The Nano Soda Bottle

Bizarre follow up to my post yesterday about the BNL scientists who have submitted a spintronics patent: This morning just before 9am, I (Steinberg) received this email:

Dear Mr Zalizyak

I have just read an article about your nano electron and the spin like double magnetic field.

I have already applied for patent on such technology and further I have used the concept and the technology for production of electricity.

I think you will find a very great areas of collaboration and conflict of patent.

My application for overall claim has been published , so I am sure we will create conflict of interest.

I produce nano materials in layers in SP3 multiplayer in a cola bottle in room temperature and atmospheric condition.

I am sure if you provided us with your patent claim number we will have covered this.

My claim goes back to October 2005.

Please contact me, that we can rectify the matter otherwise we have to take steps that you can not issue licences.

Best regards

M T Keshe

from someone whose address reads "c de roose (fb855828@******.be)" (I'll block out part of the email so as to not attract the robot again...). So "Mr. de Roose" sends a mail for "Mr. Keshe" (Ms.?)? Spin-like double magnetic field to produce electricity in a soda bottle? Looks/sounds like a scam to me. Anyone seen this kind of thing before?

Rocks, Trees, Strings

I'm a little slow to catch this sooner, but Google news just dug up this new release from the Princeton press office, regarding a relatively new PRL from Igor Klebanov and collaborators (OK, a month ago, but this is Physics, folks, not political news). Believe it or not, "A Test of the AdS/CFT correspondence using high-spin operators" may well be about more quotidien objects than quarks, gluons, or strings. From the press release:

"These problems include describing the interactions among the quarks within everyday atomic nuclei," said Igor Klebanov, the Thomas D. Jones Professor of Mathematical Physics at Princeton and an author of a recent paper on the subject. "We have previously been able to study these interactions in detail only at the high-energy conditions within particle accelerators, but with these findings we may be able to describe what's happening inside the atoms that make up rocks and trees. We cannot do so yet, but it appears that the math of string theory could be what we need to bridge this gap."

I must admit that both this paper, and the Beisert et al work (in the Journal of Statistical Mechanics) on which it was based, are a bit beyond me due to the hard-core field theory, but times change: can anyone boil this down and explain the consequences for someone in the trenches? Here's one attempt, in the press release, explaining how these results bridge the weak coupling regime (the domain of perturbation theory) and strong coupling (the domain of string theory techniques):

"Beisert and his collaborators made an inspired guess based on sophisticated notions of gauge theory behavior," said Curtis Callan, the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Physics at Princeton. "Their equation allowed Igor and his colleagues to work out the 'transition' between the two regimes. They demonstrated that it exactly matched string theory's predictions at the strong interaction limit. That was the hard part."

GMMs, QGPs, and BNL (at the USPTO?)

I'm a little slow on the uptake this week, with all the interesting things to write about (and photos to take, etc. -- i have a fantastic new 50mm fixed lens for my Nikon...). But I didn't want to let this one pass me (and thus you all) by, since it involves one of those bizarre-but-true synergies you could only get at a place like BNL:

An interdisciplinary group of scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory has devised methods to make a new class of electronic devices based on a property of electrons known as “spin,” rather than merely their electric charge. This approach, dubbed spintronics, could open the way to increasing dramatically the productivity of electronic devices operating at the nanoscale — on the order of billionths of a meter. The Brookhaven scientists have filed a U.S. provisional patent application for their invention, which is now available for licensing.

The topic is doing spintronics (making logic gates, etc.) using "graphene-magnet multilayers" (GMMs), a 2 dimensional layer of graphite in a hexagonal pattern which can propagate spin excitations:

“Graphene is quite unique,” Zaliznyak says, “in that an ideally balanced sheet is neither a conductor nor an insulator. Related to this is the fact that electrons in graphene behave in such a way that their mass effectively vanishes!” In other words, he explains, they move without inertia, like rays of light or particles accelerated to relativistic speeds — that is, close to the speed of light.

Such relativistic particles are studied at Brookhaven at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a nuclear physics facility where scientists are trying to understand the fundamental properties and forces of matter. RHIC theoretical physicist Dmitri Kharzeev and condensed matter physicist Alexei Tsvelik have collaborated with Zaliznyak to gain a better understanding of the physics of magnetized graphene.

Now if only they'd forget about this patent business, I could actually tell you what they were talking about. But who knew RHIC physics would apply to 2D spin systems?...

6-0 on Video

As promised, here is the view from the tower of all of us in "BNL 60" formation. Looks pretty good from up there -- and the time lapse video looks even better. I'm the dude in black who starts on the lower-left, then keeps making scouting runs to take photos...

In any case, I hope the lab gets this posted on YouTube sometime soon, so I can post the video right here!

BNL 60 Photo

BNL 60 Photos (2)

A whole lot of us gathered in the huge field near the BNL center today to commemorate BNL's 60th anniversary by spelling out "BNL 60" in huge letters. Roger, one of the long-time BNL photographers, perched himself on the huge blue water tower, looking down at us, and shouted down orders which some followed (and some didn't...)

Anyway, I hope we get to see one of the top-down photos soon. In the meantime, here are some of my bottom-up shots - in a Flickr set.

Response to the Response (Smolin vs. Polchinski)

Wow, I'm on fire today: 4 posts. Maybe it's that May 1 deadline, but maybe it's because there's just a lot of fun debate about physics going on, and a lot of it references the physics I do and love. Case in point: Lee Smolin has posted a reply to Joe Polchinski's online (Cosmic Variance guest blog) review of Smolin's The Trouble With Physics (something which I always meant to review online, but somehow lost my way...). I have no idea how I would have found this, except for randomly bumping into it on Peter Woit's webpage.

