Miss Atomic Bomb

A question of Supply and Demand

2012-02-10T16:25:00.002-05:00

There is a tremendous amount of discussion about the "leaky pipeline" of science, and physics in particular. Why so many children seem interested in science, and yet the number dwindles precipitously as education progresses until a mere thousand or so physics PhDs are granted in the US every year* (out of a population of 300 million, that's 0.0004%). Physics outreach programs abound.

But there is a separate argument. Why do we put so much effort into trying to increase the teaching of physics to people, it goes, when there are no jobs for those people once they finish?

This is a problem. In a traditional sense (ie, academia, government labs and highly skilled industry R&D), there simply aren't enough jobs for even those relatively few physics PhDs that we produce. But this isn't the whole story.

Physics bachelors tend to have a much better time of finding a job than physics PhDs. They're generally less specialized and therefore wind up in any number of various scientific and technical fields, whereas a physics PhD graduate has really chosen to do something quite specific as a career.

But even this isn't the whole story.

Here's really where the "supply and demand" argument breaks down. Physics outreach isn't about producing more career physicists. It's about producing a scientifically literate populace (who can then go on to train in whatever else they choose). I want you to know physics, not because I want there to be more physicists, but because knowing physics is important in its own right.

Sure, I myself am searching for a permanent job, and I wish there wasn't so much competition. A colleague of mine just recently applied to a tenure-track faculty job only to be told that there were over 200 applicants. And I've argued before that it sometimes seems that certain people graduating with PhDs didn't deserve them (this is a whole separate problem!), implicitly indicating that the system which creates these PhD researchers is broken. But does that mean I would argue against teaching as much physics to as many people as possible whenever possible? Never.

Physics is more important than the physicists it employs (or doesn't employ, as the case may be).

*Of this ~1300, approximately 3 to 4% are in Applied Physics such as mine is, and roughly 12% are women. This makes me roughly "one in 65 million." I just found that interesting.

For Whom the Bell Tolls

2012-01-27T15:39:00.003-05:00

It's a bad time to be a nuclear physicist.

Never mind that the battle cry is "better education equals better jobs," that a PhD is supposed to be one of the highest achievements one can attain, that our own government continues to tell us that science is important. This patina just serves to hide a rusting inner truth. Nuclear physics in the US is on its deathbed.

Now, don't get me wrong. FRIB will be a great boon to the nuclear physics community. But the cost of FRIB - not only financially - is too much burden for us to bear. In order to "get" FRIB, we had to trade HRIBF. We had to give up Yale. And that's just recently. For many years, smaller university labs have been closing, unable to fund themselves or else seemingly at the end of their useful lives. Slowly, the community has become, instead of vibrant individual groups doing competitive research at a number of labs, an array of satellite groups, each competing against another - not for results - but for experimental time and resources.

To use a (limited) analogy, the heyday of nuclear physics was like having dozens of Mom-and-Pop stores, each competing, and specializing slightly. But slowly, individual shops are being lost, and are being replaced by Walmart - a gigantic monopoly over the whole scientific field. This is what FRIB will be. And unlike our corporate example, FRIB will not provide more of its commodity. We will have more isotopes available for research, but the same amount of time to study them. FRIB can't run three-years' worth of experiments in one year. It's still just a year. So now more of the community is fighting for the same amount of experimental time and resource - which can only mean that fewer in the community are successful. Smaller university groups will either disappear, or be forced to scientifically amalgamate themselves with larger, more successful, groups.

Particle physics has already gone this route, if not for any other reason than money. It simply isn't financially viable to run two dozen versions of CERN. But now that the Tevatron at Fermilab has closed, we only have CERN. The Department of Energy has, of late, threatened to close even more facilities.

One of the great things about science is the objective way it views the universe. We pride ourselves on having others in our field try to prove our answers wrong. But they have to be independent in order for the system to really work. And if the US government keeps closing labs, we'll soon only have one place to do nuclear physics - and thus no truly "independent" researchers.

This collapsing of a field into only one facility (from many) has other problems as well. Fairly or unfairly, our merit as researchers is partially determined by the number of publications we have in a given year. With more people fighting for fewer resources, the total number of publications will decrease, as will the number of publications any one researcher has to his or her name. Because outside researchers are forced, in this scenario, to collaborate with larger and larger groups, only the lucky few who have a job at the one remaining facility will have plenty of publications. Everyone else has to "go through" these few staff members in order to do an experiment. This is already happening in nuclear physics - while on paper things such as a Program Advisory Committee or Experimental Evaluation Committee still exist, experimental proposals submitted to these governing bodies are less successful if a member of the staff at the facility isn't involved. It's simply a matter of familiarity. Proposing a successful experiment at Oak Ridge is difficult if you're not intimately involved with the day-to-day goings-on in the lab. You can gain that expertise by including someone from Oak Ridge in your experimental planning and proposal. So if, in ten years' time, the only place we can do nuclear physics experiments is FRIB, then all experiment proposals to FRIB will involve, in some way, FRIB staff. This creates a potentially unfair advantage when applying for jobs - those from small university groups will have far fewer publications than those who are laboratory staff, even if otherwise either person is equally intelligent, capable, and qualified. A loss of experimental facilities also leads to difficulties in performing different types of experiments. Just because you've spent $500 million to build a lab that can create something special and specific doesn't mean a $50,000 experiment can't also inform what you're trying to figure out. Sure, I'd love to do experiments with radioactive aluminum, but I learned a little something about it recently using stable silicon (the same stuff computer chips are made from). Both approaches are complementary - and necessary. With fewer experiments and fewer ways to do them, the potential for systematic errors increases. And with fewer experiments (as there is only one place to do them), more people will be on each experiment, so the contribution of each is lessened. Particle physics papers have hundreds, if not thousands, of coauthors (and it's always suspect as to how much each coauthor actually contributed to the work). If a PhD candidate had to design, set up, run, debug, analyze and publish an experiment with minimal help, he/she would have substantially more knowledge than the PhD student who spent the same amount of time simply making sure all of the cables on one side of one detector were plugged in for one experiment. But in the end, both get the PhD. It has become a bit of a running gag in the physics community that taking a two-year postdoc position with a particle physics collaboration is roughly equivalent to taking a paid vacation. Nuclear physics is headed this way. Potential PhD students may see this as a boon - less work for equal reward - but it spells death for the field. What good are a thousand coauthors on a paper if not one of them knows how to do more than one-thousandth of anything?

I know I'm picking on particle physics a bit, but it's because particle physics stands already as the model for what happens when you only have one place for your entire scientific field to do experiments. It weakens your science, it weakens your scientists, and it leaves you unprotected from the whims of your funding bodies (one Mom-and-Pop store closing is sad; Walmart going bankrupt is catastrophic). Nuclear physics research may not recover from this; we may already be too far down this road to turn around. And nuclear physics in the guise of nuclear energy and nuclear engineering won't save us, either. There will not be a nuclear renaissance, not in the near future. The public is too sensitive to incidents like what happened at Fukushima, rare (and not as dangerous) as they may be. And even if we did start building and running more nuclear plants, the research community is still at a loss. This is yet one more symptom of a dying field; there is such a degree of specialization that, as a nuclear physics researcher, I can't get a job in nuclear engineering research.

The final question remains. Why should you care?

Why should the public care if one scientific field, an aging one at that, finally dies? You should care because it affects you, too.

You may not realize it, but without nuclear physicists, you'd have an entirely different world. Nuclear physicists may have given the world The Bomb, but nuclear physicists are also the only ones who know how to safely dismantle and dispose the bombs we have. How else would you know whether the new TSA scanners are safe? How would you know how old ancient artifacts are, how would you keep astronauts safe in space, and how would you treat cancer?

And to take a broader perspective, it isn't just nuclear physics that we're considering. Death of one scientific field is a partial death for all science. Any time we stop pursuing objective truth, we lose a piece of ourselves. It tolls for thee.

"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." - John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, Meditation XVII (1623)

Nuclear Physics, Holifield, and the End of an Era (or, why I'm at work at 11pm on a Saturday)

2012-01-21T22:44:00.002-05:00

You can tell by the large pile of junk food near me that we're camped out.

When we run our nuclear physics experiments, like the one running right now, we utilize every available moment. Weekends. Overnights. We run 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Someone is always here. At least one experimenter, as well as two facility operators and the on-call radiation protection folks. But this is the price of science. Science doesn't stop at 5pm. Science doesn't take weekend breaks.

What's more, this particular experiment is important because it may be one of our last. As you probably know, the Department of Energy - our sole source of funding - made the decision last year to close us down. The Holifield Radioactive Ion Beam Facility, where I now sit, is slated to cease doing science on March 1st. This knowledge adds almost a desperate sense of urgency to the results of this experiment, prompting a concerted effort by the facility staff to keep things running. We don't have much longer, and we know it.

I don't know what I hope to achieve by elaborating upon the fact that I'm sitting at a data acquisition computer at 11pm on a Saturday. Perhaps I felt as though getting the thoughts out would help ease my pain and frustration. Perhaps I feel as though it is a justification, a reason to keep going - look, I am here now, is that not enough?

Happy Arbitrary Calendar Division Day

2012-01-01T13:22:00.003-05:00

I wanted to point you all to an excellent (re)post over on Bad Astronomy. It explains, in rather humorous fashion, why January 1st is... well... rather arbitrary.

Wouldn't you rather celebrate the changing seasons? That's a tropical year (named from the Greek tropi which means "turn," from whence the Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn derive; not for tropical climates*, where, as we know, the seasons are not so marked). It makes the most sense if you're basing your calendar on the changing seasons. The equinoxes and solstices would continue to line up on the same dates over time (the new year would fall on the winter solstice, for instance).

But perhaps you want to align your calendar with the motion of the Earth through space. But relative to what? Relative to its perihelion (closest approach to the Sun)? That's an anomalistic year. Relative to some distant stars? That's a sidereal year. Want to count up from the number of days that it takes to get the Sun back in the same position? That's a solar year. Perhaps we could use the motion of the Moon to define a year - but we know that won't work out to be the same as the others, either.

The truth is, none of these years are precisely the same, and there are good reasons for that (basically, the motion of the Earth through space is not as straightforward as one would hope). So we have to pick a standard and go with it. And picking that standard is... well... like I said, arbitrary.

So we picked the Julian calendar as our standard (365.25 days per year) and thus we celebrate the New Year on January 1st. It's not what other civilizations have chosen, but it works. I, for one, am torn - as a scientist, I'd love to use sidereal years, to base my calendar on the broadest and most thorough scope; but as a human being, as a gardener, as someone who loves to watch the seasons change, I'd prefer the tropical year.

Ultimately, it makes no difference. Regardless of what calendar we choose, we will have regular holidays (Christmas is always December 25th, for instance) and floating ones (the date of Thanksgiving varies year to year). We'll still have to add complications to our chosen system to account for time zones and axis precession and so forth. We'll still have people who disagree and use a different system (heck, we can't even decide whether to write the date month-day-year or day-month-year). But I think it's only fair that we admit it: January 1st has no meaning unless we grant it meaning. Our choice of this particular day is arbitrary. It's not even a "nice" choice that simplifies calendars or coincides with something obvious. It just is.

Happy New Year, everyone.

*Instead of double-nesting parentheses, I'll add here: "tropical" places are those which fall in between the two Tropics on the globe, and it is only incidental to the etymology that the weather in the "tropics" seems so standard. In fact, the weather in the tropics isn't standard, anyway. What we think of as standard tropical weather is actually standard tropical maritime weather. The temperature of the ocean likely has more to do with the climate in places like the Caribbean and Hawaii than does the latitude.

Security? Right.

2011-12-07T19:09:00.003-05:00

I cancelled my PayPal account today. I was fed up, as it were. Teach you to tell me what my password can or can't be.

So here's the issue. Of course, PayPal is trying - rather desperately - to account for people's general idiocy and inability to protect themselves online. You can't have "password" as your password, and that's fair. But the rules are getting ridiculous. 8 to 12 characters long, lowercase and uppercase letters, numbers, symbols, no words from the dictionary. But telling people how to choose passwords will do little to make them safer.

Case in point: those family stickers people put on their cars. I passed a van on the way home this afternoon that was particularly bad. There were five family members: mother, father, eldest son, younger daughter, infant daughter. Their first names were listed underneath the images. Add to this the license plate, which usually indicates more than just state of residence - many states list the county, and if they don't, certain letter and number combinations give this information away. Specialty plates are even worse (now, not only do I know your names, your family's relative ages, and that you're from Pike County, Kentucky, but I also know you're a graduate of Auburn or a disabled veteran). Icing on the cake would be the sports stickers - they tell you the child's name, the sport they play and often what jersey number they wear at what school. And all this information is broadcast freely from the back of your car as you drive down the street.

So I implore the world... think! It's not about following specific rules in specific instances. It's about common sense. If you remember what that is.

Don't try this at home... or do

2011-11-20T22:22:00.001-05:00

I just wanted to share with you a little bit of the kinds of things I do on my days off.

On the 9th anniversary

2011-11-17T16:52:00.002-05:00

As Yeats put it,

Some burn damp [firewood], others may consume
The entire combustible world in one small room
As though dried straw, and if we turn about
The bare chimney is gone black out
Because the work had finished in that flare.
Soldier, scholar, horseman, he,
As 'twere all life's epitome.
What made us dream that he could comb grey hair?

Speaking of that Dawkins fellow...

2011-11-10T17:22:00.003-05:00

Holy crap on a stick, Richard Dawkins has written a children's book.

Yeah, I know. That Richard Dawkins.

Why am I suddenly reminded of the scene from The Simpsons, when Christopher Walken reads Goodnight Moon to a group of kids?

(Sorry, it's just too funny.)

Darwin's God

2011-11-07T18:06:00.002-05:00

I just recently finished reading Kenneth Miller's Finding Darwin's God, a roughly ten-year-old (first printing in 2000) exposition on why evolution is true, and why (ostensibly) that doesn't matter to religion.

For the most part, I couldn't help but agree with everything he said. For the most part.

The first three-quarters of the book is written by Miller the molecular biologist. He attacks with scientific rigor and reason the "anti-scientific" positions which many religious people argue (or, at least, their vocal proponents argue): God as charlatan (pure creationism), God as magician (intelligent design), and God as mechanic (deism). Examples abound. Scientific experiments are explained in accessible terms. There are even diagrams.

Miller also quite eloquently explains, as he debunks these unscientific "theories," why basing a theology on any portion of scientific understanding is a dangerous game. The Victorians, who believed the universe ran as a great mechanistic machine, found themselves trapped in a deism that couldn't handle the scientific discoveries of quantum mechanics. The proponents of intelligent design, in pointing to supposedly "irreducibly complex" systems and claiming the handiwork of God, lose spiritual ground every time one of those systems is explained scientifically. One's religion and one's science should be separated, because science is always making progress; that progress should not be resisted because we have placed our religion within the gaps in the current scientific framework.

He then turns his criticism (and rightly so, I think) toward the "militant atheists," those within the scientific community all too willing to dress their own personal opinions with the cloak of scientific authority. He expounds upon what evolution tells us and what it does not; he explains that evolution, and science, do not have to be based upon a philosophical materialism in order to be believed or trusted. Miller does an excellent job of explaining that this use of evolution as a weapon against religious belief (cf Dennett, Dawkins, Wilson, Lewontin, etc) is likely what causes the ordinary person to resist evolution as an idea. We need our lives to have meaning; it is not science's place to say whether or not our lives actually do have meaning. But when the fierce proponents of materialism use science to bludgeon purpose and virtue, ordinary folks will obviously react to science negatively. The entire "debate" hurts both sides.

But after all of this positive work, Miller explains that he still believes in God, not only because God and science can be separate, but also because the science of quantum indeterminacy and random mutation gives God a way to interact with our world.

So in the end, Miller has done precisely what he warned against doing - using current scientific understanding, which is always subject to change, as validation of his particular theology.

I can't say that I totally disagree with his assessment. I myself find the inherent indeterminacy of quantum mechanics to be a tremendously beautiful - spiritual, even - system, within which anything and everything has its chance to become reality. But I will not balance my spiritual belief upon the knife-edged fact of quantum mechanics being true. It's as true as we know anything to be, sure. In that sense, it's a scientific theory which is more valid than those which preceded it, and so I will argue that a philosophy based on quantum mechanics is more valid than one based on a scientific theory which has since been disproven. But that's not quite the same as building up a philosophy/theology from a scientific theory.

In the end, I mainly agree with Miller simply because I believe in what he's trying to do. I believe that science is not self-sufficient as a philosophy of life, and I believe that religion (spirituality) is not meant to explain the nature of the universe. When you behold a piece of art, knowing how it was technically constructed, or knowing that it is religious in nature, is each not enough to appreciate it. That greater human passion - wonder - lies at the heart of both the scientific and religious drives, and we are not whole without encompassing within ourselves both our reason as well as our emotion.

As Darwin himself said in the closing sentence of Origin:

There is grandeur in this view of life; with its several powers having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most wonderful and most beautiful have been, and are being evolved.

Wiprud's Katrina

2011-10-20T22:59:00.002-04:00

The boys and I took in dinner and the symphony this evening, witnessing the world premier of Theodore Wiprud's newest violin concerto, Katrina. I must say that I was impressed, especially since I'm not generally a fan of postmodern classical music.

In the first movement (Les Bons Temps), the imagery - of a city inundated by water - is palpable. The bluesy strains of the violin are overwhelmed by thunder.

The second movement (Acadiana) was, in a word, haunted. Whistling to yourself in the dark. A ghost of a melody.

The third movement (Fly Away), however, was the only portion of the piece which left something to be desired. A melody tried to build, but was ultimately unsuccessful. The concerto ends on the upward swing of a phrase, but without flourish. Weakly.

The audience response was lukewarm.

To be fair, a brand-new piece is a difficult sell in between Copland's Rodeo ballet and Dvorak's New World Symphony, but all in all the program (quite Americana) was sound.

But perhaps the ending is appropriate. Where have we gone since Katrina? What has become of New Orleans? While the city struggles to recover, still, from a devastating blow, what can they do but end on the highest note they can manage?

Incidentally, I was reminded of how much I enjoy the first movement of From the New World. We have so much spirit in this place... I can only hope we never truly lose it.

It's the end again

2011-10-20T16:55:00.003-04:00

So it appears that this Friday is now the day the world will end - that's right, tomorrow - and while the prediction may have changed from horrendous doomsday to whimpering, quiet end, I wanted to say two things.

First, the entire idea of the Rapture is a tremendously selfish, individualistic and ultimately cruel and inhuman one.

Second, Harold Camping suffered a stroke shortly after his failed prediction in May.

Make of it what you will.

A Nobel note

2011-10-05T17:15:00.005-04:00

This year's Nobel Prize in Physics went jointly to three researchers, "for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae." Supernovae (which are massive, old, exploding stars) are actually quite good as "standard candles" in observational astronomy, because they're so bright (they can outshine an entire galaxy, in fact, if only for a short while) and they appear to have a very predictable driving mechanism (such that the assumption of distant and nearby supernovae behaving the same seems to be a valid one). So finding supernovae of differing brightness indicates they are at different distances (dimmer = farther away), and additionally, looking at the shift of light output in terms of the light's wavelength (redshift) tells us how fast the supernovae are moving relative to us. If you look at distance (plotted in the figure as bolometric magnitude, which is another way of saying brightness) versus the speed (redshift, z), you find the following relationship (from the Nobel website):

Basically, taking different cosmological models with differing predictions about the content of the universe (how much is made up of matter, for instance), you can examine your data to see which of the models fit. The Nobel Prize winners interpreted their results to mean that the universe is expanding, and that expansion is accelerating. This has led to the now familiar term "dark energy," the hypothesis that some form of unseen energy is propelling the universe ever more quickly outward from the Big Bang.

But I don't particularly want to talk about the Nobel Prize. I want to talk about some current research which argues against, not the data the Nobel Prize winners collected, but their interpretation of it.

A recent paper by Christos Tsagas of Aristotle University of Thessalonika, building on previous work and observations by others, argues that it's all in your perception (or, more exactly, in your reference frame). You might be able to observe the universe expanding outward, and at an accelerating pace, even if it wasn't actually true - if you happened to be sitting in a local region of the universe that was moving relative to the average (a phenomenon now termed "dark flow"). Our relative motion, here in the Milky Way, could make the universe appear to be expanding faster and faster, when really it's just us moving. This is demonstrated in the figure from the paper:

We all are familiar with relative motion, even if we don't know the terminology. Imagine you're in your car, stopped at a red light, and you've been fiddling with the radio. Suddenly, you're rolling backward... oh no!... until you realize that your foot is firmly planted on the brake, and it's actually the car next to you moving forward, and not you moving backward. Or imagine you're walking on a moving walkway. If you walk in the direction of the moving walkway, from someone standing at Gate B17 you look like you're walking twice as fast. But Gate B17 guy sees that you're hardly moving at all, if you're walking against the direction of the moving walkway. Now imagine this on a larger scale. What if our whole galaxy - in fact, a huge, 2.5-billion-light-year chunk of spacetime - was moving relative to the rest of the universe? It's possible that we'd see relative motion and misinterpret it as absolute motion. In the case of the accelerated expansion of the universe (the topic of this year's Nobel in Physics), we generally assume we're the stationary observer at Gate B17, but perhaps we're really the idiot trying to walk against the direction of the moving walkway.

This isn't a crazy idea, nor is it based in fantasy. It's actually a very simple argument: we're moving relative to the actual rest frame, and this skews our perception. But it's in direct competition with the interpretation that just won the Nobel Prize. So what do we do? We do science. Keep observing, keep testing, and keep refining our interpretations until we figure out which answer is ultimately correct.

My money's on Tsagas.

Reference:
Tsagas, C. (2011). Peculiar motions, accelerated expansion, and the cosmological axis Physical Review D, 84 (6) DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.84.063503

What's wrong

2011-10-04T14:50:00.002-04:00

If you're over 18 and you voted for American Idol and not the US Presidency, you're what's wrong with this country.

If you complain about the government's right to tax citizens while using public roads to drive to pick up your social security check, you're what's wrong with this country.

If you'd rather watch Dr. Phil than read Schopenhauer, you're what's wrong with this country. [Corollary - if you prefer watch any daytime TV over reading any book, your life depresses me.]

If you own a truck and have never hauled anything in the bed or towed anything with it, you're what's wrong with this country. [Corollary - if you own a truck and you drive around with the tailgate down because you think it improves your aerodynamics, you're an idiot.]

If you know less American history than the immigrant you're trying to keep out, you're what's wrong with this country.

If you think The Onion is a real news source and propagate its headlines based on this assumption, you're what's wrong with this country.

If the difference between there, their and they're eludes you, you're what's wrong with this country.

If you believe vaccines cause autism, you're what's wrong with this country.

If you agree that Fox News is "Fair and Balanced," you're what's wrong with this country. [Corollary - if you think most news reporting in the US is generally unbiased, I'm tremendously sorry.]

If you think the opinions of a scientist who has spent his or her entire career studying something in a systematic and in-depth way and a talk show host briefed on the topic five minutes before going on air are equally valid, you're what's wrong with this country.

If you cut people off in the parking lot of your church, you're what's wrong with this country.

If you rant about what's wrong with this country and fail to do anything about it, you're what's wrong with this country.

Neutrinos and the future of physics

2011-09-24T17:29:00.005-04:00

The scientific community is buzzing, or one would imagine we are, after news of this paper came out last week. Could neutrinos, those mysterious particles which hardly interact with normal matter, really be traveling faster than the speed of light? It was all over the news. The collaboration held a news conference. Hints of another cold fusion fiasco creep into conversations.

For the benefit of those who don't feel like trudging through the 24 page paper, here is a brief summary (with pictures!):

The detector is called OPERA, which stands for "Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus" (I know, that should be OPETA, but hey, you decide on the acronym first and then fit the name to it). It was designed to measure neutrinos coming from the super proton synhrotron at CERN. The neutrinos produced (as a byproduct, incidentally) at CERN are mainly muon neutrinos (remember that there are three "flavors" of neutrinos), and OPERA, located just under 500 miles away in the Italian national lab of Gran Sasso, hopes to see tau neutrinos. Neutrinos can spontaneously change flavor (the theory, actually, is not that they discretely change, but that they exist as superpositions of all three flavors in various mixing ratios which "condense" into one type when interacting with matter), and measuring the number of muon neutrinos which change into tau neutrinos will help to determine all sorts of interesting physical things (like whether or not neutrinos have any mass... photons don't, but electrons do). Here's what OPERA looks like:

As an added bonus, the detector measures the time spectra of the neutrinos as they pass through it, and the neutrinos, just like the protons that produced them originally (back at CERN), come in bunches. One of these bunches looks roughly like this:

The red curve is the proton time spectrum (from CERN). The black data points make up the neutrino time spectrum from Gran Sasso.

So after these two time spectra are collected for a given "extraction" (ie, a given bunch), they can be compared. Here's the kicker. The curves can be adjusted to fit one another only if the scientists assume the neutrinos which were observed in the OPERA detector are traveling faster than the speed of light. Not much faster, mind you - only 0.0025% - but over the hundreds of kilometers from start to finish, that amounts to 60 nanoseconds (ns). This number they give with a "six sigma" stamp of approval... which, in a nutshell, means that the 60ns result has only a 0.0000002% chance of being a statistical fluke.

Ok... so we have a result that seems to indicate the neutrinos are traveling faster than the speed of light. What I'd like to do now is not argue whether or not this result is correct, but instead point out a common fallacy, if you will, with regard to physics results which may or may not alter the paper's conclusions.

Fallacy #1: More statistics = better result

The authors of the paper make a big deal of the fact that around 16,000 events went into their data analysis. This is a large number of events, and naively it is true that statistical uncertainty goes down as sample size goes up - for something that follows a gaussian distribution (aka "bell curve"), for example (like the exam grades of a typical physics class), the statistical uncertainty increases with the square root of N, where N is the number of events. This means that for a sample size of 100, the uncertainty is 10 events, or 10%. Increase your sample to 1000 and the uncertainty is 32, or 3%. If you had 16,000 events, your statistical uncertainty is 126 events, or a meager 0.8%! So it appears that more stats does mean better results... but this neglects a very important point, and that point is systematic uncertainty.

There are two types of uncertainty in any experiment, as any student who's taken a basic science lab will tell you. Statistical uncertainty is the uncertainty inherent in the number of samples, but systematic uncertainty is a totally different beast. Systematic uncertainties are those which you introduce - intentionally or not - to the experiment, just by the way you do it. Is there an uncertainty in the length of the ruler you used to measure your experimental distances? Is there an uncertainty in the way you recorded the time? Sometimes, it can be very difficult to account for all of these experimental biases, because you may not even know they exist. Maybe you have some bacteria in a petri dish, and you've drawn a grid on the glass of the petri dish to allow you to measure how much the bacteria are moving. So you check the locations of your bacteria at noon, and again at three, and again on Tuesday. But did you stand in exactly the same location when you measured the bacteria against the grid? Did you lean over the petri dish in precisely the same way? Light bends through glass (refraction, the same reason a straw looks bent in a glass of water), so the angle of your eyes to the surface of the petri dish will change, very slightly, the way you see the grid and the bacteria together. Catch that? Sneaky. Yet another systematic uncertainty.

Systematic uncertainties do not get better with more data points. Systematic uncertainties are completely independent of the number of events in a given experiment. In fact, the whole data set - be it 3 events or 3 million - can suffer the same systematic uncertainty, which can sometimes cancel out, but sometimes shift the entire thing one direction or another. Consider your petri dish bacteria. If you drew your grid on the inside of the dish, before putting the whole thing together and filling it with bacteria, then what you see from the outside is always slightly off from what really exists on the inside. Even if you always stand in the same place and look in the same way, the entire grid may still be slightly off from reality, and this would offset your entire data collection. This potential offset is why, in my field, we always try to do experiments in as many different ways and at as many different labs as possible. It serves as a check. If we do things here at our lab and someone else does the same things at their lab, and our results are always offset from one another, a systematic uncertainty is said to exist between the two labs. Two methods can also suffer from a systematic uncertainty between them, such as measuring a nuclear reaction "forward" (oxygen+alpha->proton+fluorine) and "backward" (proton+fluorine->oxygen+alpha).

There are ways to estimate systematic uncertainties, and the more often you do something, the better you get at it (the more a piece of lab equipment is used, for instance, the better characterized it is). But OPERA has only been running a few years (this may seem like a long time, but for neutrino experiments, it's not). The amount of data they've collected is still being analyzed. So the potential for as-yet-unknown systematic uncertainties certainly exists (the authors of the paper even admit this fact explicitly, saying "the potentially great impact of the result motivates the continuation of our studies in order to investigate possible still unknown systematic effects that could explain the observed anomaly").

Now, to be fair, it's entirely possible that this result is real. While the observation of supernova SN1987a seemed to preclude the possibility of neutrinos traveling faster than light, an earlier result from the MINOS experiment indicated that neutrinos they measured might have been going a bit too fast (that experiment, however, had big enough uncertainties that the neutrinos could have been going light speed). String theory allows for faster-than-light travel through fluctuations in the "quantum foam" of spacetime. General relativity, however, does not.

So here are some more specific notes for the scientifically-minded reader, with regard to the things I feel are likely suspects in the search for systematic uncertainties.

1) The limits set by SN1987a are for a different energy regime and, more importantly, a different neutrino flavor (anti-electron neutrinos were detected during this event, vs muon neutrinos for OPERA and MINOS). There could be a systematic effect between neutrino flavors, as well as neutrino energy (the OPERA result cannot rule this out).

