Life as a Physicist

Today is February 10th. I sat outside at a cafe and read parts of my graduate students thesis today. Let me repeat that: I sat outside. Outside. This is February 10th. It was almost 55 degrees. Outside. Whatever the root cause, it is nice…

We are doomed! Doomed, I tell you! I saw this headline in the Seattle Times today:

Petraeus’ Iraq staff armed with lots of Ph.D.s

WASHINGTON — Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, who takes over today as U.S. commander in Iraq, is assembling a band of warrior-intellectuals in a crucial effort to reverse the downward trend in the Iraq war.

Members include a quirky Australian anthropologist, a Princeton economist who is the son of a former U.S. attorney general and a military expert on the Vietnam War sharply critical of its top commanders.

Petraeus is the new commander in charge of Iraq and implementing the surge and, well, bringing the country under control.

I like the headline: calling out a stark difference between the usual behavior in the Bush whitehouse (avoidance of science and other over-educated people).  But when it comes down to this sort of thing I just hope these people with lots of education also have lots of experience. Iraq needs both a good deep background (i.e. education), experience, and the ability to be flexible. All three of these things have been missing from the Bush administration: the people he often appoints are political appointees — people who have little experience in their assigned task, frequently have not been schooled in the task at hand, and, like him, stick to a plan long after it is obvious it isn’t working well.

I wish this group good luck. I don’t see that there is a good outcome here, just less bad ones. And I hope that if it does fail, instead of looking for the latest scapegoat, Petraeus, we’ll remember that it is a long history that got us here full of mistakes and unaccomplished missions. I wish him best of luck. From the comfort of my sitting chair this seems like an almost impossible task.

… Which begs the question: had we had a good group in charge of Iraq from the start, would the idea of fostering a democracy there have ever had a chance? I suppose we’ll never know, and I sure as heck hope that we don’t try to repeat the same exercise in another country anytime soon.

The continuing resolution recently made it out of the house. I was a little worried that it would not treat science well by keeping funding levels the same as they were the year before (as is often done in a CR). That turned out not to be the case, fortunately: the house did add additional funds for both the DOE’s Office of Science and also the NSF. While the funds weren’t restored to the full level of the original budget request, they are enough to avert most of the dire consequences. I’m not sure where this is in the Senate, but I hope it makes it out! BTW, check out that first link. I have no idea how the lobbyist from UW managed to decipher that and determine actual break outs. It must take a long time to read that law-speak. And I can see how things could slip in unnoticed!

The president recently sent his budget to congress. And thus we start again. I’m curious to see if congress can complete its job this time. The budget still calls for a doubling of the budgets of the NSF, DOE’s Office of Science, and NIST over 10 years. So, check this out. Bush asks for an increase of $57 billion in various discretionary accounts (science is in that bucket). But he routes almost $3.6 billion to security-related spending — which means about a 1% increase in discretionary spending: way less than inflation. In other words, an overall cut.

But science does fairly well. The key is that lots of other stuff got cut. So this could end up being a fight between science and all the other good stuff that got cut, I suppose. The NSF sees a 6.8% increase. The DOE’s Office of Science is looking at a 7% increase. Fusion science gets a large chunk of that (hmm, think that came up at dinner the other night). All of this is great — more science funding is fantastic. But now congress will argue over it, so we’ll see how things make out in the end. If Congress gets its job done, the budget bills will be passed by Oct 1st. We’ll see.

We are deep in the middle of faculty candidate interviews. These things are stressful for everyone — though mostly the candidates, of course! But one nice thing is the dinners. After the candidate gives their big colloquia talk they are taking out to dinner by the department. I know it is going to sound like I’m whining (yes, I am), but doing a nice dinner twice a week is more than I really like. On the other hand, the conversation is great.

These dinners are small and informal — about 6 people usually. The last two I’ve been to have been for the astrophysics candidates. At the first dinner we had, among other things, a huge discussion on what experiment currently on the blocks would be the next Gravity Probe B experiment. The reasons people thought it wasn’t a good experiment weren’t discussed at length at the meeting, but I assume it is because people figured out how to accomplish the same thing much more cheaply (i.e. on the ground instead of in space) and also beat the experiment to its results (Gravity Probe B has not yet released its results and has had a lot of trouble controlling systematics). Everyone had to pony up a guess. This dinner was last week, so I’ve conveniently forgotten the list. But it was a lot of fun.

Last nights dinner hit on another, related topic: Scientific Risk. When we judge grant proposals we often ask “how important is the science?” and “is this project technically feasible for the money requested?” Scientific risk asks the question: given this project will take 20 years to complete, what are the chances that someone else will come up with a clever way to do this experiment more cheaply? I didn’t realize how connected the two topics were until I did a little research on the Gravity Probe B experiment, but given the people were the same I guess it isn’t surprising.