Anyway, I feel no particular authority to comment on most of Smolin's comments on Polchinski's comments, but just wanted to point out Smolin's comments on the applicability to heavy ion physics:

With regard to heavy ion physics, yes the applications of the AdS/CFT duality to this are interesting and important. But they should not be exaggerated. Polchinski does so when he says, “And so the quantum gravity that is manifesting itself in dual form at Brookhaven is likely to be the same one that operates everywhere else in the universe.” First because there is no quantum gravity here, in this particular application only the correspondence with classical supergravity arises. Second, what is the basis for the “likely” here? I can imagine an aether theorist making the same argument: aether theory must be right because after a lot of work the principle of relativity of inertial frames was shown to be a consequence of the dynamics of the aether, therefore since nature “uses a small number of principles in diverse ways”, the aether must be the right explanation for why this principle is observed in nature. Further, it remains the case that the calculations behind these claims are done with an extended super-symmetric theory, when real QCD has no super-symmetries at all. It may be that they get some things approximately right for reasons that have nothing to do with string theory, such as the use of a scale invariant theory to provide a rough approximation of a non-scale invariant theory, in an experimental regime which has approximate scaling.

I might want to comment that for any approach to "get something approximately right", if it's "merely" scale invariance, this is somewhat of a cause for celebration in heavy ions, considering the non-perturbative regime we seem to have found ourselves. Even if string theory was a mere excuse to get to the "right" ingredients for a useful theory, then it's worth the (continually fascinating) endeavors of the string community.

That said, even I have been somewhat confused about the "ontological" status of AdS/CFT as it related to RHIC physics. I asked Polchinski about this in early 2004 (when he spoke at Quark Matter 2004 in Oakland, CA), trying to see if the applicability of AdS/CFT meant that string theory was somehow "in" the physics we do at RHIC, unification and all. I remember him having no particular difficulty in saying yes to this, as reflected in the sentence Smolin quotes. Would that it were true, but I'm still more comfortable saying that it's a "mathematical" connection between RHIC physics and black holes, leaving the more subtle (i.e. physical) connections for the experts!

LHC Update: No Test Run

What a disaster. I missed this Scientific American piece last Thursday about "Magnet Trouble Likely to Complicate Start of Large Hadron Collider". The disaster isn't missing the article, but what it means for the machine, people, detectors, and even some physics. Naturally, any and every delay creates logistical issues for the machine installation, which is already enormously complicated even when things stick to the plan. But it's also somewhat tricky for all of the people who have already started trying to plan their lives around the potential machine schedules, i.e. when they and their postdocs and students should be at CERN. The detectors will suffer a bit since they won't get to take "test" data while the machine is ramping up. But finally, the physics community will be missing a chance to improve the "energy scan" of collider data. The original test run was supposed to be at "injection energy" (900 GeV), without any acceleration in the LHC itself. While there exists a huge volume of useful collider data from UA1/2/etc on particle multiplicities, spectra, jets, etc, this is all around 20 years old by now. Many measurements at RHIC and the Tevatron have already pointed towards wanting to measure these things much more precisely and in greater experimental detail.

I know this was a major reason for me wanting to get to the LHC early, so I admit that I'm pretty disappointed, but life goes on...

Robot Wars, Geneva - Solved

Robot Wars, Geneva

I blogged about this a bit over a year ago, somewhat baffled by the appearance of this videogame-inspired mosaic above a street sign in downtown geneva. Now today K pointed me to this post on nymag.com about "space invader in D.U.M.B.O. area", which links to a Paris-based art site that has this interactive map of Geneva. Apparently the invasion has already taken place, and evidence is all over the city. Now I know what I should be doing next time I have a free afternoon on a sunny day during my next trip to CERN...

Light Through a Lens

For those colleagues of mine who don't keep up with the science blogs, even one as enjoyable as Backreaction, be sure to check out Sabine's recent guest blogger in her "Inspirations" series: former spokesman of the PHENIX experiment at RHIC, Bill Zajc. Bill is one of heavy ion physics' more eloquent spokespeople in general (e.g. see the story on RHIC physics he co-wrote for Scientific American last spring), and this latest example is no exception. And only one typo -- pretty good for a long blog piece (sorry, Bill!).

(shameless self-promotion of the day #1: Pertaining to this post, I did a piece for this way back in February.)

(shameless self-promotion #2: I'm going to be getting some official sponsorship starting tomorrow, when I'll be blogging as part of BNL's 60th aniverssary. Nice to have some pressure once in a while!)

UPDATE: Brant suggested I mention Bill's Wikipedia entry, for no other reason than the fact that he has one.

Fact-check of the week: Friedman vs. Einstein vs. Friedman

Nice to see a meditation on Einstein and intellectual freedom discussed in Friedman's op-ed today (OK, so it's Walter Isaacson's meditation -- couldn't a few more non-cliched Einstein quotes have made it in there?) but the Gray Lady's top man and editorial staff has let down its man it seems:

Tom Friedman says:

"If Einstein were alive today and learned science the boring way it is taught in so many U.S. schools, wouldn’t he have ended up at a Wall Street hedge fund rather than developing theories of relativity for a Nobel Prize?"