2) The GPS signals used to determine location and timing had to be taken at the surface, while the laboratories are actually far underground. This leads to an extrapolation, which can lead to uncertainties. Was the curvature of the Earth accounted for? The density and type of the rock?

3) Something I feel is most telling - the neutrino time-of-flight (TOF), which is ultimately compared to the time expected if the neutrinos were going the speed of light to get this "delta TOF" of 60ns, is not actually measured. As I mentioned earlier, the proton time spectra and neutrino time spectra are measured within their respective detectors/labs, and timestamped to within a few nanoseconds. In theory, there is no discrepancy between the timestamps (GPS and cesium-clock generated) at the different labs, but it is even emphasized by the authors themselves that this is not a t(stop)-t(start) kind of experiment. There is nothing that's actually starting a clock when the protons are produced and stopping the clock when a neutrino is seen, and that's because the whole process is statistical (they can't know exactly when a given proton will create a given neutrino, or where). So they do a "maximum likelihood" fit (a fancy, mathematical way of saying "we moved the two curves until they overlapped") to the two time spectra to determine how far off they are from each other. What if there's a systematic uncertainty here? It alters the entire result. What if the neutrino bunch just measured corresponds not to the proton bunch you think it does, but to the one before? It's not that the neutrinos are traveling slightly faster than the speed of light, they're traveling slower, and you're just off by one 'cycle.' I didn't get in the preprint a good description of how they know which neutrino bunch corresponds to which proton bunch, other than simply expecting them to be traveling light speed and assuming that anything falling within a small window around that would be real.

One last humorous note, which I mentioned previously on facebook. Have you ever been working in a spreadsheet program, entering a function into cell B2 that depends on cell D7? Everything is fine unless the content of cell D7 also depends on the value in cell B2... then you get what's known as a recursion error. The functions can't be solved because they each depend on the other, so you end up stuck inside an infinite loop (B2's value leads to D7's which leads to B2's which leads to D7's which leads to...). The OPERA result depends (rather heavily) on GPS timing and position signals. But GPS depends on relativity, and relativity, in turn, depends on the speed of light being constant for all observers (that means neutrinos, too). But if the OPERA result is correct, then the neutrinos have traveled faster than the speed of light, contradicting relativity. If your result contradicts the possibility of your result, how can it be your result?

I've heard a lot of good scientists weigh in on this result and its potential consequences. One real (rather philosophical) question remains. Does this mean the end of physics is looming? Hardly. This is science - doing experiments, drawing conclusions, testing those conclusions with more experiments. Overturning long-held (and often dearly loved) hypotheses is part of the deal, so long as it's done right. Time will tell if this is one of those instances... and won't it be great to know you were there when it happened?

Reference:
The OPERA Collaboraton: T. Adam, N. Agafonova, A. Aleksandrov, O. Altinok, P. Alvarez Sanchez, S. Aoki, A. Ariga, T. Ariga, D. Autiero, A. Badertscher, A. Ben Dhahbi, A. Bertolin, C. Bozza, T. Brugiére, F. Brunet, G. Brunetti, S. Buontempo, F. Cavanna, A. Cazes, L. Chaussard, M. Chernyavskiy, V. Chiarella, A. Chukanov, G. Colosimo, M. Crespi, N. D'Ambrosios, Y. Déclais, P. del Amo Sanchez, G. De Lellis, M. De Serio, F. Di Capua, F. Cavanna, A. Di Crescenzo, D. Di Ferdinando, N. Di Marco, S. Dmitrievsky, M. Dracos, D. Duchesneau, S. Dusini, J. Ebert, I. Eftimiopolous, O. Egorov, A. Ereditato, L. S. Esposito, J. Favier, T. Ferber, R. A. Fini, T. Fukuda, A. Garfagnini, G. Giacomelli, C. Girerd, M. Giorgini, M. Giovannozzi, J. Goldberga, C. Göllnitz, L. Goncharova, Y. Gornushkin, G. Grella, F. Griantia, E. Gschewentner, C. Guerin, A. M. Guler, C. Gustavino, K. Hamada, T. Hara, M. Hierholzer, A. Hollnagel, M. Ieva, H. Ishida, K. Ishiguro, K. Jakovcic, C. Jollet, M. Jones, F. Juget, M. Kamiscioglu, J. Kawada, S. H. Kim, M. Kimura, N. Kitagawa, B. Klicek, J. Knuesel, K. Kodama, M. Komatsu, U. Kose, I. Kreslo, C. Lazzaro, J. Lenkeit, A. Ljubicic, A. Longhin, A. Malgin, G. Mandrioli, J. Marteau, T. Matsuo, N. Mauri, A. Mazzoni, E. Medinaceli, F. Meisel, A. Meregaglia, P. Migliozzi, S. Mikado, D. Missiaen, K. Morishima, U. Moser, M. T. Muciaccia, N. Naganawa, T. Naka, M. Nakamura, T. Nakano, Y. Nakatsuka, D. Naumov, V. Nikitina, S. Ogawa, N. Okateva, A. Olchevsky, O. Palamara, A. Paoloni, B. D. Park, I. G. Park, A. Pastore, L. Patrizii, E. Pennacchio, H. Pessard, C. Pistillo, N. Polukhina, M. Pozzato, K. Pretzl, F. Pupilli, R. Rescigno, T. Roganova, H. Rokujo, G. Rosa, I. Rostovtseva, A. Rubbia, A. Russo, O. Sato, Y. Sato, A. Schembri, J. Schuler, L. Scotto Lavina, J. Serrano, A. Sheshukov, H. Shibuya, G. Shoziyoev, S. Simone, M. Sioli, C. Sirignano, G. Sirri, J. S. Song, M. Spinetti, N. Starkov, M. Stellacci, M. Stipcevic, T. Strauss, P. Strolin, S. Takahashi, M. Tenti, F. Terranova, I. Tezuka, V. Tioukov, P. Tolun, T. Tran, S. Tufanli, P. Vilain, M. Vladimirov, L. Votano, J. -L. Vuilleumier, G. Wilquet, B. Wonsak, J. Wurtz, C. S. Yoon, J. Yoshida, Y. Zaitsev, S. Zemskova, & A. Zghiche (2011). Measurement of the neutrino velocity with the OPERA detector in the CNGS beam arXiv arXiv: 1109.4897v1

Why a solar flare won't kill you

2011-09-19T15:38:00.005-04:00

In response to a comment on the previous post, I thought it would be good to explain why a solar flare won't cause the end of the world (it's going to take more space than just a comment to clear this mess!). Let's see if I can put some sense into this doomsday discussion.

"To date, Fukushima has already released 168 times the total radiation released from the Hiroshima nuclear bomb detonated in 1945, and the Fukushima catastrophe is now undeniably the worst nuclear disaster in the history of human civilization."
According to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), radiation levels at the Fukushima Daiichi site are constantly monitored, and display a "general decreasing trend." As for the claim that the Fukushima plants have released 168 times the total radiation released from the Hiroshima bomb, we have to specify a couple things. One thing that must be kept in mind is that radiation, radioactivity and radioactive material are different things. Radiation is the energetic particles which are emitted, via radioactivity (which is the process), by radioactive materials (the "parent"). Radiation affects us in a different way to radioactive materials, because while radiation is gone in an instant, radioactive materials can hang around. So if we're talking about radiation, we're talking about the "instantaneous" dose rate (the dose you'd get from the actual particles of radiation hitting you). At the Fukushima plant, the highest confirmed radiation dose rates recorded (and as I said, they're constantly getting better) were about 80 microsieverts per hour (about 8 mrem in US terminology). This was very near the plant and thus no one was actually exposed to it long-term; if a nuclear plant worker stood there for an hour, he or she would get only 2% of the annual dose we get from natural background radiation. As for radioactive materials, which are a bit more insidious because they can linger, the ongoing monitoring in Japan has picked up trace amounts of materials like iodine-131 and cesium-137. The IAEA reports that very near (under half a mile) from the plant, the highest concentrations in air for these radioactive materials was 3 Becquerel per cubic meter and 9 Becquerel per cubic meter, respectively. No ground contamination of iodine was detected; the ground contamination levels for cesium varied from very little to almost 100 Becquerel per square meter. One becquerel is one radioactive decay in a second - so 100 Becquerel (Bq) is the same as 100 decays per second. That may sound like a lot, but it isn't - at the Rocky Flats nuclear weapon building facility in Colorado, contaminations of 500,000 Bq were detected during the 1970s. (In case you're wondering, the area is now a nature preserve!)
Now, to compare these numbers to other instances of nuclear contamination. The United Nations scientific committee which investigates nuclear incidents produced a map of the cesium-137 depositions in Europe following the Chernobyl accident (and I've already touched several times on why Chernobyl was a "freak accident"). Notice the legend: that's a maximum of nearly 1500 kBq/sq m... or 1,500,000 Bq per square meter. In no way is Fukushima worse than this. And yet, even Chernobyl wasn't that bad. So let's last touch on the comparison to the Hiroshima bomb. The Telegraph ran a story last month claiming that the Fukushima incident was equivalent to 168 nuclear bombs (it's uncertain whether they were the first to do so), without really taking time to clarify what that actually means. The Japanese government has estimated the total amount of cesium-137 released so far (it's been about six months) is 15,000 teraBecquerels (TBq), or 15 followed by fifteen zeros. Governments have been known to overestimate the severity of a disaster in order to receive more international aid, and it is understood that when lives are potentially at stake, underestimating severity is more dangerous. So we know with reasonable certainty that this estimation is in actuality too large (pretend, for the sake of argument, that the 100 Bq per square meter measurement quoted earlier is deposited each day - that would mean you'd get a total deposition of ~150 TBq in the whole of Miyagi prefecture since the accident, about a hundred times less than the government estimate). Now the Telegraph writer is connecting this number - the possible upper limit on the total amount of radioactive cesium-137 released in 6 months' time (notice how specific that is) - with the amount of cesium-137 released by the detonation of Little Boy above Hiroshima in 1945. The report claims that Little Boy released 89 TBq (they actually don't specify if this is just cesium, or total), 168 times less than the Japanese claim. Making this kind of inflammatory comparison is nothing new. But, as it even says in the article, "government experts" continue to argue that the comparison is simply not valid, and for good reason. Nuclear weapons produce different radioactive materials than do nuclear reactors (the entire field of nuclear forensics is based on this fact), and the time scales are vastly different. Bombs are dispersive instruments by design, whereas nuclear reactors are made to be contained. Most importantly, from a public relations point of view, people (wrongly) associate the radiation of a nuclear weapon with the deaths the bomb causes (the vast majority of which are due to the explosion itself: heat, pressure, fire), so the inference drawn from the comparison is that release of radioactivity from a nuclear plant is equivalent to detonation of a nuclear weapon, which is the same as assuming it's the pickle that kills everyone born before 1865. And even so, it's worth noting that the radiation/radioactivity released by the nuclear weapons during WWII have - still - had minimal long-term effects on people in the area.

Long story short, I hardly believe that Fukushima represents the "worst nuclear disaster in the history of human civilization." Chernobyl was worse, and in that instance the plant operators didn't have a magnitude 9.0 earthquake and 30-foot-tall tsunami waves to deal with.

"All nuclear power plants are operated in a near-meltdown status. They operate at very high heat, relying on nuclear fission to boil water that produces steam to drive the turbines that generate electricity. Critically, the nuclear fuel is prevented from melting down through the steady circulation of coolants which are pushed through the cooling system using very high powered electric pumps."

The claim that nuclear plants are operated in "near-meltdown status" is absolutely ludicrous, and gives away a complete lack of understanding as to how a nuclear reactor actually operates. Nuclear fuel - typically uranium-235 enriched to a few percent (naturally it comprises under 1% of uranium ore) - is one of a few materials which is fissionable (it can undergo "induced fission"). Left to its own devices, uranium-235 prefers to alpha decay: it emits an alpha particle, which is the same as the nucleus of a helium atom, made up of two protons and two neutrons. Sometimes (less than 0.00000001% of the time, actually), uranium-235 will undergo "spontaneous fission," where instead of an alpha particle, it will break up into two large chunks, plus a bit of energy and a few neutrons. Inside of a reactor, where a lot of uranium-235 is packed into a small space, these neutrons (after being slowed down by water) can hit other uranium-235 nuclei and cause them to fission also (that's "induced fission"). These also produce a few neutrons, which then hit other uranium nuclei, and the process begins what's called a chain reaction, or criticality: the nuclear reaction is self-sustaining. All that energy being released each time a uranium nucleus fissions is being collected in the form of heat to make steam. But this shouldn't be confused with being "near meltdown." Here's why.

Inside of a reactor, there are several things which impede this criticality. First is the water itself: water is a neutron moderator as well as a coolant. A moderator is something which slows the neutrons down. When they first are kicked out of the fissioning nucleus, the original neutrons are actually too high in energy to efficiently set off another fission reaction. If they travel through water first, they lose some of that energy and become "thermalized," making them far more likely to cause another uranium nucleus to fission. Thus, if the cooling water is lost (in the nuclear industry, this is known as "LOCA" - loss of cooling accident), the moderator is lost as well, and the neutrons speed up - and this (ironically) makes criticality even more difficult to attain. In addition to the water, control rods are used to (as the name suggests) control the nuclear reactions. Control rods are made out of materials which absorb neutrons (things like boron and graphite), so they have the effect of removing neutrons from the reactor core, meaning fewer neutrons are available to cause fission.

Now here's an important point which is overlooked by the Natural News author: if the coolant stops, the fuel rods do not necessarily "go critical." This is what happened in Chernobyl, but for a very obvious and unfortunate reason - the operators there, while conducting a test, turned off the safety system interlocks. While a LOCA can cause the uranium fuel to overheat, it does not suddenly go out of control in some sort of nuclear-bomb-like explosion. Nuclear reactor fuel CANNOT EXPLODE like a nuclear bomb. It simply isn't physically possible (water can't burn your skin the way sulfuric acid does - it's not physically possible). Reactors these days are designed with catastrophe in mind - they have to be, given the increasingly strict regulations surrounding them (chemical plants, industrial plants and coal burning plants have incredibly lax regulations by comparison) - so with each possibility of something going wrong, an additional layer of protection is built-in.

So imagine the scenario that the nuclear plant suffers from a loss of power (and nuclear plants, just like other power plants, do supply their own power; the Japanese struggled to reconnect the Fukushima plants to the grid because it would allow them to supply power from plants unaffected by the earthquake and tsunami). All hell breaks loose, right? Nope. In modern reactors (and older reactors in the US are required by law to be retrofitted to meet new safety standards), safety systems don't all depend on getting power. The control rods are gravity fed - meaning if something happens, they will simply drop into place, no power necessary. The cooling water may run on electric pumps, but these pumps have diesel or battery backup bumps, and these have gravity fed or thermodynamic backup systems (ie, systems which run on gravity, as the control rods, or which depend upon the natural circulation of air or liquid). Reactor safety systems which don't require power - or sometimes, don't even require an operator! - are called "redundant" and "passive" systems. They operate without power, without diesel, without batteries, without plant access, without people. They just work. Designs for modular nuclear plants exist even now that are completely meltdown proof.

Without getting too much more in-depth, it's fair to say the scenario isn't quite as dire as originally imagined. But let's take a couple more specific points.

"When the generators fail and the coolant pumps stop pumping, nuclear fuel rods begin to melt through their containment rods, unleashing ungodly amounts of life-destroying radiation directly into the atmosphere."

As we previously discussed, reactors have lots of redundant safety systems built-in. So it's not a guarantee that fuel rods will melt through their containment if the cooling water is lost (see above). It's also a horrible crime to claim that when nuclear fuel gets hot, it releases radiation "directly into the atmosphere." Secondary safety systems, such as containment, prevent this from happening. If the unlikely event of a LOCA occurred and the backup systems and backup-backup systems were to fail (with each layer of failure comes an even more decreased probability of it actually happening, like drawing four aces in a row from a deck of cards), the hot nuclear fuel is contained within a steel and concrete containment vessel which can withstand the heat and pressure the fuel creates (in fact, they can withstand earthquakes and airplane crashes and all manner of highly unlikely things). Physically, there are limitations as well: nuclear fuel is heavy, metallic stuff. If you took a chunk of steel, for example, and melted it, you'd be left with a lump of steel, and the same is true of nuclear fuel. Most of the material remains as a big, solid lump. Very little becomes gaseous or particulate, so very little even has the potential to become airborne in the first place. So even if the nuclear fuel were to melt, it wouldn't escape directly into the atmosphere. And we've already touched on the fact that nuclear material is not as frighteningly deadly as it's made out to be.

"As any sufficiently informed scientist will readily admit, solar flares have the potential to blow out the transformers throughout the national power grid. That's because solar flares induce geomagnetic currents (powerful electromagnetic impulses) which overload the transformers and cause them to explode.... But the real kicker in all this is that the power grid will be destroyed nearly everywhere."

Well, this is a half-truth. Transformers explode when they are overloaded; a power spike, usually caused by lightning or a sufficient power blip down the line (perhaps caused by another exploding transformer), melts the circuits inside the transformer and secondarily heats the oil used to cool the circuitry inside, causing an explosion. I doubt, however, any "sufficiently informed scientist" will admit that regular solar flares would wipe out the entire power grid (a good scientist will always admit that something is possible, but will also maintain that it need not be probable). Solar flares occur all the time - we wouldn't have the Aurora without them. Powerful solar flares do have the potential to interrupt satellite communications and cause temporary surges in the power grid, as has been seen previously, and the Sun is coming up to the peak of its 11-year cycle (due in about 2013). But this cycle is set to produce fewer sunspots than normal, and fewer sunspots means fewer possibilities for massive solar flares.

We can't discount the potential for large solar flares, however, at some point in the future. The chances of a flare being a massively disruptive one are low, but not zero. It's not that we haven't known about the potential for years. But because of this, we have systems now to tell us when something is going to happen. NASA satellites which float constantly in the space between us and the Sun are monitoring at every moment, ready to give us hours of notice should a large solar flare occur. If we have hours to know a solar storm is coming, doesn't that mean we have hours to shut down any sensitive systems?

"Did I also mention that half the people who work at nuclear power facilities have no idea what they're doing in the first place? Most of the veterans who really know the facilities inside and out have been forced into retirement due to reaching their lifetime limits of on-the-job radiation exposure, so most of the workers at nuclear facilities right now are newbies who really have no clue what they're doing."

This is a common misunderstanding. While there are lifetime limits for work-related radiation exposure, it doesn't mean the expertise of someone retiring from the nuclear industry is lost (think, how many consultants do you know?). And to claim that new employees have no idea what they're doing is to ignore the years of technical training required by law for any nuclear operator.

"Imagine a world without electricity. Even for just a week. Imagine New York City with no electricity, or Los Angeles, or Sao Paulo. Within 72 hours, most cities around the world will devolve into total chaos, complete with looting, violent crime, and runaway fires."

We don't have to. We've already seen what happens, and it wasn't so bad.

"Now imagine the scenario: You've got a massive solar flare that knocks out the world power grid and destroys the majority of the power grid transformers, thrusting the world into darkness. Cities collapse into chaos and rioting, martial law is quickly declared (but it hardly matters), and every nation in the world is on full emergency. But that doesn't solve the really big problem, which is that you've got 700 nuclear reactors that can't feed power into the grid (because all the transformers are blown up) and yet simultaneously have to be fed a steady stream of emergency fuels to run the generators the keep the coolant pumps functioning."

I've already spent some time explaining why the response need not be so frantic (passive safety systems, etc), and I've also already spent quite a bit of time ranting about worst case scenarios. So imagining this scenario is at once easy and absurd.

"Let's be outrageously optimistic and suppose that a third of those somehow don't go into a total meltdown by some miracle of God, or some bizarre twist in the laws of physics. So we're still left with 115 nuclear power plants that 'go Chernobyl.' Fukushima was one power plant. Imagine the devastation of 100+ nuclear power plants, all going into meltdown all at once across the planet. It's not the loss of electricity that's the real problem; it's the global tidal wave of invisible radiation that blankets the planet, permeates the topsoil, irradiates everything that breathes and delivers the final crushing blow to human civilization as we know it today."

Again, let's be realistic. Even if all of the 440 power-generating nuclear reactors in operation today were to lose power (we can't count the research reactors, because they are purposely designed to be small and harmless and not designed to create power, nor can we count the nuclear navy ships and submarines, which would be impervious to any problems with the national power grid), that doesn't imply nuclear holocaust. Since the Chernobyl incident, safety standards have been raised such that containment is required; only the old Soviet style reactors lack a containment vessel, and these have been outfitted. In order to see any radioactivity leak from a nuclear plant, we'd have to have a breach of containment, and we have estimates of that potential through Probabilistic Risk Assessment (the mathematical way to calculate the potential for an accident to occur in a highly technical system, like a reactor). A Sandia Labs report estimates that a typical containment vessel might fail at a rate of roughly 1x10^-7 per year (that's 0.0000001 failures per operating year), and that's IF THE CORE HAS ALREADY FAILED (in other words, if all of the nuclear fuel has already melted). So we have 440 nuclear reactors, and we'll assume they've all lost power, and we'll assume even further that they've all lost cooling water, and we'll assume even further that they've all lost their passive safety systems, and we'll assume even further that their nuclear fuel has overheated. 440 plants with core damage times a containment vessel failure rate of 0.0000001 gives a probability of ~0.005% that any radioactive material is released into the atmosphere. In order to get one incident (in other words, in order to achieve a likelihood of 100%), you'd have to wait over twenty thousand years. And like I said, that's already assuming the reactor core is damaged.

"The world's reliance on nuclear power, you see, has doomed us to destroy our own civilization. Of course, this is all preventable if we would only dismantle and shut down ALL nuclear power plants on the planet. But what are the chances of that happening? Zero, of course. There are too many commercial and political interests invested in nuclear power."

I'm quite curious as to where he gets this idea. Nuclear power, because of all of the regulations surrounding it, is expensive and difficult to get started. I can think of not one instance of there being commercial or political investment in nuclear power in recent years. Oil and coal, on the other hand, is a huge lobby, and moneymaker, for politics and commerce. We won't even bother to go into that here (though I find it amusing that our author even admits in his own article that "most people don't realize it, but petroleum refineries run on electricity" - making the oil and gas infrastructure just as vulnerable, if not more so, to his outlandish doomsday scenario). Besides, it's ridiculous to assume that having 14% of the world's power supplied by nuclear counts as "reliance." We're far more reliant on other sources of power (coal produces nearly half the power in the US).

"What can you do about any of this? Build yourself an underground bunker and prepare to live in it for an extended period of time. (Just a few feet of soil protects you from most radiation.) The good news is that if you survive it all and one day return to the surface to plant your non-hybrid seeds and begin rebuilding human society, real estate will be really, really cheap."

Is it mean to say that I hope this is what he plans to do, so the rest of us can move on to something more productive?

Marcoule

2011-09-12T16:04:00.003-04:00

Before this gets out of hand, I have to say something.

Yes, there was an explosion at the Centraco plant in Marcoule, France. It has been described as an "industrial accident."

NO, it was not a nuclear explosion.

NO, it did not involve nuclear materials.

NO, Centraco is not a nuclear reactor. It is a low-level waste processing site.

One person is confirmed dead, and three injured.

Now compare that to the second explosion which took place today:

A leaking gas pipeline in Kenya exploded, killing at least 75 and injuring at least 100.

Was that second incident underreported? ABSOLUTELY. (Google News counts: "Marcoule explosion" in last hour: 1,710; "Kenya explosion" in last hour: 712.)

Science is suffering

2011-09-09T20:52:00.004-04:00

I wanted to draw your attention to the latest Washington Dispatch update from the APS Office of Public Affairs. Here I have reproduced a portion of this month's edition. Emphasis mine (because nothing else needs to be said).

ISSUE: Budget and Authorization Environment
Fiscal Year 2012 Appropriations
As of the deadline for APS News, the House of Representatives had passed the Energy and Water Development (E&W) bill that funds DOE and completed full committee action on the Commerce, Justice, and Science (CJS) bill that funds NSF, NIST, and NASA. A summary of key elements of the action follows.

* E&W Appropriations bill (HR 2354): On July 15th the House passed HR 2354 by a vote of 219 (209 R, 10 D) to 196 (21 R, 175 D), providing $24.7B for DOE (-$850M relative to FY11), including $4.8B for the Office of Science (-$43M); $1.3B for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy [EERE] (-$491M); $733M for Nuclear Energy [NE] (+$8M); $477M for Fossil Energy (+$32M); $180M for ARPA-E (+$0); $10.6B for National Nuclear Security Administration [NNSA] (+$76M); and $4.9B for Defense Environmental Cleanup (-$42M)....

* The E&W Subcommittee report also contains language of concern: ... (2) It also directs Basic Energy Sciences to create "a performance ranking of all ongoing multi-year research projects... by comparing current performance with original project goals" and directs DOE to eliminate $25M by terminating the lowest ranked grants based solely on that criterion.

* CJS Appropriations bill (No bill number assigned): The House Appropriations Committee passed the CJS bill by voice vote on July 13th, providing $4.5B for NASA Science (-$431M); $701M for NIST (-$49M) and $6.9B for NSF (+$0)....

* Of greatest concern to the science community should be the elimination of funding for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the highest priority for astronomy and astrophysics. Rep. Wolf (R-VA 10th), chair of the House CJS Appropriations Subcommittee, alleged that NASA had "been hiding costs" associated with the telescope... [and] also claimed that NASA had rushed its planning....

Thus far, the Senate has begun debate on only one appropriations bill: Military Construction. It is not expected to address the other eleven bills until after Congress returns from its August recess, virtually assuring a Continuing Resolution to take effect when the new fiscal year begins on October 1st.

From Atlantis to Infinity

2011-08-25T17:05:00.001-04:00

Ok, folks... I'm actually pretty proud of this one. I'm still learning how to use the software (kdenlive), but I feel like I'm at least starting to get the hang of it! This is my tribute to the NASA Space Shuttle Program, specifically the final flight (Atlantis, STS-135, July 8th 2011). To paraphrase Neil deGrasse Tyson, America is forgetting how to dream. Images/footage courtesy of NASA. Creator commentary forthcoming!

Philosophy Rules

2011-08-10T22:54:00.003-04:00

I wanted to link this particular editorial from the IoP's monthly magazine, but it's not up on the web yet. So I'll give you a synopsis. The editorial is "Critical Point: Philosophy rules" by Robert P. Crease, in the August 2011 edition of Physics World.

"Philosophy is dead." So say the venerable physicists Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow on the first page of their recent bestselling book, The Grand Design.
Physicists declaring philosophy to be lifeless is nothing new.... Why do physicists so often, and confidently, condemn a field that is not their own? Where are their instincts to be inquisitive, resist overstepping what they know, withhold judgment until certain and accompany claims with error bars?...
For philosophers, the world includes more than physical matter. As the Harvard University philosopher Steven Shapin writes in his book, Never Pure, "Plants photosynthesize, plant biochemists are experts in knowing how plants photosynthesize, [while] reflective and informed students of science are experts in knowing how plant biochemists know how plants photosynthesize." In other words, the world studied by science researchers includes not just objects, but also connections between scientists and objects.
Human beings, after all, engage with the world in different ways.... [S]cientists are not like plants whose product is knowledge.... Human beings... interpret both the world and themselves....
Hawking's theoretical stance as an observer of fundamental structures, too, is only one way for humans to engage with the world, and not the default setting either....
The lifeworld is the domain to which philosophers bring their torch of discovery. They study similarities and differences between various modes of being in the world.... To study this is not to undermine or critique these activities, but to understand and help cultivate them.

The critical point, Crease argues, is that philosophers do not attempt to "adopt a 'view from nowhere'," but instead, "when philosophers think about science, they struggle to be self-aware of that horizon and how it affects human self-interpretation." Philosophers approach the same questions in a different way. "Philosophy has moved on and remained current since the time of Plato's Academy in Athens, despite physicists' assertions to the contrary," Crease points out. And we scientists would be well advised to realize how similar our own assertions sound to those of the anti-evolution establishment. We know that the science of evolution has itself evolved since Darwin's initial postulations; why do we not afford the same courtesy to philosophy?

On the first page of his book Subtle is the Lord..., the physicist Abraham Pais reports a discussion with Einstein in which the latter asked Pais if he "really believed that the Moon exists only if I look at it." One could hardly think of a deeper, more challenging question about the concept "to exist." Yet Pais smoothly characterizes the conversation as "not particularly metaphysical." Discussing the meaning of reality is ok, evidently, so long as it is done in an amateur way.

Indeed.

Dying yet another death

2011-08-03T14:44:00.002-04:00

In the breakroom down the hall, my friends laugh and share stories over coffee. I sit with lead in my stomach, too frightened to speak, hardly able to breathe. It is like this every single time, and yet I can't help it. I have no control over my reactions. Tomorrow morning I get on a plane, and to me it might as well be hell.

Have you ever experienced a panic attack? They are, in fact, so similar to heart attacks that many people have been hospitalized for the wrong one. Your heart beats heavy and irregular, you sweat and tingle and shake and can only manage shallow breaths, your muscles go numb, your gut churns and your head swims. And yet somehow the idea is brushed off as simply "anxiety;" it's social, it's psychological, it's not harmful. It's nothing. So you don't like flying? Have a beer and get over it, they say.

