Angry Physics

An interesting article in the NYT about two MIT-trained physicists central to the negotiations between the US and Iran.

• Despite the assertions of this piece in the Atlantic, it's not that hard to setup and run a mail server. I used to do so before my campus IT was finally successful in getting me not to. And I'm not much of an outlier.
  
• Interesting study of icicles in the NYT:
  
  
  They do not yet understand the physics of the ripple formations. But they have uncovered some strange facts. The spacing of the ripples doesn't seem to vary with different levels of impurities. "The ripples have a universal wavelength of exactly one centimeter, no matter what you do," Dr. Morris said. "That's the real mystery"
  
  
  
• I'm truly pissed with my colleagues on some committee related to dreaded outcomes assessment. Their ability to waste so much time on such trivial matters is not so surprising, but their lack of appreciation for science (even among some ostensible scientists) is astonishing and disappointing. And I suppose much of my anger is that I let myself invest a little time and allowed them to ensure it would be in vain.
  

If you pay US taxes, you might be interested in this piece from Salon about getting rid of their military academies (West Point, Naval, Air Force, and Coast Guard Academies). I had sort of drunk the Kool-Aid that these were worthwhile and produce good officers, and so it was, at the least, a very different perspective. And it's written by a full professor at one of these academies.

My last post mentioned Scott Aaronson's feelings on sexism and feminism, and now I find myself trying to find women to invite to a workshop I'm organizing. Partly it's sad how hard it is to come up with anyone, and partly I worry because sometimes I find myself thinking about whether some given candidate is attractive. Am I sexist for thinking about such a thing or am I a feminist because I admit to having such thoughts but try not to let them affect any decisions?

I've been absent quite a long time. I'd apologize if I felt like I owed you all anything :).

In case you've missed it, you might spend some time reading what Scott Aaronson has been saying about women and feminism. It's gotten a lot of attention. I'd start with his comment and then follow it with his follow-up post. Whatever you think of all that, if you have the stomach for a nice helping of bile, you might read this afterward (a comment points out the link and Scott has seen it).

I don't think I was as socially handicapped as Scott (at least when it came to finding mates), but his experiences certainly ring true. At first I wasn't sure how brave he was being, but then I recalled once asking a financial question in an online forum. I was very surprised both at the nastiness of the responses and at how much the nastiness affected me. I don't think I have terribly thin skin, but it took some time to just let the comments go.

This piece in The Economist doesn't sound correct to me. It describes a study of the citations achieved by physicists who move from one institution to another to evaluate whether more prestigious institutions inherently produce better research. I have no idea how the researchers may have controlled for the reasons and timing behind a move nor am I convinced that citations are a good pathway to an evaluation of the quality of research.

In any case however, I strongly suspect that success breeds success, regardless of institution.

This article doesn't quite match what I do all day, but it still might be of interest.

Scene: airline lounge; The view out the bountiful windows showing the setting sun as planes move silently around the tarmac.
Inside: 90% men mull about in ties and jackets; a few use the cell-phone self-importantly; The occasional family barges in. Alcohol is self-serve as are little bits of sandwiches.

I don't like jackets and I hate ties. I like to consider myself a graduate student even though those days are long gone. I'm still a sucker for free food and I prefer not to be on the phone. These folks here dress better than I, but perhaps none have as expensive a laptop nor as much time with family as I. They surely make more money than I. A very good wife, healthy if not always happy kids, and I research what has fascinated me since I was a little boy. At times, I very happy, even proud, of what I have (what I have earned).

But many physicists make more money than I, get invited to more workshops, produce more interesting research and they have families as well. I see a good talk and I want to be doing that research...to be the first to understand some cool new feature. I want people to assault me at the coffee breaks asking this or that about my research.

I don't think any of this is unhealthy, but it takes some work stabilizing these competing influences. Putting a check on any jealousy, figuring out which is more important, getting an important paper out before someone else, or seeing my child in some micro-achievement at a crowded, loud, and boring even at school...Being happy and content but yet with the drive it takes to find and answer interesting questions. They'll be calling my flight soon...anxious to return home, if only to hold my family for a few days until the next meeting.

I really like the ``Talking Points Memo" blog...though it's moved way beyond blog to a full-fledged news/analysis outlet. And so I'm happy to link to a discussion of academics and to what extent they do or should influence the real world. The discussion was kicked-off by a Kristoff column in the NYT and isn't really about the sciences. Nevertheless, folks here might find it interesting in terms of established people looking back on the paths they chose and their chosen paths (not always the same). I'm not providing much in the way of links, but things shouldn't be too hard to find.

As for Svik's request for more anger, I'll keep it in mind. The anger is surely there, but it can be hard to disguise the players appropriately.

The NYT covers the first tie in an Alpine Olympic event. The times are reported to the hundredths place, but the times are actually recorded with two more digits that were not identical for the two contestants. The tone of the article is almost like it's some conspiracy to cover up the last two digits...taking it on faith that a device which is ostensibly accurate to the ten-thousandths of a second will yield a measurement with that same accuracy despite all that is involved. It would have been nice to have a more informed discussion of why measurement uncertainty isn't so simple...perhaps elsewhere such a discussion occurs. I need to remind my students of this example.

Max Tegmark has an opinion piece in the Huffington Post arguing that the universe is not just described by mathematics, but is in fact purely mathematical. As such, it exists within some huge ensemble of other universes.

I find it rather light...in other words, not terribly convincing but giving us so little in the way of actual argument that there's little to say. I do wonder what it would take for one to construct some new, mathematical universe...can one just have a set of numbers? Do you need an operator?