Nobelprize.org says:

"Albert Einstein: 'for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect'"

I know I sound like splitting hairs here, but this didn't take more than a quick Google check. More importantly, it's always been very noticeable that he didn't get his prize for relativity, which everyone knows is his most important historical achievement (despite the photoelectric effect, requiring quanta of light, being his most self-admittedly "radical"). It's not hard to dig a little, e.g. this Discover piece from this year, based on research from Robert Marc Friedman (ironic -- wonder if he's a relative?) to get the story that the Nobel Committee actively didn't want him to get a prize for relativity, in a cultural context where "his theories were dismissed as 'world-bluffing Jewish physics' by some prominent German physicists, who claimed to practice "true" German science based on observations of the natural world and hypotheses that could be tested in a laboratory." And while his star was rising in the US, and the physics community pressed for him to get the prize, especially after Eddington confirming general relativity,

1921 was not the year, thanks to one stubborn senior member of the prize committee, ophthalmologist Allvar Gullstrand. "Einstein must never receive a Nobel Prize, even if the whole world demands it," said Gullstrand, according to a Swedish mathematician's diary dug up by Friedman. Gullstrand's arguments, however biased, convinced the rest of the committee. In 1921, the Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded no physics prize.

You get the picture. This is a great story about how a politicized culture worked against Einstein at his peak, such that an opthamologist could hold him back. At least one Friedman picked up on this.

And You May Ask Yourself

How did I get here? Today I had a chance to try and explain my random walk to physics at a Career Panel held at CCNY. I was one of four speakers, the others being Rachel Connolly, Manager of Astrophysics Education at the Rose Center for Earth and Space, American Museum of Natural History, Joshua Spodek, Entrepreneurial Physicist (of linear zoetrope fame -- dig his news coverage), and Christina Tosti, Biomedical Engineer at Columbia. We had a great audience of about 40-50 CCNY students and staff, and about 90 minutes to share our stories, which had more than a few surprising wrinkles (major changes, aborted degrees, stints in the navy...). But I think it was fun for everyone there to see how our various choices got us to places we liked, and jobs we enjoyed.

My slides are online, posted here.

Circus in the Mist

Circus April 2007

As New York suffered torrential rainfall, K and I managed to score a few cheap seats for the Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey circus down the street at Madison Square Garden. We had hoped to take some younger relatives but we still had an excellent time with just us adults. Clowns, elephants, acrobats, tigers - all there. You can find a few of my photos in a Flickr set.

Pop Quiz

Just poking around Cosmic Variance this morning (as if I have time, given my trip to Chicago this evening for a PHOBOS collaboration meeting...) and stumbled upon this: a cocktail party primer about string theory. Now, love it or hate it, string theory has captured most of the available mindshare for theoretical physics (kind of like the LHC in experimental physics), so it's great to see my people (i.e. RHIC) namechecked at the bottom:

Still, particle physics experiments being performed with collisions of very heavy ions at Brookhaven National Laboratory and with proton collisions at CERN could connect string theory with reality.

And we're already running. Now.

OK, so things aren't so easy when trying to connect experimental data with a theory that doesn't really predict anything yet. But as I've tried to point out where possible, people are clearly trying -- and it's interesting how even something which might be "wrong" (in the ontological sense) might nudge people intellectually in directions they hadn't considered, which may well lead us to something that is "right" (same sense). My money is that a similar story will play out at the LHC. No matter what will be observed, people will certainly try to say 1) it's nothing (e.g. DuRujula, below) 2) it's something out of the standard model so boring, or 3) it's exotic -- soit's proof of string theory! Of course there are worlds of exotica which people don't talk about anymore, and worlds to be discovered until the data is solidified (cf. LSND/MiniBoone).

All of this will prove (once again) that data rarely speaks by itself, and even if it tries, it tends to speak quite slowly...Ok, I really have to finish a few things now.

ATLAS in RHIC News

A few weeks ago, I mentioned the new "RHIC News" which
is already on its third issue. And this one is special, since yours truly has contributed a piece on the BNL involvement in the ATLAS heavy ion program. I was hoping to make the case that the LHC will be a natural, and essential, next step for the science we have been doing at RHIC (and at lower-energy facilities at CERN and BNL). Even better, all of the LHC detectors will be able to make contributions to this scientific effort, when the machine collides ions sometime in the next few years.

Now if only they could get those magnets sorted out...

On The Radio

It's becoming clear that the LHC, even with the setbacks of two weeks ago, is starting to gain a lot of mindshare in the media. To keep up with the one-article-per-week-it-seems, NPR's David Kestenbaum (a former physicist himself) has reported a piece from CERN. rapping with Alvaro de Rujula (who I heard give a great set of lectures on gamma ray bursts in Erice a few years back). While I'm not a big fan of the "nothing is interesting" (i.e. finding no Higgs might be more important than finding one) scenario, de Rujula clearly feels no need to hold back. Have a listen!

Oh, Lordi (I'm in Finland)

Another quiescent period, but I've been at CERN all week (ATLAS trigger/physics week) and now in the land of Lordi (Finland for those who don't pay attention to Eurovision winners, or read articles in the Times about them...). Actually, I'm at a workshop in Jyvaskyla, a few hundred kilometers north of Helsinki, staying in a gleaming, white hotel on an frozen lake. And there's a suspension bridge just in front that leads to the gleaming, white Physics Department here at the University of Jyvaskyla.

It's looking like a rough week, with a student lecture to deliver on Monday ("Introduction to Hydrodynamics" - and I don't even do hydro) and a talk to give on Tuesday morning ("Consequences of Early Thermalization" etc., so once again, with feeling -- and more details). But no pain, no gain, I suppose.

