Life as a Physicist

I got a bit of a surprise yesterday. Because I’m in France I need to vote absentee in the Washington’s primaries. Washington allows you to request an absentee ballot online, which is very cool. Unfortunately, the web site wasn’t clear about what date they would send it out. As a result I asked for it to be sent to my parents home, where I was when I ordered the ballot. At the end of the process there was an explicit date they would send it — ops! I’d be in Seattle right then (next week). There was no way to cancel the request, so I just tried submitting it again with my home address hoping they would take the newest request.

My surprise: an email from the King county Voter Services office! I don’t think there was anyway I was expecting that! I usually tend to think of election services being so understaffed that they don’t have time to consider mistakes that voters like me make.

Does anyone have reoccurring nightmares of 2004 or 2000 in this election? Sometimes the thought “this country is still divided 50-50!” springs, unbidden, into my head. About 15 seconds later I remember - wait, that is just the Democrats! So, at least that split will be ok. Of course, I expect the election to be rather bitter no matter who gets elected; swift boating has been shown to work, so I can’t see either party giving that up.

Well, that is what the Economist says in a small science and tech article:

Unfortunately for Dr. Aymar, it is Dr. Heuer who will reap the reward, for after a decade and a half in the wilderness since the United States abandoned its own plans for a giant accelerator, called the superconducting super-collider, the subject of particle physics is just about to get sexy again.

Besides the implied total write-off of the Tevatron (grrr!), cool! Glad to see that the Economist gets it. Earlier on in the article it points out why things are about to get sexy again:

Inside it, he and the thousands of other physicists who work at CERN hope to find the secrets of the universe: dark matter, dark energy, extra dimensions, tiny black holes that evaporate in an eye-blink and the origins of mass itself.

This article was written because Dr. Heuer is about to take over from Dr. Aymar as the head of CERN (a big deal, obviously). And the article was pointing out that Aymar has worked hard to make the LHC come in on time and on budget (well, sort of), but will not be director any longer when the machine turns on and starts producing physics. Bad luck, eh?

I recently managed to watch a few episodes of an old (and already dead) series called Dead Like Me. I like TV shows that tell a good story and also flirt a bit with the unreal. This is one. The story telling is just excellent. It is about a girl that is killed by a toilet seat from the falling Mir space station, and becomes (against her will) a Grim Reaper — assigned to collect the souls of people just before the die. Other than that (and that she appears as a different person to the still-living), the rules for living are the same as for everyone else. So not only does she have to hold down a crappy job in a temp agency so she has enough money to live, but she also has to run around collecting souls. Nice, huh? Ok, maybe not your cup of tea, but the story telling is excellent. It was on Showtime in 2003 and 2004 (it contains a good deal of profanity - perhaps not as much as the Sopranos). I have no idea why it canceled — perhaps no audience.

The creator went on to start another series, Pushing Daisies. I’ve also seen a few episodes of that - not nearly as good. The way they tell the story is cool — but it is also quite remote and I never find myself really caring about the characters. And more than a little spooky the narrator is Jim Dale, who read all the Harry Potter books (that was how I did the whole HP series).

Despite all the indicators, I don’t really like Lost. I know lots of physicists that are crazy about the show. And while I don’t dislike it, I never really got into it. Perhaps a generational thing?

And yes, all these things violate science. In big ways.

Does anyone else find TV Series more fascinating that Movies? I really like the character development one can do over several years rather than over 2 hours. Then there is James Bond… Wait. I didn’t say that!!

I’ve mentioned several times on this blog that the lack of new features in C++ makes me nervous. I’ve not seen Java grow much either, but that may have more to do with the blogs I look at. I saw this on Gosling’s blog, the creator of Java (and many other things — like emacs):

Java feels alive, not stuck in some chisel marks on stone tablets. Closures were left out of Java initially more because of time pressures than anything else. Closures, as a concept, are tried and true - well past the days of being PhD topics. The arguments are in the details, not the broad concepts.

