Blogs / Cosmic Variance

No substantive blogging from me — I’ve lost my laptop and need to get a new one, with all the crapola that entails. (Speaking euphemistically here; it wasn’t “lost,” it was stolen. Story later.)

In the meantime here’s a video from Barack Obama, supporting Dan Savage’s It Gets Better campaign. (Via Jezebel.) Savage is a well-known sex columnist, and Obama is President of the United States, so it’s a newsworthy pairing in its own right. But this is an important message for every teenager, or for that matter for every person. The campaign is aimed primarily at LGBT (lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgendered) kids, who are very commonly bullied and ostracized in school. But bullying isn’t right no matter who the target is. It does get better, as you grow up and figure yourself out and find supportive communities. It shouldn’t ever be bad in the first place, so we have to do what we can to change the cultural acceptance of harassment.

As has been oft remarked on this blog, we are in a golden age of astrophysics and cosmology. The data is pouring down from the heavens, in large part from 14 state-of-the-art NASA space telescopes. However, this cornucopia of astronomy is about to come to a crashing stop. We are at the high-water mark, and the next few years are going to see a rapid decline in the number of observatories in space. In five years most, if not all, of these telescopes will be defunct (WMAP is already in the graveyard), and it’s not clear what will be replacing them. This is brought into startling focus by the following plot:

The dotted line shows “today”. In a few years, the only significant US space observatory may be the James Webb Space Telescope (assuming it’s on budget and on time, neither of which are to be taken for granted). The reasons for the current “bubble” in resources, and the impending crash, are myriad and complex. These missions take many years, if not multiple decades, to plan and execute, and we are currently reaping the harvest of ancient boom times. But one aspect subtly implied by this graph is the impact of JWST on space funding. The cost of this mission is now over $5 billion, and continues to rise. Very optimistically, the mission will be in space in 2014, and will continue to consume major developmental resources until then. In an era of fiscal austerity, it is difficult to imagine that the immense ongoing cost of JWST leaves room for much else to be done. The community has gone through the painful exercise of winnowing down its “wish list” to a few key, high-impact missions (as detailed by Julianne here, here, and here; my summary here). It is not immediately apparent that even this fairly “modest” list is attainable given current budget realities. Astronomical data from space over the next decade will pale in comparison to the previous one. We are at a unique moment in the history of space astronomy; it is highly unlikely that we will have fourteen major space astrophysics missions flying again within our lifetimes. We need to make the most of what we have, while we still have it.

Cross-posted to Sarah Kavassalis’s blog, The Language of Bad Physics.

A few weeks ago there was a bit of media excitement about a somewhat surprising experimental result. Observations of quasar spectra indicated that the fine structure constant, the parameter in physics that describes the strength of electromagnetism, seems to be slightly different on one side of the universe than on the other. The preprint is here.

Remarkable, if true. The fine structure constant, usually denoted α, is one of the most basic parameters in all of physics, and it’s a big deal if it’s not really constant. But how likely is it to be true? This is the right place to trot out the old “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” chestnut. It’s certainly an extraordinary claim, but the evidence doesn’t really live up to that standard. Maybe further observations will reveal truly extraordinary evidence, but there’s no reason to get excited quite yet.

Chad Orzel does a great job of explaining why an experimentalist should be skeptical of this result. It comes down to the figure below: a map of the observed quasars on the sky, where red indicates that the inferred value of α is slightly lower than expected, and blue indicates that it’s slightly higher. As Chad points out, the big red points are mostly circles, while the big blue points are mostly squares. That’s rather significant, because the two shapes represent different telescopes: circles are Keck data, while squares are from the VLT (”Very Large Telescope”). Slightly suspicious that most of the difference comes from data collected by different instruments.

But from a completely separate angle, there is also good reason for theorists to be skeptical, which is what I wanted to talk about. Theoretical considerations will always be trumped by rock-solid data, but when the data are less firm, it makes sense to take account of what we already think we know about how physics works.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History has sponsored a video contest, asking participants to express in two minutes or less how science has moved them or impacted their lives. These contests are great ways to let an “audience” become real participants in a process, and have some fun along the way.

Sadly the deadline is passed, so we can’t encourage you to contribute, but you can check out the entries. Here’s a video about the LHC, by Luke Cahill. (I’m using YouTube’s new “iframe” embedding scheme; let me know if it doesn’t work.)

Edge is collaborating with the Serpentine Gallery in London on projects at the art/science interface. Last year they looked at equations; this year they’re looking at maps. It’s a playful and broad conception of what constitutes a “map”; you will see a few astrophysical examples in there.

Here’s an excerpt from a map of the emotions by Emanuel Derman, based on Spinoza’s Ethics. I zoomed in on the cluster centered around pain, because that’s what people will be drawn to first anyway.

Every astronomer knows this poem, not with any special fondness:

WHEN I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

Now, I really like Walt Whitman, but this was not his finest moment. These days, the don’t-bother-me-with-explanations torch is carried by the Insane Clown Posse — two middle-aged white guys, Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope, who put on makeup and rap approvingly about violence and misogyny. (Sorry for the comparison, Walt, but you brought it on yourself.) They received a lot of scorn from scientists for their recent song Miracles, which featured the immortal lines

Fuckin’ magnets, how do they work?
And I don’t wanna talk to a scientist
Y’all motherfuckers lying and
getting me pissed.

Now there is a scary and illuminating interview with the duo by Jon Ronson in the Guardian, where they double down on their dislike of explanation and understanding. (Via Ezra Klein.) It’s all good, but here’s an especially clarifying moment:

“I did think,” I admit, “that fog constitutes quite a low threshold for miracles.”

