Be Careful What You Publish

I'm a little late in posting this, but I thought this ought to be discussed. We've talked a lot about the report of superluminal neutrinos and how the erroneous measurement was apparently caused by a loose cable and some clock drift. Well, apparently Dario Auterio and Antonio Ereditato both resigned from their positions as OPERA team leaders after the final investigations concluded and OPERA's collaboration board gave them a vote of "no confidence." I was personally just surprised at the direction all of this took.

Kepler Finds A Possibly Live One

The Kepler mission has been looking for planets that might have liquid water (and therefore life as we know it) and it looks like they have their first confirmed candidate - the oh-so-memorably-named Kepler 22b.  Kepler 22b, or just 22b for short, has a radius 2.4 times as big as the Earth's and orbits a star that has roughly 2% less mass than the Sun every 289 days. That places it right at the inner edge of that star's habitable zone (the range of distances from their star where planets might have liquid water), as illustrated by this lovely NASA graphic.

If you assume an Earth-like greenhouse effect for 22b (which is a big assumption considering Venus and Mars have drastically different atmospheres than Earth), the mean surface temperature (assuming it has a surface) would be a balmy but not unreasonable 22 degrees Celsius compared to Earth's mean surface temperature of about 14 degrees Celsius.

NASA likes to call this type of planet a "Super-Earth", however that's something of a misnomer as planets with more than twice the radius of Earth probably aren't primarily rocky planets like Earth, Venus, and Mars but rather more like smaller, defrosted versions of our solar system's ice giants, Neptune and Uranus.  Using planetary structure models, one can map out the range of possible compositions for a planet of a given radius (remember with Kepler's transit data they know the planet's size but not it's mass).

As you can see, 22b likely has a composition with significant amounts of hydrogen and helium, which means it may have a very thick, deep atmosphere. Alternatively it could have very large amounts of water, but at this point there's just no way to tell what it's made of as the planet is too far from it's star to be detected using the radial velocity technique, which can determine a planet's mass.  It's possible that space telescopes like Hubble and Spitzer might be able to get some information on the composition of the planet's atmosphere, but most likely this one is going to have to wait for new telescopes and instruments to be characterized more fully.

The best part is that 22b is not alone.  The Kepler team only officially announces a planet as discovered when they can confirm it using another telescope (here they used Spitzer to verify a transit), but the list of "planet candidates" in habitable zones is growing.  As of the now, there are about a half-dozen planet candidates in habitable zones that are smaller than 22b. 

As Kepler approaches it's third anniversary, expect those numbers to increase dramatically.  You can already see the trend by comparing the numbers of planets from the June 2010 (in blue), February 2011 (in red), and December 2011 (in yellow) data releases.

You can find the official NASA press release here and the slides from that press release (which are the source of these lovely images) here.

Yahoo! Makes Black Holes Hip

Disclaimer:  As a certified nerd in high school, I never really knew what the kids were saying even when I was one of them, so "hip" may not be the right word.  Whatever the appropriate vernacular, Yahoo! is doing it for news about black holes - complete with pop culture analogies.  You can see the video here (curse you Yahoo! and your lack of embedding options).  The specific "discovery" they reference was an observation of a peculiar gamma ray burst by the SWIFT satellite, which is a pretty amazing bit of science and certainly worthy of mention.  Besides, everybody likes black holes due to their position on the top of the cosmic sexiness ladder.

As someone who once hoped to model almost exactly what was observed, I have to say that Yahoo! did a decent job with the science.  Sure, they make it sound like we have close-up video of the event rather than a brief gamma ray point source and they think astrophysicists wear lab-coats and write "science" on glass plates, but those are forgivable mistakes in my book.  My only two questions are how can we get more videos like this and why for the love of everything holy don't they have an embed option?

Shameless Self-Promotion: Read Me in the APS News

Many people have their 15 minutes of fame - mine started once the APS News (the monthly newsletter of the American Physical Society) hit mail boxes in physics departments everywhere.  That's right, if you open your October 2011 issue of to page 4 you'll see an exceptionally well-written letter to the editor about the need for physicists to stop blaming politicians for recent funding disappointments and get active promoting basic science research to the public.

