Skeptics Society has an amusing story of the time he and some other astronomers saw something they couldn’t immediately explain… and make sure you read Part 2.

And y’know, his story sounds pretty familiar…

So remember, despite the claims of the UFO crowd and the media that love to play this stuff up, seeing isn’t believing. Understanding is!

Slightly expanded version of this post now available on The Guardian.

The conference on “Supersymmetry and the Unification of Fundamental Interactions“, which my colleagues and I organised in Bonn, finished yesterday. The entire week I was thinking I would drop into bed and sleep for a full day. But oddly, I feel quite refreshed. It was great fun listening to the talks and discussing with so many friends and colleagues, despite all the organisational headaches. The conference dinner was on an elegant boat which in an earlier life was used for the signing ceremony of the Schengen agreement. (For us mainland Europeans this is a big deal.)

Supersymmetry seems alive and well and ready to face the challenge from the LHC. But what is supersymmetry? And what is so super about it? Why are we so taken with it, even though there is as yet no experimental evidence it actually exists? There are two main arguments, first it is a solution to the `hierarchy problem’. I will save this for a potential second post, if Jon invites me back. The other is indeed an aesthetic argument related to the `Coleman-Mandula theorem’.

Now, I tell myself every morning in front of the bathroom mirror, that aesthetics is for wimps, but it is all the same an interesting argument.

Symmetries have become a central pillar of our understanding of nature. A sphere is symmetric in the sense that if you leave me in a room with the sphere and come back in, you can not tell if and by possibly how much and about which axis I have rotated the sphere. The sphere is highly symmetric. This however also makes a sphere kind of boring, since it has to be the same in every direction it has no structure. If the sphere has a pattern on it, like for example an old black and white football, only very specific rotations are still undetectable, this is the remaining, reduced symmetry.

It turns out that in the world of elementary particles there are two types of symmetries. One kind are internal symmetries. These govern the forces of nature like the electromagnetic force. Here a hidden, internal, property of particles is changed. The other kind we call external symmetries and they affect the way particles fly through space and time. The appropriate external symmetry is described by special relativity, invented by Einstein in 1905. The undetectable transformations are called Lorentz transformations. In this case the laws of nature are unchanged if we look at them for example on a stationary train or one moving with constant velocity (and on smooth tracks!).

Now how about Coleman and Mandula? They showed that in fact the Lorentz symmetries are the maximal external symmetry allowed in nature. If you were to introduce a larger more extensive symmetry the world would become so boring that particles could no longer interact. They would just fly around freely in space not knowing about each other. In their argument Coleman and Mandula however neglected one external property of particles, their spin. This is a peculiar quantum property, they behave as if they had a small internal magnet. In specific units all the matter particles we know, e.g. the electron and the quarks have spin 1/2. The force carriers like the photon have spin 1. Spin is an external property, which is affected by rotations in space. Now if we extend Coleman and Mandula and allow for discrete changes of spin by half a unit, we find a new maximal external symmetry of nature. This is supersymmetry. It is super because it goes beyond the previous external symmetries. If nature is supersymmetric the electron must have a partner with spin 0 and the photon a partner with spin 1/2 and all with many interactions.

However, if this symmetry were at all extended (taking now also spin into account, of course) the resulting world would be boring and trivial with no interactions. Since we have now used up all external particle properties we believe this is the end of the line. This is what makes supersymmetry so special….and to some beautiful.

Filed under: Particle Physics, Physics Tagged: herbi, Particle Physics, Physics, supersymmetry

{Reminder: We have an ongoing nomination for the Most Attractive Physicist contest. Submit your nomination today!}

If you missed the first International Particle Accelerator Conference at Kyoto this year, this report gives you a summary of the conference. It also should give you, if you don't have it already, an overview of all the possible applications of particle accelerators, especially in areas that most people are not aware of.

Zz.

OK, so I was trying to be cute with the title. Still, that would make for a great book, don't you think?

This physics education paper looks at how to illustrate basic kinematics using vehicular motion, which is a very common example in intro physics classes.

Abstract: A priority of physics instruction is to help students make the connection between the formulae they think they are required to memorize and the real world in which they interact every day. If you ask students to describe a situation in real life involving physical principles, the most commonly cited examples will pertain to vehicular motion. One situation in real life involving physical principles is vehicle dynamics. Even students who have little interest in physics eagerly discuss problems like how much a car can decelerate travelling in a flat turn or how tricks like the Wheely can be performed on a motorcycle. In the physics classroom, the motion of automotive vehicles is probably the most interesting manifestation of the principles of physics. The laws of physics limiting movements of vehicles are deduced here in a simple derivation suited for classroom demonstration as well as for homework. Due to limits on frictional forces there are subsequent limits for acceleration, deceleration and speed in a flat turn. Frictional forces also determine the behaviour of a vehicle at rapid speed in a turn. 

While it is certainly true that many students can and do know about cars, I hate to think that this is another one of those examples where we unconsciously are using illustrations that have an implicit bias towards boys. Boys tends to like and understand cars. Girls typically don't. While the basic physics here can be understood by both genders, the point here is not the teaching of basic physics, but the raising of interest in the illustration of basic physics. The authors explicitly wanted the subject matter to be appealing by choosing something he thought students would have a keen interest in. The girls that I frequently encounter don't typically find cars that interesting, certainly not to the same level as boys find cars to be.

It is certainly true that it could be very difficult to find an example that doesn't appeal more to one gender versus another. However, so far, many of the examples tend to appeal to just one gender. Examples using canons, cars, etc. tend to favor the typical interests of boys. Where are the examples that girls are more familiar with to give some balance?

Of course, a potential issue with my bringing all of this up is that I could easily be making a stereotypical characterization of boys and girls. Girls may find that associating them with 'girlie' stuff in physics classes may be insulting to them. So trying to be fair to both gender could easily backfire. That is why we tend to stick to the standard examples that we've been using all these years.