For some reason, the modern Western ideas about psychology are only just now coming around to realizing that psychological problems can physically harm you. "The danger, however, is no less real because it is imaginary;" Sir James Frazer wrote in The Golden Bough over a hundred years ago. "Imagination acts upon man as really as does gravitation, and may kill him as certainly as a dose of prussic acid." But only recently do we see depression medications meant to treat physical pain as well as psychological pain, and the like. Many cultures around the world and throughout history have understood psychological problems to be intricately linked to the physical body; to a Chinese farmer, for instance, "depression" connotes just as much "stomach pains" as it does "sadness." And to me, being forced onto a plane is the same as having a gun held to my head. The response is just as real.

The irony is two-fold. First, if my fear comes to fruition and I die in a plane crash, then I no longer have to suffer my fear; the fear is self-defeating. Second, because the physiological response is so intense and so physically damaging, the fear itself has the potential to cause bodily harm; the fear of death is killing me.

We cannot continue the ruse that we are separate psyches trapped within a physical body. The pieces are irrevocably connected as a whole. And damage to the one can cause damage to the rest.

If nothing else, I have to write because it is calming; I hope that, in seeing my final thoughts on paper, the Fates play a joke on me and allow me to live to eat my words. But the reality is, I write because the rational majority of my brain can't override the emotional core, and so I spend my time convinced that I'm about to die. And every flight, every prolonged fear of death, is just the same as dying.

Maybe someday people will understand. Maybe.

One more Fukushima mention

2011-07-21T21:28:00.002-04:00

The nuclear "disaster" in Japan seems to have fallen off the radar of late, replaced instead with incensed stories of the US debt ceiling, Rupert Murdoch's questionable business practices, and Sarah Palin's tour bus (if this isn't proof that the media is sensationalist, I don't know what is). Even I have let it go, after three posts (1,2,3) on the topic. But I wanted to share a rather prescient quote from Dr. Bernard L. Cohen, nuclear physicist at the University of Pittsburgh, in his 1990 book The Nuclear Energy Option:

Any system can be destroyed by a sufficiently powerful earthquake, but in an earthquake strong enough to cause a nuclear reactor meltdown, effects of the meltdown would be a relatively minor addition to the consequences of that earthquake.

We knew it then, and we know it now: freak accidents are exactly that. Freak accidents.

Stupidly easy ways to save money

2011-07-13T11:20:00.004-04:00

There's a lot of discussion going on regarding the federal debt, and most of it - 99.999% of it - ignores the real issue, which is where that debt is being felt. I'm assuming that most of you reading this make enough to get by, maybe paycheck to paycheck but still not having to make those "food or medication?" decisions. I know that, personally, all I want out of money is to be comfortable - to make just enough that I don't have to worry about how much it is, enough to spend a week at the beach every once in a while, enough to buy what I need and a little of what I want. Less than this (I've been there) and finances become too much of a burden; more than this and the extra becomes meaningless.

So here are a few ways to make what money you do have go further. To live a little bit more comfortably. None of this should be surprising... just common sense things that people tend, for one reason or another, not to do.

1) Get rid of cable.

I don't mean "cut back on TV" or "bundle your services" but flat-out get rid of it. I haven't had cable or dish (or even antenna) for several years now, and I'd never go back. The shows are available on hulu or the network's website, and any relevant local news is on the free antenna stations. Netflix is there for the rest. (If there's a series you really want, ask for the DVD box set for your birthday.) Instead of paying $35 upwards for TV ($110 or more for a bundled phone-internet-TV plan... more on this momentarily), I pay $9 a month for Netflix and $40 a month for DSL by itself. Annual savings in that case, not even taking into account the fact that something around $100 per month is an "introductory" price only, is $600.

2) Get rid of your home phone.

This is already true for many people. We have cell phones now. They also work inside houses. So why have a landline? How often do you use it? No reason to pay for both services. Even in a bundle, that landline is costing you money you don't need to be spending. A recent Comcast deal advertised $33 per month for each of three services (home phone, internet, cable) for a year, meaning $99 per month total. But we've already mentioned that getting rid of cable saves some of that, and getting rid of home phone will, too. That leaves you with the internet-only option... and though it may seem scary that internet by itself is $40-$60 per month, remember, that's half of what you were spending when you had the whole thing bundled.

3) Bring your lunch.

Going out to lunch is expensive. Really expensive. At the cafeteria where I work, a sandwich, soda and bag of chips will cost you nearly $7. Even the most expensive "name brand" frozen entrees from the grocery store tend to remain under $3 a piece. That's $980 a year difference! Not only are you saving money by "buying in bulk" and doing the labor yourself, you're avoiding the hassle of procuring food right at the moment you're hungry enough to want it most.

4) You don't need an iPhone.

Not only do you not need the newest, shiniest (and hence buggiest) phone, you don't need the $100 per month service to go with it. I pay $30 per month for my cell phone plan. That's $30 per month for 1000 texts, 1000 minutes, and 1000 MB of internet/data. That's less than half what Verizon charges. My annual cell phone plan savings is nearly $500.

5) Store brands really aren't that bad.

I will concede that there are a few specific things - Dr Pepper being one of them - where store or value brands simply don't cut it. But once it's out of the wrapper, can you tell the difference between Walmart's brand crackers or Ritz? How about other consumables, like toilet paper, fabric softener or shampoo? With a store's coupon card and some ingenuity, you can cut your grocery bills in half (for me, this amounts to maybe $500 a year or more). You can always go back to name brands if you aren't satisfied. (This also goes for clothes. I buy nearly all of my clothing at Kohls and Walmart. I'm not going to pay someone $70 to "pre-stress" my jeans.)

6) There are no taxes on unprepared foods.

Not just taxes, even, but costs incurred by labor. Buy a steak, some peppers and an onion, not the pre-made "stir fry mix" or pre-skewered kebabs. Stores will charge you plenty for the work they've done. A prepared fruit salad will cost far more than the individual ingredients. You can end up saving lots of money by purchasing the "raw materials," if you will.

7) Let's talk about Windows.

Ok, you're not ready to switch to Linux. Fine. But keep in mind, I didn't pay a cent for my computer's operating system, whereas Windows 7 costs anywhere between $80 for an upgrade and $320 for the full license Ultimate version. In addition, I don't need antivirus software for Linux (another $40 per year saved), and all of the programs I use (Open Office, Chrome, Thunderbird mail, games, tools, etc etc etc) were also free. But even if you have Windows, you can get open source software that costs little to nothing and has the same capabilities as the proprietary version. The cheapest version of Microsoft Office is $150. Sun Microsystem's Open Office suite is totally compatible with Microsoft documents, and is completely free.

8) Get refillable containers.

Let's assume that you can't just go without your morning cup of coffee. You can still save money by purchasing a refillable container. Most coffee places, like Starbucks, have cheap refills on drip coffee. While you're at it, get a loyalty card and remember to bring it with you, so that one out of every ten cups is free (or whatever it is). I've earned a lot of free pastries at Panera in my time.

9) Buy a used car.

I've put this lower down on the list because I assume it doesn't (shouldn't) come up that often. But when it does, who wants a car payment? New cars depreciate in value exceptionally quickly - "the minute they drive off the lot," as the saying goes - and yet you're still paying $400 a month. I chose my car carefully and bought it with cash, so now I have no car payment and a very small gas and maintenance cost each year. Used cars are also generally cheaper to insure, and when someone finally does scratch your car door with their shopping cart, it doesn't hurt as much.

10) Put on a sweater.

Energy bills can be horrendous. Keep the thermostat a few degrees above or below where you would normally set it (given the season) - try 75 in the summer and 65 in the winter. It makes a big difference. With a sweatshirt and an electric blanket, I was able to keep my old apartment at 62 degrees all winter, and my electricity bills were on the order of $30. It's harder in the summer when you live somewhere in the southern half of the US, but it's still possible. Hang out downstairs, take cooler showers and sleep without covers.

11) Share costs with others.

Instead of paying $200 a night for a hotel room at the beach, why not find some friends and rent a beach house for $1000 per week? Instead of a Starbucks trip every morning, why not get your officemates to chip in for an inexpensive espresso maker? Instead of a $500 per month studio, why not move into a $700 per month two-bedroom unit and get a roommate?

12) Do the math.

There are tons of ways to save a little money here and there, and we all know them. But all too often, either finances aren't laid out ahead of time or we set far too difficult goals for ourselves. Be realistic, and be proactive. Work out how much it will save you to take one step, and you're more likely to take that step and stick to it. Remember, the average credit card debt is over $10,000... and that's just credit cards. It's worth your time to do the math.

13) One more for a baker's dozen.

If this post seems a bit out of character, you're right, it is. But I witness these things every day, with friends and coworkers and even myself. There's such a mismatch between the myriads of "money tips" websites and stories out there and the staggeringly high amount of the average US citizen's debt that it boggles the mind. I offer this list in the hopes that we can avoid the Orwellian (or Huxley-an) dystopia which awaits us further down this road (it's bad enough that we already have a mind-controlling oligarchy). I want to know that something is being done. What tips would you share?

Finding Atlantis

2011-07-10T14:34:00.004-04:00

"Amazing, fantastic, utterly surreal."

We made it - and despite the traffic, despite the lack of sleep, despite the cost and the heat and the length of travel and the ferocious mosquitoes, we made it. It was all worth it in the end, even the 70% chance of weather delaying the launch... Atlantis lifted off from Launch Pad 39A at Canaveral at 11:29am on July 8th, 2011, and we were on the 528 westbound causeway to watch it. The mood was incredible. People cheered and whistled and applauded, and in the end (I knew I would), I cried.

I can't describe it, I really can't. To be a part of something like that - the local news said up to a million people were expected in the Space Coast area - was phenomenal. To turn around and go home right now would be fine, because I found what I was looking for. I saw it with my own eyes. And it will never happen again.

The traffic, even three hours later, was still utterly insane. Cops directed traffic at intersections. Cars eastbound on the causeway were at a standstill. The cell phone networks were overloaded to the point of allowing only emergency calls. But I can't express how glad I am to be here. How palpably nervous I was before the launch, scared it wouldn't happen, that the weather would be no-go.

We toasted the crew and the Shuttle program at the Cocoa Beach pier afterward. Now, I desperately need a nap, and the sky clouds over again in preparation for afternoon storms. But this morning, the wind was in our favor, the sky cleared just enough, the people gathered by the hundred thousands, and all our hopes and dreams as a nation collectively launched into the air at 11:29am.

In the end, the entire thing was quintessentially American - the Mustang convertible, the Eisenhower Interstate System road trip, the final launch of the 30-year-old NASA Space Shuttle program. Of the Shuttles, it seemed peculiarly appropriate that the last to fly should be Atlantis; the symbolic end of our search for a hidden "city" in the depths of space, now to be washed under the tides of history.

T-2 days

2011-07-06T15:08:00.005-04:00

There is anger floating around the internet.

I know, I know, you may not believe me, but it's out there. Much of it is faceless and aimless, a vague disapproval without direction or cause, crazies ranting about the end of the world or cold fusion or "Nobama" with little rhyme or reason. Sometimes it's righteous anger. And sometimes it hits close to home.

But right now I want to speak about something specific. I want to speak to all of those detractors out there who believe that NASA has run its course, who believe that the Shuttle program is no longer of interest to Americans, who believe that "launching rich people into space" is a waste of taxpayer money... this taxpayer is taking time off of work and spending hours in the car in order to get to Canaveral on Friday for the final launch of the Space Shuttle Atlantis.

Little kids still want to be astronauts when they grow up. Perhaps it's not as prevalent a wish as in the 1960s or 1970s, but it's there. One and a half million people visit Kennedy Space Center every year. People still cry when they watch Shuttle launches (I, in fact, share a birthday with the Shuttles). Baby boomers still remember where they were when, on July 20th, 1969, the crew of Apollo 11 first touched the surface of the Moon. Younger generations still remember the tragedy of the Challenger disaster in 1986 and Columbia in 2003 (I know I do). And Americans still need something to galvanize and rally us to greatness, something that embodies the very spirit of who we are.

The Shuttles, the Hubble Space Telescope, the International Space Station - all of these things still have the potential to evoke feelings of pride and awe. This specific brand of patriotism is not partisan or xenophobic or hateful. Remember this iconic image? Seeing the Earth as the pale blue sphere that it really is has made our patriotism into something more, something tempered and precious. With our pride in the technological achievement of our country comes the humbling understanding that we are all in this together.

I don't intend to simply spout platitudes; as a fan of Alan Watts I am well aware that we are as far into space as we'll ever be already. "So we're going to conquer space. You know we're in space already, way out. If anybody cared to be sensitive and let outside space come to you, you can, if your eyes are clear enough. Aided by telescopes, aided by radio astronomy, aided by all the kinds of sensitive instruments we can devise. We're as far out in space as we're ever going to get." But he ignores one very important fact - no matter how far out in space we are already here on Earth, we can never really know how far it is until we go further and look back. Perspective is everything.

So to those who are angry, those who call NASA's measly budget a waste of money and who claim that the Shuttle program was a bust, I say this: when Atlantis lifts off, I'll be there.

A wonderful, moving and informative video is here. Photos courtesy of (in order) Orlando News Sentinel, NASA, NASA.

My America

2011-07-04T13:39:00.000-04:00

Happy Independence Day, everyone.

Hypocrisy

2011-06-23T15:13:00.003-04:00

Tea Party: Oh my God, the price of gas is so high! Tap into the federal reserves!

Obama: No.

Tea Party: But it's sooo expensive! Tap into the federal reserves!

Obama: No.

Tea Party: I waaaaaant cheeeeeap gaaaaaaas!

Obama: Fine. Here's 30 million barrels.

Tea Party: What the hell did you do that for? The reserves are for emergencies only!

(not that this is the first time something like this has happened...)

More magic numbers

2011-06-21T14:34:00.007-04:00

I was alerted to some interesting work by a recent report in the IoP's Physics World magazine. Researchers have finally worked out that there is, in fact, a correlation between group size and quality of research.

The paper (available on arxiv and published in Scientometrics, which is apparently the research of... research) took information from a survey of UK universities (and a few French) and determined the "quality vs quantity" of the research output (the "quality" metric is described in more detail in the paper, but it is essentially the same metric used to determine how much federal funding the researcher gets). This was parameterized (fit mathematically) via a complex system model and something unusual popped out: the model predicted so-called "magic numbers" - at which a research group gets the best return on investment, so to speak. Above this magic number, or critical mass (if you prefer), the group begins to fragment, as is demonstrated in Figure 2 of the paper:

A table of all of the different scientific research areas and the model's predicted "magic number" for that subject is shown below:

Pure mathematics has the lowest magic number (less than 2, a traditionally "every man for himself" kind of field), and one sub-branch of computer science the largest (almost 25, with "business and management" a close second at 24).

Everyone knows anecdotally that, though a trend doesn't necessarily indicate ubiquity, it is true that at a certain point, when a group gets too large, not everyone in the group will be carrying weight and the quality of the research done (per person) goes down. It's fascinating to see this generalization plotted and put to a statistical analysis. As one of the study's authors remarked, he would consider using these results in putting together a research department from scratch.

And, of course, I'd say our group (my last paper had 15 coauthors) is just the right size.

Reference:

Kenna, R., & Berche, B. (2010). Critical mass and the dependency of research quality on group size Scientometrics, 86 (2), 527-540 DOI: 10.1007/s11192-010-0282-9

The end of the world

2011-06-12T18:59:00.003-04:00

With the rapture come and gone, and the rest of us still here, I find myself in (as physicists would say) a superposition of states: I am simultaneously experiencing fatigue and panic. Yep, the phobia's kicked in. I leave tomorrow morning.

Around the house are signs of the impending apocalypse... the cat sits sulkily in my suitcase and refuses to move, the bottle of diet Mountain Dew has run out, my summer vacation is officially booked (wouldn't the fates just love to steal that from me?), the calendar reminds me that this flight is an anniversary of another... there are signs and wonders everywhere, and Harold Camping isn't the only one who can see them.

The trick is, of course, that I know the things I perceive are only in my head.

But like Sir Frazer knew, things in your head can kill you just as well as can "real" things. The hypertension, the shallow breathing, the teeth-grating, the rush of chemicals - in short, the stress of a phobia - can kill you. The reaction is more dangerous than the trigger, as was the case with the "Spanish flu" epidemic of WWI. So what good is it to "face one's fears" when doing so is, physiologically, bad for you?

In any case, it's all just rambling. There's nothing I can do at this point except take a deep breath and a lorezipam.

Here's hoping that you'll hear from me again tomorrow.

Apologies

2011-05-24T10:45:00.003-04:00

I have apparently had some issues with the Blogger spam detection preventing several of my "regulars" from posting. I apologize, and though I can't say the issue is resolved, I've at least published those messages which were misidentified as spam.

On a different note, thanks for following me! I'm now third (if you don't count the list of images) on a Google search for Miss Atomic Bomb!

Sue Harold Camping

2011-05-22T12:04:00.002-04:00

So Judgment Day had come and gone, it seems, much like any other day... in fact, much like the several other days in the past which Family Radio's Harold Camping has claimed the world will end. We laugh off Camping and his crazy theories, and we jeer at his followers - but I think we need to take a different approach.
Camping is, as incredible as his theories may sound, a charismatic leader, and he was able to convince hundreds if not thousands of people that his prediction was true and correct. We've seen this kind of behavior before, and not only in a religious context. What about those people who were swindled of their life savings by real estate scams? What about Enron? Here were normal, perhaps slightly gullible (who isn't once in a while?) people being taken advantage of by someone with more power. What did we do in those cases? Pursued the culprit, the mastermind, both judicially and financially. Why not do the same to Harold Camping?
Camping is worth over $70 million, none of which he gave away in these "last days." But his followers did: some quit their jobs, some sold their homes and some even metered out the last of their savings to last them through - you guessed it - yesterday. They've been had, pure and simple. And they should pursue legal and civil action against the man whose fault it is.
If you are going to be responsible for the lives of people who trust your message, you should remain responsible for those people after your message has failed to bring change. We hold financial and corporate scam artists accountable - we should hold religious scam artists accountable, too.

Why carbon-14 is like an old woman

2011-05-20T13:40:00.002-04:00

Everyone knows that there exist in nature "old women." These "grans," as they are technically referred to, live nearly forever, relentlessly refusing to give up the ghost, stretching their lifetimes out indefinitely. Carbon-14 is one of these, too. As nuclei go, it may be pretty famous, but it's famous because it's anomalous... it lives too long. And a new paper in Physical Review Letters finally explains why (publicly available version here).
To get to the crux of it, the issue is the approximations we always use in science to get "first order" solutions to otherwise almost impossibly difficult problems. Some equations are just so convoluted and complicated that they can't be solved analytically (ie, in an exact mathematical way), so they have to be approximated. This is typically done by taking the equation and breaking it down into small chunks, called a series, and determining how many of the "orders" of the series are necessary to get a reasonable answer. The first piece of the series is zeroeth order, then first order, then second order, third order, and so on. Generally, at a certain point, adding more orders to the series will result in smaller and smaller changes to the solution, so you can then reliably pick a cutoff and can solve the equation "to first order." A lot of good and interesting physics has come out of these bulk approximations - we can model a nucleus like one particle outside of a larger particle instead of as dozens of individual ones, for instance - but sometimes the approximation just isn't good enough. Carbon-14 is one of those cases.
The authors, including a friend of mine, have taken into account numerous things in order to get past the approximation and get to the basic principles of how a carbon-14 nucleus is formed and behaves. This includes building it up particle-by-particle and accounting for not just nucleon-nucleon forces, but also three-body forces as well, and sticking all of this information into the Schroedinger equation of quantum mechanics. By examining both carbon-14 and nitrogen-14, which 14C decays into, the authors could determine any systematic uncertainties in their approach.
Now, I mentioned that we use the approximations in order to make the math "doable," and that's still true. By starting from basic principles and not using approximations, the authors made their lives very difficult. But fortunately, they didn't have to solve these equations by hand - enter Jaguar, the ORNL supercomputer. It is only with this level of computing power that such a study becomes feasible.
In the end, the authors found that a sort of "cancellation" was occurring in certain components of the physics governing the nucleus of 14C, which was allowing for the anomalously long half life. But a lot of work went into discovering this. Sometimes the most interesting things exist just under our noses.

Reference:
P. Maris, J. P. Vary, P. Navrátil, W. E. Ormand, H. Nam, & D. J. Dean (2011). Origin of the Anomalous Long Lifetime of 14C Physical Review Letters, 106 (20) : 10.1103/PhysRevLett.106.202502

STS-134

2011-05-16T14:05:00.001-04:00

Congratulations to the crew of the Space Shuttle Endeavour, who lifted off this morning just before 9am Eastern time on their way to the ISS. This is the last flight for Endeavour and the second-to-last shuttle flight ever.

Nuclear Hysteria, or Why We Can't Trust the Media

2011-05-09T16:42:00.003-04:00

I recently finished a book (found and purchased cheaply at a discount bookstore) written by a journalist about nuclear energy. In growing up in Albuquerque and meeting the people involved, she learned about the nuclear fuel cycle and so forth, and came to the conclusion (gasp!) that nuclear energy isn’t bad… in fact, it might just be good. I don’t wish to get into a technical critique of the book (she’s a journalist, after all, she won’t get some of the more scientific details… like that ORNL didn’t close, but K-25 did…), but I wanted to touch on a specific point.

At one point in the book, she quotes a study done by a University of Pittsburgh physicist (Bernard L. Cohen) and published in one of his books, The Nuclear Energy Option (the book is “available” here, but when I say available, I mean there’s only a cached copy of it). I haven’t been able to find the specific study yet (it’s difficult to read a book which only partially exists…), but the basic premise (as Cravens paraphrased it in her book) was this: the number of news stories about nuclear incidents is way out of proportion to the actual danger posed by nuclear incidents. To make his point, Dr. Cohen took a sampling of stories from the New York Times for an entire year, counting the number of stories on mundane things like car accidents, as well as the number of stories about nuclear. He then plots them against the actual number of deaths for the given danger in that year, and fits a curve to it. What he concludes is that, if the copiousness of news stories is to be used as a gauge for the number of deaths, we should anticipate something like 700,000 deaths due to nuclear related incidents per year. Yeah, right. (Cohen also found this to be absurd.)

Since I haven’t yet been able to locate his original study (I plan on ordering a copy of his book), I’ve decided to take my own sampling. In order to get a fair assessment across the board, I went to NPR, Fox News, The Huffington Post, and two small, local news channels (9News in Denver and KnoxNews here in Knoxville). I searched each news agency for three representative danger categories: "car accident," "tornado" and "nuclear." Because of the way each individual site performs its story search, the absolute numbers shouldn’t be given too much weight, but the obvious trend is still easy to see. Here’s what I found:

	# of stories by type of death (2010)
news agency	car accident	tornado	nuclear

NPR	89	374	1530
Fox News	291	602	5758
HuffPost	196	1630	5560
9News (Denver)	328	654	670
KnoxNews	16	32	191
Average	184	658.4	2741.8
Actual deaths	43000	45	0

*Actual deaths: car accident statistics for 2008 from AAA; tornado statistics for 2010 from NOAA; nuclear statistics for 2010 from WHO/UN. Consider that even the Chernobyl accident, the worst nuclear accident on record, will likely result in only 4000 total deaths – TOTAL – which is still only a tenth of the number of people who die in car crashes every year.

To put this in a more visual form, here’s a bar chart:

And here’s a graph plotting the averages against one another:

Note that in BOTH plots, I’ve had to make the y-axis log scale (meaning each tick is a factor of ten) to fit everything in. In this last graph, in fact, I had to make the number of deaths in 2010 due to nuclear-related incidents (that would be a bit, fat ZERO) into 0.00001 simply so that Open Office would know to draw a point there.

The conclusions are obvious – the media is fear-mongering the public with regard to all things nuclear, and there’s little doubt that this feeds the public misperception of the dangers of radiation and nuclear plants. The dangers associated with nuclear energy and radiation are being grossly misrepresented – on a logarithmic scale, no less – and the public is falling for it.

As Chuang Tzu once said, "Great truths do not take hold of the hearts of the masses. And now, as all the world is in error, how shall I, though I know the true path, how shall I guide? If I know that I cannot succeed and yet try to force success, this would be but another source of error. Better then to desist and strive no more. But if I do not strive, who will?"

Chris Botti and musical talent

2011-05-08T14:28:00.004-04:00

Last night was one of the KSO's pop series, featuring Chris Botti and his band. We had ticket vouchers and needed to use them by the end of the season, so off we went.

The first thing that struck me when we entered the auditorium (slightly late, as we'd not realized the venue was different from the normal schedule) was that the music I could hear through the doors into the lobby was not the type of music I was in the mood to hear. It was that mind-numbing kind of pseudo-jazz that you would expect from Yanni, except with trumpet substituted for sax. The music faded, there was applause, and we slipped into our seats.

The first thing I saw, however, was the enthusiasm and talent of the musicians playing on stage - a pianist, a guitarist, a drummer and guy on double bass - arranged in a comfortable semicircle in front of the (as yet) silent orchestra. Chris and his trumpet had been sidelined for the moment to allow a funky, almost reggae style beat play host to an incredible piano solo. The four piece band played with a fervor and synergy that I haven't seen in a long while. The piece ended, more applause, and the trumpet-toting Botti once again took center stage. He took the opportunity to tell a slightly amusing story introducing his pianist, who turned out to be the multiple-Grammy-award-winning Guggenheim fellowship winner Billy Childs. Oh, good, I thought to myself. More than one band member has been nominated for a Grammy. So this should be pretty good, I figured. I was wrong.

The next piece, whatever the hell it was, featured a supremely talented jazz quartet and the boring, uninspired, three-bar-long solos of trumpeter Chris Botti.

Aside from his irritating habit of dropping names left and right (oh, yes, I'm sure Sting is a good friend of yours, and that Mik Jagger and Steven Tyler appreciate your subtle talent) and his nomination by People Magazine as one of the top 100 beautiful people in 2004 or whenever it was, the band leader had really nothing to speak of which warranted the attention he was getting. While his technical skill may have been above average, his musical talent was definitely lacking, and he brought down the rest of his band. Improvisations were short, often stolen (note for note copies of Miles Davis could be heard), and never elaborated. I'm not trying to say that he was bad - it's not that. But it's akin to reading the dictionary. It's not wrong, per se, but it sure as hell isn't a very good story. The whole thing reminded me a bit of high school; I knew talented musicians in high school, and I also knew musicians who got far more attention than they deserved. Chris Botti falls into the latter category. He is the reason jokes about trumpet players are funny. How many trumpeters does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Just one - he holds the bulb and the world revolves around him.

To ice the cake, the encore - deserved by the band, not by their leader - was not one, not two, but THREE slow, saccharin, depressing ballads. As we learned in De-Lovely, "never open on a ballad, never end on one either." Nothing up-tempo to send you home snapping your fingers. Poor choice.

All in all, the night wasn't unpleasant, but the headliner was hardly worth the publicity. His band, on the other hand, lived up to their forebears: Miles Davis, Gene Krupa, Herbie Hancock.

Though it could have been worse. It could have been tonight's "Spring Baroque" concert. And as we all know, if it isn't baroque, don't fix it.

Earth Day 2011

2011-04-22T13:25:00.003-04:00

Happy Earth Day from the energy source for the universe... nuclear!

Nuclear reactions power the stars, and rather importantly, our Sun. The Sun provides warmth and weather. The Earth's molten core is still molten thanks to nuclear decay, and as such we get plate tectonics and volcanism (which are responsible for most of our atmosphere) and a magnetic field (which protects the Earth's surface from the bulk of cosmic radiation, and gives us the auroras). And nuclear fission can provide us with clean electricity to continue powering our society. It's all thanks to nuclear physics!

It would appear I get the dubious honor (notoriety, perhaps?) of having my recent interview published on Earth Day, so I wanted to leave you with an Earth Day sentiment.

"In a city, everything is available all the time. Meat comes in plastic wrap and nobody thinks about the steer it came from. Death and birth are going on all the time, and you witness that when you're living on the land. But in cities and suburbs, that's all hidden or ignored.... People want goods and services and energy but they don't want to think about the costs to the environment. This is why I'm so scared of global warming. Almost nothing is being done." - Dr. R. Anderson (Sandia Nat'l Lab, quoted in Gwyneth Cravens' Power to Save the World)

Worst case scenario

2011-04-16T21:11:00.003-04:00

My brain is exceptionally good at envisioning horrible outcomes. For whatever reason, my mind plays out daily what Stephen King achieves in 700 pages. My fear of flying turns every plane into a ticking time bomb of catastrophe - I might as well (as the prophets of old) see blood dripping from the wings and windows. But because I retain some capability of reasonable analysis, I know that these scenarios, while gruesome and frightening, are ultimately not real, nor are they ever likely to become so.

This doesn't seem to be a talent of the popular news media.

At softball practice the other day, a woman on the team mentions knowingly that the Japanese should have realized that they lived in an earthquake-prone area and built reactors that could withstand 9.0 earthquakes. Aside from the rather insidious proposition that an amateur slow-pitch softball player from the southeastern US knows more about nuclear reactor engineering than the whole of Japan, I was taken aback. Are you serious? Do you realize just how big a 9.0 earthquake is? Does it not matter that this particular quake was the fourth largest in the world's recorded history (and that the reactors at Fukushima Daiichi have actually done an excellent job of preventing a worse disaster, all this considered)? Her demand that Japan prepare for something that is historically unprecedented is the same in nature as my belief that every and all flight I take will crash in a burning fireball into the sea. It would seem that reasonable assessment is impossible. We can't just engineer for bad scenarios. We have to engineer for worst-case scenarios.

So here, for the benefit of all mankind, present and future, is a worst-case scenario for which you should all be planning.