“Fog?” Violent J says, surprised.

“Well,” I clarify, “I’ve lived around fog my whole life, so maybe I’m blasé.”

“Fog, to me, is awesome,” he replies. “Do you know why? Because I look at my five-year-old son and I’m explaining to him what fog is and he thinks it’s incredible.”

“Ah!” I gesticulate. “If you’re explaining to your five-year-old son what fog is, then why do you not want to meet scientists? Because they’re just like you, explaining things to people…”

“Well,” Violent J says, “science is… we don’t really… that’s like…” He pauses. Then he waves his hands as if to say, “OK, an analogy”: “If you’re trying to fuck a girl, but her mom’s home, fuck her mom! You understand? You want to fuck the girl, but her mom’s home? Fuck the mom. See?”

If you’re confused, Violent J doesn’t actually want to have sex with his paramour’s mother. He is simply advocating not changing your behavior just because a parent is in the house. One word serving many purposes.

Oh yes, and they are evangelical Christians. There are many different senses in which science and religion might come into conflict — personally I care about “religion makes claims about how the world works that aren’t true,” but there are certainly others. Here is one of them. As Shaggy puts it: “But since then, scientists go, ‘I’ve got an explanation for that.’ It’s like, fuck you! I like to believe it was something out of this world.”

I don’t think religion is causing these lovable mop-tops to rebel against the power of scientific explanation; that’s too cheap an explanation. Rather, there is an underlying attitude that both pushes them away from science, and toward religion: a strong preference in favor of believing a certain set of things about the world, well before any evidence is in. First we decide that rainbows and magnets and Stonehenge are miraculous and mysterious things that cannot be accounted for by ordinary, understandable processes; then we reject science and turn to religious beliefs because that’s what flatters our preconceptions. It’s hard to know how to reach people like that. I’m thinking Phil Plait and Brian Cox should put on clown makeup and start rapping about Maxwell’s equations.

Time once again (slightly late, actually) for our annual DonorsChoose fundraising challenge. It’s a great program. Public school teachers around the U.S. ask for small amounts of money for their classrooms, and the donor — that’s you — gets to pick exactly how much you give, and to what project. It will break your heart to hear about elementary-school kids in high-poverty areas who need a few bucks to buy whiteboards or calculators. But these basic tools can make a huge difference in inspiring someone to get excited about math and science. Check out some of these projects:

Cosmic Variance Challenge 2010

and see if you aren’t moved to throw a few bucks their way.

As before, we are part of a larger Science Bloggers Challenge. A little friendly competition is good for the soul, and for the donating. Now, in the past, the readers here at Cosmic Variance have done incredibly well in donating — over $12,000 last year! Not sure how that happened, honestly. You guys are good. Can we possibly do even better?

One thing that will help is that your donations are leveraged. The folks at Hewlett Packard have agreed to match any donation up to $50,000. (Not that we would object if you chose to give more, but it’s not strictly necessary.) So every dollar you give is two dollars of impact.

And who know? Maybe there will be gifts for people who are especially generous. We’re not above bribery. Any ideas for what would constitute a good bribe?

Also! If any other bloggers want to put up a post encouraging their readers to donate at our page, we will be very happy to link back to them with assorted compliments. Heck, we’ll even link to tweeters.

John Huchra, a leading astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, passed away on Friday. I’m not sure of the cause, but he had been suffering from heart problems; he was 61 years old.

John was most obviously known for his scientific accomplishments, especially as a guiding force behind the CfA Redshift Survey. For you youngsters out there, this project was the pioneering effort at mapping the large-scale structure of the universe. It revealed, to the surprise of many, that there was a lot of structure out there! The iconic image of cosmology in the 1980’s was the “CfA Stickman” reveal in the famous A Slice of the Universe paper by Valerie de Lapparent, Margaret Geller, and Huchra.

The stickman was not the universe being playfully anthropomorphic, it was simply the Coma cluster as distorted in redshift space. (You measure positions on the sphere of the sky, but velocities along the line of sight; converting these velocities to distances is inevitably distorted because galaxies in a cluster have peculiar motions inside the cluster.) Before this map was released in 1986, many people assumed that the galaxy distribution would be basically uniform on these scales. They shouldn’t have thought that, in retrospect (you need to go to larger scales before the uniformity becomes apparent), but sometimes it takes real data to get a point across. The survey went on to discover the Great Wall of galaxies, arguably the largest known “object” in the universe.

John had a number of other important contributions, including measurements of the Hubble constant and the discovery of Huchra’s Lens, one of the most dramatic early examples of gravitational lensing. He was also very active in the community, serving as president of the American Astronomical Society and numerous other roles.

But many of us will remember him mostly for his spirit and good humor. When I was a graduate student at CfA, he was one of the most friendly and helpful senior faculty members around, someone you were always happy to bump into in the hallways. There is a guestbook here for people to leave their reminiscences about John; he will be greatly missed.

George Carlin, asked about the meaning of life, proclaims his love for astrophysics and particle physics. And the cyclic universe scenario, in particular.

The interviewer, sadly, is pretty clueless, and wears his cluelessness like a badge of honor. Carlin shows quite a bit of restraint.

Just a quick update about the Science is Vital campaign that I posted about last week. If you are interested, and close to London, thousands of people are gathering outside the Treasury today as part of Science is Vital to protest about the planned cuts to science funding in the UK.

I’d also like to correct an omission in my last post by giving credit to Jenny Rohn for founding Science is Vital. Thanks for doing this Jenny!

If I could be at the Treasury today, I would. If you can, I hope you make it.