And if you think that I've been flip-floping back and forth in this blog entry, you're absolutely correct!

Zz.

We all know it would come to that, but it is nice to finally hear it. The appeals by Walter Wagner and Luis Sancho has been thrown out. We knew that it had no ground based on the physics, but in the end, it was thrown out on procedural grounds.

"Wagner cannot demonstrate that he has standing. A plaintiff alleging a procedural injury, such as Wagner, must still establish injury in fact. See Laub v. U.S. Dep’t. of Interior, 342 F.3d 1080, 1086 (9th Cir. 2003). Injury in fact requires some 'credible threat of harm.' Cent. Delta Water Agency v. United States, 306 F.3d 938, 950 (9th Cir. 2002). At most, Wagner has alleged that experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (the 'Collider') have 'potential adverse consequences.' Speculative fear of future harm does not constitute an injury in fact sufficient to confer standing. Mayfield, 599 F.3d at 970.

"Even if Wagner has demonstrated injury in fact, he nevertheless fails to satisfy the causality or redressability prongs set out in Lujan. The European Center for Nuclear Research ('CERN') proposed and constructed the Collider, albeit with some U.S. government support. The U.S. government enjoys only observer status on the CERN council, and has no control over CERN or its operations. Accordingly, the alleged injury, destruction of the earth, is in no way attributable to the U.S. government's failure to draft an environmental impact statement.

 So there!

Zz.

For years, claims have circulated that red rain which fell in India in 2001, contained cells unlike any found on Earth. Now new evidence that these cells can reproduce is about to set the debate alive

Panspermia is the idea that life exists throughout the universe in comets, asteroids and interstellar dust clouds and that life of Earth was seeded from one or more of these sources. Panspermia holds that we are all extraterrestrials.

While this is certainly not a mainstream idea in science, a growing body of evidence suggests that it should be carefully studied rather than casually disregarded.

For example, various bugs have been shown to survive for months or even years in the harsh conditions of space. And one of the more interesting but lesser known facts about the Mars meteorite that some scientists believe holds evidence of life on Mars, is that its interior never rose above 50 degrees centigrade, despite being blasted from the Martian surface by an meteor impact and surviving a fiery a descent through Earth's thick atmosphere.

If there is life up there, this evidence suggests that it could survive the trip to Earth.

All that seems well established. Now for the really controversial stuff.

In 2001, numerous people observed red rain falling over Kerala in the southern tip of India during a two month period. One of them was Godfrey Louis, a physicist at nearby Cochin University of Science and Technology. Intrigued by this phenomena, Louis collected numerous samples of red rain, determined to find out what was causing the contamination, perhaps sand or dust from some distant desert.

Under a microscope, however, he found no evidence of sand or dust. Instead, the rain water was filled with red cells that look remarkably like conventional bugs on Earth. What was strange was that Louis found no evidence of DNA in these cells which would rule out most kinds of known biological cells (red blood cells are one possibility but ought to be destroyed quickly by rain water).

Louis published his results in the peer-reviewed journal Astrophysics and Space in 2006, along with the tentative suggestion that the cells could be extraterrestrial, perhaps from a comet that had disintegrated in the upper atmosphere and then seeded clouds as the cells floated down to Earth. In fact, Louis says there were reports in the region of a sonic boom-type noise at the time, which could have been caused by the disintegration of an object in the upper atmosphere.

Since then, Louis has continued to study the cells with an international team including Chandra Wickramasinghe from the University of Cardiff in the UK and one of the leading proponents of the panspermia theory, which he developed in the latter half of the 20th century with the remarkable physicist Fred Hoyle.

Today Louis, Wickramasinghe and others publish some extraordinary claims about these red cells. They say that the cells clearly reproduce at a temperature of 121 degrees C. "Under these conditions daughter cells appear within the original mother cells and the number of cells in the samples increases with length of exposure to 121 degrees C," they say. By contrast, the cells are inert at room temperature.

That makes them highly unusual, to say the least. The spores of some extremophiles can survive these kinds of temperatures and then reproduce at lower temperatures but nothing behaves like this at these temperatures, as far as we know.

This is an extraordinary claim that will need to be independently verified before it will be more broadly accepted.

And of course, this behaviour does not suggest an extraterrestrial origin for these cells, by any means.

However, Wickramasinghe and co can't resist hinting at such an exotic explanation. They've examined the way these fluoresce when bombarded with light and say it is remarkably similar to various unexplained emission spectra seen in various parts of the galaxy. One such place is the Red Rectangle, a cloud of dust and gas around a young star in the Monocerous constellation.

It would be fair to say that more evidence will be required before Kerala's red rain can be satisfactorily explained. In the meantime, it looks a fascinating mystery.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1008.4960: Growth And Replication Of Red Rain Cells At 121oC And Their Red Fluorescence

• Conference blogging from the best of the best: Fields medalist Tim Gowers has been covering the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM 2010) in Hyderabad on his blog


• John Baez has turned from higher category theory to saving the planet and blogs about it at his new blog


• Rob Knop has taken up blogging again at the new Scientopia website, which hosts the bloggers that left ScienceBlogs as a consequence of "PepsiGate" or for other reasons

All good things come to an end (some bad ones too) . Among the many duties of the organisers of a conference, the last one is to close the conference "officially", as well as all the peripheral activities... like this blog.

Since all conferences are as much a human adventure as a scientific one, there are a couple of thanks that I would like to address before switching the lights off.

Yes, I know, I’m not very good at this hiatus thing. But there is important news that needs to be promulgated widely — the news of calculus. No more will innocent citizens cower in fear at the thought of derivatives and integrals, or flash back in horror to the days of terror and confusion in high-school math class. Because now there is a cure for these maladies — The Calculus Diaries: How Math Can Help You Lose Weight, Win in Vegas, and Survive a Zombie Apocalypse.