Extra Extra

If you have a fixin' for RHIC news, and find yourself scouring the arxiv after Quark Matter conferences, you need look no further than the just released "RHIC News". It's planning to be a bi-weekly release, with new content from RHIC scientists and updates from the machine and experiments. For more on the philosophy, and even how to contribute (that means you, RHIC scientist!), you can read John and Susan's introduction.

String Debate '07

The String Wars of 2006 continue, but are kicking it up a notch in 2007 with the first (that I've heard) String Debate. And not just debate as in "let's argue in journals or magazines or newspapers" but debate as in:

String Theory: Brian Greene and Lawrence Krauss Debate Co-sponsored with the Department of Energy’s Office of Science
It comes down to this: Are all things in nature actually super-tiny bits of strings that are vibrating strands of energy? If so, string theory would merge general relativity and quantum mechanics, and would explain the origin of space, time, and the universe itself. Or is the theory, as some critics claim, just extraordinarily complex mathematics which may have nothing to do with physics and a theory of nothing, not everything? If so, physicists are back to the drawing board in their quest for the Holy Grail of physics—an ultimate theory of everything.

For those of you in DC in a couple of weeks, this will be happening at the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian, moderated by Michael Turner.

But seriously folks, who benefits from these kinds of debates, besides the obvious rock-star experience seeing two charismatic speaker/performer/scientists argue in real life? Then again, who wants to imagine Greene and Krauss snapping fingers at each other, going "Bring it!"? In sum, I'm not sure (as it's mildly fun to watch smart people argue, despite the inevitable vacuousness of any result from this particular debate...kind of like the WWE, right?). All I know is

Greene is a professor of physics and professor of mathematics at Columbia University; Krauss is Ambrose Swasey professor of physics and a professor of astronomy at Case Western Reserve University; and Turner is the Rauner Distinguished Service professor in the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago.

so Greene, lacking a titled chair, which even the moderator has, is already racing to catch up.

(Thanks, Burt!)

Mistakes Were Made

I generally try and avoid politics in my blogging, but the political firing of federal prosecutors really irks me, reeking of the anti-democratic odors one has picked up emanating from this administration for years. That said, how often does a national figure (i.e. AG Gonzales) quote Matt Groening's Life in Hell: "I accept that mistakes were made"? OK, seriously, Groening was was quoting Reagan but was Gonzales (who gets mixed style points for combining active and passive voice in the same sentence)?

In trying to remember where that phrase came from, I found a blog post by Caterina "Flickr" Fake on the subject, and she found a great excerpt from Charles Baxter on the subject. Totally relevant now, and totally excellent.

What difference does it make to writers of stories if public figures are denying their responsibility for their own actions? So what if they are, in effect, refusing to tell their own stories accurately? ... Well, to make an obvious point, they create a climate in which social narratives are designed to be deliberately incoherent and misleading. Such narratives humiliate the act of storytelling. You can argue that only a coherent narrative can manage to explain public events, and you can reconstruct a story if someone says, "I made a mistake," or "We did that." You can't reconstruct a story — you can't even know what the story is— if everyone is saying, "Mistakes were made." Who made them? Everybody made them and no one did, and it's history anyway, so let's forget about it. Every story is a history, however, and when there is no comprehensible story, there is no history. The past, under these circumstances, becomes an unreadable mess.

(Please don't ask me where I got a copy of LiH, since more people should be allowed to see them online! Google will reveal all.)

UPDATE: Gee those New York Times reporters know lots of stuff about mistakes.

Freeman (Dyson) in New York

Why do I ever leave the apartment without a camera? K and I left the house on Sunday afternoon with a few errands and some work to do, but knew that our final destination was the Guggenheim Museum. The goal was to see "El Greco to Picasso" (at least for 15-20 minutes after bumping into one of my oldest college friends who lives in Turkey, etc. -- can anyone reading this quantify the effective area of the entire planet, once network effects are taken into account?), find somewhere to eat on the Upper East Side (Cafe Alsace, found by accident given Saigon Grill's unexpected renovations, was pretty great), and then to see Freeman Dyson talk about "How We Might Have Gone To Mars in 1965."

Freeman Dyson. I nearly jumped when I got the email announcing this late last week. Here's a guy who has made a mark in real science (QED, Schwinger-Dyson equations etc.), real science & military policy (JASON, test-ban treaties), and even science "fiction" (Dyson spheres, Dyson trees -- on comets no less) and written more than a few books for general consumption. And he's 84, so no time to waste. Then again, K and I saw him being guided through the main exhibition and he looked pretty spry, regardless of age.

Anyway, no time today to go into how great his talk was, or to explain the context in detail. Bottom line: Project Orion - a spaceship to explore the solar system (carrying real scientists in addition to astronauts, even, a la the Beagle) powered by several thousand 1-kiloton nuclear bombs, deployed via what was planned to be essentially a Coke-bottle dispenser (General Atomic even consulted with Coca-Cola about this!). The powerpoint (prepared by his son George, one famous child among six, who wrote the definitive history about Orion several years ago) was incredible, simple and full of 1) archival images, many declassified for George Dyson's book, and 2) honest-to-God information, which he would let us read. And finally, he answered questions, lots of them, and even the ones which were completely off topic. After we left the theater (downstairs at the Guggenheim and clearly unaltered Frank Lloyd Wright -- itself worth the price of admission) and the post-talk reception (an extremely gracious touch, but where K noticed that no-one seemed to be getting Dyson a glass of water -- so she brought him one!) we basically flew home. It was a really well-executed Sunday event by Dyson and the Guggenheim, and we'll be back.