The conversations are, of course, much more broad than what I’ve related here. But these were two things that really stuck in my mind. I think there are 3 more dinners before we are done…

My uncle is a lawyer and a painter. Recently he got an award for his painting and in the pamphlet it was listed as an “Attroney”. Poking fun, I asked what that was and here, in typical Uncle fasion, is what came back:

    Fortunately  my regular medium was “on duty” and was able to contact my OLD law professor Julius Goebel, an expert in legal history, now buried  along with the now long defunct origins of legal jargon “in the dark backward and abysm of time.”

    “To the best of my knowledge and belief, affiant sayeth as follows:”

    The term “attroney” arrived in England at or about 1066 (Norman Conquest??) along with the quaint Norman notion that trial by combat (”le tournament”) was the best way to go since all disputes were invariably settled (”dead and buried”, so to speak).
    A certain somewhat shady breed of character was known to haunt these episodes, offering to “stand in” for the hapless accused. These initially carried the moniker: “a toro nez” or “bull nose” in honor of their noticeably pugnacious character and ability to extract hansome fees.
    While intially uncomfortable with these hangers on, the English (in true accomodating fashion) eventually accepted these “a toro nez” under the not inappropriate elsion: “Attroney.”
     Unfortunately too many of these characters would inhabit the assizes, acompanied by the perjorative: “Ah, trow ‘im out.”
    With due regard for “too close for comfort” an association was formed and, in honor of its rising influence, decreed that its members should be known as “attorney” instead of “attroney“, thereby masking in a cloak of false dignity what was obviously an occupation whose nefarious shadyness had only grown over the years.
    Naturally the rewriting of history would not be complete without a wholesale expungement of any reference to the now-hated term in any dictionary, even that of Samuel Johnson (not ever known for being comprehensive).
    Such tortured exercises are not unknown in English literature, but invariably serve a useful purpose. For example, who cannot but lament the fate of poor Frederick whose luckless apprenticeship to a “pirate” was to last until 1940? If only there had been a less confusing name!

    “Further affiant sayeth not.”

I flew back from Chicago today. It was freezing: pumping gas with no gloves was dangerous. It is -8 F as I write this, comfortable back in my home in Seattle at a balmy 45 F. But Chicago didn’t seem to care much: it was all a joke — the Bears were in the superbowl. Almost every United Airlines gate in Chicago had a big Bear’s sticker slapped on it. About a quarter of the people were wearing Bear’s clothing. It looked like half the staff had left their uniforms home and replaced it with a Bears jersey. It was great.

I don’t really follow sports. Tomorrow it will be a little colder in Chicago. And for that I’m definitely sorry.

So, it might be time to eat my words! I understand there is a news conference on Thursday at which Barry Barish will announce the cost of the International Linear Collider — the machine that many of see as the next logical step in high energy particle physics. How many interaction regions? How many billions? What energy? There are rumors out there, but I’m not going to report them; Thursday comes soon enough!

I mentioned the great talk Craig Hogan gave about the proposed LISA project. He and others will be giving these talks around the country: they have just finished a science review and are trying to influence the NASA Beyond Einstein committee (well, to make sure they have all the facts!).

• A discussion of the science that LISA might or might not see
• A discussion of the space mission (note that Craig is a theorist, as he repeated noted while he was giving this portion of the talk).

The 1/2 a billion project has a lot going for it. It is “cool” (heck, three laser interferometers trailing the earth spaced at a distance of 5 million kilometers - you don’t get much cooler than that). There is a lot we don’t know about how stars interact. Well, I should say there is a lot we do know, and there are some rather distinctive signals that LISA might show and that would tell us how good our model was. And, finally, an argument that has been made a lot in the halls of UW is that every time you turn on a new telescope you see something new and unexpected (i.e. the Cosmic Microwave Background). Finally, there is way more dark matter than any other kind of matter and we know it does interact gravitationally (and we don’t know much else), so why not have something that is sensitive to gravity!?

I’m not entirely convinced of the science case. For one thing this will really be the first instrument that we can build to study gravity waves. You might point to LIGO, in southern Washington. That is a great prototype, indeed. But its sensitivity, unfortunately, is severely limited — and only just begins to touch on what we might see with LISA. 1/2 a billion bucks is a big leap. And if you do see gravity waves that you can’t explain (i.e. that are due to dark matter) what do you learn over things like the galaxy crashing observation?

On the other hand, they are talking about real international collaboration (indeed, the Europeans seem to be out ahead of the US when it comes to this — something that is happening more and more often) which should reduce the USA price tag.

Heck. What we really need is for the science budget to get a good boost! Then this would be totally worth it!

CDF has invited Aran to their single top meeting to talk about our single top results. They sent us a list of questions so that we could prepare some background materials. It is quite a list! What is nice is almost all of the questions were asked during our internal review so it is just a matter of sorting through the information.

Good luck, Aran!

For a meeting that was scheduled to happen tomorrow, I just got the following email canceling tomorrow’s meeting:

All of the speakers for tomorrow’s meeting are two days from having really great results to show.  Unfortunately, tomorrow is only one day away.