Yes, you read that subtitle correctly. Let’s be clear: this book is probably not for you. That’s because you, I have no doubt, already love calculus. You carry a table of integrals in your back pocket, and you practice substituting variables to while away the time in the DMV. This isn’t the book for people who already appreciate the austere beauty of a differential equation, or even for people who want to study up for their AP exam.

No, this is the book for people who hate math. It’s for people who look at you funny and turn away at parties when you mention that you enjoy science. It’s for your older relatives who think you’re crazy for appreciating all that technical stuff, or your nieces and nephews who haven’t yet been captivated by the beauty of mathematics. The Calculus Diaries is the book for people who need to be convinced that math isn’t an intimidating chore — that it can be fun.

Know anybody like that? Any gift-giving holidays coming up?

Now it’s true, I know the author. In fact, I appear as a character in the book (to a certain degree of comic effect). I’m the one who gets soaked when we ride Splash Mountain at Disneyland, but also the one who maximizes his winnings at craps by clever betting in Vegas. You get the idea: this isn’t a textbook, it’s a tour through the real world (and occasional fantasy worlds), pointing out that math is all around us, and that perceiving it is kind of cool.

When you understand math, how you think about the world changes. Every day, we all change position by accumulating velocity, or do informal optimization problems when making a decision. But most people don’t know about the wonderful insights that math can add to these processes. You know, because you are a mathphile. But you are outnumbered by the mathphobes. You have a secret that they don’t know, but now there’s a way to share it. What are you waiting for?

The AIP has just released the latest 2009-2010 academic year roster for the Physics Departments at US institutions. Both the number of physics bachelor degree granted continues to increase.

The number of physics bachelor’s granted continues to climb, with 5,908 degrees in the class of 2009. As physics undergraduate enrollments continue to increase, bachelor’s production will also see increases. PhD’s are also on the rise with 1,554 conferred in the class of 2009.

Zz.

The Guardian have decided to host “Life and Physics” on their site. I’m really pleased about it, since I guess it can only mean a wider readership. I am also flattered that professionals wish to associate their paper with my writing.

I don’t intend to change anything other than the hosting site. I’ll continue to maintain this site on wordpress, but most if not all posts will from now on only appear here as stubs, with the full post on the Guardian website.

Like this one.

Filed under: blogging, Physics Stories Tagged: guardian, writing

I read this blog entry, and I find the same fight that I've been waging against physics quacks. And since this is a truly wonderful argument against a pseudoscience, I am more than happy to give this blog entry ample air time on here.

This is a response to a response. The author had thoroughly argued against a peer-reviewed paper that purportedly claimed to have seen a positive impact of homeopathy. Both the author, and another, have severely criticized the paper for several shortcomings. But it appears that these criticisms irked a writer at a homeopathy website (surprise!). What you can read is not only a rebuttal, but also a very pointed attack against pseudoscience in general.

The issue that keeps coming back is the fact that many people cannot tell the difference between anecdotal evidence and scientific evidence. They also cannot reason why an anecdotal evidence is insufficient to claim validity of something. To me, that is the fundamental reason why we are having this discussion, and on why pseudoscience flourishes.

It would be interesting to see if this paper will get a ton of rebuttals in the coming months.

Zz.

This is a rather interesting and certainly provocative piece by John Gribbin. In it, he is pushing out the idea that our universe could have been by a designer - but not a 'god' - that is not too far from us, using nothing more than a giant particle accelerator!

The black holes that could be created in a particle accelerator would be far smaller: tiny masses squeezed into incredibly tiny volumes. But because of gravity's negative energy, it doesn't matter how small such holes are: they still have the potential to inflate and expand in their own dimensions (rather than gobbling up our own). Such expansion was precisely what our universe did in the Big Bang, when it suddenly exploded from a tiny clump of matter into a fully-fledged cosmos.

You have to read the entire article to get the full picture. For me, it makes for a very good science fiction novel or movie. Again, there's nothing here that we can rule out as being impossible, but is it probable?

Zz.

Well, there was a lot of interest in the iPad discussion I started on Friday, with hundreds of people viewing the post, and several interesting comments either put after the post or sent to me in email. Note taking to the device via handwriting seemed to be a major thing that people are keen on, and I admit that it is also something that, as I said in the Friday post, made me see the device firmly as a primary work tool here on out. But some are unsure, perhaps unconvinced. So, I decided to reply to many of the comments by writing a letter, including a diagram of sorts. I did it on screen, while riding the bus home, using the excellent program Note Taker HD that I told you about in the post, mostly in "edit 2" mode, allowing for compact and relatively neat writing with just my finger. Here it is (just click on an image of a page for a larger view, and be warned that a few full stops (periods) at the end of sentences did not show up so well in the images): [...]

A new technique for studying the relationship between bacteria and protozoans could boost our understanding of how these organisms spread disease

In 1980, Tim Rowbotham, a microbiologist at the University of Bradford, made an extraordinary discovery about a tiny single-celled protozoa called Acanthamoeba. These organisms are ubiquitous, turning up almost anywhere there is liquid water. Since the 1950s they have been known to cause a number of rare diseases, mainly in humans with impaired immune systems.

What Rowbotham found was that they could be much more dangerous.

It had long been known that protozoa feed on bacteria, gradually munching through great mounds of these bugs. However, Rowbotham discovered that Legionella, the particularly nasty bacteria that causes Legionnaire's disease, could not only survive being eaten by Acanthamoeba but actually thrived on it. In fact, it turns out that there is some kind of symbiotic relationship between these organisms that even today is not yet fully understood.