First, terrorists will hijack not 1, not 4, but all (roughly) 28,000 commercial flights on this particular day. Also private planes, single- and twin-engine Cessnas, UPS and DHL freight carriers and anything else they can get their hands on (they'll probably break into the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum on the National Mall and take The Spirit of St Louis and a few old Air Force rockets, too, just to add insult to injury). Every one of these hundred thousand aircraft will be flown with one accord (and full complement of fuel) into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico. Somehow, every plane will reach the target, which is (in fact) deep underground in a thick, impenetrable salt deposit. All of the leaking jet fuel will ignite an explosion that somehow burns hotter than jet fuel is designed to burn and melts the nuclear waste containment canisters, releasing nuclear materials. The force of the explosion causes a crack in the crust, which quickly travels deeper until it hits a dormant lava plume below. The lava plume is reawakened and erupts, sending molten rock through the WIPP chambers and into the air, carrying with it jet fuel and radioactive waste. Immediately, it begins to rain, the water running off in all directions, carrying the nuclear material from the volcanic ash to hundreds of surrounding miles (never mind that at this point the nuclear material would be too dispersed to even be measured above background). Quick-reacting politicians in Washington hear about the unfolding disaster, but with information sketchy at best, they misinterpret the data (explosion, nuclear material...) and believe we have been hit by a nuclear weapon. The decision is made to retaliate, and the military immediately begins bombing North Korea. North Korea, in its death throes, retaliates by launching its own missiles, failing to hit the US but doing considerable damage to South Korea, Japan and China. Suddenly all of Asia is in a radioactive, deathly panic, and a high-ranking official in the Indian government takes advantage of the chaos to turn weapons on Pakistan. Pakistan retaliates. A misfire from Pakistan ends up in Russia, and the Russian military now joins the deluge.

The sheer quantity of nuclear weapons being detonated causes major earthquakes to occur along delicate fault lines, razing San Francisco and Los Angeles to the ground. Volcanoes in Iceland are triggered, sending plumes of ash (in addition to the radioactive fallout) across Europe, killing crops. Meanwhile, a rogue nuclear submarine from the US Navy gets incorrect bomb codes and hits several accidental targets along the eastern seaboard, as well as Canada.

After the two-minute rush of nuclear arsenals is used up, hundreds of millions of people are dead, and hundreds of millions more are without power, food, information, or clean water. Slowly the sky darkens from the quantity of ash in the air. Looting begins, people rioting in the streets, trampling children and the elderly, police beating people to death in a horribly awry state of martial law. Quasi-religious sects, seizing their chance, declare war on whomever they consider infidels, killing hundreds in the open during the chaos.

And then, to make matters worse, the Sun suddenly uses up the last of its hydrogen fuel. This causes a conversion to helium burning, turning the Sun into a Red Giant; its radius extends past Mercury's orbit, immediately incinerating the tiny planet, and the intense heat and radiation from the Sun's sudden proximity boils the atmosphere and all the oceans from Earth and fries us all to a crisp instantaneously.

If that's still not enough, a D-brane instability appears in our local region of 10-dimensional space, creating an ever expanding void of nothingness that envelopes the whole universe.

This is why it's ridiculous to demand that things be engineered for worst-case scenarios.

Get on it, people. I want my universe to be D-brane-instability-proof. Ready, go.

A useful analogy: Radiation and Temperature

2011-04-14T14:35:00.002-04:00

In an attempt to explain the dangers - real and merely perceived - of radiation, I propose the following analogy: radiation and temperature*.

1. Radiation, like temperature, can cause immediate damage to a living being, but only if it is sufficiently "hot."

2. Some places on Earth are warmer than others, and some colder. But that temperature difference doesn't create differences in cancer rates (you're not more likely to get a tumor in Fort Lauderdale than you are in Omaha, Tacoma or Duluth). Similarly, some places on Earth have more natural radiation, and some less, but this difference isn't significant enough to affect us.

3. A small rise in temperature, even when sustained, isn't likely to cause us any damage. In fact, we hardly notice it. Same goes for radiation; if we're exposed to 300 mrem in a year or 400 mrem in a year, we won't notice, and the change isn't likely to hurt us.

4. There are natural "sources" of temperature, and man-made sources. We can locally raise the temperature (by lighting a fire or turning on the heater), but when taken in the context of the universe, it's hardly a blip on the screen. Similarly, we can create local sources of radiation (nuclear weapon, nuclear accident), but they too are minuscule in the grander scheme of things.

5. Temperature is not dangerous when it is understood and controlled. Neither is radiation.

*Microwave and infrared EM radiation, which are direct causes of temperature increases from the vibration of molecular bonds, are, in fact, radiation. So the analogy obviously has some weakness to it, just like all analogy and metaphor - they can only go so far. But I'm trying to convey information about what people think of when they hear the term "radiation," mainly, ionizing radiation, or, incorrectly, radioactivity. If the terminology is bothersome, substitute your own: "radiation" could be replaced with "release of radioactive materials" or similar. For the purposes of the analogy, decouple any effect which certain forms of radiation have on temperature, and pretend they're independent.

Another note on Fukushima

2011-04-12T19:15:00.002-04:00

(original post may be found here)

With today's announcement that the crisis at Fukushima Daiichi will now be provisionally classed as a level 7, the worst possible in nuclear accidents, equal with Chernobyl, again I must insist that the fear-mongering press need a good kick to the head.

Firstly, we need to make sure that this fact is well understood: the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi plant has not worsened. The change in category is based upon what happened at the beginning of the crisis, not what is happening now. As NPR's Eliza Barclay reports:

The decision to bump up the rating from 5 to 7 was prompted by new data on the amount of radiation released at the plant in the early days of the crisis — not by any recent change in the plant's status.

Having just witnessed NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams "explain" the situation without so much as one mention of the rating's meaning, the reasons for the change, or the fact that the alteration is being applied after the fact*, I knew the other "news" stations wouldn't be much different in this gross misrepresentation of facts.

This leads me to my second point: The updated rating (on a scale about as useless as Homeland Security's color-coded terrorism threat levels) doesn't make clear that the release of radioactivity into the environment was ten times worse during the Chernobyl incident than for the Daiichi plant. We know this because the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), a Nobel-winning establishment which is internationally recognized as being foremost in the science, information and understanding of nuclear reactors and their ilk, said so. Not only that, but the categorization is provisional - which means it might not stick. And let's not forget that the Daiichi reactors suffered the fourth-largest earthquake in the world's recorded history, followed by a thirty-foot tsunami.

Third, reactor designs are updated, just like all engineering projects. To class the reactors themselves as "like Chernobyl" is as misguided as claiming all cars suffer the same weaknesses as a 1972 Ford Pinto. The Fukushima Daiichi reactors are not at all the same engineering design as the failed reactor at Chernobyl (which did not have a containment vessel, something required of all US reactors). They are incapable of failing in the same way. And so far, they have not failed in the same way. New reactor designs (currently referred to as "Generation IV") exist which could prevent completely the possibility of a core meltdown, such as liquid metal or pebble-bed reactors.

Lastly, the Chernobyl nuclear incident is not as bad as everyone seems to think it is. If we're going to compare the situation at the Daiichi plant with what took place outside Prypiat, why don't we care to know what we're talking about? For instance, despite panic on the part of the public and government officials, only 60 people died of acute radiation poisoning (the large majority of them first responders, who were not aware at the time of the inherent danger of entering the destroyed reactor building), and only 3,900 more are expected to develop cancers from it - out of an exposed population of 600,000 (compare this with another industrial, but non-nuclear, accident). When compared to the number of cancers normally expected for a "control group" of that size (ie, a group who are only exposed to natural background radiation), this is an increase of only 3%. As the IAEA explained:

Confusion about the impact has arisen owing to the fact that thousands of people in the affected areas have died of natural causes. Also, widespread expectations of ill health and a tendency to attribute all health problems to radiation exposure have led local residents to assume that Chernobyl related fatalities were much higher than they actually were.

Other effects the public generally blames radiation for, such as birth defects, showed no positive correlation with the exposure from the Chernobyl release. Also according to the IAEA's multitudinous reports, radiation levels in the Exclusion Zone have fallen, many to safe levels. In fact, the radiation levels in the Exclusion Zone are lower than the natural radiation you would get if you lived in certain areas in Brazil, China, India, Australia, the Colorado Plateau (CO, NM, AZ, UT), Finland, Iran, or Washington State, to name a few.

So please, please, please folks! Let's be reasonable. Should we not concentrate on the fact that thousands of tsunami victims are still missing? Or maybe... just maybe... we should actually help, instead of sitting around talking about it?

*and yet somehow keeping myself from throwing something at the TV...perhaps because I was on a treadmill at the time. An amusing note: Brian Williams, as is the case with many other purported "news" anchors, is so self-important that he himself counts as a "news" topic on NBC's website.

Government shutdown...

2011-04-06T22:17:00.002-04:00

I'd like to make perfectly clear at this point, before it happens, the striking resemblance I see in the looming government shutdown to a story from my youth.

Most of us have heard the story. It's from the Old Testament, a story to show how wise Solomon was as king of the nation of Israel.
Two women come to Solomon to settle a dispute. Both claim that the same baby boy is in fact their own infant. The child is mine, cries one woman. No, she lies, the child is mine, wails the other. So Solomon thinks for a moment, and announces his decision: it cannot be decided, so the child will be cut in half and split evenly between the two of you.

And the king said, "Divide the living child in two, and give half to the one and half to the other." Then the woman whose son was alive said to the king, because her heart yearned for her son, "Oh, my lord, give her the living child, and by no means put him to death." But the other said, "He shall be neither mine nor yours; divide him." Then the king answered and said, "Give the living child to the first woman, and by no means put him to death; she is his mother." And all Israel heard of the judgment that the king had rendered, and they stood in awe of the king, because they perceived that the wisdom of God was in him to do justice. (1 Kings 3:25-28, ESV)

Ok, American public, you want to know who loves you more? You want to know who really has your best interests at heart? It's the one who says, in order to keep the system going and to prevent a complete government shutdown, "oh, my lord, give her the living child." It's the side that caves first in the budget debate, because in doing so they realize that at least the entire system won't come to a jarring halt. It will be the side that seems to give in, because they know it's the only way to keep you alive. Not that I wish for it - we shouldn't give up all of the federally-funded programs that benefit the majority of American citizens. I hope I'm wrong. I really do. But right now it seems rather obvious to me that one side is going to concede the debate in order to ultimately save the object of the debate.

And I promise you it won't be the Republicans.

Scientific illiteracy and the Chevy Volt

2011-03-21T15:35:00.003-04:00

Electric cars are quite popular these days... both in the public eye and in government. But I see this, not as good news, but as proof that those entities (the general public and government) are being fed misinformation. It's a demonstration of this country's scientific illiteracy that electric cars are so big. Sure, cars that don't need gas to generate power are great... but where does the power for the electric car come from?
Has anyone ever done a study of the complete fuel-cycle path for a gasoline-powered car and an electric car? Taking into account efficiencies for oil extraction, oil refinement, petroleum/gasoline distribution, and internal combustion engines on one hand, and efficiencies for oil/coal/gas/nuclear mining, electricity generation, electricity distribution, battery manufacture and electric motor performance on the other, and working out the difference? It could be that electric cars are, as a net effect, worse for the environment. But this is what science can tell us, and it's the important piece of the puzzle that seems to have simply been neglected.
In any case, I'm pretty proud of my fifteen-year-old Corolla. I get 32mpg city and 36mpg highway, without even trying, and at a minimal maintenance cost. And as soon as someone actually develops the Mr. Fusion, I'll have one of those instead.

A note on Fukushima

2011-03-15T10:14:00.010-04:00

With all of the sensationalist scare-mongering that takes place in the news, I have been remiss in providing a voice of reason (for the sake of reason, I encourage you to actually follow and read all of the included links). Of course, I do not wish to underestimate the magnitude of the disaster in Japan - the quake appears to be the largest in Japan's recorded history - and I feel it is a testament to the ingenuity and foresight of the Japanese people that more people have not lost their lives. But something must be said to cease the propagation of the "nuclear myth" in the face of the reactor accidents at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. In fact, a friend and colleague pointed out yesterday that Wolf Blitzer was debating the safety of nuclear reactors with an expert in nuclear engineering*... and so I must say something.

First off, let's begin with the facts (and nothing else!). One of the reactors (a GE Mark 1 Boiling Water Reactor) at Tokyo Electric Power Company's Fukushima Daiichi plant lost its emergency cooling system because of the tsunami resulting from Saturday's anomalously strong earthquake. The reactor was shut down safely and according to protocol, but because nuclear fuel is so energy-dense (in other words, you get lots of energy out of the amount of material you have), the fuel rods were very hot. This isn't something specific to nuclear reactors, either - when you burn coal, it gets so hot that it turns red. The heating itself is not a nuclear process, but instead a byproduct of energy production. Now, this isn't usually a problem, because a constant supply of cooling water keeps the heat of the fuel under control. But in this specific instance, because of the catastrophic earthquake and tsunami, power to the cooling water was knocked out, and the backup generators were also damaged (keep in mind, before trying to point out that these kinds of things should be designed to withstand a disaster, that it wasn't just the plant - power to hundreds of thousands of people along Japan's northeast coast was lost). So because of the sheer enormity of the quake, it was exceedingly difficult for the workers at the plant to restore power to the cooling water systems. Cut them some slack, folks. This earthquake managed to shift the whole of Japan. No kidding.
So while the cooling water was off, the fuel rods - which are uranium (the nuclear part) coated in zirconium (for chemical protection) - were still hot, and unfortunately hot enough to essentially catch fire. The zirconium coating (not the uranium) burned in the presence of the oxygen in air, creating zirconium oxide (basically ash) and hydrogen gas. The hydrogen gas built up in the cooling water pumping system (which was not full of water, as it should be) and eventually reached a critical limit where it caused an explosion. Again - and I cannot stress this enough - THE EXPLOSION WAS NOT NUCLEAR, IT WAS CHEMICAL.
Japan opted to act on the safe side and evacuate a region around the plant, as they worked out innovative ways to prevent more damage by pumping seawater into the reactor to cool it. While flooding the reactor vessels with water could potentially (and it appears did) cause additional pressure buildup - more hydrogen gas, as well as steam - the mass of water would cool the reactor fuel to the point that it was no longer a potential danger. That was a judgment call, and it's difficult to tell, even with the subsequent explosions, whether it was the right move or the wrong one.

Now, for some commentary. First of all, the reactors in question are about forty years old - just old enough to have been designed before all of the lessons could be learned from Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. While that's true, however, they were built to the rigorous specifications of the day, such that

"The likelihood there will be a huge fire like at Chernobyl or a major environmental release like at Chernobyl, I think that's basically impossible," said James F. Stubbins, a nuclear energy professor at the University of Illinois.

This is really important, as it speaks directly one of the main tenets of the nuclear myth: nuclear energy is not safe. The number of nuclear reactor-related disasters worldwide can be counted on one hand, but because the word "nuclear" carries such a strangely voodoo-esque connotation, we think three disasters = unsafe. Think of all of the reactors out there which haven't failed. Think of the total number of hours they've been running in the last forty years. Statistically, nuclear energy is far safer than the more traditional oil, gas and coal plants (in fact, here are some of those stats), for many reasons (some of which may surprise you). And even radiation is not as scary or risky as you might think, as has been recently explained by a colleague of mine.
We don't need to look too far in order to see the magnitude of the imbalance: just a short distance along Japan's east coast is the Cosmo Oil refinery at Chiba, which on Saturday was consumed by flames due to the quake. Guess what? It's now Tuesday, and the fire at Chiba is still burning. But this apparently isn't as newsworthy as the word nuclear. And the fact that the news is enough to send stock markets all over the map is itself a disgusting and disappointing result.

So I'm making a stand for the future of nuclear energy. It's safe. It's reliable. It's clean. It's efficient. These things were true a week ago. And all of these things are still true.

What we need to be doing right now is not selling Japanese yen on the forex markets or buying shares in solar energy - we need to be helping the Japanese people recover.

*Wolf, you are yet another example of the reason so many people in the US distrust science and scientists, and you're contributing to the scientific illiteracy of the public. What right do you have as a reporter to debate an expert in a specific field? The reason you've brought them on the show to begin with is to provide expert opinion - and an expert, by definition, is someone who knows more about a given subject than probably anyone else. That includes you. This expert has spent his or her entire life studying the topic in question, and yet you, who has known nothing but the basic generalities of the topic for a mere seventeen minutes, think you're qualified to argue over the details? Shame on you. Of course an expert's opinion shouldn't be taken as gospel, so to speak, but it should be given the credence it rightly deserves. You, on the other hand, are a news reporter. Your job (strange as it may seem) is to report the news. Not debate it.
As someone rather eloquently stated the other day, "we call them 'news anchors' because they're slowly drowning us all."

Physicists and the future of humanity

2011-03-07T19:06:00.006-05:00

Among my colleagues, being a jack-of-all-trades is absolutely necessary.

If you wish for someone to work with computers, we will debug your C++ code, interface your data acquisition system hardware with the software, design parts in CAD, write and run a monte carlo simulation and produce a beautifully formatted LaTeX file of our results. When you ask how, we will simply say, "I'm a physicist, I have to do it."

If you wish for someone to work hands-on with equipment, we will mount your expensive detectors, cable them and apply high voltage, set up a rack of power supplies and electronics modules, design and build a vacuum chamber, machine special components, mount all of the pumps with flanges and valves and power and cooling water, leak check the whole thing, stick targets on a ladder inside the middle and align them all perfectly. When you ask how, we will simply say, "I'm a physicist, I have to do it."

If you wish for someone to do chemistry, we will dissolve deuterated polyethylene in a p-xylene solution, spin the solution onto glass slides, float the films in water and mount them to target frames. When you ask how, we will simply say, "I'm a physicist, I have to do it."

If you wish for someone to do statistical analysis, we will compile our data and apply every rule, fit Gaussians and high-order polynomials and Lorentzian curves with low-energy tails, calculate systematic and statistical uncertainties due to innumerable contributions, display the data in curves, histograms, contours and scatter plots, and propagate the results through multiple steps of analysis. When you ask how, we will simply say, "I'm a physicist, I have to do it."

If you wish for someone to present, we will gather by the few or by the hundreds at international conferences, discuss and debate and cooperate and compete, write interesting and understandable posters and talks, publish proceedings, and organize the next conference somewhere else. When you ask how, we will simply say, "I'm a physicist, I have to do it."

If you wish for someone to handle money, we will write grant proposals, estimate budget shortfalls, purchase everything from two-cent pens to $200,000 compressors and million-dollar detector systems, operate facilities on tight budgets, and report our usage to the appropriate oversight committees. When you ask how, we will simply say, "I'm a physicist, I have to do it."

If you wish for someone to be an advocate, we will set up a website, twitter and facebook accounts for the cause, write dozens of letters to Congress and Senate (or Parliament and Ministry, or...), lobby on the Hill on our own dime, sign petitions for the cause, and get our peers to do the same. When you ask how, we will simply say, "I'm a physicist, I have to do it."

We are computer scientists, electricians, plumbers, machinists, financiers, construction workers, babysitters, debuggers, public speakers, beta-testers, lobbyists, drones, mathematicians, writers, illustrators, and thinkers. This is what it is to be a physicist. And this is why humanity needs us.

When science isn't enough

2011-03-04T16:05:00.005-05:00

I'd like to begin with an example.

When we teach children mathematics, we start at the very bottom: simple addition and subtraction, 2+2 and 5-3. We move on to multiplication and division and describing geometry in simple, qualitative terms (circle, triangle, parallelogram). The next step is to make easy abstractions: instead of 2+2 = x, we move the unknown to the left hand side of the equation and make 2+x=4 instead. With increasing difficulty in algebra and trigonometry, we increase the level of abstraction: 5.9x+y = 14, tan(z) = 0.24. Soon, we reach pre-calc (also known as infinite series and limits), calculus, then perhaps (if we continue) multidimensional calculus, multi-variable calculus, complex math (you know - square root of -1), and finally topologies, gauge theories and group theories, with their beautifully simple – but completely abstract – symmetries. Once we've reached this point, we suddenly realize that the basic algebra we began with was merely a specific, small-scale example of the larger group theory we've come to know. In essence, we begin with the specific and concrete, and end with the general and abstract.
Once we've learned the abstraction, the powerful general theory, it's not unreasonable to ask: why don't we start with this? I've argued this before – that we should start teaching children group theory, and then specialize (this is how we teach college/graduate level physics, after all – what's more specialized than your thesis project?) to algebra. It's not too difficult for children to be taught group theory. We just think so because we're accustomed to being taught group theory at a very, very high academic level. But that's just cultural ingraining.
But there is a reason that children are taught math this way, and it's because this – the progression from specific, concrete example to general, abstract theory – is how the human brain works. At a very fundamental level, humans are "built" to abstract from specific, real-world, experiential examples. And this fact can be found built-in at the deepest level to the "scientific method."
The scientific method, that invention above all inventions, that way which is supposed to be the most logical, reasonable, unbiased and objective means of observing the world, has at its core this fundamental "flaw" (if you will) – it's based on us humans. Because we think from example to general theory, we have built science to follow this rule. Experiment, holding everything constant but one variable. Repeat. After enough repetition, we can start to make generalizations. After even more repetition, we can build a theory. And this isn't a bad thing. We need to be rigorous and structured and specific when we're doing science. But here’s the catch. Science isn't enough.

Consider two of the most incredible strides forward in physics in the last century – so important that even non-scientists have heard of them – the discoveries of general relativity and quantum mechanics. When Einstein proposed his theory of general relativity, it shook the Newtonian ground beneath his feet: Newton's universal law of gravitation had held for so long, hundreds of years, that to even think to question it was beyond many scientists. But experiment later (and that's the important point) bore out Einstein's suppositions. General relativity was right, and it had started as something tremendously abstract (mathematics), only to be verified by specific examples later (general relativity was so abstract, in fact, that people are still coming up with particular solutions to its equations). Similarly, the idea of quantum mechanics (thanks to Feynman, Heisenberg, Schroedinger, Planck, Bohr, Pauli, Dirac, etc) was born out of a mathematical oddity – when matter and energy was thought of as continuous, why should a quantized (hence the term "quantum" mechanics) equation better describe it at the atomic level? The theory grew much faster than the specific experiments could keep up. We're still "testing" quantum mechanics, but again, so far, it's been completely correct. But neither of these two discoveries came about via the "traditional" scientific method. They involved – nay, required – a view which surpassed and complemented the scientific method. Don't get me wrong; of course, these theories eventually need to be experimentally tested, but that requirement doesn't preclude a top-down approach to building the theory in the first place.
In today's society, I'm beginning to believe that we might never again see the likes of Einstein or Feynman, because we are taught (in science) that the scientific method is the be-all-end-all of thought and inquiry (a fact which in and of itself causes all manner of problems, this one notwithstanding). Even those we think of as greats, such as Stephen Hawking, declare the scientific method as the only solution... even going so far as calling philosophy "dead" (in fact, Hawking has on several instances over the last few decades proclaimed the imminent end of theoretical physics, only to rescind his announcement at the news of yet another breakthrough in theoretical physics). But if philosophy is dead, science is dead with it! If we have no other method of thought, nothing which supersedes our "specific example to general theory," concrete-to-abstract way of viewing the universe, then we are nothing more than just bean counters and stamp collectors. Science will have lost one of its most important attributes: novelty (part of the success of general relativity and quantum mechanics both was the ability to break out of the traditional mode of thinking to create something different, yet even better). We will have killed science by demanding that science conform to the scientific method. (I believe this is why there is such hostility to string theory within the scientific community, even as it is greeted with amazement by the general public.)

In other words, science simply isn't enough.

We have put on these blinders by choice, but now we've gone so far that we don't even recognize the view of the world once the blinders are off. We have to learn to see the world from both the specific and concrete and the general and abstract points of view, or else we will never have a complete view of the world.

As the famous physicist Max Planck said, "Science [ie, the scientific method] cannot solve the ultimate mystery of Nature. And it is because in the last analysis we ourselves are part of the mystery we are trying to solve." We have to acknowledge that the scientific method isn't everything - we have to acknowledge that our view of the universe and existence is ultimately, and unfailingly, subjective.

Social media updates

2011-02-20T14:11:00.002-05:00

If you're on facebook, you can follow me here, support the HRIBF here, and on twitter, #HRIBF @supporthribf - get connected and get involved! Don't let politicians cut funding to science, education, and social support programs (Americorp, LEAP, etc)!

Holifield needs your help

2011-02-17T14:16:00.002-05:00

Below is the text of a letter in support of the continued operation of the Holifield Radioactive Ion Beam Facility at Oak Ridge National Lab. It currently has a dozen signatures attached to it, with more being added daily. If you agree with the letter, consider contacting your representatives and asking them to grant us a fair review.

It would be a great tragedy to see the operating budget for the Holifield Radioactive Ion Beam Facility (HRIBF) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory cut, as has been proposed by Secretary of Energy Steven Chu's recent budget announcement [1]. The news came as a shock to all of us in the nuclear physics community, especially considering the tremendous contributions to science that the facility continues to provide.

The HRIBF enjoys a lengthy and consistent publication record, including a recent Nature paper on doubly-magic tin-132, which was honored with an Editor's Summary and a "News and Views" article [2], and even appeared as a cover story in the August 2010 Physics Today issue. In fact, this work won the collaborators an ORNL Laboratory Director's Award in late 2010. Recent successes at the HRIBF have garnered millions of dollars in project grants and several new staff researcher hires, adding to the shock at Chu's announcement.

In addition to an ongoing, strong science program, the HRIBF draws visiting nuclear physicists from around the globe as one of the top ISOL (isotope separation on-line) facilities worldwide (and the only one in the US that still operates as a users facility). No other facility can create beams of heavy r-process nuclei at the energies, intensities and purities of which the HRIBF alone is capable. In fact, the facility still boasts the world's largest electrostatic tandem accelerator. The unique and unmatched combination of a large range of available radioactive ion beams with the high quality of a tandem beam has made the HRIBF a world-renowned laboratory for nuclear physics studies [3]. The science program at the HRIBF is also the basis for many external DOE grants, providing support to a multitude of universities across the nation, both individually and in consortium as Centers of Excellence.

While the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB), also funded by the DOE and operated by Michigan State University, will in the future provide a new national user facility for cutting-edge nuclear science, it will cost approximately $600 million and take about a decade to design and build. HRIBF would play a crucial role in the intervening years by providing rare isotope beams for the user community until, and even after, the completion of FRIB. With the first beams at FRIB being based on an in-beam fragmentation technique (such as is used at the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory), HRIBF would still provide the only US capability for studying the properties of rare isotopes using ISOL techniques [4].

Finally, and perhaps most disappointing, is the fact that the HRIBF users and staff were not given the opportunity to provide input toward the decision. To shut down a facility without granting the benefit of a full, open and transparent review is unsettling to say the least. We decide whether a paper is worthy to be published based on a peer review of its scientific merit; we can only ask that the government would extend the same favor to a world-renowned facility before taking away their entire operating budget. Funding cuts are inevitable in the current financial climate, and we agree that the government should work to reduce wasteful and frivolous spending, but it is impossible to do so without first properly identifying, based on an impartial and democratic review, what spending is wasteful. With the potential loss of the Holifield Radioactive Ion Beam Facility under the current circumstances, the entire scientific community has reason for concern.

[1] http://blog.energy.gov/blog/2011/02/11/winning-future-responsible-budget
[2] Jones, K., Adekola, A., Bardayan, D., Blackmon, J., Chae, K., Chipps, K., Cizewski, J., Erikson, L., Harlin, C., Hatarik, R., Kapler, R., Kozub, R., Liang, J., Livesay, R., Ma, Z., Moazen, B., Nesaraja, C., Nunes, F., Pain, S., Patterson, N., Shapira, D., Shriner, J., Smith, M., Swan, T., & Thomas, J. (2010). The magic nature of 132Sn explored through the single-particle states of 133Sn Nature, 465 (7297), 454-457 DOI: 10.1038/nature09048
[3] cf. Beene, J., Bardayan, D., Galindo Uribarri, A., Gross, C., Jones, K., Liang, J., Nazarewicz, W., Stracener, D., Tatum, B., & Varner, R. (2011). ISOL science at the Holifield Radioactive Ion Beam Facility Journal of Physics G: Nuclear and Particle Physics, 38 (2) DOI: 10.1088/0954-3899/38/2/024002
[4] http://www.phy.ornl.gov/hribf/usersgroup/cyclo-users.pdf

Save US science research and education

2011-02-15T13:04:00.002-05:00

Ok, folks, consider this me activating the phone tree.

Don't let US science research and education be set back decades by irresponsible budget cuts. Contact your member of Congress! A free form to do so may be found here. Science drives the innovation of our country, the education of our public, and provides for the betterment of our lives.

"Winning the Future" - by losing it?

2011-02-12T00:22:00.004-05:00

Hot on the heels of today's announcement, I feel as though I must speak. It is this note, almost in passing, that cuts to the quick:

The FY 2012 budget request closes the Holifield Radioactive Ion Beam Facility at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which will save $10.3 million.

$10.3 million dollars may seem like a lot, and to us, it is. It's our operating budget. But to the Department of Energy, it's hardly a line item. One only has to look at the previous item in Stephen Chu's blog post to reckon as much: cutting the credits and deductions currently being given to the oil and gas industry will save nearly $4 billion next year alone. They'll save billions of dollars, and yet are still going to push to close the HRIBF for a $10 million pittance?