In all seriousness, I would recommend that we all look into joining Scientists and Engineers for America, which "is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that encourages technically-trained citizens to become more engaged in US politics and the policy-making process", or another organization like it.  The issues facing science funding are clearly political, but generally not partisan.  Pretty much everyone from both parties thinks it's a good idea to develop the science that will enable new technologies the way electromagnetism has enabled the development of wireless communication, but if we don't make our case effectively to the public some one else will convince politicians with short attention-spans to funnel resources elsewhere.

Big News: Einstein Is Still Right

A couple weeks ago I posted that the OPERA collaboration had measured neutrinos moving faster than the speed of light in violation of Einstein's theory of special relativity.  The experiment was very simple - neutrinos produced at CERN on the broader between Switzerland and France were shot towards a detector in Italy.  The time between the pulses' creation and detection was measured using atomic clocks and the distance traveled was measured using GPS satellites.  The result was that on average the neutrinos arrived 60 nanoseconds faster than if they moved at the speed of light.

It turns out that the problem wasn't too much Einstein but rather not enough.  A Dutch physicist named Ronald van Elburg found that the OPERA team made a small mistake in the way they applied special relativistic corrections due to the velocity of the GPS satellites.  This correction to the OPERA team's calculation should decrease the travel time of the neutrinos by 64 nanoseconds.  You can read the pre-print here.

In response, Einstein says:

Nobel for Supernovae and Dark Energy

The Nobel Prize in Physics this year will go to Saul Perlmutter of UC-Berkeley, Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute at Johns Hopkins, and Brian Schmidt of the Austrialian National University for their co-discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe caused by dark energy.  Perlmutter founded the Supernova Cosmology Project, while Riess and Schmidt founded the High-Z Supernova Search Team.  These two group announced in 1998 that observations of extremely distant supernovae showed that the expansion of the universe was accelerating through a still mysterious force known as dark energy. 

This has to go down as one of the least surprising Nobel announcements in recent history.  The discovery that 3/4 of the mass energy of the universe is in some mysterious form that behaves as a sort-of anti-gravity was a block-buster from the day it was announced.  The fact that subsequent work has confirmed this discovery continues to emphasize its importance.  Good call on this one, Nobel committee.

Final Tevatron Shutdown

In addition to a great conference weekend, there was another item of note this last weekend. This weekend, the Tevatron, Fermilab's principle accelerator had its final shutdown. The Tevatron, completed in 1983, held the record for the highest energy particle accelerator in the world until 2009, when it was surpassed by the LHC.



The accelerator's list of milestones is impressive by any standards. The Tevatron announced the discovery of the top quark in 1995, with a measurement of its mass by 2007. The B_C meson was detected in 1998, the tau neutrino in 2000, and the Sigma_b, Cascade-b, Omega_b and Xi_b baryons detected in 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2011, respectively.

In the Discovery News article reporting the shutdown, Jennifer Ouellette gives an impressive quote from Robert Wilson, the first director of Fermilab. When asked before a congressional committee what the new, proposed Fermilab would be good for, he responded,

It has only to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of man, our love of culture. It has to do with: Are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? I mean all the things we really venerate in our country and are patriotic about. It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to make it worth defending.

Neutrinos Behaving Badly

The OPERA Collaboration has announced what they claim is a 6-sigma measurement that neutrinos move faster than the speed of light in a vacuum (see stories by Nature and the BBC).  OPERA is an Italian experiment designed to measure neutrino oscillations in a stream of the elusive sub-atomic particles coming from CERN.  To date they have detected the arrival of over 16,000 neutrinos (which is quite a few considering how hard it is to stop a neutrino) and now they claim that they have good evidence that those particles move just a hair faster than what was thought to be the universal speed limit.

The OPERA folks are being very cautious with their claims and the point out that this could simply be some systematic error for which they haven't accounted.  Interestingly, Nature is reporting that there was some evidence for similar speeding neutrinos at the MINOS neutrino experiment, but that the distance from Fermilab (where the neutrinos were being made) to the MINOS detector wasn't know to sufficient precision to be able to make such a claim.