Microbiologists are still coming to terms with the implications of this discovery. They have since found that Acanthamoeba can host other nasties too such as H Pylori, the bacteria responsible for stomach ulcers, various strains of the food poisoning bugs Lysteria and E coli, a type of Chlamydiae and MRSA, the superbug currently sweeping through many hospitals.

The fear is that Acanthamoeba harbours these bacterial species, providing a safe haven against attack from antibiotics and contributing to the virulence of these bugs. That could make them an important source of infectious disease that is largely ignored.

So the study of the interaction between Acanthamoeba and the bacteria it supports has become an important area of research. But it is hampered by the difficulty of studying how protozoa interact with bacteria.

Today, Giorgos Tsibidis from the Foundation for Research and Technology in Greece and a couple of mates make a contribution that could help. It takes the form of a computer vision system that can identify individual protozoa, distinguishing them from cysts by virtue of their shape, and follow them as they move. The same system is also able to monitor concentration of bacteria.

They've tested the idea by watching the behaviour of Acanthamoeba protozoa grazing on a lawn of Salmonella bacteria. The machine is able to follow the Acanthamoeba as they move and to measure the drop in concentration of the Salmonella bacteria is they are eaten.

That'll save some postdocs a huge amount of time and could dramatically improve our understanding of protozoan-bacterial interactions. it may even help save a few lives if it turns out that Acanthamoeba play a significant role in the transmission of disease.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1008.4662: Automated Two-Dimensional Acanthamoeba Polyphaga Tracking And Calculation Of Salmonella Typhimurium Distribution In Spatio-Temporal Images

As a scientist, I am used to my work being read by my peers, and I’ve made it into the occasional magazine or newspaper article, and even the odd TV and radio slot. But last week I travelled to Venice’s Architecture Biennale for the culmination of the first phase of the Architectural Association’s Beyond Entropy art/science project (which I’ve described before). I took a vaporetto to the island of San Giorgio, and next to one of Venice’s more spectacular Palladian churches, I saw the Beyond Entropy banner hanging over the entrance:
(I took these pictures, but there are many much more professional ones taken by the AA’s Valerie Bennett.)

Before arriving, I didn’t know what to expect from the project: small-scale, low-key, amateurish? In this setting, it was clearly big and serious. And inside this lovely building were these, the prototypes for our time machine:

Last year I traveled to South America to witness the launch of our several-hundred million-Euro Planck satellite, surely a big and serious project. But the sight of my own work — our texts, flywheels and gyroscopes — sitting on a plywood plinth, plausibly described as something at least related to the very different creative process of art, was nearly as disconcerting (despite the lack of highly explosive rocket fuel).

I’ll leave any assessment of the overall quality to others, although it became obvious that these pieces really are prototypes for what could become more finished works, but we have a long way to go. Nonetheless, let me explicitly thank my collaborators, Shin Egashira (whom I will also congratulate on his wedding which gave him an excellent reason to not show up in Venice) and Scrap Marshall, a student at the Architectural Association who joined us toward the end of the project and did an enormous amount of practical and creative work getting our pieces together. From speaking to members of  some of the other groups, we were lucky to all be based in London, and to eventually come to see our project in similar ways, albeit from different directions; some of the more widely-dispersed groups had to deal with significantly greater practical problems, and the interpersonal ones those ended up causing.

That first day was dedicated to the AA’s visiting school, and the next day was the centrepiece: a marathon symposium of more than thirty talks, dedicated to the themes of “entropy” and “energy”. Remarkably, none of our projects addressed the ecological, societal and political aspects of these topics, while many of the speakers attacked them directly, from Richard Burdett and Reinier de Graaf’s complementary discussions of the bleak picture for energy and climate if we keep to “business as usual” in our habits of consumption and production, to Italian Green Party politician Grazia Francescato’s hopeful discussion of “Green Jobs and Green Economy”. There were a few talks on science per se, from Angelo Merlina’s brief introduction to the LHC at CERN (of which a third talked about cosmology, and a third was pre-recorded), to one of my favourites, biophysicist Tania Saxl’s description of the amazing mechanism behind the motion of rotating bacterial flagella. There was also an inexplicable prerecorded description of “parallel worlds” in film from de Gruyter and Thys, a performance from the Arazzi Laptop ensemble, and contributions from Serpentine Gallery curator Hans-Ulrik Obrist (which was interesting but mostly about himself) and Charles Jencks. Jencks tackled the overlap between science, art and architecture head-on, each as a different metaphorical system for describing and interacting with the world. This culminates in his Scottish Garden of Cosmic Speculation, a hugely symbolic landscape replete with double helixes and grassy knolls in the form of black hole spacetime diagrams (I admit I’ve also found these supposed metaphors a bit too, well, literal for my taste — with insufficient information to be effective teaching tools, but too didactic to be truly beautiful.) I think the most important thing I learned was that, in their own way, the architects are just as nerdy as us scientists, but just better looking dressed.

Also, there was plenty of fine food and free-flowing sparkling wine (which meant that I probably missed about half of the presentations).

Finally, I would like to thank everyone from the AA who made the project happen (and will continue to do so, if further funding is forthcoming): Artemis Doupa, Sylvie Taher, Esther McLaughlin, Aram Mooradian and most especially the ever-enthusiastic project director, Stefano Rabolli Pansera. Thanks also to the AA visiting students, and all of the other participants, especially Ariel Schlesinger and Wilfredo Prieto for giving me a glimpse of the Architecture Biennale through artists’ eyes.

Tags: Beyond Entropy, Biennale, energy, entropy, Venice

Students from 17 African countries came together for the rare opportunity to learn about particle physics this month. Some African students have earned advanced science degrees but are looking for the specialized training in particle physics and its associated applications not usually offered on their own continent. The first African School of Fundamental Physics and its Applications in Stellenbosch, South Africa, provided that training and financially supported some African students.

