Life as a Physicist

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.

This Tuesday is Super Tuesday. Whomever you are voting for — vote!! It doesn’t matter if they look like a shoe-in in your state — get the numbers up as high as possible. Whomever wins in your state should win because a large fraction of the state is backing them!

When Bush was elected in 2000 I remember thinking “oh well… it isn’t as if one guy can really change the direction of the USA. The USA is like a super-tanker; takes years to turn it!” I did vote, but I didn’t really care that much about the out-come. I was totally wrong! With a some tragic help, he has managed to really change things. Agree or not - we need to get as many people out there voting.

And, speaking to the scientists out there, please vote your agenda. I’ve always looked as candidates from the social and economic angle - Roe v Wade support, free trade support, etc. But the recent science funding debacle tells me that we have to start yelling “science” a little bit louder this year. As I posted a bit earlier, the link to the AIP site. Read it (for example, Clinton and McCain are the only ones to talk about the roll a science advisor would play in their administration so far). If you vote other people’s agenda, then their agenda will get taken care of, not yours. Do what you can to make others around you understand that science is important and should factor into their voting decisions!

But most of all — vote!!!

I’ve been reading What’s New on-and-off for years. This is written by Bob Park and is a sarcastic take on the non-science crap that goes down (usually) in Washington. Sadly, the first entry of this week’s issue was:

1. FURLOUGH: WHAT’S NEW WILL HAVE TO TAKE A BREAK.

It will start next week. Issues of support need to be resolved. Except for the week the tree fell, it will be the first break WN has taken in 25 years. We’ll be back when we can. I appreciate all 1274 opportunities I’ve had to share my concerns with you - there is much to be concerned about.

I’ll definitely miss you Bob — I hope the support issue is worked out. And he temporarily exits the room with a bang (i.e. typical style):

2. OTHER DIMENSIONS: THE GOVERNMENT’S UFO COVERUP.

I was invited this week to join a panel of “experts” on “It’s Your Call with Lynn Doyle,” an Emmy Award-winning, viewer-interactive news talk show on the Comcast Cable Television Network. The subject was “Are we alone?”

The object was to increase advertising revenue by pandering to a public that lives in a mythical world. I was the token scientist; Ted Schick, a philosophy professor from Muhlenberg, was the other rationalist. Then there was a delusional M.D. who saw lights she couldn’t explain over Phoenix, and the delusional head of the Paradigm Research Group, devoted to exposing the imaginary UFO cover-up. But the “experts” hardly mattered; the stars were the callers, with tales of strange lights and space aliens who can walk through walls. Is that really possible? “Of course it is,” a caller explained, “quantum physics has proven it.” The aliens, another cautioned, may be in another dimension - “there are eleven you know.” What have we done?

I’ll miss the weekly dose of plain-text depressing science humor. Hope you are back soon!

“The United States is committed to strengthening our energy security and confronting global climate change. And the best way to meet these goals is for America to continue leading the way toward the development of cleaner and more energy-efficient technology.

To keep America competitive into the future, we must trust in the skill of our scientists and engineers and empower them to pursue the breakthroughs of tomorrow. Last year Congress passed legislation supporting the American Competitiveness Initiative, but never followed through with the funding. This funding is essential to keeping our scientific edge. So I ask Congress to double federal support for critical basic research in the physical sciences and ensure America remains the most dynamic nation on earth.”

From last night’s State of the Union text. I have no idea what these things mean — especially given Bush is a lame duck now. But he did mention the dropped funding. Some of us have been hoping that something might be connected to the stimulus package - but I also agree with the point that funding science is not the right way to make a short term cash infusion into the economy - but it is good for the long term health of the economy (as he mentions).

The word science occurred one other time in the speech, and its context must aggravate most medical researchers:

On matters of life and science, we must trust in the innovative spirit of medical researchers and empower them to discover new treatments while respecting moral boundaries. In November we witnessed a landmark achievement when scientists discovered a way to reprogram adult skin cells to act like embryonic stem cells. This breakthrough has the potential to move us beyond the divisive debates of the past by extending the frontiers of medicine without the destruction of human life.