I am very happy to see this sort of thing. Programming languages should be living things.

Closures are a very cool concept, btw. They come straight from functional programming, and they make it very easy to design call-backs in complex systems. Basically, I can write the following (in no particular syntax of any language that exists today - that I am aware of):

int x = 0;

vector<int> junk;

… fill the vector of int’s junk with some values…

junk.foreach (doit (int val) { x = x + val; });

I define this inner function “doit”, which is passed as an argument to the foreach method of the vector junk. The foreach method calls “doit” for each value. And do it adds to x the value generating the sum. Anyone that has used STL and the std::for_each algorithm function knows the kind of pain it causes: if you have to maintain any state between each call you end up having to create an object. In C++ that is a lot of syntatic overhead. Closures almost totally eliminate that. I’ve used the C# language, which has closures, and writing this sort of code just flows from your finger tips - in C++ you have to fight to get the code to come out, your source files become huge, and you generate all these objects you never reuse.

Maybe someday soon C++ will have this as well. That would be sweet and would make STL a whole lot more powerful — and most importantly — easy to program.

Nick asked a question on one of my posts:

Okay, humor me for a moment while I learn something: is this laughable because it suggests there are many “types” of higgs particles (which I’ve only ever seen reference to in this article) or just because the article suggests that the search is over and then quietly notes that we’re really still in the same place we were before the article was printed?

The latter. There have been discussions of the possibility of many Higgs for years — for longer than I’ve been in particle physics (>20 years - yikes! That is scary!).

How many Higgs particles depends on which world you live in. Lets say you live in the plain old Standard Model, and only the Standard Model. In that case, there is just one, the ONE Higgs. At the moment the Standard Model predicts pretty much every result we can measure. The Higgs particle was added to the original version of the Standard Model in order to get the W and Z boson masses correct — those are things we can measure today (unlike the Higgs, of course, which remains unseen).

Actually, that paragraph contains a lie — the Standard Model can’t explain everything — dark matter and dark energy, for example. There are other reasons why we think the Standard Model isn’t the whole story as well - so we have to fix it. So, on the one hand, we know it isn’t complete, but on the other hand we also know it can predict the results we measure at current experiments to amazing levels of accuracy. So, if we do fix it, we have to be careful of not breaking it in the process.

So we “extend” it. We develop new theories that “contain” the Standard Model. There are lots and lots of these theories. One of the more popular ones is called SUSY. Another is extra-dimensions. And there are more. Some of these models, like SUSY, actually contain 5 Higgs-like particles. The one that CP proposed in the paper referenced by this article also has 5 Higgs. In these extensions, btw, they must still get the W and Z masses correct - as the Standard Model does — and that is what Marcella (I think!) is complaining about: You might find another Higgs like particle, but the one in this model that does the work of the Higgs that gets the masses of the fermions and bosons like the W and Z right is still going to be just as hard to find.

On the other hand, finding a light Higgs as suggested would be a revelation. And grounds for a Nobel prize if the theory was born out. So the article that CP wrote is just fine. I was complaining about the way the press wrote it up.

Or should I remember that all press is good press?

I am so in the wrong business.

Clinton tried to raise 3 million in 3 days. She missed. She raised 4 million in 24 hours! Where is that cash going to go? Straight into the pockets of TV stations. The Obama and Clinton campaign must be spending at a furious rate right now, buying up blocks of time in markets that are not used to mattering at this point in the race (can you say “unexpected windfall”??).

What we could do with that kind of money…

P.S. I wrote a few posts ahead of time, but they seem to have all come out today. Sorry about that!

I am so in the wrong business.

Clinton tried to raise 3 million in 3 days. She missed. She raised 4 million in 24 hours! Where is that cash going to go? Straight into the pockets of TV stations. The Obama and Clinton campaign must be spending at a furious rate right now, buying up blocks of time in markets that are not used to mattering at this point in the race (can you say “unexpected windfall”??).