This month there will be approximately a hundred different planetary science meetings (a list of which is at the end of this post). In the meantime, business goes on as usual in space, with the biggest event this month being the start of Deep Impact's Encounter Phase with comet 103P/Hartley 2. It's headed for a 700-kilometer flyby on November 4. Also, you may want to wander outside and look up on September 18, which has newly been named ....

Congratulations to the Mars Climate Sounder team on winning a spot for a successor instrument aboard the next Mars orbiter, the joint NASA-ESA ExoMars, set to launch in 2016. Here's an update on their plans for that mission. ....

When I posted the awesome video of a fire tornado last week, I had only heard rumors of such things. Apparently, they’re more common than I thought.

Here’s another amazing video, and this one is even better: it’s longer, and you can see the rotating smoke cloud around the column of fire!

This really is a fantastic demonstration of how microscale weather works. Imagine: a fire starts. As the air is heated above the fire, it rises, and the upward motion can be very strong. This leaves a lower pressure spot at the fire, and the air from outside the fire rushes in to fill the gap. The air is very turbulent, and as the inward-moving air from one side hits air coming in from the other, swirls can form. These get amplified by the constant gale of air, and rotation on a larger scale can get started and sustained. The whirlwind gets pumped by the hot air rising, and the next thing you know you’ve got a full-blown tornado of fire.

Watch the video; see how the fire tornado is narrow and well-focused, but the air outside it is rotating more slowly? That’s an outcome of a law of physics called the conservation of angular momentum: if you take something that’s spinning and shrink it, the rotation rate will increase. You’ve seen this a bazillion times; figure skaters start spinning, then draw their arms in. Their decreased radius increases their spin, sometimes very dramatically. Water draining out of a bathtub does the same thing, too.

We see it in astronomy all the time too: massive stars undergo core collapse at the ends of their lives. The core shrinks so much the spin rate can go up vastly, and we’re left with collapsed neutron stars — mind-numbingly über-dense objects with the mass of the Sun compressed into a ball only a few kilometers across, and they’re spinning quite literally a thousand times per second: faster than the blades of a kitchen blender.

Angular momentum is a powerful, powerful thing. And it’s also beautiful. On scales as titanic as an octillion tons of star matter collapsing to form a weird quantum mechanical fluid, down to an almost supernaturally awe-inspiring column of fire, physics is everywhere, and it’s an astonishing thing to watch.

Tip o’ the fireman’s helmet to Dave Mosher.

The public often complains that they do not have access to many scientists, and are not given proper guidance and education about science issues. This actually isn't true unless one expect things like this to be spoon-fed. A little bit of effort is involved, including finding proper resources on the web.

Still, there are efforts to educate the public, and this is one just respectable endeavor. A series of seminars on popular misconception about science will be held at the Appalachian State University campus in North Carolina, starting from Sept. 14 and will run till Dec. 9. A look at some of the topics that will be presented makes this sounds very interesting:

Sept. 14—“Hypotheses, Theories, Laws and Facts in Science: What’s the Big Deal and Why Should You Care?”
Sept. 30-“Science, Pseudoscience and Junk Science: How Knowing the Difference Between Good and Bad Science is Important for Maintaining a Scientifically Literate and Democratic Society,”

If you are in the neighborhood, this would be a good thing to attend.

NASA announced today that they had placed several new sets of historical photos on their "NASA on the Commons" Flickr site, and invited the public to help tag and caption the photos. There are lots of cool images, such as this one of Lunar Prospector's launch:Click to enlarge >Lunar Prospector LaunchesNASA's Lunar Prospector spacecraft launched successfully on its way to the Moon from Launch Complex 46 at Cape Canaveral Air Station on Jan 6, ....

A new paper produced by the DZERO collaboration got me quite interested today, for several reasons. The analysis is based on a large data sample: over seven inverse femtobarns of proton-antiproton collisions! This is a huge dataset, the result of about 500 trillion proton-antiproton collisions! In fact, the measurement these data has made possible is extremely precise and it exposes quite strikingly the shortcomings of our present modeling of the production of vector bosons.

read more

The film is selected for the Netherlands Film Festival 22 sept-1 oct 2010 at Utrecht.

Screenings
23-09-2010 om 20:00 uur in Hoogt 3
25-09-2010 om 18:00 uur in Hoogt 2

The 13th Brooklyn International Film Festival is glad to inform you that the film “HIGGS, INTO THE HEART OF IMAGINATION” has been selected in competition for our 2010 festival, which takes place June 4-13, 2010. We are proud to represent your film’s United States Premiere here in Brooklyn, New York.

The US comes second in a new quality of life index designed to be mathematically objective

Here's a thorny problem: to develop an objective way to rank countries according to the quality of life they offer their citizens.

There are various ways of approaching this problem. For example, the Economist Intelligence Unit compiles its quality of life index using surveys, a useful technique but one that is hard to show is objective. Another widely quoted index, the Life Quality Index is based on life expectancy at birth and the gross domestic product per person but is only able to rank countries by applying a correction factor for each country that some critics say is open to bias.

Is there another way? Andrei Zinovyev at the Institut Curie in Paris and Alexander Gorban at the University of Leicester in the UK think so, using a mathematical technique developed in the mid-90s that can cut through this kind of problem .

They chose several widely-measured and well-studied indices on which to base their index: GDP per capita, life expectancy at birth, infant mortality rate and the incidence of tuberculosis. This data from 2005 is available for 162 countries.

Zinovyev and Gorban then plot this data in four-dimensional space. To create a ranking, the important question is whether there is a linear function that reduces this four-dimensional dataset to a one-dimensional set. Unsurprisingly, the answer turns out to be no. "Any linear mapping will inevitably give strong distortions in one or other region of data space," they say. That's what makes this problem tricky.