The salt in the wound is that the cut would come, if you will, "unsupported." Whenever a facility suffers a funding cut or is shut down, it is after a lengthy ranking and peer review process. The peer review process ensures that facilities aren't shut down "out of the blue" (as is the case now), but because they have failed to produce good, and consistent, science. We've been given no such chance. We publish myriads of papers, including Physical Review Letters and even in Nature (here's a reminder). We were just awarded Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Directors Award (partway down this page). We present talk after talk at conference after conference. We are the only facility in the US that can produce high energy, high intensity beams of r-process nuclei like tin and tellurium, one of the only facilities that produces beams using the ISOL technique (the only one in the US that operates as a user facility), and we have the largest (25 million volts) tandem in the world.

This budget cut simply cannot stand. $10.3 million dollars in savings is not enough to justify setting back the US involvement in basic nuclear physics research by years, if not decades. Something must be done. Contact your Senators and Congressional delegates. Contact Stephen Chu and the DOE. But contact someone.

If you believe me at all, if you have caught any glimpse of what I've tried so hard to convey - the importance, and the wonder, of science - then please, act. I can ask no more. But I can also ask no less. Our future depends on it.

A thought on physics

2011-02-04T13:54:00.002-05:00

Often, we physicists consider ourselves at the peak of the scientific fields - it's a well-known sentiment:

But I'm beginning to believe the line is too blurred to argue that the distinction still exists where it once did. Bear with me.
About sixty years ago, when nuclear physics was still a burgeoning field of study, Fred Hoyle (not yet Sir Fred Hoyle) did pioneering theoretical work to show that carbon-12, essentially the basis of all life, needed to have a special "trick" of nuclear structure called a resonance in order to exist as copiously as it does throughout the known universe. By looking at the amount of carbon in the universe and accounting for the temperature of typical stars, he worked out that carbon-12 had to have a resonance of a very specific strength and energy - and years later, that exact resonance was found. Hoyle had made (among many other successes) a tremendous and dramatic contribution to the infant field of nuclear astrophysics (and, by proxy, cosmology); the resonance has since been famously known as the "Hoyle state."
Today, research in nuclear astrophysics continues, but we've come to a point of diminishing returns. We know generally what to expect now - surprises like the Hoyle state just don't arise any longer - and our work has boiled down to measuring cross sections to greater and greater precision and accuracy. Since there are no more Hoyle states to anticipate, we instead anticipate having a bit more beam intensity for our experiments or a bit less background noise. We build better detectors and better facilities to measure the reactions to 20%, 10%, 5%... and while this is important, I'm beginning to believe it's simply another form of stamp collecting.
Those same incredible surprises still exist - in the study of string theory (superstring theory) and quantum field theory (while I acknowledge that other fields, such as neurobiology, are also basking in the glow of their recent growth, I'm limiting my argument to fields within physics). These are the topics all of the popular science books cover, these are where the brightest of the bright go to strive for the next great discovery*. The cutting edge of physics lies at the heart of quantum field fluctuations and supersymmetry.
So where does that leave the rest of us who claim to be physicists? Can we really say that what we do, the measuring of a certain reaction to smaller and smaller uncertainty, is so different from an engineer whose job is to test hard drives to withstand greater and greater forces, or a technician who tweaks an MRI machine to get better and better resolution? Have we ceased to really do physics, and are now just glorified bean counters, relegated by virtue of our aging field to the category of "applied science"? Or can we still truly claim to be physicists, even if we no longer work at the bleeding edge of physics? Perhaps in the end it's all just a matter of semantics, and it doesn't really mean anything. But perhaps it does.

*oh boy... don't tell my string theorist friend I said that!

The Deep Laws of the Cosmos, or Hope Springs Eternal

2011-01-31T23:48:00.003-05:00

After my disappointment with a recent read on multiple universes and M-theory, I was hopeful that Brian Greene's latest offering, The Hidden Reality, would soothe the ruffled feathers. Thankfully, I wasn't disappointed (how can you be with statements like "gravity is matter's sugar daddy"?).

Greene has a way about him that is at once knowledgeable and endearing; he starts his description of parallel universes with a story from his childhood. It isn't forced or unnatural. He wants you to understand.

Though Greene has substantially more space to take tangents (141 more pages than Hawking, though I can't attest to the font sizes or line spacing being the same...), he stays on topic. No random digressions into Newton's church attendance or arguments against philosophy or religion (he does tell some funny side-stories, including one about Gamow's notorious sense of humor, but they are all couched in the point at hand: he introduces a person before introducing that person's key insight into the scientific theory being described), no vehement arguments over free will or aversion to individual scientists due to their beliefs (in fact, Greene even describes some groundbreaking work by Weinberg, among others, who used as his motivation the so-called "anthropic principle"). Greene uses amusing anecdotes, relevant references to popular culture (Cartman makes what may be his scientific debut), and his own insight from years of personal experience to describe what would otherwise be completely inaccessible to anyone without a graduate degree in mean field theory. And despite being more in-depth than the recent Hawking publication, he doesn't mince words or add fluff. There's nothing wasted in that extra volume.

Nine versions of possible multiverses (multiple/parallel universes) are presented, each with appropriate historical and scientific background, as well as - gasp! - possible scientific experiments which could test for each of them (not much can be done with the current level of technology, but the future is bright and the possibilities copious). In Greene's terminology, they are: the Quilted Multiverse, Inflationary Multiverse, Brane Multiverse, Cyclic Multiverse, Landscape Multiverse, Quantum Multiverse, Holographic Multiverse, Simulated Multiverse and Ultimate Multiverse (parts a and b). Briefly - and really, you should read the book - they can be explained as follows:

Quilted Multiverse: if the universe is infinite (in space), conditions will necessarily repeat across space, which yields an infinite number of parallel worlds. We wouldn't "see" these parallel universes-within-the-universe, because they'd fall outside of our cosmic horizon (the distance limit we're able to observe due to the finite speed of light). This multiverse proposal arises mainly from general relativity, which doesn't require that the universe be finite.
Inflationary (or Bubble) Multiverse: with the advent of inflationary theory, with its "inflaton" field (it can essentially be thought of as an antigravity field), to describe the beginnings of our own universe, an interesting tangent arose. The inflaton field could yield different areas of inflation (due to quantum fluctuations; this is how Cartman got involved, believe it or not), each forming a "bubble" within which a universe would form.
Brane Multiverse: our first true string theory contender, "branes" are higher-dimensional objects within the string theory framework. A universe like ours could exist on a three-dimensional brane (for reasons he explains, the universe is essentially "trapped" on the brane), but more branes could exist elsewhere in the multi-dimensional space which carried their own universes.
Cyclic Multiverse: the "braneworlds" from the Brane Multiverse, since they can move, have the potential to collide within the larger-dimensional space. If and when they do, the universes on each are completely annihilated and begin anew. Since branes are gravitationally attracted like any massive object, they could be pulled in and collide over and over, creating many new universes.
Landscape Multiverse: delving deeper into string theory and adding in inflationary theory, we find that the multiple dimensions allowed by string theory subsequently allow an entire N-dimensional "landscape" upon which an infinite number of inflationary bubble universes could form.
Quantum Multiverse: this may be the most familiar of the list. It refers to the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which flew in the face of the historical Copenhagen interpretation. In essence, each quantum possibility (is the electron here or there?) is actually manifested in a parallel universe (in our universe, it's here, but simultaneously in a parallel universe, it's there).
Holographic Multiverse: strange, cutting edge science from string theory, quantum field theory and black holes suggests that our universe may just be a mirrored or projected "image" from a distant, differently-dimensioned (2D instead of 3D?) but physically equivalent parallel universe.
Simulated Multiverse: the most banal but perhaps most immediately relevant, technological growth may make it possible for entire, self-consistent, self-aware and self-propagating simulated universes to be created.
Ultimate Multiverse: Part (a), if you will, is actually philosophical - the "principle of fecundity" asserts that every possible universe is a real universe (even the ones made entirely of gorgonzola or the ones made of nothing), thereby nullifying the question of why our particular universe is the one which exists. Part (b) trims this slightly by introducing a level of self-consistency, proposing that every possible mathematically consistent universe is a universe, or, more correctly, that "these universes instantiate all possible mathematical equations."

What struck me most of all, however, wasn't Greene's incredible ability to explain string theory (I almost found myself believing it... don't tell my string theorist friends!), or his encyclopedic knowledge, but his belief in the future of science. Completely contrary to the conclusions drawn by Hawking and Mlodinow in their text, which amount to "we have a bunch of piecemeal theories which describe our universe, but our universe is only one of many, and therefore we can't achieve some beautiful mathematical description of the universe and our piecemeal theories are the best we're going to do," Greene candidly admits that not only does he believe we may still discover a true Grand Unified Theory, he hopes we will.

"The breadth of multiverse proposals... might suggest a panorama of hidden realities [essentially, what Hawking/Mlodinow were suggesting]. But I've titled this book in the singular [The Hidden Reality] to reflect the unique and uniquely powerful theme that underlies them all: the capacity of mathematics to reveal secreted truths about the workings of the world. Centuries of discovery have made this abundantly evident; monumental upheavals in physics have emerged time and again from vigorously following mathematics' lead.... [The] multiverse proposals similarly rely on a belief that mathematics is tightly stitched into the fabric of reality."

However, he continues:

"Our universe is not the only one possible [if these theories are true]. Its properties could have been different.... In turn, seeking a fundamental explanation for why certain things are the way they are would be pointless....
I don't know if this is how things will turn out. No one does. But it's only through fearless engagement that we can learn our own limits. It's only through the rational pursuit of theories, even those that whisk us into strange and unfamiliar domains, that we stand a chance of revealing the expanse of reality."

Lastly, on a bit of a schadenfreude note, I wished to make a point about philosophy. Unlike Hawking and Mlodinow, who seem to believe that philosophy is dead, Greene takes a far more reasonable standpoint. During a philosophy course as a freshman at Harvard, he was challenged by his professor: "Let's say you find the unified theory," he said. "Would that really provide the answers you're looking for?" The answer is, of course, no. The philosophy professor was right, and Greene knew it. It was this encounter which prompted Greene to consider the concept of the Ultimate Multiverse - proving, it would seem, that instead of philosophy being dead, it is alive and well and helping to push forward the frontiers of science.

And one last poke, at those Dawkins-ites:

"I understand well the impulse to tether scientific investigations to those propositions that can be tested now, or in the near future; this is, after all, how we built the scientific edifice. But I find it parochial to bound our thinking by the arbitrary limits imposed by where we are, when we are, and who we are. Reality transcends these limits, so it's to be expected that sooner or later the search for deep truths will too.... Sometimes [science] challenges us to reexamine our views of science itself."

Fail

2011-01-31T21:03:00.002-05:00

I intended to write a post on Brian Greene's new book, The Hidden Reality, which I finished last night and which came out a few days ago. But the best intentions are often thwarted by... weather.
It took me almost an hour to get to work this morning. Snowy roads and idiots in four-wheel-slide SUVs kept the pace at half normal. But this evening... this evening was far, far worse. Snow and ice was only a part of it. Traffic was horrendous. It was so cold outside that my car's heating struggled to keep above the peg at the bottom of the dial. It was nearly three hours after leaving my office that I finally made it home. I know some people are used to commuting. I'm not one of those people.
There are generally three stages which one goes through upon encountering traffic.
Stage 1: Optimism. It doesn't look too bad from here, you think. I can get through this without too much hassle. It won't last long. Perhaps you even turn the radio up a bit too loud and sing along with AC/DC, much to the chagrin of those trapped in cars around you.
Stage 2: Anger. The optimism from Stage 1 quickly drains, replaced even more quickly with frustration. It's not fun anymore, and soon it's positively embolism-inducing. You grumble, shout, gesture, hit the steering wheel, honk the horn, drive so aggressively that your fuel economy is quartered. More often than not, the commute, or at least the traffic, finally ends during this stage. We slam the door as we come in, breaking a picture frame by knocking it off the wall, then drop into a vague remorse and soothe ourselves with a beer.
Stage 3: Catatonic. It's not often one reaches this stage, but after two hours of strain on your shifting knee, the possibility arises. You're resigned to your fate. There's nothing left in your future but more traffic. Taillights as far as the eye can see. You're no longer really there, no longer fully present inside your own head. Your eyes don't waiver from straight ahead, nor is any movement anything more than an automated gas-brake-gas-brake. You're dead inside. The traffic wins.
Needless to say, I hate commuting. I may work from home tomorrow. Maybe then I'll be able to tell you about Brian Greene.

The Grand Design, or Why I Hate Reading Books About Science

2011-01-19T18:48:00.002-05:00

When you set out to write a popular science book, as Stephen Hawking had presumably done in the recent "The Grand Design" (coauthored with Caltech physicist Leonard Mlodinow), you generally should discuss... well... science.

When you've already made the statement "philosophy is dead" in the first two paragraphs of the book, you're not doing yourself any favors.

When on the first page you introduce the ancient Greek/early Church version of science as "the traditional conception of the universe," I'm bound to start losing my patience.

When you spend the next 80 pages bashing Aristotle for not knowing the scientific method (it hadn't been invented yet) and Newton for being a deist (a lot of science wouldn't have been done had the scientists themselves not believed in a God who set the laws of the universe in motion that we might even be able to measure them), dismissing myths and fables as feeble, uncivilized attempts at pseudo-scientific explanation (everyone knows fairytales are meant to teach, not to explain), and extolling the idea that "free will" is only a result of our inability to do the complicated calculations necessary* (sorry, guys, but scientific determinism went out the window with quantum mechanics), then you're lucky I have enough tenacity to finish reading.

This is, I'm afraid, the bane of modern science. Scientists don't talk about science anymore. Hundreds of people would pack lecture halls to listen to Feynman talk about QED, but now we brush him off with a mention of that crazy "Dick" Feynman and his psychadelic Feynman-diagram covered VW bus. We instead choose, like Dawkins and the rest, to use the grand name of Science to bludgeon honest philosophic inquiry. The point of science, the beating heart of science, is not to ridicule people into agreeing with atheism! The point of science is to discover truth, and they're mainly "local" truths, and they're often only empirical parameterizations of that truth. But we don't like to talk about science, apparently. We'd rather talk about why God can't be an old white guy in a robe.
With every new "science" book I read, I find we drift farther and farther away from what we should be doing: talking about science. I want people to know how fascinating science can be, how interesting, how wonderful, how beautiful. I want to show them how we can work things out, how sometimes nature seems simple and elegant and sometimes filthy and complicated, how we can use science not only to increase our knowledge but to better our lives. I want to make scientists. But the "ivory tower" zeitgeist seems to want to make minions to science instead.
The authors finally did get around to talking about science (in their case, M-theory and the idea of an infinite number of "histories" for the universe), and when they did, it was engaging, interesting, and fun to read. But they lost it all again in the last chapter, revisiting their earlier derisions, neglecting all else. The "grand design" will be found in M-theory, they state. "Spontaneous creation" is why the universe exists, and why we don't need a god to get it started for us. But how is their "spontaneous creation" any different, in the end, from a religious "spontaneous creation"? "Because it had to" and "Because God did it" are really the same thing.

*
"It is hard to imagine how free will can operate if our behavior is determined by physical law, so it seems that we are no more than biological machines and that free will is just an illusion.... [I]t also seems reasonable to conclude that the outcome is determined in such a complicated way and with so many variables as to make it impossible in practice to predict. For that one would need a knowledge of the initial state of each of the thousand trillion trillion molecules in the human body and to solve something like that number of equations.... Because it is so impractical to use the underlying physical laws to predict human behavior, we adopt what is called an effective theory.... In the case of people... we use the effective theory that people have free will."
Quantum mechanics indicates that while we can predict the most probable outcome of any given set of initial conditions, we can't know exactly which outcome will happen. The authors even discuss this point later in the text. So even if we could do all of the trillions of calculations necessary to "predict" someone's behavior, we still couldn't know it exactly - we could only know the probabilities that they would do one thing over another. And that's not the same as determinism. So their argument that free will is an illusion... is an illusion.

A global human history

2011-01-06T00:45:00.002-05:00

I just finished reading Steven Mithen's After the Ice (sorry, out of print), and while I enjoyed learning a multitude of things I never knew about the prehistory of humanity (did you know pottery developed independently in Japan thousands of years before it appeared anywhere else?), what caught my eye was the concluding paragraphs:

So what about the 'blessings of civilisation'? Are the delights of the microscope, the thoughts of Darwin, the poetry of Shakespeare and the advances of medical science, sufficient recompense for the environmental degradation, social conflict and human suffering that ultimately derive from the origin of farming 10,000 years ago? Would it have been better if we had remained as Stone Age hunter-gatherers forsaking the development of literature and science? The answer is in our hands; it depends upon what we choose to do during the next hundred years of global warming - our future, that of planet earth, remains within our control.

He concludes by quoting John Lubbock, Victorian polymath and archaeologist:

Even in our own time we may hope to see some improvement, but the unselfish mind will find its highest gratification in the belief that, whatever may be the case with ourselves, our descendants will understand many things which are hidden from us now, will better appreciate the beautiful world in which we live, avoid much of the suffering to which we are subject, enjoy many blessings of which we are not yet worthy, and escape many of those temptations which we deplore, but cannot wholly resist.

Safety

2011-01-03T11:13:00.002-05:00

So I woke this morning with that familiar sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. Four hours each way of flights for a day and a half of "networking" hardly seems worth it, even without considering my specific (phobic) reaction.

It's been big news this holiday season, the new TSA full-body scanners... but it doesn't matter. What people fail to realize is that none of it matters in the least. In any arms race, one team must always be one step behind the other.

First, it was guns and knives, so we instituted the metal detectors. Then plastic explosives worn under the clothes, so we have full-body scanners and "puffers" (the trace element detectors that use mass spectrometry to identify chemicals that have been blown from your person into the detector with puffs of air). But what's next? There is no end to it, and anyone who stops to think about it will see that.

The scanners and puffers are useless against explosives carried internally (and let's face it, if somebody really wants to blow up a plane, then swallowing a chunk of C4 is not out of the question), and no detection method can stop something taking place outside of the secure area (think of O'Hare - the doors to the passenger drop-off lane are literally 50 feet from security lines, with dozens of people in them). Additionally, there's always a way to sneak something past security using any number of loopholes. Consider, for instance, that not all of the air cargo is scanned before being loaded onto the same plane that you've just boarded (though new rules make it required). What of the tons of products that are brought into the airport each day by the restaurants, booksellers and vendors? One bottle of Coke out of a pallet could be filled with explosives, just waiting for the person who knows to buy it from the machine. And all of this neglects the "easy" stuff, the mistakes and errors and judgment calls and weather and engineering failures that give rise to many more air accidents than terrorism.

My point is not to give people ideas (as the joke goes, sexual harassment training is the best place to learn new sexual harassment techniques), but to say simply that nothing is safe. That's just the way it is. That's life. Flying's not safe, driving's not safe, the train isn't safe and even staying at home isn't safe. The level of danger is, of course, relative; statistically, you're more likely to be in a car accident than a plane crash, or to slip in the shower than be struck by lightening. But the basic truth of the universe is that nothing is certain. Nothing.

Christmas

2010-12-25T14:24:00.003-05:00

Christmas isn't my favorite holiday. In fact, the further I've been from home, the less important it has become. But still, I wanted to share my favorite Christmas song... so here it is.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

The Wisdom of Insecurity

2010-12-23T19:10:00.002-05:00

A friend loaned me this little book, and in it I came across a very nice exposition which I'd like to share.

... in practice we are all bewitched by words. As a consequence, we are dismayed and dumbfounded when they do not fit. The more we try to live in the world of words, the more we feel isolated and alone, the more all the joy and liveliness of things is exchanged for mere certainty and security. On the other hand, the more we are forced to admit that we actually live in the real world, the more we feel ignorant, uncertain, and insecure about everything.
But there can be no sanity unless the difference between these two worlds is recognized. The scope and purposes of science are woefully misunderstood when the universe which it describes is confused with the universe in which man lives. Science is talking about a symbol of the real universe, and this symbol has much the same use as money. It is a convenient timesaver for making practical arrangements. But when money and wealth, reality and science are confused, the symbol becomes a burden.
Similarly, the universe described in formal, dogmatic religion is nothing more than a symbol of the real world, being likewise constructed out of verbal and convenient distinctions. To separate "this person" from the rest of the universe is to make a conventional separation. To want "this person" to be eternal is to want the words to be the reality, and to insist that a convention endure for ever and ever. We hunger for the perpetuity of something which never existed. Science has "destroyed" the religious symbol of the world because, when symbols are confused with reality, different ways of symbolizing reality will seem contradictory.

Arsenic and life

2010-12-02T13:14:00.005-05:00

Remember that movie a decade or so back with the non-carbon-based alien lifeforms? They were defeated by selenium poisoning, as chemically the selenium would react the same way arsenic reacts with us. A NASA news conference (due to start in 43 minutes) may tell us something about it. Gizmodo has already leaked the news (as did the BBC): NASA has found bacterial life (here on Earth, mind) with arsenic in place of the phosphorus in its DNA. Let me put it in simple terms: THIS IS HUGE.

All life on Earth - at least, as we knew it - has the same "building blocks" from which to begin: DNA (and RNA), comprised of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, sulfur and phosphorus. But these bacteria, discovered in Mono Lake, California (a highly toxic environment), have no phosphorus in their DNA. None. It's all been replaced with arsenic. They are, in short, completely and fundamentally different from the rest of life on the planet. And that has tremendous implications. To everything.

Magnificat

2010-11-15T17:59:00.002-05:00

NPR's Three Minute Fiction winner has been announced... sorry to say, it's not me. But for your reading pleasure, below is my submission to this year's TMF contest.

Magnificat

Some people swore that the house was haunted.

There may have been something to the rumor, I suppose; cool summer evenings with the window open, the breeze, never steady, would maneuver into the room and toss the paper-lantern light like the proverbial park swing devoid of a child. Hell, some people swore the whole city was haunted. There were six distinct “World Famous” ghost tours one could join on any given night.

It had been a cold year in the north of England. The usually prolific blackberries were few, small and unpleasantly tart. A weak sun hardly broke the clouds, I swear not even trying, despite the elongated hours between sunup and sundown. The whole year seemed to merge into one damp, milky twilight. I was forced to rely on externals: so many cups of coffee, so many hours with the SAD lamp, so many pints of beer at the local pub. Heavy British ales almost as depressing as the weather. I was a child of the desert, solar powered, so what was I doing here in this soggy, godforsaken flatland where the daylight was simply a milder shade of grey? In those awful early hours of the morning, everything seemed so soft - and here I was, incessantly smothered by the unending greyscale softness.

But I knew why I was here: that grand and imposing Gothic cathedral. I was here to study the intensely colorful and iconographic stained glass windows – one cannot do it from photos alone – and though I made a point to visit other smaller churches and chapels, ruined abbeys and cloisters-turned-libraries, the draw of the Minster was like a drug. I chose this flat because I could see the Central Tower from my bedroom window, lit from below like some ghostly movie set, towering over the Victorian houses and Georgian market streets that filled the intervening two miles. Around my neck, a tiny piece of purple glass set in filigree; it was a polished, thousand-year-old chip from the Five Sisters window in the North Transept.

And, of course, you were here.

I first encountered you during an Evensong that summer. There was a benefit to my arriving under academic auspices, for I was able to move freely throughout the ancient building, into the Chapter House and undercroft without paying admission; but I tried weekly to attend a service, to see the warm trimmings of the Anglican Church festooning the cold stone and feel the reverberation of the gilded organ in my chest. I noticed you immediately, across the Quire, obscured partially behind a lectern. You glanced up, and I caught the emerald shimmer of your eyes and held it for one ecstatic, eternal instant.

I choked; a searing pain welled up behind my ribcage like a fanned flame. The whole chapel was suddenly alight, walls crumbled, ceilings dissolved. Was anyone in the whole of England but you and I? I don't know what happened next – all I could recall was the deep, living forest in your eyes, and then the organ voluntary. You had disappeared, along with everything else, into that murky, overcast twilight which eventually tainted the whole of life.

“Of course you were here,” I thought, but were you? I never saw you again. I was convinced the entire occasion must have been mere dreaming, my subconscious acting out against the mundane, colorless circumstances of my conscious life, except for one thing. Since that night, when I had arrived home, the chip of stained glass around my neck was green.

Nothing was ever the same again after that.

On travel and home

2010-11-07T21:51:00.004-05:00

I know the tones of the different rumble strips cut into the pavement along the shoulder of the Eisenhower Interstate System. I have traveled extensively, if selectively, and I know the strangest airports, the best restaurants along Historic Route 66, and that there's nothing like a week of hotel soap to make you long for a loofah. I have traveled by car, bus, plane, train, and boat. My friends, my coworkers and my colleagues have traveled more than most, just as I have, and together we have an insider's knowledge of the various destinations - and methods of getting to them - where we constantly find ourselves. Places as far-flung as Chicago, Vancouver, Caen, Canberra and Tokyo. Collectively, we have millions of frequent flier miles, thousands of road hours, and our names on a hundred different accounts for rental car and hotel upgrades.

I am a child of the American southwest. I am a daughter of the high desert, the land of the Sun, of steer and sagebrush, adobe and mesquite, mesa and arroyo, pinon and ponderosa, mountain and plain; the land where the Railroad is King, where pronghorn and roadrunner and tumbleweed roam freely, where elk and mountain lion sleep in the cool shade of high evergreen forests, where the sky is a bright painful blue emulated nowhere else and the mountains are purple silhouettes against an orange sun. I know this place because it is in my blood; this place where we use the name river mainly as a synonym for stream, where being in the shade actually is cooler, where coyotes and cactus and volcanic rock slowly turn to dust. I am intimately familiar with the way the desert makes the horizon look like a painted backdrop, the way the road surface bakes in the sun and burns your bare feet, the way tiny lizards and ground squirrels and jays move amongst the stones and gambol oak. I can mimic the sound of crows, ravens and sparrows (and peacocks, but we won't get into that...). I can recognize the sweet scent of an alpine park, the syrup flavor of prickly pear, and the distinctive whisper of the wind through tall pines. These are my "purple mountain majesties," my Colorful Colorado and my Grand Canyon State and my Land of Enchantment. I know the rattlesnakes and the saguaro. I am a Sonoran; I can laugh with the mestizos and tejanos at el gringo from New York; I can palate spicier peppers than most of the people I know. While others learned about the Civil War or the Norman Invasion, I learned about the Anasazi and the Trinity Test. To me, the Four Corners of the southwestern US are the Four Corners of the World.

I just returned from a week in New Mexico for a conference, and in another week or so I'll be in Michigan for an experiment. Traveling to New Mexico reminded me of what I love of the place I call home, and traveling anywhere else reminds me of what I miss.

I think I'll have a piece of cactus candy and a nice local microbrew.

Jon Stewart, President Obama and the vote of confidence

2010-10-28T00:42:00.002-04:00

I had the opportunity to watch President Barack Obama on The Daily Show this evening (the video should be available within the next day or so on the Comedy Central or Daily Show websites). But something Obama said, almost in passing, struck me - I was, in a word, humbled.

He said that, during this upcoming midterm, voters needed to look ahead not to the next election, but to the next generation.

This point is obvious, but how many of us actually consider it? In a culture where immediate gratification is everything, where it seems few people have the patience to work out the biggest issues that have faced our country since the Great Depression (and thus are quick to back out of supporting any particular cause), have we forgotten that it's not just about us, not just about right now? I voted for Obama, and I continue to support him and his administration because I believe in what he says and what he does, but I know that these things take time. Reasonable people understand that these things take time. And yet, two years after Obama's election, some Democrats are scrambling to disassociate themselves with his campaign. Why? They're catering to that immediate gratification. They're bowing to the whim of the fickle general public (if you don't believe me that the public is fickle, consider parachute pants) because they sense frustration with the tempo of those changes the campaign promised, instead of standing up and saying "it will happen, but it will take time."

Jon Stewart asked President Obama (I paraphrase), "if you could go back to your campaign, would you still say what you did, would you still say 'Yes We Can,' or would you be more pragmatic, knowing how difficult this has been?"

Obama replied, "I would say 'Yes We Can,' but it won't happen overnight."

I want to start a discussion. Is it possible that the fickleness of the voting public of recent years, the way the political parties seem to bounce back and forth in power, is being exacerbated by the nature of our 'culture of immediate gratification'? Because we expect results and expect them right now, are we unconsciously setting the standards we expect of our elected officials too high (in terms of achieving goals and campaign promises)? Or are we just as we always were, only now able to hear about it faster? Are we more selfish now (because the focus is on "now" and not "later"), such that we can only see the next election, and not the next generation?

Twelve Nights at Sea

2010-10-18T13:39:00.005-04:00

Here, edited only for the sake of people's names, is the text of the journal I kept during my twelve-night transatlantic cruise. I've never been on a cruise before, but took advantage of what I saw as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to return to the US the way thousands of people have before me: by sea.

The entries are by day. Full line breaks indicate breaks in time throughout the day.