Apparently, he's got a book to sell, but this piece doesn't prod me to look at it.

When I pointed out a strange acknowledgments section previously, I hadn't been aware that apparently such strangeness is common, according to an article in Slate.

Photos of large physics experiments.

Singh is coming out with a book on the math in "Simpsons." Did Homer find a counter-example to Fermat's Last Theorem? Does 3987 raised to the twelth power added to 4365 raised to the twelth power = 4472 raised to the twelth?

Bonus: I forgot to include a link to this interesting article in the NYT a few days ago about a tenured professor who got fired and arrested after Georgia Tech apparently got offended by his high-flying ways.

• In this interesting interview with George Clooney there's mention that his dog is named "Einstein."
  
• Laurie Anderson says farewell to Lou Reed in Rolling Stone and mentions regretting that she "never studied physics."
  
• A variety of business folk apparently studied physics in undergrad. Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Elon Musk of Tesla (among other ventures), and a third...but I can't place him. Maybe a reader can trigger my memory?
  

The NYT has an article on "The Repurposed Ph.D.: Finding Life After Academia — and Not Feeling Bad About It." I didn't see anything too insightful to quote, but there were some links to blogs that might be worthwhile. Are there really lots of people entering PhD programs who are not aware of the meager job prospects?

I'm all for the questioning of authority, but this seems strange...check-out the "Acknowledgments" of this paper: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1310.6052v1.pdf. I'm not sure what "caps" they're talking about...the limit of three-months of summer salary in total (from all agencies) per summer? The NSF's cap at two months? And they question the "lack of support of basic research in general"? Are they suggesting that this paper is applied, not basic? Very strange, even for Willy.

Update: Peter Woit explains at least part of the issue...NSF's salary caps on summer salary. I was thinking things were so tight for Willy that he needed a second job as an EMT, but apparently his EMT gig is as a volunteer. Also note, that there's a new version with a much more politically correct ack.

I know that I'm everyone's source for late-breaking physics-news, and so I've rushed to the terminal (neh, laptop) to update you all.

Everyone's favorite Star Trek-related author and physicist Lawrence Krauss is talking about The Higgs Boson Hangover. It's pretty mild compared to what Peter Woit might say, but then again this is in Slate and probably reaches a wider audience. The older I get, the more I realize that I continually overestimate the understanding of science and how it proceeds by the general public. And so it's good to publicize that scientists tend to want to be surprised instead of proven right.

Doug is discussing some fraud in the biomedical community about which I was completely unaware. This is, of course, part-in-parcel of how science corrects itself. Teaching the scientific method in school is all well-and-good, but I think it would behoove us to teach how science-the-enterprise corrects for the faults of those who practice it.

Slashdot today mentions a Forbes article about how I've got such a low-stress job. The link isn't working for me and so I've not read it, but apparently there's a big stink about it, and Slashdot has a number of links to some arguments against.

Finally, unrelated to physics, I wanted to link to a couple pieces by, and with, the person who turned-in Bradley Manning for allegedly leaking all those documents to Wikileaks: a very difficult piece by Adrian Lamo and a chat with him and someone else. Whatever one thinks of Manning's actions, the torture he's been put-through is awful and inexcusable.

This is a long read, but I found it pretty interesting. A guy who abandoned his goal of entering the academic linguistics world, but still had the drive to contribute bycreating a new language. But at one point he's quoted as:

I was surrounded by all these people hanging on my every word. It was intoxicating-especially for a loner like me. For one day, I got to play as an academic. I got to live this fantasy where I took the other path in the garden. I got to see what it would have been like if I had gone to graduate school and become a professional linguist. The fates of the universe tore open a window to show me what my life could have been. That night, I went back to my room, took a shower, and burst into tears.

Umm, where are these people hanging on to my every word? Am I doing this wrong?

This guy's no physicist (but did major in math as an undergrad), but he is an academic who got in trouble with financial reimbursements from his University: Sudhir Venkatesh, a sociologist at Columbia of whom you may have heard via the best-seller Freakonomics which features his work prominently.

This type of financial ''discrepancy'' doesn't seem terribly uncommon, but I don't see how this happens as much as it seems, given how tight and controlled most university's systems are. It's probably just that my mind isn't built to see the ways to abuse the system (that's not supposed to sound as immodest as it does).

His story and rise to academic stardom though is quite emblematic of how the academic world deviates from a pure meritocracy. Not to take anything away from the guy, but he clearly knows how to work the system and it's hard to believe there aren't many others who have gained far less with work just as significant.

A bit more can be found at the Freakonomics blog.

I've had a number of things to share over the past few months, but none significant enough to merit a blog posting (as if that were a high hurdle!). It even crossed my mind for the first time that Twitter might be appropriate for communication.

My physics life, as opposed to family/friends/etc, has been up-and-down recently. I was riding high, feeling confident for a while...invitations to talk or visit, emails about recent papers, new projects with interesting collaborators, a phone interview with an interesting university.

Now, not so much. No response to my latest from some folks interested in a paper. Not even a "thank you but..." from the search committee. One collaborator has gone completely AWOL, hopefully just because he's too busy. A big snafu with some refereeing has left me pissed at some editors. A bunch of grant proposals are submitted, but given the current financial situation (e.g. "fiscal cliff") facing the U.S. right now, it's hard to be optimistic.

I know things go up and down and I've got enough experience and job security to ride it out. But it's not fun.