So back to that camera. I normally post my own images from these kind of things (e.g. the theater, Dyson, his slides, etc) But no luck this time, having left said camera at home. But frustratingly, I can't find any images online of Orion as it was shown in Dyson's talk. All one finds are images from the NASA-influenced "final" design, which was ultimately cut. Dyson didn't have many nice things to say about it, so I will just show something based on Jules Verne's "From the Earth to the Moon", which was, according to Dyson, literally how they imagined the Orion spaceship for most of its project lifetime.

Two Minutes or Less

In a group meeting yesterday, my colleagues pointed me to this interesting, um, contest, from Discover Magazine.

The Challenge
Just over a century ago, Albert Einstein published three groundbreaking scientific papers in one year, any one of which could have won him the Nobel Prize.

Taking a cue from The Great One, Discover.com is now challenging armchair theorists to produce a similar feat of inspired - and speedy - brilliance.

Your goal is to create a video that quickly and clearly explains perhaps the most baffling idea in the history of the world: string theory.

And the best part is that you have just two minutes.

The Opportunity
The winning video will be selected by Columbia University physicist Brian Greene, best-selling author of The Elegant Universe and The Fabric of the Cosmos, and broadcast via a prominent spot on the homepage of Discover.com.

The individual or team who submits the best video will be featured in an upcoming issue of Discover Magazine.

The Rules
The video should present an accurate, basic understanding of string theory that will stick in the brains of relatively intelligent non-scientists.

You can use any teaching aides you like (props, animation, etc.)

Submissions will be accepted from individuals and teams (subject to the terms and conditions).

Don't go over the time limit.

I wish I could explain anything in two minutes. My only question is why you wouldn't just go straight to YouTube...

Going and Coming Home

Sorry for the unintended break. It's not that I have a maximum number of words per week, but I had to finish up a few things before a 5 day trip to Ireland for a wedding. My first time, and highly recommended (for me to go back, that is -- I don't normally try and give travel advice).

Anyway here's the first thing I come back to, in the new issue of Physics News Update (It's a broken link for now -- I get this via email):

STRING THEORY EXPLAINS RHIC JET SUPPRESSION. String theory argues that all matter is composed of string-like shreds in a 10-dimensional hyperspace assembled in various forms. It has won acclaim from many who appreciate the theory’s elegant mathematics and ambition to unite quantum mechanics and general relativity, and skepticism from others who cite the theory’s lack of a practical track record. String theory, the doubters say, makes no testable predictions. But this isn’t exactly true. Indeed, the theory has not yet been experimentally vindicated in the realm of quantum gravity, but has been put into play in the realm of high-energy ion collisions, the kind carried out at Brookhaven’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). A few years ago string practitioners attempted to establish a relationship between the 10-dimensional string world and the 4-dimensional (3 spatial dimensions plus time) world in which we observe interactions among quark-filled particles like protons (for background, see Physics Today, May 2005). This duality between string theory and the theory of the strong nuclear force, quantum chromodynamics (QCD), was recently used to interpret puzzling early results from RHIC, namely the suppression of energetic quark jets that should have emerged from the fireball formed when two heavy nuclei (such as gold) collide head on. The thinking was thatperhaps the plasma of quarks and gluons (quarks bursting free from their customary proton and meson groupings) wasn’t a gas of weakly interacting particles (as was originally thought) but a gas of strongly interacting particles, so strong that any energetic quarks that might have escaped the fireball (initiating a secondary avalanche, or jet, or quarks) would quickly be slowed and stripped of energy on its way through the tumultuous quark-gluon plasma (QGP) environment. Two new papers by Hong Liu and Krishna Rajagopal of (MIT) and Urs Wiedemann (CERN) address this problem. The first paper calculates a specific quark-suppression parameter (namely, how much the quarks, each attached to a string dangling "downward" into a fifth dimension, are pushed around as they traverse the quark-gluon plasma) that agrees closely with the experimentally observed value. Rajagopal (krishna@ctp.mit.edu, 617-253-6202) says that in the second paper, the same authors make a specific testable prediction using string theory that bears not just on missing jets of energetic light quarks (up, down, and strange quarks), but on the melting or dissociation temperatures of bound states of heavy quarks (charm-anticharm or bottom-antibottom pairs) moving through the quark-gluon plasma with sufficiently high velocity, as will be produced in future experiments at RHIC and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) under construction at CERN. (Physical Review Letters: first paper in the 3 November 2006 issue; second paper, upcoming article)

Wow that's a long "blurb". No wonder we have such trouble explaining how this all fits together. You have to explain most of modern physics in the same paragraph. Anyway, so we're done (i.e. String Theory Explains RHIC Physics)? I can go home now?

OK, seriously: Nothing brand new (i.e. I heard all of this in China in November) but interesting to see it bubble up to the level of news. While it is nascent phenomenology for now (at least to my eyes/ears), it bodes well for a fascinating future ahead of us. Follow the references and citations of these papers and you'll find a rapidly-growing community of theorists getting in on the action. What do they usually say about exponential growth?...