Sunday (Oct 3rd).
Headed south, all is rain. The strength is variable, but its existence is not. Passing silently, canals, highways, power plants. Ponies hunched with their backs to the wind. Drab brick terraces hunched likewise.
I feel so utterly strange. After the convoluted transfer in St Pancras, I have no idea where I am going or what awaits me. I am simply on the train: slanting rain on the windows, the rocking of the rails, the chemical smell of the toilets, the intermittent beeps of phones receiving messages. I check mine again - nothing. I am alone in a vast sea already.
Near Folkstone, the chalk arises from the ground; first small bumps, pimples on the flat landscape, then larger ridges, the backs of sea monsters undulating through Kent. It is all hills and trees until one more tunnel dumps us, without ceremony but with great surprise, along the side of the sea. Though the day is grey and damp, the water is calm.
I made my way, not without difficulty thanks to two overweight suitcases, to my Victorian closet at the top of the hill. It is nice and not without charm, tastefully decorated in neutrals and slate blues, with a window that overlooks the station. A still life of Danish porcelain and oranges graces one wall. Car traffic passes on the rain-soaked street below, like white noise. Sitting here, I picture the map of the town in my head, trying to remember how to get to the cruise docks, the fortress, the high street where I will likely find dinner. It's only 4pm, but I am hungry. Curse this weight which the months here have added.
It is true that I go home to someone familiar and loved, and with a strange and foreign thought floating around in my head, unbidden but seemingly brought on by consideration of the permanency of certain things; but I will miss those I have loved here - and I do not shy away from calling it love, for that is what it was. All have left a mark; none will be forgotten.
My friend drops me off at the train station in York. We embrace. "What will I do without you?" he asks. "You'll be fine," I reply.
Such is my mind - nearly thirty years old, and still prone to flights of romantic insanity. Though lately, dramatic and terrifying flights of phobic insanity creep in as well. Schizophrenic, perhaps. My own brain often surprises me.

I ventured into town and ate dinner at an empty Italian place on the Dover high street, where music played that I was certain I could recognize, if only it wasn't sung in Italian. I was chatted up at the end of the night by the owner (cum-waiter-cum-chef), a short, rotund divorcee of fifty with a Mediterranean complexion and dark, bushy eyebrows. His name was Adam, and he complained of the British weather and the British temperament (especially the propensity to regularly drink to excess and their lack of honesty) nearly as much as I do. He'd felt guilty to charge me for a whole bottle of Prosecco when I couldn't finish it on my own, but I managed to pawn the last two glasses off on the table behind me, an older couple who will, it turns out, have the stateroom nearly above mine on the same ship tomorrow. I'd already had half the bottle to myself by then, so I cannot remember the woman's name, but the husband's name was "Harp" (it says so on the "business" card he gave me, along with their cabin number). They barraged me with tips and tidbits - do this, don't do that - and told tales of other cruises too numerous to mention individually. They're regular cruisers. From Nebraska. The restaurant owner offered me a meal tomorrow, on the house; I said I could come back for lunch. He spoke kindly of the US and Americans, and of friendship. Perhaps now I must go back.
The rain has abated and the sun has set. I can hear the muffled voice of the PA from Dover Priory, and it seems odd to me that I won't have to navigate my way through the small station again.

Monday.
Didn't sleep well last night - attributable to some combination of the hard bed, the nerves and the prosecco, I'm sure - and snoozed my alarm to gain another hour of fitful sleep. The B&B owner kindly made me a breakfast sandwich to take with me, as I had slept through breakfast. He had also called a taxi. I was on my way to the dock at 10am, far too early to be able to do much, but unable to disagree.
The check-in, security and boarding process, while elongated, was straightforward, unhurried, pleasant. Joking with the security staff, chatting about places to see in York, the like. No rush. Finally boarded and through the cavernous main atrium (a hotel lobby on the water, it would seem), I got to deck 11 where lunch was being served in the buffet while the cabins were prepared and generic upbeat music played over the PA: "everybody wang chung tonight." The ship is enormous; I watched from this unthinkable height as the navigational antenna dipped slowly against the backdrop of the SeaFrance ferries and the famous white cliffs of Dover, and felt nervous and slightly nauseous. The ship rocks with a mode almost like breathing while asleep. I called S - damn the cost - because I had to hear a familiar voice, I had to know everything was ok. I was overwhelmed.
Just talking to S (who had woken to my call) made me feel better. We promised to speak again soon, and I went for a belated lunch at the buffet. Sitting on the deck now, the sun winning against the clouds, I feel much more relaxed. I cannot let my fear get the best of me. For all the glamour and the million wait staff trying to sell you overpriced booze, this is just a ferry. The white painted steel I-beams, the water spots on the glass, the bright orange emergency equipment and the heavy doors, they are all familiar. Except this isn't a trip to the island from Portsmouth, or out to Arran from Ayr or Wemyss Bay. This is a trip home. The word brings tears to the backs of my eyelids. Home.

We are finally underway - I watched, with a large crowd, from the deck off the lobby, fore and high, as we passed between the walls of Dover harbor and outward. The sunset is phenomenal, setting the foggy air alight. I have toasted to my Sister Sea with the last tiny dram of my 18-year-old Macallan; one sip for her, and one for me. May this go towards the "angels' share." I sit now on my balcony (a pleasant and unexpected surprise), watching the wake below me and the steady, blurred horizon farther out.
Needless to say, this is still the Atlantic, albeit a small portion (I'd like to see where we are, and wave as we pass the Isle of Wight), so the air is chilly. Some of the passengers, likely already drunk, tested out the swimming pool. A hot tub I can understand, but it is so cold and humid that my joints ache.
I have plenty of time to sit here by myself; I should go up to the top decks and take a look around.

I turned the small TV in the room to the map channel to see how far from the Isle of Wight we are, only to hear something familiar; sure enough, I turned up the volume to be greeted by Barber's Adagio for Strings. Almost as soon as it had begun, it ended, giving way to lifeless, rhythmic easy-listening fake jazz. The ship trembles ever so slightly under your feet. We are not far off the coast of Eastbourne, and the lights of the coast are still visible off the starboard side. The relative humidity is tremendously high - something in excess of 80% - and I can tell; I am constantly chilled, my joints ache, and there are grains of uncooked white rice in the salt shakers. My mother once used that trick, probably a holdover from her youth in the midwest, but in the dry altitude of Arizona and Colorado, it is unnecessary. I hear the wind whistle around the bars of the balcony railing, and am almost convinced it is the wind which causes the ship to shudder, and not the waves.
It is still odd to me, funny, in a way, that room service should be free of charge, but as always the minibar costs.

Tuesday.
Woke to swells, the ship's rocking becoming more of a roll, alternatively pressing you into the bed or lifting you from it. It is not severe - just about the level to start the car alarm cascade on the ferry, by my reckoning - but with my lack of sleep and lack of food, it still enough to cause my head to ache and my stomach to turn ever so slightly. Sitting on the balcony helps, feeling the air move around me. Somewhere beyond what my eyes can see lays the coast of France; we are not so far, as we are still trailed by seabirds.

...and DOLPHINS!

Wednesday. Happy birthday to me.
The swells (the sea counts as "rough" in the captain's log) confined me to bed all of yesterday, trying desperately to eat a sandwich from room service (it took nearly all my power to call them) but unable, in the end, to keep anything down. Reception finally sent up some antiemetic, which I took and which quelled the illness long enough for me to sleep. I managed, just after dark, to put the room-service order for breakfast out. This morning, it came, and I was able to keep down a muffin, a roll with strawberry jam, and a Pepsi. I finally managed to shower and get out for lunch - and oh, what good the food and fresh air on deck did me. The motion is not so obvious from the open deck; I have even been able to read. I should eat again soon before I let the nausea of an empty stomach catch up with me again.
I now have birthday letters to read, and I will try to get online briefly later to check my e-mail. The room stewards have left me a towel wrapped up as a dinosaur, placing Ten Tons of Uranium (yes, I brought him and Pegasus with me) aside it on the bed. I laughed heartily when I returned to my room. I should tip them heartily as well. We are now off-shore of where Portugal begins and Spain ends. I ran into the couple from the restaurant in Dover this afternoon on deck, and was able to chat with them; the seas will get better (even the open Atlantic). We're in a shipping lane - we have passed and been passed by many a freighter and cargo vessel - and it is soothing to sit on the upper decks, read a book, nurse an iced tea, watch the container ships pass, and only notice the motion of our own vessel on the waves by the occasional sloshing of the pool water out of the confines of the pool.
And, as if to say 'happy birthday,' the cafe is serving Mexican for dinner tonight.

With the new headphones from S, I can just hear Jacqueline Du Pre's rendition of Elgar's Cello Concerto above the roar of the sea below. It is dark but the ship still pitches and rolls, its progress seemingly fits and starts; stars move in and out of view from my small balcony.
I watched the sun set behind a razor-straight horizon of sea, then later, after a brief trip to the gym (it is nearly impossible to run on a treadmill when the floor is moving beneath your feet), I went up to the silent and dark upper deck, far forward of the pools and the lights and the music, and gazed at the stars. When it comes to stargazing, a ship is its own worst enemy, trying as it does to flood its minuscule portion of the great, black sea with light. But I found a reasonably dark spot, the most forward and highest on the ship, and from there could see the stars - I remember tears running down my cheeks, singing along with the Rowing Song, spinning slowly and arcing my neck to see better. Even out here, the ship is too bright to allow one to see everything, and there is some remnant cloud cover which, though I cannot see it, I can perceive through the blurriness of the stars that are in view. Tiny, sparkling lights on the horizon are actually more ships; we pass out here, far from land, my Nebraskan friend says, in order to spare the closer waters for fishermen. So anything and anyone en route from the northern portions of Europe to the Mediterranean must first pass by this way.
Lisbon tomorrow morning; I may stay on the ship, or perhaps wander at my leisure into the town; I have no desire to be up at 8, though with the bustle of docking I may well be anyway. I have a propensity for semicolons, one that even poor Simon cannot fully comprehend.
At least, I hope someone else finds it as amusingly ironic as I do that there is a rowing machine onboard the ship.

Thursday.
It is an odd sensation to fall asleep at sea - rough seas, no less - and wake up docked in calm waters. Somehow, I woke this morning early, just in time to view the quayside of Lisbon slipping past slowly. We pushed silently under an enormous bridge, lovely in the early morning fog; all of the buildings on shore were bathed in a reddish glow - which, of course, didn't show up on camera.
It has been odd, remaining on the ship when many others disembarked for their guided tours of Lisbon hours ago. The crew run drills, the announcements for passengers to disregard alarms coming every ten minutes. I'm so used to the motion of the sea, I feel as though I'm still moving, like when I was a little kid in the ball pit at a McDonalds. The view from my bed out the balcony window could be the view from any hotel in Lisbon; it's only when one puts one's head over the edge that one sees the water.
The sky, though reasonably light, is hazy. The air is warm. A major road passes just off the port side, where we are docked - it was probably the sounds of traffic, of civilization, coming through my open balcony door that woke me. The building just across (it appears to be a train station) is painted an unapologetic sky blue. And they're down there driving on the right side of the road, praise God. Kids ride bikes down there just like kids ride bikes anywhere. Aside from the poor man in the macaw costume at the bottom of the gangway, this is any city on any weekday, just getting on with its business.
I could really use a Coke.

What likely woke me this morning, in hindsight, was the bridge - as we passed under it again just now, departing mainland Europe for the unknown, it howled with a thrumming, deep sound, loud as a jet, though whether the sound came from the traffic motoring across it, the trains rattling slowly along on the second deck or the wind (a chilly and insistent, but not vicious, wind from the sea) through the cables, or some combination of the three, I cannot know for certain.
After spending all day re-acclimating myself to stillness, to the certainty that the floor will be there when I move to lower my foot, I am nervous to return to sea; especially, as it is now, the open ocean, the real deal, the 788 nautical miles of nothing but water and sky until Ponta Delgada. The ship's horn sounds, three long blasts to signify our passage through the mouth of this sheltered inlet. My brief luck, being attached to a Portuguese phone carrier instead of the ship's, will soon disappear. I did manage to refill my phone with credit while we were docked.

The water turned choppy almost immediately, as though a line had been sighted and drawn across the mouth of the harbor, with the lighthouse as its midpoint; a trip to reception for more antiemetic revealed that the weather was expected to worsen. I sat, silent and still, in the sports bar while awaiting dinner, allowing the medication time to kick in and settle my stomach and my nerves (maybe I should consider taking this stuff when flying...). I was halfway through my second chicken strip when the news came.
The captain began an announcement over the PA, addressing it to "ladies and gentlemen and all members of the crew," and at that point I knew the news was bad. My stomach lurched, this time without the help of a passing wavefront. I have a copy of the announcement here in my room, so I can peruse it at will - if one wills to do such a thing. Because of inclement weather, specifically a low-pressure system sitting just off the coast in the Atlantic as well as a possible later interception with Tropical Storm Otto, our route was being altered.
We're foregoing the Azores, which, I'm sure, will disappoint me at some later point (we're being reimbursed, obviously). But for the time being, the more pressing concern is riding out the night. I was not - am not - yet mentally prepared for the Atlantic crossing. We're headed southwest now, and we'll cross the ocean farther south than originally planned, to avoid the storm (NOAA predicting, as the announcement said, 35-knot winds and swells of 24 feet... good God) and hopefully avoid Otto in the coming days as well. The announcement, obviously, must by its nature take on a cautiously optimistic tone: "This new route... will provide us with a much better chance of great weather, smooth sailing and an on-time arrival in Port Canaveral." To normal human beings, such a statement is almost a guarantee of such "great weather" and "smooth sailing," but to me it is a guarantee that there will be no such things. I did note, on the map, that our new route takes us past Madeira, which is comforting (knowing a port is not far is a kindly thought). The sea (at this particular moment, anyway) does not seem worse than the last two nights, with the exception of a whipping, blustery wind (I have video of the pool hitting a rocking resonance and splashing everywhere - they've since been drained). The antiemetic seems to do its job, and though we rock and shudder, I do not feel sick or dizzy, but the fear is still there. The fear that things will get worse; the fear that they've emptied the pools because they know something we don't, the fear of swells twice as bad as what I've already (and just barely) endured, the fear of screaming wind and rain and spray and an eventual erasing of the horizon into one great grey mass.
I did manage to go to the gym, just after sunset, but I had to give up on the treadmill after ten minutes of a slow, halting pace. It was simply impossible to keep going with the ship itself seeming to grind to a sudden stop as it crested another swell, the downturn of which would propel me into the hand grips. I moved to the elliptical instead, finding it easier to move with both feet and hands planted firmly, even if I was farther from the window and unable to see the frothy white of the ship's wake. Funny that something like that should be so comforting.
Perhaps I'll try to get back to my book. I'm reading Stephen Fry's autobiography, and as much as I love the man, the book is so full of 'Britishisms' and, to be frank, monosyllabic conversation, that I simply can't get into it. Perhaps the issue is that I do not love Fry the man, but only Fry the character, Fry as I know him and see him.
Funny how I came on this trip to try and discover who I am, only to find I am a sniveling, crying coward who spends all her time curled in a little ball and hoping things will improve. Other passengers (everyone but me, it will invariably seem) sit around playing cards and bleeding money and complaining about the service, while it's all I can do not to run screaming through the corridors shouting "MAKE IT STOP!" At dinner, the woman behind me was complaining to her husband that it's been ages since she ordered and the food still wasn't there... "did you not notice," I wanted to say to her, "that the sea is rough? So perhaps the chef is having a difficult time, and maybe you could cut him or her some slack...." I can do little to nothing, so who am I to bitch about my dinner taking a few minutes longer to prepare? I should hope the cook takes all the time necessary not to accidentally cut off a finger in seas like this. But even that I could not do - cowardice to the full, the embodiment of it, the incarnation of the god of cowards.

Friday.
I slept poorly, more likely because of my nerves than the actual motion of the ship. Indeed, there were points this morning when a glance out the balcony door - closed for the first night since leaving - would reveal a slate-grey palette, with no differentiation between sea and sky, save the random whitecap. But now, just before 11 (the clocks on the ship were set back one hour last night), the sun is bright and the horizon a thin silver line. Though the wind blows fiercely ("near gale") and the sea is choppy and rough, the air is pleasantly warm (almost 70 degrees, according to the bridge).
Earlier, I missed an announcement from the captain, as I couldn't hear the PA (there are speakers in the hallways but not the rooms, so the voice was lost under the constant noise of the waves and wind). Something about how the weather will remain like this as we skirt the lower edge of the low-pressure system (I suppose that, had we stopped in the Azores, the weather there would not have been conducive to photography or, generally speaking, enjoyment of the outdoors). They're showing Casablanca in the disco this afternoon, and tonight one of the musicians will perform Celtic music on her guitar. But to be honest, at the moment I'm sick of England. I'm sick of Stephen Fry's autobiography, I'm sick of the incessant drivel I've read lately about the Victorians and the way life was between the Wars and so on. I just don't care.

A rainstorm; as fierce as it was brief. It would seem I'm benefitting quite nicely from this strong westerly wind: we're traveling southwest, and I'm on the port side, so no rain blows in my balcony. I could see the knife-edge of the rain moving off behind us, and in the distance, out toward Africa, is a break in the clouds, where the ocean transforms from this purplish royal blue to liquid platinum, as if an invisible breakwater could be found just beneath the surface. But presumably, if we are in the rain then we are passing through the front. Now more rain, and the view outward blurs to monochrome; soon the horizon will be nothing more than a watermark on a sheet of paper.

It seems odd to me that I should only just have noticed the small paintings hung inconspicuously along the corridor walls. They are, I suspect, not meant to be noticed, but meant to prevent the walls from being noticed.
The swells have become intense; early this afternoon, without needing to be told, I still held my breath when the captain came over the PA to tell us the waves were 15 feet. We're passing Madeira at the moment (by Harp's reckoning - and a sidenote within a sidenote, I keep running into him on deck, but never his wife, so I hope she's all right; but as he says, they're seasoned at this, despite coming from landlocked Nebraska - we should pass within 50 miles of it, a shame not to stop). I think the feel of the swells is worse now, after I managed to swallow my fear and catch the showing of Casablanca, because they align more closely with the length of the ship. The whole of the vessel rides the whole of every intruding swell; the ship rocks, not front to back, but side to side, which gives the faulty impression of each swell lasting longer. The wind still whistles through my balcony door and wails through the rigging on the ship's forward instrument tower. The captain expects we should, if we are patient, come out of the worst of it into a calmer and warmer tomorrow.
The sunset was spectacular, taking up the whole of the sky and filling it with blue and gold, purple and amber, all polished and gilded and sparkling. But when the spectacle was over, the darkness was absolute. There is nothing to be seen out there now but our own lights reflected back in the pale blue of the churning water of our wake.
I will try soon to go to the gym, but I do not have high hopes in seas like this. At dinner, I had to grab a knife at the last moment which threatened to slide off the table. Almost as regularly as breathing, I am pushed into my chair, then lifted with a dizzy head until finally my brain is shuddered and jostled back into position.
It's funny, the way people desired to be lied to: simple, subtle things. The map on the ship's informational channel shows our progress and our projected route; though being a round globe projected flat on the screen, the line across the Atlantic to Canaveral is shown as perfectly straight. We will travel a (reasonably) straight line, and we know this, so intrinsically we look to see a straight line. To see the "real" path, the geodesic, which would appear curved on such a projection, would seem odd and incorrect. And so we are "lied to" in order to preserve our own sanity, by being told we will travel a straight line on a flat map.
I should try to go to the gym, for my mental as much as my physical well-being, but I'm suddenly so tired.

Saturday.
I would have been disembarking right about now, lining up for my 4x4 tour of that particular island in the Azores chain. But instead we pitch and roll and there is nothing but water; even the sky is water. It's upsetting to me that this should have long since ceased to be a vacation. I am not relaxed, I am not enjoying myself. I am enduring. I put my head down last night, just to take a breath before going to the gym, and woke up an hour and a half later, surprised (I gave up and went to bed... it was only 9:30). I am forced to eat more than I would otherwise to keep my stomach in a perpetual state of half-full to stave off seasickness (waking up with an empty stomach is a sure way, I have learned, to feel nauseous). I find that I am glad the showers are as small as they are (and really, they are just as big as the weird plastic en-suite bathroom "pods" in my room in Wentworth when I first moved), for it makes showering easier, when one is able to plant both feet firmly against a wall. I sit up on deck and try to read, but even that escape has been taken from me; I cannot concentrate on the words, but instead watch the ocean just above the top of the page, waiting for the inevitable swell to encroach slowly, unstoppable like a nightmare's monster, and me glued to the spot and unable to run. I watch the bow of the ship tilt skyward, then tip down as if meaning to plunge into the sea in a dive, only to crash against the water below and shudder as it rights itself. I wonder what the cutoff is? When the waves are larger than the draft of the ship? I still have so many technical questions, but I never encounter anyone but the hotel and restaurant staff, to my dismay. With each knot in my throat, my eyes dart to the nearest window, balcony or railing, searching desperately for the horizon and a steady reference frame - just as when I am flying. My only respite is being here, already on the surface of the water, instead of 3 minutes of freefall above it.
The weather is warmer, when the wind isn't blowing at least. We were told yesterday that sea and sky were about the same temperature, 75 degrees or so. Sunrise creeps later and later as we travel south. But every day I still cannot go up on deck without a coat, and every day still the clouds have moved in and the wind has been wintry; how I long for warm sun. It's been so long since I've encountered summer. And since I've encountered calm. Thanks to the moratorium on free soft drinks, I've had a slim amount of caffiene (I try to make myself instant iced coffees by putting ice, milk, and coffee together in a glass, but they taste of the fake coffee), yet I still grind my teeth.
There is some value, though. The seas were so rough for the past day or so, and the air so relatively dry now, that when I woke this morning and opened my balcony door, I discovered crystals of salt on the railing. The ship is a giant pretzel.

Did I mention the darkness is absolute? It isn't, quite. Out there it is. But here, atop this infeasibly large ship, this massive metal island unto itself - here there is always light.
Another beautiful sunset, this one the first from the port side; I could tell just before dinner that we had turned westward. I finished a book, ate too much dessert, went to the gym, stepped out into improbably warm air. All of the good movies seem to be on the German channel; I'm left with the remade Clash of the Titans and rerun after rerun of Julie and Julia. During the afternoon, the seas seemed calmer, but now the swells have returned. Perhaps it is the darkness that makes everything more frightening.

Sunday.
Late last night, or I suppose early this morning, when the dawn was still nothing more than a blue line across the horizon, I woke to pee, but for some reason was drawn to my balcony instead of back to bed. I stepped outside, and the air was warm and comfortable. The sea around the ship was lit by the lights onboard, and seemed to glow from within like a thick turquoise fog. And behind a few low, grey strips of cloud, the universe.
I smiled a smile of my whole being, saying silently, "there you are - I've been waiting for you." I blew a kiss to Orion, who, at that time of morning, hovered just outside my balcony doors. I went back to bed feeling happier than I have all week.
And this morning, the swells are smaller and the sun shines. The weather looks so pleasant, in fact, that for the first time this trip I began to worry about not having sunblock.

I am finally beginning to learn the subtleties of my Sister Sea. The slight variations in color, for example: the crests are a deeper shade of blue than the troughs, such that when one looks out from the first swell across the ocean, one sees this striation all the way out to the horizon, sparkled with wavelets of white and silver accents. But we do not see the true ocean currents, the great cycles of mass driven by sea temperature and salinity; we may perceive the surface, but her depth is hidden. What lives down there, Sister? What creatures take up this boundless expanse and call it their own? My eye searches to the furthest horizon, seeking some variation, but aside from the gilded edge provided by Father Sun, there is nothing. Nothing but Sister Sea and her royal hues, Brother Sky and his constant lightness, Father Sun low on the horizon, still sleepy with winter, and somewhere below it all, Mother Earth (capital E earth, as in the globe), imperceptible in her fullness, round and great and verdant and full of life and expectation. I do not have what it takes to be a mother. It takes more than simply owning the correct equipment.
Perhaps my Sister scares me because I wish so much to be like her, deep and mysterious and capable, mighty and nurturing and unknowable in her entirety. But I, instead, am all the things that she is not, weasely and frightened and superficial, and I hate myself for being intimidated by one who loves me regardless. Why am I so afraid all the time? Why am I frightened by the sea, by the sky, by the truth of life and death that knits us all together? Why?

After dinner (during which time a friendly busboy with a babyface pointed out to me that we have the same phone) and a trip to the gym, I stepped outside into the balmy night air to see the stars. At first, lying back on the raised wooden bench that surrounded the pool, I could see very little. Surely we can't be producing that much light pollution, I thought, but unconvinced I stood and retreated cautiously to the furthest forward deck, high above the lights and incessant pop music from the deck PA. In the darkness here, as my eyes adjust, what I hoped to see appears before me, wild and bright as love itself. "There you are," I whispered. "I've been looking for you." The galaxy above me, around me, enveloping me; the stars and the constellations and the cool gas of the Milky Way. We deprive ourselves. We pour our light out into the universe, afraid of that inky darkness as an island is afraid of the ocean, and so we miss it - we deprive ourselves, and we suffer needlessly. How I wish that every human being could see this as they prepare for bed at night. Are we alone? people ask anxiously. Look around you, open your eyes. Of course we are not alone. We never were, and never will be.
We are, at the moment, at 29deg 40.27' N, 035deg 10.74' W, busily crossing the Atlantic near its widest point. It is equally comforting and frightening to comprehend, to see that map and the glowing little beacon that represents us.
The wind has died down, and with it the swells; the sea is calmer as well as warmer. But I still suffer, still misplace my foot when I think the ship has rolled beneath me. Running on the treadmill was incredibly difficult. My brain is still sloshing about inside my skull, like the milk in a jostled jug.

Monday.
I was shaken from a sleep full of strange dreams (likely due to watching Coraline, in German, just before bed...). Thinking it a fluke, that I had only dreamed the motion, I rolled over to return to sleep, only to be jostled again, quite violently. I nearly jumped from the bed. The seas had once again turned rough, and this time our ride is not smooth: we slam down into the trough only to meet the next crest halfway, sending violent shudders through the ship and setting the joinery to creaking. I am out of antiemetic. I hope the banana I saved from last night's dinner, and the Pepsi I've allowed myself to open ($2.75 or something like that, stupid minibar), will stave off any illness.
A few minutes outside on the balcony was enough to determine the cause of our different "ride" - the swells are coming straight toward us from the front, instead of at an angle. We hit several in a row and our sinusoidal motion grows worse and worse until we hit one or two out of phase, crashing into them and sending off a massive wake to carry away the energy. The blue sky far behind us, the grey cloud before us, and the waves traveling antiparallel to the ship seems a bad portent for what may be coming. I will hurry and get dressed to make sure I'm up on deck to hear the captain's lunchtime announcement. It's become a usual thing since we left Lisbon.

It is difficult to describe the sensation of attending a musical production, complete with lighting, set, costumes, mics, etc, in a two-story theater... on a boat. It boggles the mind (enough so to warrant my spending of $4.75 to log on to facebook and announce it).
The sea is calmer now; the swells earlier were remnants from hurricane Otto, nowhere near us but sending out a line of swells while moving north near the Bahamas.
Tonight, I emerged from the theater onto the open upper deck and looked up to see the stars. I started up the stairs to the dark foreward deck, but paused at the end of the lit portion. I looked up again.
"Aren't you coming to see us?" the stars asked.
"I am," I replied. I shivered, despite the muggy warmth still in the air.
"Are you scared?"
"I am," I replied again.
"Don't be afraid," the stars replied. "No matter where you are, you are with us and we are with you." That is the secret I learned tonight. In gratitude, I went all the way to the dark upper deck, craning my neck at the beautiful galaxy, tonight dressed in wisps of milky cirrus cloud, and sang a tune I know by heart: the Eagles' "Seven Bridges Road."

Tuesday.
Another time change overnight. We're now only two hours' difference from the East Coast - in fact, of the three maps which are shown, variously, to display our position, the second map (the three being at different levels of zoom) shows us on the eastern edge of the USA's ocean border, into the Sargasso Sea. It is overcast, and the back of my neck is still sore from the heat of sunburn. We're truly in the middle of the ocean now. There's no turning back.

Rain... lots of rain. Erasing the line between sea and sky, ocean and air, liquid and vapor. We are in the middle of the Atlantic and shall disappear into the unending grey, lost forever in the void. But now the rain abates, and the blue line of the horizon is barely visible once more. All is not lost.

Sighted the first vessel, so far as I can remember, since leaving Lisbon. It was sometime between three and four in the afternoon, as I sat starboard on the main upper deck at a table near the pool. A middle-aged couple playing rummy at a table nearby, as I sat and fiendishly read my chunky Frazer, pointed seaward. "You have younger eyes than us," the man said. "What is that out there?" I looked, and an inch-long, multicolored miniature of a container ship presented itself just shy of the horizon. I answered in kind, but continued to watch the ship afterward, glad not to be alone.
The copious information and miniscule typeface of The Golden Bough, however, eventually strained my eyes and my brain too far. I realized I was weary, suddenly fighting the onset of a headache. I took a respite with a banana, a brownie and a plastic cup of iced tea, but I noticed as I ate that the color of my fingernails seemed off, too deep a purple, as if I was chilled. The rain was starting up again. Fatigued, I ventured back to my stateroom, took an excedrin and watched the horizon turn hazy through the balcony doors. It is now only 5pm, but the rain has changed the nature of the light, and the room feels darker. I should take a nap.