So what does this mean?  The joke that half of all 3-sigma results are false rings in my ears.  If I had to bet, my money would be on some sort of error or some effect of a previous theory that accounts for the apparent effect.  I guarantee that there will be a lot of very smart experimentalists thinking about systematic errors in measuring neutrino speeds and that there will be a whole slew of papers from theorists showing that super-luminal neutrinos are predicted by their brand of quantum gravity, super-symmetry, or f(R) theory of gravity.  What does it mean if this is true?  Well, we can start by going back to the drawing board on relativity.

UPDATE:  The paper is up on the arXiv here.  I am not a particle physicist, but it looks like they have done a very nice, careful job in not over-selling their result.  The measured velocity was about 7430 +/- 1740 m/s faster than the speed of light.

One other interesting note:  When the famous supernova 1987A went off in our friendly neighborhood Large Magellanic Cloud, neutrino bursts were measured at three different detectors around the globe about 3 hours before the first light from the supernova was seen.  This is generally explained because 1987A was a core-collapse supernova and while the neutrinos it produced could simply stream outward through the outer layers of the collapsing star, the light could not and therefore was delayed slightly.  That supernova was about 168,000 light-years away.  Assuming that neutrinos actual do travel faster than light by the amount measured by the OPERA team, those neutrinos should have arrived 4 years prior to the first light from the supernova.  Things like this are why most physicists are looking for a problem with the experiment rather than throwing relativity out the window.

Osama Got Jimmered

Unless you've been living in a cave in Afghanistan or a luxury fortress in eastern Pakistan without phone or Internet access for the past couple weeks, you already know the news.  But some enterprising BYU students put it best with the following sign in Provo, UT near BYU's campus (click to embiggen):

Couldn't have put it better myself.

[Hat Tip to Jay Drew's BYU Sports Blog]

Finally, The Navy Has Laser Guns

If we look at older science fiction (think the original Star Trek), we can see that there are some technological advancements they got very wrong.  We already have better computer displays than whatever Spock was looking into and my cell phone is already smaller than Captain Kirk's.  But for all of our advancements, there is one area in which we are way behind what people in the 60's thought:  laser guns.  It seems like everybody thought we'd trade in bullets for batteries by now.

Well they may not have been that far off.  From the Associated Press:

The Navy for the first time last week successfully tested a solid-state high-energy laser from a ship. The beam, which was aimed at a boat moving through turbulent Pacific Ocean waters, set the target's engine on fire... The baseball-sized laser beam... could be used to stop small crafts from approaching naval ships. It could also target pirates.

That's right - the Navy is going to be shooting pirates with lasers.  We live in an age of wonders.

Of course the whole laser gun thing turns out to be a little less cool than what the starship Enterprise has.  Here's the movie:

So there are no sound effects or explosions and nobody is getting vaporized anytime soon, but hey, I suppose we shouldn't be too hard on ourselves since we still have 300 years to develop phasers.

BYU Law School #2 If Value Is Considered?

As a BYU alumni, I have to give a shout-out whenever I see something worthy of praise.  BYU has yet another reason to feel it gives an exceptional education for the money: Malcom Gladwell, as reported by the Wall Street Journal, ranks BYU's law school as #2 in the country behind the University of Chicago after "the school’s affordability [is taken into account] in its rankings".

Here are the top ten law schools, as reported in this Wall Street Journal article, after affordability is considered:

1. Chicago
2. BYU
3. Harvard
4. Yale
5. Texas
6. Virginia
7. Colorado
8. Alabama
9. Stanford
10. Penn

Anyways, congrats BYU for yet another example of providing a great education for the money!

“I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords”

Well, I'm going to steal a quick news article. We may not have our warp drives or teleporters yet, but we recently got a good deal closer to the world pictured by Star Trek. In a special exhibition show on "Jeopardy!", an I.B.M. supercomputer named "Watson" defeated Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter -- two well-known Jeopardy champions. After realizing that Watson's lead was too great to overtake, under his correct Final Jeopardy answer Ken Jennings wrote "I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords" (taking the line from a Simpsons episode).