What we could do with that kind of money…

P.S. I wrote a few posts ahead of time, but they seem to have all come out today. Sorry about that!

These two got married last Saturday morning. This would never happen in the USA - and if it did - the guy would never be taken seriously again. Or at least, he would be subject to a continuous swift-boating operation by the opposition.

The woman is Carla Bruni. The guy is Nicolas Sarkozy. Sarko is the current president of France. Under normal circumstances that isn’t the same as being the president of the USA: the prime minister of France does most of the day-to-day heavy lifting in the government. However, Sarko is a “go-to” guy. He is one of those “there is a problem. I’ll solve it right now.”

Along those lines, he got divorced in October. I suppose he had a problem. On Saturday morning, he fixed it. BTW, Carla looks almost identical to his former wife, Cecila, just about 10 or 15 years younger.

Can you imagine if this happened in the USA? Is this guy fit to run our country if he can’t keep his marriage intact? He got married so quickly - was there something going on behind Cecila’s back? How awful! Must impeach him now (I’ve not seen any hints in papers that that is the case - but that may have to do with my poor french…).

That isn’t to say that many French wonder about the swiftness of the romance and you can imagine the difficulty in protocol when a state visit occurs and you bring your girl friend along.

I wonder if a single guy could ever make it to the presidency of the USA in modern times? How about a widower?

A while back I wrote that I had supported Bill Foster’s candidacy for congress. The thank-you note finally got here (took a long time as I’m living in France and it went to Seattle!). The letter indicated that he had actually read this blog. That is one of the fun things about donating to a local campaign as opposed to a big national one — the candidates might actually have some time to interact.

I was listening to a pod-cast of the political conversation from last Friday on the Leher News Hour. A conservative columnist (from the New York times, of course) and a liberal columnest have a friendly conversation. I think it was Brooks who said “You vote for Clinton if you want information, you vote for Obama if you want inspiration.” That is one of the best descriptions I’ve seen of the differences in style - if you look at the answers to the AIP candidate questions of the two you’ll see it: Clinton has laundry lists of programs and funding - she has clearly given running this country a lot of thought already. Obama is sparse on detail and all about vision. My preference tends towards the “detail” right now — I’m a little scared by the current fellow in office not being detail oriented enough. But I think either one will make a great candidate - and I think either will flatten any republican that looks likely to win if they continue their sorry performance (i.e. McCain in the last debate - I kind-a like him, but that was pretty nasty).

Ok, I’m not really willing to go that far. But as almost everyone has seen, Bush submitted his budget. Since he is lame duck I have no idea what it means, and considering the size of his military request among other things, I don’t know how much will be listened to. But… if one were to cherry pick…

Looking at the Office of Science, DOE section of the budget (see page 9) - btw, Office of Science is the largest single science funding agency in the government — their budget for basic science (all types) is larger than the NSF’s — we see that in 2007 3.844 billion was spent. That increased to 3.973 billion in 2008 (an estimate, of course). The request for 2009? A cool 4.722. Nice. Particle physics and fusion science get some of the largest increases - perhaps to make up for the harsh cuts of this last year.

Now, can we get everyone pointing in the same direction again - and can we prevent it from getting killed at the last minute? Actually, can we even get parts of congress to support it so that it makes it into their bills?

The NSF isn’t doing badly either — a 14-16% increase has been requested. This is nice because the NSF is the agency that directly funds my group at UW. The detailed document has Mathematical and physical sciences going from 1.151 billion to 1.403 billion. Included in the overview: “$148 million for the design or construction of four major new cutting-edge research facilities in astronomy and physics, and $115 million for a diverse portfolio of smaller-sized instruments and other tools.” It is hard to see, in the details, exactly how that money is put in, but that is great news. I can think of several projects that deserve to get a chunk of this!

Now we just have to make it happen.