However, in the mid-90s a group of mathematicians devised a technique for reducing the dimensionality of complex data sets. This technique is essentially equivalent to connecting various data points together with springs and allowing the system to relax; hence it's name: elastic mapping. The trick is to find an arrangement of springs that "flattens" the data set, or in other words, reduces its dimensionality.

And that's basically what Zinovyev and Gorban have done, creating what they call the Nonlinear Quality of Life Index in the process.

Here are the top and bottom 5 from 2005:

1. Luxembourg
2. USA
3. Norway
4. Ireland
5. Iceland
.
.
.
158. Zambia
159. Mozambique
160. Zimbabwe
161. Kenya
162. Swaziland

No real surprises there, although there are some interesting features of the list. For example Equatorial Guinea is ranked at 140 although its GDP per capita is more than Saudi Arabia's ranked at 37. That's because of Equatorial Guinea's appalling health statistics: 123 infant mortalities per 10,000 inhabitants, for example, compared to 21 in Saudi Arabia.

For similar reasons, Russia is ranked 71st despite having a GDP per capita that is significantly higher than other countries with a similar ranking.

Every list throws ups anomalies like this. The important point about this one is that it is done objectively and transparently.

That's important because these kinds of indices are widely used by economists and politicians as a measure of economic and social development and so used to determine spending polices and legislation.

Objectivity is hard to come by when making these kinds of decisions. If the people who matter would agree to use it, this index could help.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1008.4063: Nonlinear Quality of Life Index

I am Lily, a new postdoc at Argonne National Lab.  I’m the one who thinks she can find the Higgs boson by listening to it. Thanks Jon for letting me play on your blog.

I moved here just over a week ago to work on ATLAS physics analysis.  So far the closest I have got to doing any physics is talking about ways to limit the shock a colleague gets from the carpet-humidity-doorknob setup in his office here. But that’s a start.

I’m loving it here so far. It was a tricky one deciding whether to move 4000 miles from London with an 11-year-old child and no driving license. I’m glad we did.

Argonne is full of smart people doing interesting physics. My PhD was on the search for the Higgs boson, which is one of the few areas the people at Argonne aren’t actively involved in. I’m giving a seminar about my research in the next couple of weeks which will either draw them in or put them off for life, or most likely a mixture of the two.

I have done no physics whatsoever in the last week, so here is an edited summary of our experiences so far, to be filed under “non-physics”.

My laptop died the night we arrived here. We fell asleep watching the Simpsons, and when I woke up the next morning the old girl had given up the ghost. I got the whrrr but no ping, and a black screen. I wrote at the time “This kind of shit is almost enough to start me believing in god (one of the angry, vengeful ones that smites non-believers).” I’m over it now though, madly in love with a younger, faster model. And a bit poorer, but having a working laptop in my situation is priceless.

The day after we arrived, around 50 soldiers checked in to our hotel, fresh from Afghanistan. Left to my own devices I would almost certainly have befriended them, but I was a bit scared. Blamed it on the jet lag. I didn’t want them to laugh at my pyjamas. Which are definitely not Dr Who.

The following day I finally decided that the intense pressure in my face and head was possibly not psychosomatic, so I went to Target, a massive supermarket. I had to sign an affidavit in order to purchase sudafed. Apparently sudafed is what crystal meth is made from. Felt fantastic all day.

My sister has insisted (via the highly influential medium of video-skype) that I am not allowed to talk to the soldiers. This is difficult for the following reasons:
(a) there is nobody else here in the hotel.
(b) they gave my daughter Jessie a plate of cookies in the shape of a happy face.
(c) it is impossible to get a look inside their ravaged minds without talking to them just a bit.

The following day I spent the whole morning trying to spell my name to Illinois secretary of state voice recognition software. My daughter is registered at school, which she loved (phew). I couldn’t sleep well that night because the following morning I had to put her on a school bus in the hotel car park at 7:20. Eek.

The school bus was a breeze. I have never seen Jessie so happy: “Mum, I was born to live here”. And I slept well the following evening, due in part (I suspect) to locating an off license. It was the size of a small planet. Or perhaps a moon. Just thirty minutes walk up Kingery highway.

We’re having a really good time.

People are much friendlier here than anywhere else I’ve been. The television is always on, everywhere. They have advertisements for antidepressants about every five minutes.

As vegetarians with no kitchen we are restricted to eating deep-fried cheese. There is no concept of waste- all the breakfast things in the hotel are throw-away polystyrene and plastic.

Every pond has a huge fountain on in the middle 24 hours a day. And people think we are insane for walking/cycling a couple of miles or even less. But they are really, really friendly. Must be the pills .

Filed under: Particle Physics, Physics Stories, Rambling Tagged: chicago, food, Lily

So I had a big payoff. The War has dragged on for a long chunk of the Summer, with attacks on three fronts, air (Flitty), ground (Slinky), and, most annoyingly, tree (Fluffy). While I do counterattack, including pointless and potentially embarrassing bouts of fury that see me rush outside early in the morning, sometimes in various states of undress, waving a broom, towel, pan, cup of tea, machete, or whatever I can lay my hands on, most gain is made by thinking through useful purely defensive countermeasures (perhaps in another post I will share with you a rogue's gallery of the results of other countermeasures - see e.g. here). These were first laid on in July, while the figs were still far from interesting to the enemy, and also while they [...]

by Charlene Anderson Visualization can help the brain comprehend what words and numbers can struggle to covey. There's a YouTube video posted by "szyzyg" making the rounds right now that drives that point home. In the last few decades, our discoveries of these space rocks has increased fantastically – but words and charts just don't convey how much we've done in very little time. The video simulation begins in 1980, the same year the ....

This post is now also on The Guardian.

Back in Geneva after the SUSY meeting in Bonn and a day in the mountains.

The return journey wasn’t as pleasant as the outward one. The train didn’t turn up at Bonn Hauptbahnhof so we were taxied across town. This meant a 30min delay and I missed both the next connections. However, via Mannheim, Basel and Bern, I made it in the end*.