It's interesting living in in a world where Deep Blue can defeat Kasparov, and Watson can best Jennings; where we find directions from Google rather than from a map, and where someone can print and bind a book as cheaply as a library can lend it. (FYI, as I understand, it costs the Harvard library about $3 every time someone checks out a book (mostly for paperwork and re-stocking), but the Internet Archive bookmobile can download, print and bind a book for just about $1.)

I.B.M. is looking at using this question answering technology as a programmable physician's assistant. It's admittedly next to impossible to predict upcoming innovations like this, but I'd like to ask where else you see things like this leading? Where do you think this kind of technology will go, and how will it affect daily life? Is this technology going to go down as a major breakthrough, or do you see it as essentially Google / Wolfram Alpha with voice recognition? What else do you see computers doing in the near future?

We Might Have A Live One: First Possibly Habitable Extrasolar Planet Found

People have been freaking out of the possibility of finding habitable extra-solar planets for close to a decade now.  It looks like they might just have their first candidate:  Gliese 581g  or Gg to it's friends.  You can see the press release or the 50 page preprint for those of you that want the gory details.

The Lick-Carnegie collaboration used over 11 years of continuous radial velocity measurement of the star Gliese 581, a nearby red dwarf star with about 30% of the mass of the sun (type M3V for you astronomers out there) that is already known to have two other small planets right on the inner and outer edges of the star's habitable zone - effectively jumbo-sized versions of Venus and Mars.  Gg, however is right smack dab in the middle of the habitable zone with an estimated average surface temperature of 228 K - chilly but not "lifeless chunk of ice" cold.  Also helping things out is the fact that planetary evolution models indicate that Gg is probably tidally locked to its sun, meaning that one side is in eternal day and the other in eternal night.  This might allow the planet to have a wide range of temperatures - from scorching hot at eternal noon to extremely cold at eternal midnight.  Gg is also about 30% more massive than the earth, meaning it's gravity is probably something like 10% stronger than ours, which might be helpful in holding on to an atmosphere.

So when do we send tourists?  Probably not for a very long time.  Gliese 581 is about 20 light-years away and our current fastest moving spacecraft (Voyager 2) is only going about 0.001% of the speed of light, so it'll be a very long time before we get a probe there to check it out, much less a person to write a travel review.  And it gets worse.  Since Gg's orbit doesn't happen to line up with our line of sight its sun, we can't even use satellites like CoRoT or Kepler to watch Gg transit across its sun.  It looks like more information on Gg is going to have to wait for the next generations of missions like SIM-lite or New World Explorer which should be able to directly image it.

NRC PhD Program Rankings Are Coming... For Reals This Time

The premier ranking of PhD programs in the US comes from the National Research Council's "Assessment of Research Doctorate Programs", in which leading academics compile the results of extensive surveys, publication data, grant information, and a bit of voodoo (just for fun).  This wealth of data is then made into some sort of ranking system, upon which every graduate program in the country will pounce and then come to the conclusion that they are ranked highly in some way.  More usefully, it will give prospective graduate students some sort of semi-objective ranking system upon which to make decisions about where to apply for graduate school.  The NRC has announced that this will be released on September 28th.

But wait, you say, wasn't this supposed to come out several years ago?  Why yes, I respond.  It is nominally set to happen every 10 years, with the last report being released in 1995.  But, you continue, wasn't there a post on this very blog a year ago claiming the release was imminent? I have no idea what you're talking about and I will not be taking any further questions. I will however say that I'm already planning a post for September 28th celebrating just how far CU has moved upward in the rankings. That is all.

Innovative Solutions to Global Warming: Attack the Discovery Channel

Let me start out by saying that I am making light of something that was literally a life-or-death situtation for some people.  I'm not trying to be insensitive, just a little irreverent.  Speaking of irreverence...

*************************************

Almost all scientists who have studied global climate change agree that it either already is or is going to be a problem.  Even if you argue that a slightly warmer climate might be preferable to our current model, the fact is that we have based world civilization on the current climate and changing everything we've built over the last several centuries is going to be harder culturally, economically, and politically than leaving things be.  However some change is coming even if it's not in the climate - significantly lowering our carbon emissions is no walk in the park.  Basically what I'm trying to get at is that we could use some outside-the-box thinking in this area.