This evening, I took a walk around the Promenade Deck (aptly named), along the jogging track that runs the perimeter of the ship. In so doing, one passes along a corridor with the exterior wall to one's left (there is a prescribed direction of travel, yes), a chest-high railing or large portholes to one's right, and above, hanging like baskets of flowers from a balcony, the lifeboats. These are no wooden dinghies. They are great molded-plastic, traffic-cone-orange whales, some traditionally shaped, some with cross-sections like a hydrofoil to prevent capsizing, all completely enclosed and impeccably clean from disuse. This particular ship, I believe, was christened in 2001, which means that, other than perhaps for full-on crew drills, these lifeboats have likely never been used. They remain silently moored, just overhead like enormous slumbering bats, to their mothership. (I later learned, thanks to one of the NCL TV channels, that the lifeboats are equipped with fresh water and emergency food rations, and that the inflatable life rafts which are stored in white barrels around the Promenade Deck are mainly intended for crew members, and only for passengers as a back-up.)
A bit later (just before 7), up on the high, forward deck to watch with appreciative eyes the stunning, iridescent colors of the sunset, I happened to look aft and see, to my utter astonishment, a bird. I followed its movement, flapping about the rear of the ship, off to the side, riding an air current, raising again above the edge of the plexiglass - as it moved, so did I, aghast, rushing to the edge of the deck for a better view. The black shape disappeared. Stunned, I sent a text message to S: "I swear to God I've just seen a bird." It seemed utterly impossible. Here, in the middle of the Atlantic, a bird. Sure, I've seen a handful of flying fish escaping at the last minute from the wake coming off the prow of the ship, but a bird? Unbelievable. I walked down to the next deck, tracing the path I'd last seen the bird take, straining to see it again, hoping it wasn't my mind finally gone mad with cabin fever (Jose and Gerald did leave me a swallow as my towel animal today). But suddenly, there it was again! It flew past me, and I got my phone out just in time to record a few seconds of video as it flitted upward and finally perched on the instrument tower. I watched it for some time, convincing myself it was real, long enough that a busboy (the one with the same phone) walked by and said, "the bird? Yeah, it probably nested in the smokestack...." It wasn't just me. What a relief. My curiosity sufficiently, if not completely, satisfied, I ventured inside for dinner.
We are past the halfway point - the captian said as much during his noon announcement - closer to the US than to Europe or Africa. "Three more days," Harp said when I saw him after lunch today, holding up three fingers for emphasis. What day is it? Is it really Tuesday? Do we really arrive on Saturday morning? I'm only just getting used to this. And just as I do grow accustomed to this life of relaxed repetition, other facets of my life come into focus and I am shaken from complacency over them: how it is that I am now almost thirty, unmarried and without children; how I loved, and who I loved, in recent years. The unease rumbles in my stomach just as surely as the waves still splash around inside my head.

The clouds have dispersed, and the moon, the thickening curve of a D, shines so brightly among the stars that it gilts the waves between us in silver. The illuminated path to the Moon Goddess, straight and narrow and always a direct line by its very nature. One need only to look.

Just before 11pm, I watched the moon set, a fiery orange crescent that slipped slowly into the dark ocean. I bid her goodnight, her disappearance signaled by a pale blue glow on the horizon which eventually faded, then watched the myriad of stars that grew brighter in the darkness. I sang to them again, one of the only songs I can think of which seems appropriate to the circumstances. "Sometimes there's a part of me, wants to turn from here and go; running like a child from these warm stars, down the Seven Bridges Road...."
S has said he's glad that I've experienced the Sea in so many of her various moods, for it is only through these experiences that this cruise truly becomes a voyage.

Wednesday.
I woke to sunshine and a mandatory crew emergency drill. Both were difficult to ignore.
A word about cruise ships: everything is a bar. If it sounds like a bar, it is a bar. If you're not sure what it is, it's a bar. Even if you don't think it could possibly be a bar, it's a bar. Champs? Bar. Windjammer? Bar. Garden Cafe? Yep, there's a bar in it. Java Cafe? It's a bar, I kid you not.

As if to make good my earlier comments, around 2pm the bar staff started wandering the deck with huge trays laden with plastic cups of rum punch. These they appeared to be giving away freely, and when a waiter came by my table asking if I wanted one, I warily asked why. "It's my birthday," he replied. I prodded, is it really your birthday, and he just shrugged and said no with a smile. I took a cup. A few minutes later, an announcement over the PA by the cruise director indicated that it was a party, and no more; just dancing to a live band and free rum punch from 2 to 3. I didn't argue.
The two cups of punch I imbibed while laughing at drunken old people dancing without scruple or dignity across the deck were, to be honest, my first alcohol of the trip, the sip of whisky I shared with the sea on the first night not included. It is not that I have gone tee-totaller or am abstaining for moral or physiological reasons; it is simply because I do not wish to double the price of my cruise by purchasing drinks on board. Every drink is so insidiously charged to one's room, they seem to flow freely, and the mandatory 15% gratuity goes practically unseen. Imagine the shock that some of these passengers will feel when they realize that nearly two solid weeks of drinking has cost them hundreds of unexpected dollars. Imagine one is frugal and only consumes, say, two beers a day; each of those beers costing at least $5 means roughly $130 for the trip. The soda is treated in the same manner; food may be free (it is, anyway, if you realize there is no point in going to one of the "fancy" restaurants on board that charges a cover), but if you want something to drink (other than flavorless iced tea and truckstop quality coffee), it'll cost you. And I did notice that my head was none too pleased with the combination of alcohol, heat and the gentle rolling of the ship - yet another reason to abstain.
While I refrain from booze and much of the daily activity the cruise director schedules, most people have no such reservations. They wish to be entertained, to sit in the jacuzzi all day with a constant flow of frilly drinks in bright plastic cups; to eat constantly (in the only hour they don't seem to have the buffet open, the ice cream counter remains heavily visited) and then be pampered in the spa with treatments designed to "melt the fat away;" to spend hours in the casino and the art gallery (who ever heard of buying art on a cruise ship?); and to be subjected to a non-stop parade of party music and pretty lights (I maintain that half of the "musicians" on this ship are not musicians. I listened to a pair the other day at lunch who did no more than sing along with background music, a glorified karaoke. The guy had a keyboard, but he merely played along with the simple chord progressions of the music, and the girl often did nothing but step rhythmically from side to side and shake her ass for the benefit of any leering men in the crowd. I got up and walked to a completely different deck, where I was sheltered from this monstrosity - I'd texted J that "Mellencamp almost had it right, this loud salsa band is crucifying Santana" - though I had a mind to boo them off the stage). All I want is to be left alone with Sir James George Frazer, and to be allowed the occasional extra serving of dessert. I don't even want to have my used dishes cleared for me - I'd rather carry them myself to wherever they'll be washed.
I have been impressed with the piloting of the vessel; according to the informational channel (and the captain's daily updates), we have maintained a heading of due west - 270 degrees - for several days, to within a degree either side.
I have sunburned my arms a bit, the back of my neck and a triangle at the center of my collarbone (thanks to a half-buttoned polo I was wearing), and my hair seems - if I am not mistaken - a shade or so lighter. But it is impossible for me to stay out of the sun for long; it is such a welcome visitor after so long without that familiar warmth. Almost to my detriment, I wish only to sit quietly in the warmth of the sunshine, and be happy.

There is no doubt in my mind why people throughout the ages have worshipped the sun. I worship the sun.
Tonight I witnessed what may be the single most spectacular sunset of my life. I stood in rapt attention as the pastels turned to fire and the sun was quenched in the ocean. Pray tell me what I might sing, and I will sing it with abandon and without hesitation! But words failed me. My voice failed me. I wanted to shout praises, to sing hymns, to take a knee or cross myself or something to consecrate me to that sacred event in which I had just partaken. Instead, dumbstruck, I laughed and cried, all at once, unable to move or speak or make so much as a sign with my hands.
I was not alone; the forward decks had filled with people, all watching the same stunning cosmic dance. Even the captain and a few of his starched-white crew were to be seen leaning against the railing, arms crossed, eyes wide, silent. The communion of saints in the swish of the water and the whistle of the air. I remained, tears in my eyes, until the last of the color drained from the sky and it became the moon's turn, to extinguish the candles and bathe the world in cold silver. "Do not weep, Sister," I told her, the only person watching her approach across the sky. "For it is your right and your power alone to blot out the Sun." After a pause, smiling, I added: "Do not forget what I said of you last night."
Even now, the colors in the sky and the mirrored ocean are burned into my retinas. I cannot move from where I sit, afraid to lose the image. Tonight my heart leapt and resided in the sun and the sky and the sea and the moon and the clouds, and there it burned, a willing sacrifice on the altar of the universe.

Thursday.
US Customs landing cards were handed out yesterday. It seems so strange - I know all the things I have to do, the list of things awaiting me when I disembark is long and detailed and each one noted in my head, but still they seem so foreign.
The water, last night and this morning, is so utterly calm - even more so than when we first left Dover and ventured into the Channel - that it is hard to tell we're moving. I lay awake in bed last night with the balcony door open, listening in vain for the familiar swishing sound of the ship's wake. I could almost convince myself that I'm sitting in a hotel, and the ocean is merely a wide channel moving silently past me. Even the report from the bridge lists the sea conditions as "calm, rippled: 0ft" and the wind as "Force 1: light air" (it's too bad Force 2 is "light breeze" and not "heavy air").
Late last night there was a special chocolate buffet, and the line was out the door. As I was joking congenially with a woman in line in front of me, a group of four (what appeared later to be husband and wife, mother-in-law and father-in-law) joined the line, not behind me, but next to me. Over the course of the next fifteen feet the younger of the couples had succeeded, how I still don't really know, to move in front of me in the line. Soon they were in front of the jovial, short woman I had been speaking to previously. Upon reaching the stacks of empty plates, the older woman was in front of me, and her beer-toting husband behind. I kept trying to assert my position, but said nothing. It was when we reached the first platter of delicacies that I lost my patience: the woman, in front of me, took a piece of chocolate pastry and passed it over me to her husband. Unwilling to be treated like an inconveniently-placed table, I swiftly moved around the woman as she parcelled food onto her own plate, taking the next pair of tongs and carefully serving myself, making sure to take enough time that the woman and her husband had to wait until I finished.
I took my leave after that, retreating with my plate and silverware back to my room, where I sat on my balcony and complained to the sea and the sky and the moon, finally apologizing for losing my patience. But if a friend or family member were to ask me whether I'd recommend they go on a cruise, I'd say no. We don't fit in. We say please and thank you, we clear our plates and hold doors open and tip well and are generally polite, even, if not especially, to those people who are the servers as opposed to the served. I can see why the mandatory daily gratuity charge was instituted. And it depresses me.
I've woken too early today. I seem to be coming down with a cold; a sore throat, thanks to all the mucus running down it all night, kept waking me, and combined with another time zone change has left me with wide-open eyes. It's only now 9am. I called room service and asked them if they could bring my breakfast order now, instead of in an hour. They kindly obliged. As they always do. I need to find a way to break some of my bills. I've been tipping (extra, I know) my room stewards, and I'd like to tip the guy in the sports bar who knows my order. But thanks to the cash machine at HSBC, all I have is sticky-flat new twenties.

I have once again seen our peregrine passenger, this time from my balcony as he swooped low past the side of the ship. There does not seem to be much doubt now that the stowaway is some form of small falcon. Though we are now only 700 or so nautical miles from Florida (and nowhere near that far from Bermuda or the Bahamas), so as we approach the continental shelf I will be on the lookout for more marine life. Still there are flying fish, one or two at a time, only every so often, floating like bubbles from the ship's wake.
I retreated indoors because that awful excuse for a band was polluting the air on deck again, the woman caterwauling just out of key, the man singing the same dozen songs over and over, with the bass too loud and the mid-range too quiet, plunking chords on a keyboard as though this was penance enough for using other people's music. When I'd eaten lunch and returned to the pool deck from the aft of the ship only to discover they were still on stage, I gave up on the crowded scene (the performers were receiving little applause, and the smell of stale cigar smoke hung in the air under the eaves) and reclined instead in the small chair on my own balcony, placating myself with Beethoven's Pastoral.
I wrote a letter to the Captain, eloquently thanking him for changing course while expressing my regret at thus missing the stop in the Azores. Part of my intent was merely to put words to the disappointment which still, at times, catches me unaware. But part was more selfish: to take a chance on thus winning myself something; perhaps a letter in return, or a smile and handshake, or a free t-shirt. As if I have grounds for complaint.
The weather is so pleasant, I wish I could remain out in the sun, but like the first nice day of the season I am unprepared, my skin having no protective tan from days on end in the sun. I burn easily like the pale northerner I've become; like the first day with a tank top in the warm sunshine of a Tennessean April, I come inside to find my lips chapped and my forearms pink.
It's 4pm... perhaps I'll go amuse myself for a while indoors with "When Harry Met Sally."

Friday.
Last day at sea. Another time change - this one putting us, finally, in step with the eastern seaboard - and we're in the North Atlantic basin, just at the edge of the continental shelf. I woke early on account of the extra hour, and decided to head up on deck early to finish the last dozen pages of Frazer. As a reward, I received not only the honor of finishing the book (I swear it has more pages than the Bible), but also a go around the buffet breakfast. Is there anything so wonderful as breakfast? Chopped fruit, bacon (the American kind, and they had both chewy and crispy, marked by little signs), thick-cut french toast... all I had wanted was a cup of coffee. Imagine my elation.
The air is some 80 degrees and the water, according to the captain's noontime announcement, nearly 84. We're about 120 nautical miles north of the Bahamas. I sat out on the aft deck for a while before and during lunch, away from the nuisance that is "Cafe Latino" (yes, them again), letting the sun soak into my skin like a balm. I've seen three ships, two tankers and one laden container vessel, since waking this morning; doubtless there are others which have escaped my view. It's not so busy as the waters were crossing the Bay of Biscayne, but still, there is activity enough to suggest, despite the watery horizons, that we're finally back in civilization.
Since finishing the Frazer, I've decided to give myself a break (there's nothing else I want to read, really), but it made me feel a bit awkward as I sat before lunch, as though the fact that I was doing nothing would be brought to everyone's attention. The hypocrasy of the statement is obvious enough - most everyone else is here to do precisely that, nothing - but such as my Western philosophy is well-congealed, I am the center of my own universe. For better or worse.
I think I'll go do a few laps around the Promenade Deck, then come back up for some dessert. The musical abomination should be finished "playing" by then.

The water is growing minutely rougher, now that it is shallower and we're nearer land. More shipping traffic, but no wildlife to speak of - except for a large dragonfly and a monarch butterfly, individually seen being blown about on deck earlier this afternoon. We're just under 200 nautical miles from Port Canaveral on the Florida coast. S is already in Orlando; two hours ago, in fact. I've donated (ie, pawned) all of the other books I brought (which I'd bought cheaply and only for the journey) to my room stewards, with a note to keep them or pass them on, as they so desire. It's a habit I've grown into of late; I take a book, good but reasonably transient, with me as I travel, and once finished (usually at the end of a flight) give it to whomever expressed the most interest in it as I read. I am my own personal book swap.
I have been feeling more and more... well, excitement, I suppose, as we approach ever nearer to land. The thought of actually seeing S after all this time, being accustomed to his existence as a disembodied voice, actually caused me a small amount of queasiness. Tomorrow morning we dock at 5am, I'm scheduled to go through customs at 7 (it's actually done on the ship), and disembark at 9:30. I have the feeling that I'll be awake long beforehand. To that end, I've stowed a diet Pepsi in my backpack, and set my alarm for 4:30, mainly because - even before dawn - I'd like to see landfall; I want to see the lights of the port sparkling across the water in the distance, and hear a voice cry out "land ho!" (even if only in my head). My excitement expresses itself outwardly as a vague agitation. I'm simply never quite settled, always wanting to do something, unable to sit and relax, wondering why the time doesn't proceed faster.

I watched the sunset tonight from the forward deck - last sunset over the sea, a nearly cloudless sky, but the hue toward the west, toward land, was different than before. The wind rushed at us, carrying a different scent. No longer the fresh air of the ocean, but the warm, sweet smell of shore and swamp. It's interesting the things that become apparent, when nothing else exists to the eye but air and water.
We come into port at 5am. I plan on being awake.

Saturday.
1:48am. We've just docked.
Just after midnight, I opened my eyes to my first glimpse of land; a string of lights on the horizon. I wouldn't have known we'd docked, but I left my balcony door open as usual, and woke to loud music. I thought perhaps it was a party on deck, until I located the source of the sound as a well-lit bar which we passed painfully slowly. I heard the change in the engines, and we were swinging around to the side - so I threw on my coat, grabbed my keycard and my camera, and went upstairs to the foredeck. Sure enough, along the starboard side (which I couldn't see from my balcony), we'd pulled alongside a quay, hard-hatted staff ready in the darkness to secure the ropes to the massive cleats. Upon returning to my room, once our ropes were in their hands, I found my phone to be back on a land-based carrier, which gives me internet access once again.
I wonder if anyone else has noticed that the ship has stopped. Nearly 2am. All movement ceases, save me typing away under a desk lamp, and all of the port staff hard at work tethering us once again to the firmament of earth.

And as the sun rises on central Florida, the weary traveler is there to greet it, her ship safely harbored.
I thought I would miss it, but as I emerged from my stateroom for the last time, having cleared customs and returned to collect the last of my things, the sun was a red glow on the eastern horizon. It's been a long time since I witnessed a sunrise, and especially since I've done so by waking before it (as opposed to staying up all night). It's now just after 8am, I've eaten breakfast and the sun, rising just as surely as it always has, warms by back as I sit here on the pool deck. Now we wait until our "color" is called - I'm purple, 9:30 - and then disembark. Steve is due to meet me at 10. Herons and seagulls, and one pelican, skim the still surface of the water below. Jackdaws, sleek and spindly, hop across the open decks, stealing crumbs, occasionally making a raucous show of their presence.
So this is it. Somehow, as I watch the waking scene below, I can tell it's home. Home. That word swells up in my chest and sticks in my throat. I've never been here before, and yet I know the place. It bears a familiarity that I can only now appreciate.
Across from us, at other terminals, are a Disney Cruises and a Carnival ship. The Carnival ship is enormous, crowned with a bright yellow and blue waterslide; it dwarfs us and the Disney ship. The Disney ship is sleek, sharp, traditional and aesthetically pleasing. They're still calling about two dozen people to complete the mandatory customs check (first, by politely calling "all those who have not yet," then by room number, and now, forcing their hand through embarrassment, by name); people mill around on deck, talking prolifically into cell phones that are finally available to them again. The sun is warm on the back of my neck. Gerald, the younger of my two room stewards, asked for my e-mail address this morning. I was so amused that I gave it to him. I'm on my second cup of coffee, after chugging a diet Pepsi earlier. I am anxious; as I watch the scene to the west, cars and hotel shuttles, buses and trucks, port authority crew, bags unloaded and loaded, I have no other wish than to be in the fray. My heart thuds within my chest. Home is calling.
Home.

Something magical

2010-10-02T06:29:00.002-04:00

For anyone who has not seen the classic animated film The Last Unicorn, the opening credits can be viewed here - and pay close attention to the music (yes, that's America):

When the last eagle flies over the last crumbling mountain
And the last lion roars at the last dusty fountain
In the shadow of the forest, though she may be old and worn
They will stare, unbelieving, at the last unicorn

When the first breath of winter through the flowers is icing
And you look to the north, and a pale moon is rising
And it seems like all is dying, and would leave the world to mourn
In the distance, hear the laughter of the last unicorn:
I'm alive
I'm alive

When the last moon is cast over the last star of morning
And the future has passed without even a last desperate warning
Then look into the sky, where through the clouds a path is torn
Look and see her, how she sparkles - it's the last unicorn
I'm alive
I'm alive

If you do not remember the plot, a quick refresher: the last free unicorn (after discovering she is the last) seeks, with some unlikely help, the other unicorns, which have been trapped by a selfish king. In order to save them, she must take on human form - clearly an archetype of incarnation - but in doing so she becomes different from them, because she experiences human emotions, which unicorns cannot. The world itself is fully of magic, but there is no "good magic" and "evil magic," but instead the magic, which is used to good or evil ends by any given character with the knowledge of how to access this magic.

There is something in the song, and the story, which I think speaks of an almost unbearable hope. There is not simple a silver lining to clouds - the whole world hides magic just out of sight. Even when all seems lost, when winter's grip is worst and one cannot even imagine spring, "in the distance hear the laughter of the last unicorn," because she knows it is all a cycle, she knows the magic underlying the world, she is as intimate with the winter wind as with the summer sun. My own soul aches when I hear this, because of this knowledge. It is not a mere cozy memory of childhood and a familiar movie, it is a truth that speaks to the Truth. Fairytales, and their modern equivalents, speak to such truths because, like scriptures, they were a means to convey spiritual wisdom from one generation to the next. (I remember distinctly a scene in Religulous where Maher asks a devoutly Baptist woman in a Christian bookshop whether she would consider using a book of fairytales as a religious scripture instead of the Bible. She was, unsurprisingly, appalled. I, on the other hand, left the theater mildly upset that Maher would thus mock the spiritual power of fairytales.)

It all boils down to something I have said over and over - that true religion is not about doctrines or dogmas, but a way of viewing the world. If we are willing to see magic in the world, then that magic truly does exist.

A damp pilgrimage to Lindisfarne

2010-09-29T15:49:00.003-04:00

I awoke before the dawn; as I dressed, a faint red glow seemed to emanate from the entire clouded sky. Dawn itself did not arrive.

By the time I arrived at the train station, I was already soaked from the pooled rainwater on the roads (and my own sweat - almost late for my train!). The weather was not improving. Should have stayed in bed, I kept thinking. Then, hurry up, you've come this far, don't miss your train now.

More rain along the journey - the sea was not even visible from the coast. I disembarked in Berwick, had a diet Coke from the station's single cafe, waited for the bus. There is only one bus service to Lindisfarne -the "Holy Island," home of the famous Lindisfarne Gospels - and it only ran one day this week. That would be, you guessed it, today. Thanks to the lonely nature of this island, and the unruly tides which periodically separate it from the mainland, it is difficult to get there. The bus arrived, I paid my return fare (I had but one chance to get there, and one chance to return, unless I wanted to wait for the next bus... on Saturday), sat, and waited. It was impossible to see anything from the shuttle save the small patch of road immediately ahead; the large side windows were all plastered with sand and seawater, and the rain kept coming. We were dropped unceremoniously at the single bus stop on the island, just outside a large shop where you could sample the famous mead.

I grumbled my way around; first a small fee to English Heritage to visit the remains of the Lindisfarne Priory (rather windswept and cold on a day like today) and, after lunch, another fee to the National Trust for the privilege of touring the iconic castle (did you know - someone lived there after it was a garrison?). It was wet and cold and miserable, a terrible day to be out and an even worse day to be out on an isolated island in the North Sea. Why did I come today? Why didn't I come last week when the weather was better? The wind tugged at my jacket and pulled my umbrella like a petulant child; unwilling to be placated, it wailed and screamed through the rigging of the ring of beached sailboats along the small harbor. But it only occurred to me as I stepped out past the shelter of a sandy bank and directly into tiny rain droplets driven until they stung like needles that this was precisely the day to visit the island. I suddenly understood.

For sixteen hundred years, this tiny island has been inhabited, mainly by cloistered monks, in weather just like this. They not only survived on this harsh strip of sandy soil that rises barely above sea level and is subjected to the full brute force of the harsh North Sea winters, they were able to create some of the most beautiful Christian works ever made - and here I was, unable to even keep myself dry, let alone a parchment! I was soaked to the bone, eventually conceding to the rain and humid wind as I walked the completely exposed mile between the minuscule town and the converted castle (of which the interior was surprisingly cozy, though humidity damage and drafty windows have plagued it all its life). My jeans had soaked up enough water to turn a different shade of blue. But these monks, they lived here, and they worked here, too. I was overwhelmed with the effort.

Even the myth of St. Cuthbert takes on an altered hue when seen in this unforgiving, damp light. Legend has it that Cuthbert's body, after being entombed for 11 years (in a process similar to the Jews, the saint was dug up after a predetermined amount of time to retrieve his bones as relics), is found to be in perfect condition, without decay. The story takes on a tone of believability if we assume it takes place somewhere arid; "unassisted" mummification is not unknown. But here, on this dreary, waterlogged island, for remains to be lacking any sign of decay? It's impossible. But perhaps that's the point. The monks opening Cuthbert's casket knew as well as I that it simply wasn't feasible for his body to remain intact after all that time. But the story wouldn't be a miracle - and the saint wouldn't be a saint - if this essence of disbelief is absent.

I stood on the upper garrison of Lindisfarne Castle, the melody of "Lone Shanakyle" running through my head, and learned what I would from the sea. Things I would not have learned had the weather been clear, the ruins dry.

Sad, sad is my fate in weary exile
Dark, dark are the night clouds round lone Shanakyle
Your murdered sleep silently pile upon pile
In the coffinless graves of poor Erin...

I boarded the return bus several hours later with a weary, clammy happiness. And just south of Newcastle on the train journey home, the rain dissipated, and the clouds parted just enough to reveal a spectacular sunset.

Scientific findings

2010-09-27T15:54:00.002-04:00

This is a blog post about a news website article about a scientific finding.

Please, please go over to the Guardian and read this editorial. Aside from being absolutely hilarious, it points out the weaknesses of the current "methods" for science reporting.

Born in the USA, part 6

2010-09-27T06:59:00.002-04:00

There should be little doubt that America is the current world power. Bank crises and war debts aside, the US dominates the world both socially and politically.

I'm not saying this to be boastful. I'm saying it because it's important to my point.

Last night, I watched an episode of Horizon about the frontiers of science and the "death of God." After two minutes, it was already failing to live up to any standard its name might imply. The show - a clip show of older episodes of Horizon (some from the 1970's... I'm sure that science is up-to-date) - was narrated, not by a scientist, but by a science historian. I should have known to stop watching when the very first topic of discussion was Galileo.

But I soldiered on, determined to learn something from this otherwise useless show, but about twenty minutes in I hit a major snag. They were discussing the Scopes trial, the Dover lawsuit and the teaching of evolution in schools, but making no effort to show that these were exceptional cases; in fact, the narrator even made a comment implying that all American school children, for decades, have been taught nothing of evolution.

Now, I was there. I know this isn't true. I was an American schoolchild in past decades. I realize that there is still something lacking in the way we normally communicate the scientific subjects to students, but to blithely gloss over the whole of a nation with a derogatory statement like that - and you call yourselves the standard of news reporting! Shame on you!

But here's why I stated before that the US is a world power. Not to say "I told you so" to anyone who thinks our education system isn't good enough, but to point out that the rest of the world is interested in our education system simply because we are a world power, and they hear about it constantly. Everyone in the UK has seen US television. Most people with televisions around the world, or radios, have heard news from the US, because it propagates like wildfire. We're the popular kids, so rumors spread quickly. Would the BBC even think to make an entire hour-long program about the curriculum in schools in Romania or South Korea? No. The world is overly critical because the US is so much of what they see, and yet make sweeping (and usually incorrect) generalizations because all they see from the US is the exceptional cases. If you lived in Oman and all you saw of the US was episode after episode of Jersey Shore, you'd think the US was pretty... well... expletive deleted.

I can understand why the Horizon episode ended up as superficial as it did, but I do not excuse it. The BBC, bastion to what the idea of information dissemination should be, owes better to its viewers (the UK taxpayer, myself included at the moment). Americans are not all inbred, uneducated hicks, just as the British are not all Cockney chimney sweeps.

On fairness and the refereeing system

2010-09-23T14:16:00.002-04:00

Recently, I have encountered one of those highly specific dangers particular to the sciences - being sniped by a concurrent publication.

While there is a great deal of collaboration in my field, there is also a fair amount of competition, arising mainly between facilities with similar experimental programs. This competition serves its purpose when approached in a friendly manner; results published by different groups using different facilities but studying the same reaction help to quickly converge on the real (physical) values desired. But it can sometimes lead to a conundrum, when two differing (though not necessarily contradictory) results are submitted simultaneously.
The authors behind these two manuscripts, both vying for a quick and painless publication, may - in all likelihood - be completely unaware (at that point) of the other's work. If no conference proceedings or earlier talks discussed the work, the publication would be the first appearance of it, and thus two as-yet-unpublished papers would have no knowledge of one another. But each goes to a different referee, and perhaps one referee is faster, more efficient, less critical or simply not on vacation at the time - so that paper is published first.
Now, let me tell you, it is an unpleasant shock to discover (while still waiting for your own referee to do his/her job) that someone has published results similar to yours at the same time as you. From here on out, you're already in the negative, because people outside will only see that the other paper was published first (even if you submitted for publication on the very same day). Even if your work is concurrent, your submission simultaneous - even, in fact, if your work was completed first - you now carry the stigma of being a follower. This is tricky ground to navigate, and it leads to a rather obvious question.

Does your referee have the right to ask that you incorporate the other author's work (or a reference to it) into yours?

In other words, is it fair that you be asked to reference the other author's work, when, were the (random) referees swapped, it would be the other author referencing you? You had no knowledge of their work before submitting your manuscript, nor did they know of yours. In theory, your work is just as timely as their work is, but this is not something that outsiders will see (as it will not be fairly reflected in the differing publication dates). And you, already being on the wrong end of the "leader vs follower" stick, are now to be asked for even more effort, which will seemingly make your own position even weaker?
There is a positive, of course. If your work is just as timely, but you are able to include reference to (and perhaps refutation of, as the case may be) their work, then your (finally) published paper becomes the one more often referenced, at the cost of one reference, on your part, to the other authors. But you still lose, in appearance, the contemporariness of the published results.

So what's the best way forward? This situation, while reasonably rare, appears to be a weakness in the current way refereeing is handled in publication. Maybe making publications only released once a month? Sorting by submission date instead of publication date? I really don't know.

Physicists

2010-09-15T05:05:00.002-04:00

Man, I love xkcd.

"If you need some help with the math, let me know, but that should be enough to get you started! Huh? No, I don't need to read your thesis, I can imagine roughly what it says."

The "facebook cycle"

2010-09-11T06:52:00.003-04:00

I read a wonderful quote about a week or so ago about how facebook is a mirror; it allows us to focus on ourselves, hiding such narcissism under the guise of focusing on relationships. How many times have you heard someone complain, "so-and-so added me as a friend on facebook, but never talks to me!"? This led to the birth of the facebook cull: going through your list of online friends and removing them if they have seemingly ceased to communicate with you.