Why I Am A Physicist

Once in a while you get the chance to bare your physicist's soul in the harsh light of the physioblogophere, and today is my chance. Sabine Hossenfelder co-writes a great, funny blog called Backreaction (which I've posted to several times, and which I've seen mentioned in various realms of said ogosphere), and as part of an email thread starting with me asking her to put in a good word for me at the Perimeter Institute (where I'm still interested to give a RHIC seminar someday), she ended up asking me to contribute a few words on "Why I became a physicist". I have to admit that I didn't expect to get into high memoir mode, but I did (and in a bit more than a few words, I now notice), partially inspired by a very moving piece about Ron Mallett I heard on This American Life a few weeks ago. So here it is, bigger hair and all (and thanks to K for taking the photo at Storm King Art Center back in October)

Starlings

Speaking of excellent, I'm totally smitten by this photograph: "Migration of starlings, Algeria", a 2nd place prizewinner in the Nature category of the World Press Photo 2007 Winners Gallery.

2001: Central Park

2001 Central Park

K and I stumbled on this, if one can think it possible to "stumble" on anything sitting on the southeast corner of Central Park, kitty-corner to the Apple Store. It's Liz Larner's "2001", a 12'x12'x12' mashup of a huge sphere and a huge cube, coated with essentially resilient automobile paint that reflects different colors from different angles. Excellent.

Science Creative Quarterly

My god, a McSweeney's for creative science types. With knots and badges for Science Scouts, no less. I guess I qualify for Badge #6 ("The 'I blog about science' badge") and Badge #32 ("The 'I've done science with no concievable practical application' badge") and maybe #23 ("The 'I work with way too much radioactivity, and yet still no discernable superpowers yet' badge"). Do I qualify for Eagle Science Scout yet? Heck, I never even made it to cub scout meetings when I was a kiddo in the 70's. Too bad, as I'd surely invalidate SCQ's recent Valentine's Day Hypothesis #1 "All we need is love".

The project looks neat. Thanks to the intermittently-posting Collision Detection for pointing to it. Clive also points to this outrageous video of a glowing giant squid. Glowing. Giant. Squid. Egads.

Forever Blowing Bubbles

Catching up on ATLAS work today, but while waiting for my Athena (software) to compile I'm catching up on some physics blogs. Bee, from Backreaction (whom I'll be guest-blogging for in the next week or so!) has linked to an older post of hers on "Water in Zero Gravity". Most people who've spoken to me in the last few years know that I've become mildly obsessed with fluid behaviors of all sorts, in the vain hope that I'll collect enough insight to better understand the "near perfect fluid" we think we're making at RHIC.

This one will haunt my dreams for a while. And this one (1930 animation, totally off-topic, downloadable here) will haunt yours (i.e. it's old, weird, fascinating -- and nominally children's entertainment. Go figure!)

Penrose's Universe (@ BNL 2/6/07)

Roger Penrose stopped by Brookhaven early this week, to discuss his views on the Big Bang...and before. While I'm still working through what he seems to be saying (that the universe somehow serves as the "inflationary" period for the universe which succeeds it...) I found his slides particularly evocative and managed to get a few photographs. Enjoy!

Quantum Computer History

Not sure how or why I missed this yesterday, but I was really busy. Really. But really, quantum computing is now technology that can be demonstrated? Last I checked, it was still a messy tech on the bench, and thought to be incredibly fragile. Now D-Wave is "ready to make computer history" (but shouldn't that be "computing history"?) with it's Orion system:

The Orion system is a hardware accelerator designed to solve a particular NP-complete problem called the two dimensional Ising model in a magnetic field. It is built around a 16-qubit superconducting adiabatic quantum computer processor. The system is designed to be used in concert with a conventional front end for any application that requires the solution of an NP-complete problem.

Of course, the skepticism level is still high:

"This is somewhat like claims of cold fusion," said Professor Andrew Steane of Oxford University's Centre for Quantum Computing. "I doubt that this computing method is substantially easier to achieve than any other."

But wait a minute, that D-wave blog post says that:

At the demo, what we’re going to do is run two different applications, live, on an Orion system residing in Burnaby, BC. Orion is designed such that it can be used remotely, and this is the mode we’ll be using for the demos.

They're going to run a hardware demo in California on brand-new, highly-anticipated, but widely-doubted technology, and the hardware will be a thousand miles away from the demonstration site? Not the greatest marketing concept I've ever heard, and it won't do much to fend off those skeptics no matter how well it seems to work. We'll check back next week.

But in the meantime, D-wave's blog also points to a paper on arxiv.org on the Orion's architecture. Arxiv? Did I mention that I was really busy yesterday? And this news is burning up the gadget blogs, e.g. check out these images posted to Gizmodo...

Nuke You Less

Stumbled on this NYT blog piece by...Dick Cavett?...on a subject near and dear to my heart, and a mainstay of my cocktail party banter: just why W refuses to say "nuclear" correctly. Everyone knows it's "new clear", but even now, more than six years after "winning" the 2000 election, he insistently, deliberately says "nuke you lur" over, and over, and over again. Really, I've learned to accept it as the usual follow-up joke people make when I tell them my profession for the first time. While it instinctively drives me nuts, it's not a matter of personal and professional pride. I certainly agree with Cavett that it's a slight to the English language. But I have also thought that it's his way of being stubborn in the face of criticism from "intellectuals", whom he probably ultimately as effete ineffectuals, worrying about pronunciation when there are more important things to deal with in the post-9/11 world. But of course this is the same stubborn disregard that has gotten him and his colleagues and our country into such trouble in the past -- and which continues unchecked to this day.

Anyway, I heard Andy Rooney riff on this on 60 minutes when I surfed by CBS at the gym last week. And I like Cavett's transliterations, especially "nuke-you-luss". I'll have to sneak that into a talk one of these days. And I'm not going to reflect on "nuke you less" in the light of Seymour Hersh's reporting on the Administration's plans for Iran.