Thanks to mental problems, cable TV, and the availability of firearms in our country, we now have another idea:  stage a full-scale assault on the Discovery Channel.  From the Associated Press:

"A man who railed against the Discovery Channel's environmental programming for years burst into the company's headquarters with at least one explosive device strapped to his body Wednesday and took three people hostage at gunpoint..."

Apparently he felt that the Discovery channel was "encouraging the birth of... more parasitic human infants" and needed to be stopped.  I'm not sure I can explain a thought process that... um... unique in words so here's a pictorial representation:

therefore

 Whatever else you might call this guy, you certainly can't say he thinks inside the box.

BYU Leaves the Mountian West, Goes Independent (Maybe)

It's been a wild summer for college sports.  As of right now, in 2011 the Pac 10 will have 12 members, the Big 12 will have 10 members, and the Big Ten will have 12 members.  Utah, BYU's long-time conference rival, got a golden ticket to join the Pac 10 (along with my own Colorado Buffalos), leaving BYU as pretty much the biggest football program left out of the top conferences in college football.  Most BYU fans bemoaned the situation but felt there was nothing to be done.  Or is there?  From the Salt Lake Tribune:

Brigham Young University will leave the Mountain West Conference, go independent in football and rejoin the Western Athletic Conference in all non-football sports beginning in the fall of 2011, The Salt Lake Tribune confirmed Wednesday morning.

According to a source in the WAC office, BYU will seek final approval for the moves from its owner, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, either today or Thursday. Pending approval, a press conference is planned for early next week. But because of media reports that broke late Tuesday night, that timetable may change.

BYU officials have apparently decided that the best business model for BYU to follow is that of another large, religious university with a prestigious football program - Notre Dame.  And really it makes sense to leave the Mountain West - where in terms of tradition, facilities, and fan base BYU was clearly the king of the midgets.  The Pac 10 allegedly picked Utah with is smaller national following over BYU because of BYU's religious affiliation and the only other major conference that made any sense for BYU, the Big 12, might only be around for until Texas, Texas A&M, and Oklahoma feel like they can't suck any more money out of the other 7 schools.

So BYU joins Army, Navy, and Notre Dame as the only conference-less teams in top-level college football.  It may be a bit of reach but here's to hoping they score big.  You may now return to your regularly scheduled programming.


Thanks to Dr. Saturday for the heads-up.

Astro2010: The Future Cometh

The future of astronomy and astrophysics was announced last Friday.  Over the past two years a committee of some of the big-wigs in the field have researched, listened, pondered, and cost-assessed the future of the field.  You can find their full report (an 85 Mb pdf) here and the slides from their press conference here.  They made three big decisions:  first, they stated three science topics as the big questions for the next decade; second they ranked the upcoming space mission prospects; third, they ranked the upcoming group observatory proposals.  So let's work through the list.

The Big Topics

1. Cosmic Dawn or "the Dark Ages" - the period of the universe of the first stars and galaxies.
2. New Worlds - the search for extrasolar planets, especially earth-like planets
3. Fundamental Physics - using the universe as a way to study basic physics like inflation, dark matter/energy, general relativity, etc.

Who got left off?  While you can find a way to connect pretty much every topic to one of these big ones, some of the more glaring admissions are stellar and galactic physics.

The Space Missions

1. The Wide-Field InfraRed Survey Telescope (WFIRST):  Formerly known as JDEM, this wide-field IR telescope will be able to do everything from dark energy to exoplanet observations and will launch in 2013.  Think of WISE on steroids.
2. More Explorer Class Missions:  More small- and medium-class missions such as WISE, NuSTAR, and IBEX.  
3. The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA):  The gravitational wave detector in space,  LISA should launch by 2016 assuming that LIGO finds gravitational waves and the pathfinder mission in 2012 doesn't crash and burn.  Drs. Nelson and Hirschmann must be cheering.
4. The International X-ray Observatory (IXO):  The successor to XMM-Newton and Chandra wasn't seen as ready for launch yet and would currently cost $5B.  Don't hold your breath for this one.