It is hard to disagree with the statement “respecting moral boundaries”, at least in the abstract. Unfortunately, it is a codeword for all the stem cell research battles.

To put this in some context I looked back at his last three addresses. The American Presidency Project, among other things, keeps many past state of the union addresses in its archive. I looked back at 2007 - science is mentioned once, in the context of the no child left behind law. In 2006 it is mentioned in the context of education and also the proposal of the American Competitive Initiative - which includes doubling the science budget (which got killed). Code words also appear in the context of medical science. In 2005 the word science didn’t appear once. So 2006 was a banner year…

My Dad’s latest issue of Scientific American (Feb) just arrived. The cover carries the title: Special Report: The Future of Physics, with the short underneath it:

Hidden natural laws? Unseen dimensions? Two new particle colliders will search for answers at unimaginable energies

“Two!?” was my first thought. The first is, indeed, the LHC. The second is the ILC — the one for which all the funding was just cut. Ops. Reading the editorial I see no mention of the funding cuts, so I assume this went to press before that was known. Still, to be excited about something that has its funding slashed shows how out of touch science and politics are. For what it is worth, the authors of the articles make me think they will be good reading - I’ve not read it yet, but I’d suggest picking it up!

As a side note, I was listening to a pod-cast of Science Friday the other day and they had an interesting bit on the MESSENGER satellite’s return to Mercury. James Head, a professor from Brown University, was the guest. Early on in the interview he made the comment “science funding in the USA is at its lowest point in my lifetime.”

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) was given a 30 million dollar gift from a fund run by Charles Simonyi (20 million) and Bill Gates (10 million). The proposed telescope will scan the sky night-after-night providing time-lapse pictures at a scale and detail not previously available. It is a proven technique that has been used on a much smaller scale previously. This experiment looks to me, actually, a lot like a high energy physics detector, aimed at the sky (perhaps that is part of the reason I like it). And, perhaps, the fact that members of the UW physics department and astronomy department are involved in it.

This is old news, especially if you read other science blogs (I first saw mention of it on the 4th). But I wanted to post it for several reasons. First - this is great. I can’t tell you how happy I am to see private money like this flowing to science. I suppose it always has - especially for applied research. But the LSST is about as pure as it gets: there are no products coming out of this - this is a search for dark matter/dark energy. There are lots of ways to donate your private cash to research efforts. The one I’ve been aware of for the longest is to donate your computer time: Rosetta@Home, SETI@Home, LHC@Home, etc. But getting cash in isn’t easy - especially when you realize that $30 million is only part of the LSST’s budget (something around 170 million)!

And that brings me to the second reason I have been wanting to post to this. The LSST is marked as one of Astrophysics top priorities. Numerous reviews of the field since have all put LSST at or near the top of the list. This is one of the experiments that would likely have benefited in the doubling of the science budget that was supposed to start this year but is likely now put off (for who knows how long). The LSST is high priority enough that eventually it will be funded - though if science funding in America continues to remain very tight who knows what other smaller experiments will suffer - in a similar way that science at NASA has suffered at the hands of the Mars program. Though, for me personally, this is very different - I don’t think of a manned mission to Mars as having much scientific value and I definitely think of the LSST has having scientific value.

Finally, I used to think of large private donors as being perfect for funding things that government won’t for political reasons. Cheap drugs because they are beholden to big-pharma, for example. Disease prevention in Africa because a government doesn’t think the continent is important enough (though I note that is finally starting to change). I have always thought that funding of pure research was the duty of a good government - it isn’t something that a company should be expected to shoulder and it is obviously important for the future of the country. So I find this a bit galling as well.

The director of particle physics, Steve Kahn, at SLAC commenting on the budget cuts and the BaBar program:

As you all know, one of the consequences of the budget cut we face here at SLAC is the early conclusion of the B-factory run. Persis mentioned in her all-hands meeting that BaBar started operating in a different mode just before Christmas to make the most of the shortened run. The PEP-II accelerator team and BaBar physicists have put in a huge effort to adjust their program so rapidly to the changes imposed on us and it is testimony to their resourcefulness that this plan could be implemented so quickly.

Because they are turning off early a number of other science programs will go forward (the Tevatron, for example). What a pity!