The SUSY meeting made it on to German TV in a report starring Herbi Dreiner but briefly featuring me listening to my own talk, thanks to some nifty editing**. As far as I can tell with my poor German language skills the report looks fun & informative – good when physics is news. Herbi is a bit of a “science in public” star anyway, having won the European Physical Society prize last year for his physics show, something I hope he gets to perform in the UK soon.

I can’t really give an account of the meeting because I could only be there for one day. But even on that day you could see the change of mood now people are finally showing LHC data rather than simulations. So far the data don’t break new ground in SUSY, but it won’t be long at this rate. The plot shows the amount of data collected by ATLAS from LHC collisions. Not only is it increasing, but the rate of increase is increasing. When we have about 50pb^-1*** we will be passing the Tevatron in the search for SUSY. By this time next year we expect to have about 1000pb^-1. (Today we have three…)

I said I might give an argument as to whether or not supersymmetry “looks nice” (apart from the Higgs mass and Dark Matter arguments I gave earlier).

Briefly my take on it is that it introduces a symmetry between the force-carrying particles (photon, W, Z, gluon) and the others (quarks and leptons). Symmetries in nature general make things look more compact and natural.

Unfortunately, if SUSY is going to solve the Dark Matter problem and the Higgs mass problem, it has to be a broken symmetry, because otherwise all the SUSY particles would have the same mass as the Standard Model particles. And they don’t, or we would have seen the SUSY particles already. Plus SUSY does not explain why all the Standard Model particles have the particular values of mass that they have. So it introduces lots more arbitrary parameters into the theory (to do with the masses of the SUSY particles, how they mix up, and how supersymmetry is broken). This is why it is so “flexible” as I described before, but it also makes it less predictive and less aesthetically pleasing. Or “nice”.

Herbi couldn’t remember whether it was a napkin or not. But he is better qualified than me to explain the good bits about SUSY (the theory, not the conference), and will do so shortly I hope.

* And despite this delay I am still a fan of Deutsche Bahn, especially their website which is the only way I know to sensibly book European rail journeys (even outside Germany).

** Any diehard fans can find a video of the almost identical talk I gave in Paris here (Friday session). The idea behind it is essentially the idea behind this.

*** That’s inverse picobarns, a unit I will not expain here. Yet.

Filed under: Particle Physics, Science Tagged: LHC, Particle Physics, supersymmetry

I'm on a short vacation, so probably no new updates until Monday. In the mean time, keep those nominations coming for our contest to select the Most Attractive Physicist. I've been quite impressed by the nomination so far.

Zz.

The best of the rest from the Physics arXiv this week:

Lunar Palaeoregolith Deposits as Recorders of the Galactic Environment of the Solar System and Implications for Astrobiology

Toward A Quantitative Understanding of Gas Exchange in the Lung

Testing the No-Hair Theorem with Observations of Black Holes in the Electromagnetic Spectrum

About The Possible Role Of Hydrocarbon Lakes In The Origin Of Titan's Noble Gas Atmospheric Depletion

Distinguishing Left- And Right-Handed Molecules By Two-Step Coherent Pulses

Let us say that I have been getting weird fortune cookies lately. It is my belief that whoever makes them is getting more inventive with what they dare put into such messages. Apart from fortunes of the type

You will travel far in the near future

I’ve been getting professional help from these cookies. For example, a couple of weeks ago I got one that went like this:

It is better to be approximately right than certainly wrong

Which is some of the best advice for physics I have ever heard. I’ve had other such that seem to resonate with my profession. Today’s was particularly funny:

You could prosper in the field of wacky inventions

If a colleague would tell me that I would be willing to bet that he thinks I am a crackpot. Oh well. Share your own.

Filed under: humor, Random

The Standard Model of particle physics has been under attack since its original formulation, in 1967, and yet it has so far resisted every assault; in so doing it has become one of the most thoroughly tested physical theories. Like it or not, the construction has stood the test of time so well that theorists and experimentalists alike feel threatened by the chance that the Large Hadron Collider, too, will fail to find new physics beyond what the model predicts.

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I've had a fun morning of noodling around learning how to write KML files, and have produced one for Google Mars that shows you all of the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter tracks that cross the area Opportunity has driven through already, as well as the area of Endeavour crater. For the 5% of you who have any idea what I'm talking about and any understanding of why I would want to do this, here's a link to the KML file and a screen grab from Google ....

by Amir Alexander Two nearly simultaneous announcements by scientists that they have detected entire planetary system deep in space have set the astronomical community abuzz. One discovery was made with data from the planet-hunting spacecraft Kepler, the other with a ground-based telescope in La Silla, Chile. In both cases, there are strong indications that the systems contain at least one small rocky planet, only slightly more massive than the ....

One of the things I've been meaning to tell you about is my recent explorations of the capabilities of the iPad. I'm extremely impressed with it, and want to tell you a bit about how I use it in case it might work for you. There is a lot that is being said out there, and lots of yelling and whining about what it is not, and so a lot of people are a bit confused, it seems. I've a nice chunk of time here on the bus, heading home from my first day back on campus, just after the end of my first class of semester, where in fact I used the device a lot, and so this is a good time to begin to tell you a bit about it. Bottom line? The small bag I carry that you can see in the picture to the left contains everything I need for a huge number of day to day work tasks, for the research, teaching, and administrative tasks that are part of the standard Professor gig, and a whole lot more. It is all I carry, even on a longer business trip. The main complaint that a lot of people had was based on dashed expectations. Lots of us, and I include myself in this camp, wanted Apple to produce something like a tablet computer. A "real" computer. One that you can program and so forth like you might do your laptop or desktop, or at least run a lot of applications that are considered the business of serious computers these days, even if not writing machine code or C++ or FORTRAN...(You know, the stuff of Real Programmers.) So typically, when the iPad is discussed, people give a list of queries about what they want it to do, and if it does not do those things, it is dismissed as a toy, essentially. End of discussion. You can find lots of shouty discussions about the iPad on the web, with lots of accusations about how Apple let people down, and the phrase "dealbreaker" being tossed around as though its some discussion about dating criteria. Ok, so the iPad might not work for you, but make sure it is really for the right reasons. The bottom line, I realized after having my own list of disappointments, is that the more useful approach might be to figure out what sort of things it does well, and to not think of it as a failed laptop or tablet, but an opportunity to learn a new workflow [...]