The Ground Telescopes

1. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST):  The next big survey telescope, this bad boy will take images of the entire sky every 3 nights and generate a 100 Peta-byte archive over 10 years.  Absolutely no one was surprised by this.
2. A Mid-Scale Innovations Program:  This new program would found smaller, faster telescopes.  The recommendation is for 4 to 7 of them over the next 10 years, the first one being CCAT.
3. A Ginormous Telescope:  Without taking sides in the debate between GMT and TMT, they endorsed a 30-meter-class telescope to be built around the end of the decade.
4. The Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescope Array (ACTA):  Someday the NSF will fund the successor to VERITAS and the Pierre-Auger Observatory, but don't hold your breath.

So, who won, who lost, and why?  Let's hear what you think.

Any Buyer's Remorse For Majoring In Physics? (Not Really.)

The graphic below says it all.  Nearly everyone who majored in physics would do it all over again if they could. (Even the unemployed).

I'm curious if anyone has any thoughts for why this is?  

Will A Mis-Calibration Using Jupiter Mess Up Cosmology?

Some of you may have heard of a recent paper stating that there may be a problem with the WMAP results. (But I'm sure it is not.)  From the press release:

New research by astronomers in the Physics Department at Durham University suggests that the conventional wisdom about the content of the Universe may be wrong. Graduate student Utane Sawangwit and Professor Tom Shanks looked at observations from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) satellite to study the remnant heat from the Big Bang. The two scientists find evidence that the errors in its data may be much larger than previously thought, which in turn makes the standard model of the Universe open to question. The team publish their results in a letter to the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Here is essentially the problem, from what I can tell:

1. Experiments don't have perfect resolution.
2. The measure of angular resolution is very important for WMAP's cosmology results.
3. Specifically, the true resolution has a powerful effect on the shape of the angular power spectrum.  (Pictured above.) Small deviations and the best-fit cosmology changes.
4. WMAP uses the bright object Jupiter to calibrate their angular resolution.
5. This paper calls into question the accuracy of that calibration.
6. They show if the calibration is off as much as they think it can be, then the standard flat Lambda-CDM universe may not be the best fit cosmology anymore.

Okay.  A few thoughts.

1. Though this article did get published, I have a lot more faith in the WMAP team who's work has been scrutinized and reverified by several groups for years.
2. I'm sure the WMAP team will respond, and when they do I'm sure they will provide ample evidence nothing in their calculations are wrong.
3. Many groups have used separate data and techniques and have all arrived at the same conclusion as WMAP.

So I'm sure there is no need to question WMAP's results.  That said, I am glad people force groups like WMAP to be very careful, especially when slight errors cause major problems.  

The Evolution Of Morality. (And Parallels With Language.)

Francisco J. Ayala is a biologist here at UC Irvine and recently became a member of the National Academy of Sciences (One of the highest honors than at scientist can achieve) and was awarded the 2010 Templeton Prize. (He is giving the $1.5 million prize money to UCI's science library.)

He has some recent papers discussing the evolution of morality among humans and I would like to focus on one point: the parallel he draws with the evolution of language:

    One needs to distinguish the capacity to have morality/language with the actual system of morality/language one uses.  He argues the ability to speak languages is something that has resulted from biological evolution.  All humans have the capacity to communicate using some language or another. However, exactly what language one happens to speak is not a result of biological evolution but a result of cultural evolution.


     He claims the story is exactly the same for morality.  Biological evolution gave humans the capacity to have a system of morality.  Three things evolved biologically that gave rise to this capacity: "(a) the ability to anticipate the consequences of one's own actions; (b) the ability to make value judgments; and (c) the ability to choose between alternative courses of action."

    However, the exact moral code each person follows using that capacity is derived from cultural evolution: "Moral norms are products of cultural evolution, not of biological evolution."  It is analogous to the statement: I can speak because of my biological makeup but I choose to speak English over Chinese mostly do to the culture I was raised in.

Thoughts?