(And an interesting footnote: surfing around Google images to find a nice image of a nukeyouless, there are a lot more cells than subatomic clusters of nucleons... A sign of the times?)

Steve Jobs vs. DRM

I know this isn't in my official purview, but I've hated DRM on my iPod just like everyone else. But, Lo and behold, Steve Jobs doesn't like DRM either and is willing to speak out against it on the Apple website:

Though the big four music companies require that all their music sold online be protected with DRMs, these same music companies continue to sell billions of CDs a year which contain completely unprotected music. That’s right! No DRM system was ever developed for the CD, so all the music distributed on CDs can be easily uploaded to the Internet, then (illegally) downloaded and played on any computer or player.

In 2006, under 2 billion DRM-protected songs were sold worldwide by online stores, while over 20 billion songs were sold completely DRM-free and unprotected on CDs by the music companies themselves. The music companies sell the vast majority of their music DRM-free, and show no signs of changing this behavior, since the overwhelming majority of their revenues depend on selling CDs which must play in CD players that support no DRM system.

So if the music companies are selling over 90 percent of their music DRM-free, what benefits do they get from selling the remaining small percentage of their music encumbered with a DRM system? There appear to be none. If anything, the technical expertise and overhead required to create, operate and update a DRM system has limited the number of participants selling DRM protected music. If such requirements were removed, the music industry might experience an influx of new companies willing to invest in innovative new stores and players. This can only be seen as a positive by the music companies.

Much of the concern over DRM systems has arisen in European countries. Perhaps those unhappy with the current situation should redirect their energies towards persuading the music companies to sell their music DRM-free. For Europeans, two and a half of the big four music companies are located right in their backyard. The largest, Universal, is 100% owned by Vivendi, a French company. EMI is a British company, and Sony BMG is 50% owned by Bertelsmann, a German company. Convincing them to license their music to Apple and others DRM-free will create a truly interoperable music marketplace. Apple will embrace this wholeheartedly.

It's way too fun to imagine Steve actually reading this outloud, in his inimitable (well, highly imitable, but you know what I mean) style. Right on, Brother. Next, Bill Gates has to make Windows free, or at least cheap, to keep those Russian schoolteachers out of Siberian prison.

Entertaining Science vs. the Super Bowl

Yes, despite being a longtime Chicagoan, I missed more than half of the Superbowl by attending Roald Hoffman's "Entertaining Science" series on Sunday evening at the Cornelia Street Cafe down in Greenwich Village. And while I felt more than a little twinge of traitorious guilt, I really enjoyed the talk (on organic chemistry, no less) by Karl Anker Jørgensen of Aarhus. The theme of the last couple of programs has been the role of "mirror molecules", and I never cease to be surprised by the wildly different functions of chiral molecules (e.g. peppermint vs. caraway) and their benign and malign effects on biological processes (e.g. sugar substitutes vs. thalodomide). Next program is Sunday, March 4 -- see you there.

What is the, ahem, LHC?

Just stumbled on this, in the "Big Questions" piece in the recent Wired magazine. John Hodgman (full disclosure: whom I went to school with years ago...) reports:

What is the Large Hadron Collider?
The Large Hardon Collider is a giant particle accelerator: a 17-mile-long tunnel beneath Switzerland and France. With it, scientists hope to isolate the Higgs boson, the particle that could explain mass. Some worry that the Hardon Collider is too big and could create a black hole that, while awesome, would destroy Earth. Is such a huge Hardon Collider worth it? Why are you laughing? Oh. Oh. I see. My mistake. I meant to say “Large Erection Collider.”

I've never heard this joke before. I swear.

Not Exactly a Hollywood Ending, 2007 Edition (i.e. RHIC funded in 2007)

Sometimes we get incredible surprises, like the Renaissance Technology intervention at the end of 2005, but this time we get, well, surprises...like the 2007 budget as it was promised to us last year. No small thing, given the huge transitions in the Congress. Anyway, In the email box this morning (Thanks, Susan!):

"Energy Dept. Assures Delegation It Will Fully Fund Brookhaven's RHIC Program, Significantly Fund NSLS-II
...
Editor's Note: The following is a joint statement released from the offices of Senator Charles Schumer, Senator Hillary Clinton and Congressman Tim Bishop.
...
Following this week’s announcement that the Department of Energy’s Office of Science will receive a $200 million increase for the FY 2007 from its FY 2006 funding level, yesterday, DOE Office of Science Director Raymond Orbach assured Senators Schumer and Clinton and Congressman Bishop that the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) program will be fully funded for FY 2007 and the National Synchotron Light Source II (NSLS II) program will be significantly funded for FY 2007. Orbach’s assurance is a huge victory for Brookhaven National Labs which was girding itself for devastating budget cuts.

On Tuesday, Senator Schumer sent a letter to the Office of Science urging it to use its increased budget to fully fund RHIC and NSLS II. Yesterday, Schumer followed-up with a phone call to Director Orbach and secured assurances that RHIC would be fully funded and NSLS II would be significantly funded for FY 2007.

“I’m thrilled that Director Orbach responded so quickly to our request, and that he understands the huge impact Brookhaven’s programs have on our nation’s scientific research and Long Island’s high-tech job market,” said Senator Schumer. “Continued funding for these two cutting-edge programs will help ensure that American science remains a global leader.”

Here's more of the press release hosted by the BNL press office. This is really great news -- and now we can go back to our regular programming. Lots of entropy to bound out there.