By now you may have heard about this interesting video showing how many asteroids we’ve discovered since 1980. It’s pretty cool!

I have no idea how accurate it is, but the numbers seem about right; I know there are several hundred thousand known asteroids in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter [Note: the creator of the video talks about this in the comments below]. Note that a lot of the ones you see toward the end get close to Earth; according to the JPL Near-Earth Object site, almost 7200 near-Earth asteroids have been cataloged as of August 20, 2010! Of these, 815 are larger than about 1 kilometer in diameter, and 1137 are considered to be potentially hazardous; that is, have a chance (however small) of hitting the Earth.

It’s interesting to see where the asteroids are when discovered; usually in the opposite direction of the Sun, because that’s where surveys tend to look. Right at the end you’ll see two white patches at 90° from the direction of the Sun on either side. If I were a betting man — and I am — I’d wager those were from WISE, an infrared survey satellite. It scans the sky constantly, looking at right angles to the Sun, and I know it’s designed to find asteroids.

More interesting, to me, is how crowded the asteroid belt looks! But don’t be deceived. The distance between Mars and Jupiter is a bit roomier than depicted in the video. Remember, Mars is about 220 million km (130 million miles) from the Sun, and Jupiter is about 800 million km (480 million miles). That’s a whole lot of real estate: almost 2 quintillion square kilometers (670 quadrillion square miles)! Written out, that’s 2,000,000,000,000,000,000 square kilometers.

Yeah, a whole lot of real estate.

And that assumes those asteroids all lie in the same plane. In fact, many of their orbits are tilted, so we’re really dealing with volume. Even allowing that they may move above or below the plane of the solar system the paltry amount of a million kilometers, that means there’s really 2 septillion cubic kilometers: 2,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 cubic km! The volume of the Earth is only about a trillion cubic kilometers, so we’re talking a volume of space that could fit a trillion Earths in it!

So there’s plenty of room for these asteroids. The biggest, Ceres, is less than a thousand km across, so it’s small compared to Earth. Most of those asteroids identified in the video are roughly a few kilometers across, so they are positively tiny on this scale. The only reason the video looks crowded is because each asteroid is represented by a pixel that’s much, much larger than the actual asteroid size on that scale — even the Sun would be smaller than a single pixel at that scale! Displaying the asteroids actual size would be difficult; on my monitor a 10-km wide rock would only be about a nanometer across. A human hair is 100,000 times wider!

My friend Dan Durda — you’ll see lots of him on my TV show premiere Sunday night — studies asteroids. He once told me there are a billion asteroids in the main belt bigger than about 100 meters across. Even so, on average, there are millions of kilometers between them!

Space is big. Really, really big.

Despite what you see in this video and in movies, the asteroid belt is not a swarming mess of rocks going every which way. It’s actually mostly empty space. In fact, when we send probes to the outer solar system, the odds of even getting anywhere near one are incredibly small. Scientists have to physically aim the probe on purpose to get near enough one to get good images of it. The fact that we have, many times, is a testament to how good we’re getting at this sort of thing.

So anyway, the lesson here is twofold: we are getting better at finding asteroids, but there’s still plenty of room for them to exist in.

In a fun Q&A piece, the HHMI Bulletin asked four researchers "What 'For Dummies' book are you most qualified to write?"

A long-standing puzzle over the craftsmanship behind Viking bracelets and necklaces has finally been solved--mathematically.

The beautiful bracelets and necklaces made by Viking artisans leave archaeologists with something of a conundrum. These objects are made from rods of gold and silver which have twisted together into double helices. The puzzle is the regularity of these helices, which are remarkably similar in jewelry found in places as diverse as Ireland, Scotland, the Orkney Islands and Scandinavia.

How could craftsmen have achieved this regularity in such disparate places?

The answer comes today thanks to the work of Kasper Olsen and Jakob Bohr at the Technical University of Denmark. They point out that two wires become maximally twisted when no more rotations can be added with deforming the double helix. They go on to demonstrate the properties of maximally twisted wires. (We looked at a similar but more detailed argument about the properties of old rope a few weeks back.)

Olsen and Bohr then measured the properties of helices in Viking jewelry are twisted. It should come as no surprise to find that Viking jewelry is maximally twisted, which neatly explains why it all looks so similar. "Maximally rotated geometry is universal and therefore independent of the skills of the craftsman," say Olsen and Bohr.

Problem solved.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1008.4306: Hidden Beauty in Twisted Viking Neck Rings

Amateur image mage Bjorn Jonsson has recently turned his attention back to Voyager 1's close-up images of Jupiter. Before I get diverted into detail, I'll just post his latest work and let you feast your eyes on the fantastic details of turbulently swirling clouds. Click to enlarge >High-resolution mosaic of Jupiter Credit: NASA / JPL / Bjorn Jonsson Voyager 1 took lots and lots of images that were intended to be assembled into mosaics covering ....

Speaking of video goodness, we’d be remiss not to remind everyone that Sunday is the premiere of Phil Plait’s new mini-series on Discovery, Bad Universe.

It will be a lot like Armageddon, with Phil instead of Bruce Willis in the role of the balding hero figure. And science instead of complete nonsense. Improvements all around!