But what of the log in your own eye, I ask? You complain that they never speak to you, but when was the last time you spoke to them? A relationship cannot be one-sided. It takes two to tango, so to speak - it takes two to add one another as friends on facebook (even if someone complains, "but he/she added me!" it is worthwhile to remember that you're the one who still had to click "ok"), and it takes two to keep that friendship active.

Which is why I do not participate in the facebook cull. I have what is known in my inventive parlance as the facebook cycle.

I try, with a reasonable reliability and regularity (in practice, I'm still very bad at this, as I find it does take a significant amount of time), to contact everyone in my facebook friends list. To comment on a great photo from their vacation, to send them a link I think they'll appreciate, to write "Remember the time we...?" on their wall or even just poke them. And the response I get is amazing (because, of course, I have wonderful friends!). I hear hilarious stories, I enjoy fantastic pictures, I'm directed to the funniest and most sincere websites on the internet, and I get to stay in touch with people whom I consider friends. This is really the important point. These people are my friends, and I value that friendship - even on facebook - and so putting in the time and effort to nurture that friendship is important to me. It turns out to be important to my friends as well.

So the next time you're considering a facebook cull, trying contacting those people first. After all, if facebook really is about relationships, it means we're all in this together.

What religion should be

2010-09-03T07:22:00.003-04:00

No one move
No one speak
Please don't say that it's just me
It's not just me

And even though
I won't forget
Just don't want this to end just yet
Not just yet

But if I had one chance to freeze time
To stand still and soak in everything
I choose right now

If I had one night where sunshine
Could break through and show you everything
I choose right now

If this is it, all we have
I know I've done all I can
If this is it

And we can't stop
And start again
We can't fast forward to the end
This is it

But if I had one chance to freeze time
To stand still and soak in everything
I choose right now

If I had one night where sunshine
Could break through and show you everything
I choose right now

Before the fears that I once had
Start coming back
And I can take the stings and stones and fire
'Cause I know you'll make it all worthwhile
And I ever time I thought it's over, ah,
You finally dragged me up again and again
Oh, please come back again
Oh, please come back
Again

And I'm so scared
I might forget
Just don't want this to end just yet
Not just yet

But if I had one chance to freeze time
To stand still and soak in everything
I choose right now

If I had one night where sunshine
Could break through and show you everything
I choose right now

Before the fears that I once had start coming back
Again

As is usually the case, enlightenment came when it was unexpected.
I hard a difficult time waking this morning - when the sun won't get up, neither can I. Regardless of how much sleep I've had, the SAD prevents me from waking refreshed and ready when the sun doesn't shine, and today the dawn was overcast. Mornings like this, my brain is as foggy as the clouds above the river; I switched on the solar-spectrum lamp, but it was too little too late. Desperately lonely music, songs of utter sadness, played through my head, unbidden and unwanted. Nothing comes together the right way on days like this; the sun was hidden, my teeth hurt from the grinding they'd been subjected to overnight, I couldn't get my hair right, none of my clothes fit properly, I chugged two full glasses of diet Coke only to nearly drop the glass; it was going to be "one of those days." I could tell from the moment my alarm sounded.
Walking through the allotment on the way to work (late, as is usually the case on overcast mornings when I suffer so), the sky still a back-illuminated grey like sunlight through dark, sheer curtains, a random Newton Faulkner song came on my iPod. And I was struck dumb, fastened to the spot. In his simple, guitar and soft voice way, he said: "if I had one chance to freeze time, to stand still and soak in everything, I choose right now." And that's exactly the point.
Religion should not be dogma; it should not be atonement or salvation or grace, or, at least, it should not try to define these things. Religion should be a way of experiencing the world, a certain light in which to view everything around you. Being able to see a world, which on the surface (both physically and psychologically) is only grey, as something beautiful and magnificent and worthy of freezing into eternity - "I choose right now" - that is true religion. Every moment is worth choosing.
The clouds burn away. The sun's out.

Born in the USA, part 5

2010-08-29T14:47:00.003-04:00

One of the greatest classical music concert series of modern times is the BBC Proms. A showcase for excellent music, both new and old, and a venue meant to give access to the "common man" - the promenaders - through cheap, standing-room-only tickets, it is commendable. In the US, I had held the BBC in the utmost regard; it seemed the pinnacle of what a news and entertainment broadcasting corporation could be, like NPR but state-sponsored and immense.

Today, on a TV show from the BBC aimed at small children, I heard a character say "a whole nother."

Now, to hear distinctly British idioms would not surprise me in the least (though it would irritate me). But for a show geared toward children who are still learning the language to blatantly use something incorrect - this angered me no end. I clenched my fists. How could the organization responsible for the Proms - for a two-month-long classical concert of world renown - also be responsible for this, a travesty of the English language? I was hurt.

And then, on my walk home, a girl walking past while on her phone: "asshume." If there is one thing I hate more than all others here, it is the way a preponderance of English people mispronounce assume. My better-educated UK friends assure me that this is not common. But this doesn't explain the number of people I hear say it.

Even now, as I listen to the BBC communicate in a flawless and ethereal violin dialect, I wonder if they were forced to give up one language - English - for the musical other.

From Trinity to Tsar Bomba

2010-08-27T06:10:00.002-04:00

Below is a video demonstrating all of the nuclear weapons tests from 1945 to 1998 (a moratorium on testing was signed by most nuclear nations in 1996; however, India and Pakistan continued testing until 1998, and there are reports that North Korea has successfully tested nuclear weapons as late as 2009). The link is here.

Born in the USA, part 4

2010-08-23T08:13:00.002-04:00

I have one particularly pedantic British friend. We jokingly joust over the nuances of the British English vs American English usage of the language; whether license should instead have two c's, if "vitamins" is pronounced like "vitriol" or "vitality," or what the correct plural of "octopus" is (it's octopodes).
But on the train, headed north toward Berwick-upon-Tweed, I overhear more of the very British butcherings of the English language.
"Nah, it's much more better than the other time..." a girl says.
A male voice: "...daunt do pez," which I learn - upon discovering he is playing a card game with his acquaintance - was meant to be "don't do pairs."
The kindly bus driver who tried to direct me to the rail station shortly after I moved to the UK, whose reference to some kind of "hatchwye" turned out to be a directive to walk under the "archway."
Americans are rightly to be blamed for "y'all," but the British are hardly innocent.

Born in the USA, part 3

2010-08-20T12:52:00.002-04:00

A few of us linger after lunch, digesting, talking. Usually nothing of importance. This particular afternoon, it's higher education.
"I like the British system better."
"You only know the British system." But, then again, I only know the American system. Mainly. I have learned some.
"Well, I'd hate to graduate with so much debt. The average debt for graduates in the US is something like two hundred thousand dollars."
Cue the sigh. "Only medical students would come out of college with debt like that. That can't be more than 5% of the student population. The majority of grads would have maybe a few thousand dollar debt."
"Oh, well, I was under the impression that everyone had lots of debt because your education isn't paid for like it is here."
One of the professors nearby decides to join in at this point. "Actually, it's true that the average debt for US students isn't that high. In fact, I just recently read an article that said nowadays the amount of debt a graduating student has from the US or the UK is pretty equivalent." He turns to me. "Does that agree with what your perception is?"
I simply nod.

Born in the USA, part 2

2010-08-20T06:40:00.002-04:00

Again in the breakroom. The weather outside hovers around that warm/cool boundary, the type of weather that prevents you from knowing whether or not you need a coat. The sun is not visible for the low clouds, but there is no rain - for the moment.
"I don't even know how to do that," the student is saying. "I don't think I've ever touched a capacitor in my life. Guess I'll have to make a friend in the engineering department."
Cue the long sigh. "How I pine for my undergrad."
"You mean you wish you had an undergrad?"
"No, I mean I wish you all had to do my undergrad. We had to take things like circuits and machine shop and C++."
"I'd have liked to take machine shop... that would be cool. But we had to take physics courses."
"We had to take physics courses and machine shop."
"Oh." There's a pause. Finally, a friend breaks in: "I went to sixth form with a guy who didn't even know what a lathe was."
"What's a lathe?" Oh, good lord. Sigh.

Born in the USA, part 1

2010-08-19T07:12:00.004-04:00

We are sitting around the break room, having tea (at least, everyone else is having tea). Somehow the conversation makes its way to Mexican food. Someone says, "so what's the difference between a fajita and a burrito?"
"It's just the way it's rolled up at the ends or something, right?"
I sigh - heavily. "A fajita is more a way of cooking, not just something that's rolled slightly differently to a burrito."
"But on the box of fajitas you buy at the store, the instructions say to wrap the tortilla around the meat..."
"You shouldn't even be able to buy a 'box of fajitas.'"
"Yes you can."
"It makes no sense."
"So what is a fajita, then?"
"Like I said, fajitas are a way of cooking something - you take scraps of meat and maybe some vegetables and cook them in a skillet..."
"Or a frying pan?"
"Yes, fine, or a frying pan. Or a wok, if it's all you have."
"A skillet has the wavy bottom part."
Sigh again. "And you then serve the cooked meat and vegetables with tortillas, but you can simply use the tortillas to pick up the food...." Here I make a pinching-scooping motion with my hand, the way one does with naan bread at an Indian restaurant. There's a pause.
"So then, what is a burrito?"
"That's when you wrap a bunch of fillings in a large tortilla, coat it with something, and bake it."
"But then what's the difference between a burrito and an enchilada?"
I can see I'm getting in too deep - do not cast your pearls before swine, or, translated, do not try to teach British people about Mexican food. "Enchiladas have a very specific sauce." I remember bringing my one can of Stokes Green Chile to a bar-b-que, sharing it rather than hoarding it for myself, trying to show my friends from the UK the glory that is Tex-Mex. The response was less than ideal. It looks like vomit, one of them had said flatly. Yes, well, I can think of a few unappetizing things that vindaloo looks like, but that doesn't mean it isn't delicious.
I would later discover that "fajita" is a Mexican term meaning "little belt," and that as such, fajita was not just a way of cooking but specifically a way of cooking skirt steak. Skirt steak, or more specifically, flank steak, is tough and is normally marinated, but this also allows it to last longer than a normal cut of beef - ideal in the hot climates of northern Mexico. Fajitas, like fondue or curry, were a way of making what little food there was keep, and last, as long as possible. A long cry from the nonsense you can buy in Britain now.

York after Rain

2010-08-07T13:50:00.002-04:00

In a change of pace from the workday science, I wanted to elaborate upon an experience I have been fortunate enough to have while living here in York. This city is home to Europe's second largest Gothic cathedral, but it is also home to a great, slow-moving river, the Ouse (aptly named, as it oozes so slowly it is difficult to tell which way it flows), medieval walls, Roman columns, Victorian townhomes, giant horse chestnut trees and, least of all, me. I have been to services in the Minster, and I have walked along the river at night, and there is no way to express the feeling which I get from both - but I have tried. So I submit for your critique or enjoyment the following, entitled, as you may have guessed, "York after Rain."

the curtain of rain has parted, the door is opened on a cavernous,
purple darkness

I step lightly over the threshold as streetlights flicker on,
one by one,
like candles in the Minster – birds as acolytes
and trees as deacons, clothed
in shimmery green vestments

before me, the silvered path
and the hushed breath of the river, like the silence between the “hallowed be Thy name”
and the “Thy kingdom come”

the Ouse in inky, velvet blackness, the cloth that covers the altar
before we break the bread

the softest buzz of insects intones the Prayers of the People
in dewed, fluttery wings

and there, at the front, a great chestnut tree:
wide as the Quire Aisle, the Evensong, the whole night itself,
golden branches extended in blessing,
I bow as to the High Altar as I approach

verdant, holy leaves just above me release one single
blessed
drop
of baptismal water onto my upturned face

and with a new song in my heart, I go in peace

to love and serve the world.

APOD

2010-08-02T09:37:00.003-04:00

Today's APOD is pretty fascinating... it turns out that one of Saturn's copious count of moons, Prometheus, is essentially creating gravitational "ripples" in Saturn's thin F ring once every 15 hours. Go check it out.

Chernobyl, 24 years on

2010-08-01T07:40:00.005-04:00

An article on the BBC this morning discusses (in the usual BBC "style") the recent findings of a study by researchers conducting a wildlife census in the Chernobyl "exclusion zone," published in Ecological Indicators. The researchers concluded that the radiation contamination had a "significant impact" on the local ecology.

The actual article (available for a fee from Elsevier here... don't get me started on Elsevier, those murderers of the spirit of science) concludes that, within statistically significant correlation, mammals and birds in the exclusion zone had increased instances of "effects," and that "standard breeding bird censuses can be used as an informative bio-indicator for the effects of radiation on abundance of animals."

First things first - before we go all vigilante and decide that nuclear power is too dangerous, let's put things in perspective. The Chernobyl disaster (which cannot be duplicated in the US, France, UK or elsewhere because the fundamental reactor design in Russia at the time was flawed) released somewhere around 10^19 becquerels (nearly 300 MegaCuries) of radiation into the environment - that's the equivalent of the radiation dose you'd get from naturally occurring radioactive potassium by eating about one hundred thousand million million pounds of bananas. We're talking big doses here. Big, unreproducible doses.

Second, we need to be certain we know what, precisely, "effects" are. Here, they simply mean variations in abundance. They went out and physically counted the number of spiderwebs, the number of starlings, the number of foxes, and so on, for nine different "taxa" (ie, biologically similar groups, like "birds" or "mammals"). We're not talking about increased instances of cancer, or birth defects, or anything like that. Purely the number of creatures counted.

Now, for the results - there was a correlation between background radiation (from the disaster) and taxa abundance. This correlation remained when possible confounding effects were taken into account; things like time of day, cloud cover, temperature, or presence of water sources. The correlation was strongest, by a significant fraction, in birds. And, as one might expect, the effect (variation in abundance) was greater in taxa of higher population densities, and was also higher for taxa with higher "natal dispersal ability" (ie, the ability to travel, which comes at a significant biological cost: "dispersal is costly in terms of production of free radicals from physical activity due to actual dispersal and/or from immune response to novel antigens encountered in the new environments during dispersal"). And so we find that birds are the most susceptible to the undesired radiation in the environment.

But this is nothing new. Scientists have long known that birds are good indicators of ill effects in the environment - in fact, even before science began looking for indicators, miners were taking canaries with them into the mines as warnings against deadly carbon monoxide gas. That bird populations are affected by a sudden, increased level of radiation in the environment shouldn't surprise us. But what we don't know - and what the study doesn't tell us - is why those bird populations are dwindling, what the mechanisms are, whether or not the radiation is killing them slowly or is affecting their ability to produce offspring.

This, I suppose, remains to be seen.

Reference:
Møller, A., & Mousseau, T. (2010). Efficiency of bio-indicators for low-level radiation under field conditions Ecological Indicators DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolind.2010.06.013

Innovation

2010-07-17T10:10:00.002-04:00

This morning, I read an editorial from the BBC Magazine on America's love of innovation. I typically read such things with trepidation, and today was no exception. In fact, the title (which ended in a preposition) was nearly enough to cull my interest. But I was intrigued by what a Brit might think of American innovation, so I swallowed my initial irritation and read.
Webb begins by explaining that innovation means different things across the Atlantic. That, in Europe and in America, the term itself connotes different meanings, different feelings. The understanding of it is taken in a cultural and social context.

In the New World it is a wholly positive word; it connotes the life-force itself. It speaks of what drives human beings to achieve. It suggests the conquering of disease and ignorance. It is at the core of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Of Europe, however, he says:

But innovation per se? Let us get back to you on that; let us see how it really turns out, this innovation of yours. Let us wonder out loud whether change is really necessary or whether in fact the old ways of doing things, stretching back to feudal times, are the best ways.

I began to see what he was getting at, and in my American brain a truth rang loud and clear: sometimes you must take that first blind step away from your comfortable past and toward your unknown future.
Webb continued, drawing (amusingly) on his own "European" past (though most Brits will tell you they loathe to be considered European). A bit of this English snobbery came out:

David Brooks, one of America's finest political commentators, suggested years ago that his countryfolk lived life in the future tense. That imperative to succeed, to see innovation as the core of the way things should be, is an American phenomenon. We Europeans live life at least partly in the past tense. We are fearful and careworn: experience tells us, we say, that this might not work. Americans, sans experience of anything much, reckon it might and reckon as well that it is worth giving it a go. Whatever it is.

I objected - "we have experience!" I thought defensively. But I caught myself and considered, and he's right. We've had wars, but not like Europeans have had wars; we've suffered terrorism, but not like Europeans have; we've had a busy couple hundred years, but they've had a busy couple thousand. It's not that we don't have experience, it's that our collection of it has, admittedly, a lot of catching up to do. That doesn't mean our limited experience is worth less, but only that it is just that - limited.
In the end, Webb even linked the American belief in innovation to our "weird religiosity." While Europeans are content with the empty, passive traditions of their old churches, Americans demand results: "in fact it merely represents, it seems to me, a truth about the [American] nation: the search for God is not just a search in the lazy passive European way: it is a search with an end in sight." And in a strange way, this touched me. My search for meaning in life has always been, and continues to be, almost frantic - every night I fall asleep with an unspoken hope that I can wake again in the morning and continue where I left off, even if I know full well that I may never reach any conclusion. That hunger will never be satiated, and I prefer it that way. If this frenetic, seeking hope is what is meant by innovation, then so be it. It makes me proud to be an American.

And to make a last little jab at the British (I just can't help it) - one commented, "The author is obviously misinformed. We Europeans are always and have always been at the forefront of innovation. We are just incredibly modest about it. A recent study by a Japanese University concluded that over 40% of all modern inventions were invented in Northern Europe with a large majority originating from the UK." The projected population of Europe for last year was about 800 million, whereas the American population is only 300 million. This makes the European "40% of all innovations" a bit piddly, considering all those people... not only that, it completely ignores the fact that many of those inventions were by Europeans who had moved to the US. And having to tell yourself that you're being modest only proves you're not.

Oil

2010-07-03T17:28:00.002-04:00

An interesting thought occurred to me late last night. Thanks to the "smoke and mirrors" nature of ionizing radiation (as well as the newer threat of terrorism), many people fear nuclear power. It is a taboo subject in the US since the 70's, with no new plants built since. But to make my point, I'd like to do a little comparison.

The Three Mile Island incident of 1979 severely hindered nuclear power in the United States, though - rather notably - no one died as a result of the accident. A partial core meltdown accidentally released some radioactivity into the surrounding areas, but, as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's report explains,

Detailed studies of the radiological consequences of the accident have been conducted by the NRC, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (now Health and Human Services), the Department of Energy, and the State of Pa.. Several independent studies have also been conducted. Estimates are that the average dose to about 2 million people in the area was only about 1 millirem. To put this into context, exposure from a chest x‑ray is about 6 millirem. Compared to the natural radioactive background dose of about 100‑125 millirem per year for the area [this is more like 300mrem per year for people living in places like Colorado], the collective dose to the community from the accident was very small. The maximum dose to a person at the site boundary would have been less than 100 millirem.

In addition, the effect of such a nuclear "accident" on the surrounding ecosystem was minimal; as the report states,

In the months following the accident, although questions were raised about possible adverse effects from radiation on human, animal, and plant life in the TMI area, none could be directly correlated to the accident. Thousands of environmental samples of air, water, milk, vegetation, soil, and foodstuffs were collected by various groups monitoring the area. Very low levels of radionuclides could be attributed to releases from the accident. However, comprehensive investigations and assessments by several well‑respected organizations have concluded that in spite of serious damage to the reactor, most of the radiation was contained and that the actual release had negligible effects on the physical health of individuals or the environment.

Even the once highly-contaminated Rocky Flats (a Superfund site) is now, 15 years after the start of clean-up, a wildlife refuge.

Now, let's consider the BP oil spill in the Gulf.

According to the various estimates, the spill (now likely far worse than the Exxon Valdez accident) is leaking about 2.5 million gallons of oil per day into the Gulf of Mexico, threatening 400 species of wildlife (30 species of birds), some of which are endangered, and thousands of miles of coastline (including 8 National Parks). 11 people died in the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig, 17 more were injured (in fact, chemical explosions have historically and statistically caused more deaths than accidents at nuclear plants: the Chernobyl disaster, by far the worst at a nuclear plant in history, resulted in "fewer than 50" direct deaths according to a joint IAEA/WHO report, whereas the chemical leak at Union Carbide plant in Bhopal resulted in somewhere between 2000 and 15,000 immediate deaths). Cleanup of oil-soaked ecosystems can take years, even decades (in 2007, nearly 20 years after the Exxon Valdez ran aground, an estimated 26,000 gallons of oil still remain mixed into the sandy beaches of Prince William Sound). The economic damage to the area near the Deepwater Horizon spill could end up in the billions of dollars. And while rural families still live successfully within a crow's flight of the defunct Chernobyl plant, a friend of mine in Baton Rouge can smell oil from her house. A Scientific American article on the BP spill concluded that "when an oil spill occurs, there are no good outcomes."

My point is this: we need to fear that which is more dangerous. Our dependence on energy is a given, but we have the power to alter where and how that energy is generated. We can choose nuclear power, wind power, solar power, geothermal power, hydroelectric power. We can choose to cut our ties with oil. And the devastation due to the BP oil spill - especially in comparison to the minimal damage from nuclear accidents, wind turbines, etc - should be the catalyst that we need to make it happen.

Fireworks

2010-07-01T18:36:00.003-04:00

In 1962, on the 9th of July, the US government tested a hydrogen bomb high above our atmosphere. 248 miles above Earth's surface, in fact. Starfish Prime, as it was known, was aimed at answering a few questions about the newly discovered Van Allen belts - trajectories of high energy charged particles that whip around our planet's magnetic field (it is at the poles, where the magnetic field concentrates charged particles from the solar wind, that we get the Aurora phenomena) - among other things. This test was one in a multitude of test explosions, above, on, and even below Earth's surface, conducted by both ourselves and the Russians - but this test was different. It changed things.

The 1.4 megaton explosion created an artificial expansion of the Van Allen belts, creating bands of charged particles, simultaneously glowing red, green (both oxygen) and blue (nitrogen) in the upper atmosphere. Across the Pacific (for hundreds of miles), a surreal light show (similar to the Aurora) graced the skies. It lasted nearly seven minutes. The resultant EMP knocked out electrical systems as far away as Oahu (roughly 800 miles distant). And yet people crowded onto rooftops, decks and verandas to see the spectacle. (All through the Cold War, in fact, people would travel to test sites to witness nuclear blasts; Las Vegas cashed in on much of the "atomic tourism" by designing specific packages to cater for those wishing to view tests at the Nevada test site.)

So this Fourth of July, when you sit in the park watching all of those rainbow-colored chemical explosions a few hundred feet above your head, remember the nuclear explosions conducted decades ago a hundred miles above your head. Celebrating our country's independence is no longer merely a matter of one small piece of history - it should be a memorial of all pieces of our country's history, the triumphant, the humbling, the dirty and the heroic. We didn't invent fireworks - the ancient Chinese did that - but we did invent the nuclear bomb.

Last Days

2010-06-19T10:27:00.002-04:00

In the quest for life's meaning, people are often asked - or ask themselves - what they would do differently if today was their last day to live.

It is a romantic idea, supposedly a shining and fabled example of humanity's great and yet latent capability, but this is all wrong. It is a myth, incommensurate with life, unachievable. If you were really going to die tomorrow, how could you "eat, drink, and be merry"?

My phobia draws this inconsistency into sharp contrast. Every time I fly, I am convinced - utterly and unconsciously - that I will die. I may as well see biblical visions of planes drenched in blood and licked by fire, for the way I react. It is an illegitimate fear, I know, unfounded and overblown, but this is the nature of phobias. They are not something one can be "talked out of." An airplane of any shape, size, make or age is, to me, nothing more than a guaranteed death, in true catastrophic, claustrophobic and no-heroes-no-survivors fashion. I am not, and perhaps will never be, well enough acquainted with my own mortality to be calm or reserved at this prospect. In the days, even weeks, leading up to a flight I must take, my brain attempts to do everything in its power to absolve me of this certain horrible fate. Considering that I should be "getting the most out of life" during these last few days only makes matters worse, because I am completely incapable of enjoying whatever I do. Everything is tainted with the stench of decay, as it were. I can in no way "eat, drink, and be merry" during these periods - I would vomit everything back up, my psyche so overwrought with fear that even watching others "be merry" becomes an insult.

If this was your last day to live, would you be satiated simply by doing whatever those things are that you enjoy? Or would it admittedly be more frantic? If you were sick, would you let it stop you? Would you bother to sleep? Could you afford to waste time traveling to some favorite destination? Would you allow your self-seeking behavior to harm others?

I think that, ultimately, the reason the question is nonsense is because it is already implied; in asking it, we force it to the forefront, the same way a phobia does. In making the question too important, we make the answers irrational. Deep down in our most ancient memories, we know, as does every living thing, that tomorrow may be our last. That fact is the framework within which we were all built, the code in which we are all written, the boundary conditions to our mathematical solution. Applying extra boundary conditions (by asking the question again) creates nonsensical solutions (in forcing us to "live" as though we weren't already living).

In two days' time, I fly out to the US, and though I desperately need what awaits me on the other side, the fact that I must travel there by plane prevents me from looking forward to it. And so, oddly enough, it is this phobia - ultimately, a fear of dying - which prevents me from truly living.

How magic is your work?

2010-05-26T19:25:00.002-04:00

If you're Dr. Kate Jones of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, the answer is very.

Inside of a nucleus, just like for the electrons in an atom, there are discrete energy levels into which the neutrons and protons can arrange themselves. In chemistry, this behavior - in electrons - leads to the periodic table: different elements behave in different ways chemically because of the number of electrons they have. More precisely, what matters is the number of electrons outside of a closed shell. I'll explain what this means.

One can (albeit simply) view the electrons of an atom as orbiting the nucleus, and the energy of the electrons are determined by the orbital in which they reside. Electrons can change orbitals, if the precise amount of energy necessary to "jump" from one orbital to another is put into the system (or carried out of the system). And because of the intrinsic nature of electrons (and all nucleons), only so many of them can be in a given orbital at once. As soon as the orbital, or "shell," is full, it's referred to as a "closed shell." The electrons in the last shell (which is typically not full) are known as valence electrons.

Interestingly, the nucleons (protons and neutrons) inside the nucleus of an atom behave in a similar way. They also pack into shells, with discrete energy differences in between. The study of this behavior has elucidated many variations on the simple theme, but one thing which continues to be of interest is the location of the "shell closures" - these locations being indicated by magic numbers. Once a magic number of nucleons (a magic number of protons, or neutrons, or both) is attained, like in the ultra-stable nucleus ²⁰⁸Pb, the nucleus behaves in a different way. It's like the "noble gases" in chemistry - helium, neon, argon, etc - which are much more stable and inert than other elements, because they have closed electron shells (in other words, magic numbers of electrons).

So the search was on for other nuclei that might be just like lead-208 because of their "magicity" (that's a great term, isn't it?). In essence, nuclear physicists wanted to find other nuclei that behave as almost perfectly magic due to their internal structure. It just so happens that tin-132, an isotope of tin with 50 protons and 82 neutrons (both magic numbers, making ¹³²Sn "doubly magic"), is one such nucleus. And Dr. Jones and her collaborators proved it (the Editor's Summary can be read for free on the Nature webpage here).

By looking one nucleon away from the doubly-magic tin isotope, at tin-133, the collaboration was able to show that the tin-133 behaved essentially like a single particle - in other words, the single nucleon outside of the closed shell of tin-132 completely dictated the behavior of the entire nucleus. That means the tin-132 "core" was as inert as it could be, precisely what you expect from a doubly-magic nucleus.

Dr. Jones and her collaborators performed the ground-breaking work at the Holifield Radioactive Ion Beam Facility (HRIBF) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee. And it couldn't have been done anywhere else. I know, because I was there. "Magical" results like this (if you'll excuse the pun) don't come easily; it takes years of work. But the reward - finding another nucleus which demonstrates so clearly the successes of the nuclear shell model - was well worth the wait.

Reference:
Jones, K., Adekola, A., Bardayan, D., Blackmon, J., Chae, K., Chipps, K., Cizewski, J., Erikson, L., Harlin, C., Hatarik, R., Kapler, R., Kozub, R., Liang, J., Livesay, R., Ma, Z., Moazen, B., Nesaraja, C., Nunes, F., Pain, S., Patterson, N., Shapira, D., Shriner, J., Smith, M., Swan, T., & Thomas, J. (2010). The magic nature of 132Sn explored through the single-particle states of 133Sn Nature, 465 (7297), 454-457 DOI: 10.1038/nature09048

Whose English?

2010-05-15T12:39:00.002-04:00

A recent article from the Daily Telegraph reads thus:

The native dunces

British undergraduates are almost three times more likely to make errors in their written English than those from overseas, research suggests.
A study of work by final-year students found that, on average, they had 52.2 punctuation, grammatical and spelling errors per paper, compared with 18.8 from the international students.
Prof[essor] Bernard Lamb, a reader in genetics at Imperial College London, and president of the Queen's English Society, who conducted the research, said the most common mistakes were disagreement in number between subjects and verbs such as "male sterility are useful" and wrong plurals as in "varietys".
"Done by my partner and I" and "a women" were among grammatical errors found. Spelling mistakes included "relevent" for relevant and "pail vains" for pale veins.
The work will be published in the society's journal, Quest, next month.