Silence

Sometimes you just gotta go. While I'm totally knuckled under with papers papers papers (catching up from last year's conferences this year...) K's friend was showing a piece in an opening of "[silence]". I somehow managed to survive the mild traffic home (although the LIE is generally quiescent in winter for the most part) by nearly finishing up my listen to David Foster Wallace's excellent (if ridiculously-abridged) audiobook of "Consider the Lobster" and wound my way from the Midtown Tunnel to Franklin Street in Tribeca to Gigantic Artspace. There I walked into a maelstrom of, well, sound. Not exactly silent at all, as one of the pieces consisted of transmitters and various radios. K's friend Michelle Rosenberg had a lovely piece: a necklace made of headphone speakers, delicately connected by wires that conducted the signal being delivered by a pen-size Sony radio. Couldn't hear it above the din (silence, indeed) but it looked great.

In the way back was another fun piece, this one by Douglas Repetto. This one was a room-sized array of wooden blocks (shown on that web page), densely packed, suspended from the ceiling by thin wires. A switch was placed at head-level with "puff" on a slat of plywood. Blowing on it tripped the switch, which activated a small gadget near the ceiling that jostled one of the blocks hard enough to induce some "sound waves" in the "liquid" of blocks. I see physics everywhere, but this one wasn't trying to hide it at all.

Congressional Update

So the budget battle wages on, but a major victory happened yesterday, the implications of which are outlined in this Science article. One can find all of the blow-by-blows here on the house web page. This includes real honest-to-god blow-by-blows on the floor and a full roll-call of yeas and nays. Democrats were all-in, but only 30% of the Republicans went for it, 140 of them voting against (and with some prominent abstensions, e.g. Hastert). Are they angry about the earmarks removed so as to free up $130M for the DOE's discretion?

Gonna Sit Right Down and Write [Appropriators] A Letter

As I should have mentioned previously, this year's RHIC run depends crucially on legislative action to get us over the funding "hole" incurred by the inaction of the new Congress to pass a budget. There are several letters going around Congress, where the representatives and senators are being asked to support increases of funding to the DOE Office of Science and the National Science foundation. The current status of the letters is here, as posted on the AIP FYI web site. I and many of my colleagues participated in this process by writing letters to our local Congressmen asking them to sign this.

Apparently, the House will be considering legislation to finish up the 2007 budget process (good thing too, considering we're already 4 months into FY07!). Here's hoping they get the job done this time.

A Day Off

There is an iron law of professional physics: for every talk you give, there is some sort of proceedings (be it conference, workshop, meeting) to write. Thus, I've been having lots of trouble blogging, since all of my writing mojo has been used up by the end of each and every working day. And yet, it's a new year, the LHC is looming, my serial deadlines have almost run their course, and there are interesting new things popping up daily.

The last few days have been a brief respite from work, work-related travel, and family-related holiday travel (Woodstock, Vermont, Chicago, etc.) K and I decided to take our lives back for a day and remind ourselves about all the outrageously interesting things one can do in NYC, given one has time to take a deep breath and look around.

So just in one day we: 1) zipped through the Chelsea galleries (this despite Jed Perl's withering assessment of the current scene in the New Republic, subscription required though...), seeing neat stuff by Kim Keever at Kinz, Tillou + Feigen, Adi Nes' photographs portraying biblical scenes at Jack Shainman, and Marc Newson at Gagosian, 2) headed down to the Angel Orensanz Center on Norfolk to see Bill Morrison and Michael Gordon's "Decasia" live with at least 6 screens (does the decaying altar count as a "screen"?) and 55 musicians tucked into the balconies playing seemingly-asynchronous punctuated polyrhythms, all in the service of a beautiful montage of decaying vintage film stock (David Bowie was there too, seated about 10 feet from us. Dude.) and 3) grabbed dinner at Momofuku Ssam Bar on 2nd and 13th (the burrito -- ssam -- was fine but nothing special, but the urchin was tasty and the grilled mackerel stellar, as were the rice-coated ice cream balls). Not a bad day at all.

Budget Battles, Redux

As good an update as any. As some of you may have read, RHIC is once again in the news. Not for new discoveries or technical progress, but because, once again, our funding is at peril, just as it was at the end of 2005. And the reason is the same, since the new congress has neglected to pass a 2007 budget at all, instead letting the government coast on a "continuing resolution" that nominally keeps all programs funded at last year's levels. Of course, with the normal rate of inflation, this translates into a 3-4% cut. On top of that, the '06 budget was notoriously stingy to RHIC science, requiring an infusion of $13M from private investors who realized that the return to investment was enormous (i.e. by investing less than 10% of the operating budget, they would be responsible for making good on a full year's operation). Anyway, no-one expects a similar Hollywood Ending this year, so an entire RHIC year remains on the block.

Unless.

Unless the Congress can pass legislation modifying the continuing resolution to allow reallocation of money within the Department of Energy. The money exists (leftover from completed projects) and it's just a matter of Congressional effort now.

Stay tuned.

The Vanguard

Maybe Lisa Randall was just paying me back a few karma points for linking my masses of readers to her online interview. Or not. In any case, here she is touting the virtues of science at RHIC in a Seed magazine piece on "The Vanguard of Science":

Also of interest is the recent application of string theory to the physics being done at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), where string theory permits some calculations that would otherwise be intractable. The idea at RHIC is to better understand the strong force that binds together the elements of a nucleon, and 2007 may see the theoretical advances of string theory inform the experimental results from RHIC.