Author: Sean Carroll

Greetings from Frankfurt airport! I have nothing special to say, but it just feels especially modern and sophisticated to be able to sit in a European airport cafe and post to the same blog that I would from home. German was the language that I took in high school, but it appears to have completely fled my brain; when I try to talk to any of the airport staff, it comes out in French, and I don’t even speak French. Fortunately they all speak English, as nobody is surprised to hear. Unfortunately, Germany seems to be one of those benighted countries in which the default mode for cappuccino is to have cinnamon on top.

No sleep on the flight over. All of my immediate neighbors were part of a single group, who seemed new to the concept of transatlantic travel, and thought it would be fun to chat the night away rather than grabbing a precious hour or two of sleep. What kind of group was it, you may ask? Well, they were going to Athens. For the Olympics. But not to actually watch the sporting events. No, they were going to be handing out tracts to passers-by, trying to persuade them to accept Jesus as their savior. (Chick tracts? I don’t know, and feared to ask.) I alternated between reading the latest Harry Potter book (now out in paperback) and working on a paper on the Big Bang — so I don’t know if they didn’t proselytize to me because they were saving their energies for Greece, or because they had given up on me without even trying.

Okay, so I did have something to say. I’m just too exhausted to say it in any sort of nuanced way.

The image of the United States in the world has, to be sure, taken a big hit over the last couple of years. Clearly drastic measures are called for. What better way to get people throughout the world to think better of us than to let them listen to some cool jazz? Something along those lines must have been going through the minds of the clever folks at the State Department and Lincoln Center, when they got together to start the Jazz Ambassadors program.

The idea is to assemble a few small groups of talented (and hopefully diplomatic) musicians, and send them on several-week tours of places that don’t get much exposure to US culture. I know about it because Michael Raynor, a friend of mine who is Von Freeman‘s drummer, has just left for a tour with the Chicago Jazz Quartet, a group thrown together for just this purpose. They will be visiting Vietnam, Thailand, the Phillipines, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Bangladesh before returning to the City of the Broad Shoulders. Perhaps, through the wonder of swinging, improvised music, they can bring peace and prosperity to the far reaches of the earth. Or maybe they will merely entertain and stimulate some audiences of people who think of Rambo when anyone mentions the United States. Which would make the project more than worthwhile.

Meanwhile, I shall go hop on a plane, and when you next hear from me I should be in Geneva, land of international banking, accurate timepieces, and high-energy particle physics. Further reports as events warrant.

The National Science Foundation runs a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program, which provides funds to universities that would like to sponsor undergrads to visit for the summer and engage in some real live research. This summer I’ve been advising Suz Tolwinski from Brown (see a tiny picture at my group web page), who gave a presentation this morning on what she’s accomplished.

Undergraduate research experience is very valuable, but it’s hard to do as a theorist, since there is so much background knowledge required before you can do original work. I’ve advised a few undergrads, both during the school year and during the summer, and usually ask them to learn enough general relativity and cosmology that they can at least begin to answer an original question. (Actually, I usually just say “no,” but occasionally the stars align correctly and I agree to advise someone.) If all goes well, at least they will learn a lot of good physics. But teaching yourself GR over a summer, with time enough left over to work on a real problem, is undertaing a tremendous task. Suz did a great job, learning both GR and some bits of classical field theory from scratch, and then investigating whether Lorentz-violating vector fields would lead to an observable anisotropy (direction-dependent stretching) in the expansion of the universe. This is an extension of work I did with Eugene, except that Eugene’s vector fields were pointing in a timelike direction, and Suz’s were spacelike. Which is actually harder! So I was very impressed with the final project.

Actually, I was impressed with all of the REU presentations this morning, on topics from waves traveling through sand to numerical investigations of cellular automata. It was a tremendous joy to hear about the accomplishments of these students, especially when you remember that doing physics research is not how most undergraduates spend their summer vacations. Being an academic can be a stressful occupation, as discussed recently in posts at Pharyngula and Uncertain Principles (referencing several other academic blogs, including Making Contact, Steven Krause, Playing School, Irreverently, Just Tenured, Barely Tenured, and Bitch. Ph.D.). One of the things that Suz has been wondering about is how happy one actually is as a science professor, especially after talking to current graduate students and hearing stories of, shall we say, incomplete contentment. I’m not the most representative person to comment on the pros and cons of academia, since I’ve been passionately in love with the idea of being a professor ever since I understood what it meant. I mean, our job is to teach and do research; what could be better than that? There are certainly less-fun parts of the job (applying for grants, grading, committee meetings, etc), and it can undoubtedly be stressful and over-competitive. But it’s too easy to get run down by these aspects and forget about the exhilarating ones. Listening to a collection of talented and enthusiastic students explain the research they’ve been doing over the summer is an excellent way of being reminded.

Tangled Bank #9 is now online over at Pharyngula. The idea behind Tangled Bank is to collect together a weekly greatest hits of science/nature posts in the blogosphere and stick them in one place for easy consumption. The greatness of the posts themselves is decided upon by their authors; if only more things in life worked that way.

Most of the TB posts are oriented toward the biological sciences; I sneaked myself in only on the basis of my dinosaur reports. Maybe they should do more physical sciences?

On Friday I head off again for a couple of weeks, and blogging abilities might be spotty. I’m spending a few days visiting friends at CERN, the particle accelerator in Geneva where the World Wide Web was born, so presumably it won’t be too hard to find an internet connection (although things might be hectic). After that it’s off to the European Forum Alpbach, where Bob Wald and I will be giving a series of lectures on cosmology. Alpbach seems pretty far away from everything (not even a train station), and I’m guessing it’s rather isolated.

So I’m very happy to introduce another guest-blogger to keep things cooking while I’m away: Lindsay Beyerstein will be piloting Preposterous while I’m galivanting around the Alps. Lindsay is the proprietess of Majikthise, one of the most stimulating and well-written blogs out there, as you will soon discover if you haven’t already.

I am hoping that my willingness to choose guest-bloggers who are more entertaining than I am will be seen as an indication that I am self-confident enough to not fear being upstaged, much like John Kerry choosing John Edwards as his running mate.

Click the image for more. I had run across this some time ago, and was reminded of it in a post at Uncertain Principles. Consistently amusing, within even tighter self-imposed constraints than the original Law & Order series.

Another reason why living by a Great Lake is better than living by the ocean: little danger of tidal waves.

A collapsing volcano could trigger a vast tidal wave capable of wiping New York, Washington and Miami off the map, warn geologists.

They also fear southern England could be hit.

Geologists are concerned that an unstable flank of the Cumbre Vieja volcano on the island of La Palma in the Canaries is in danger of sliding into the sea.

If shaken loose by a volcanic eruption, the huge slab of rock would send a tsunami more than 150 metres high racing across the Atlantic at the speed of a jumbo jet.

Within three hours, the wave would swamp the east coast of Africa, within five hours it would reach southern England and within 12 it would hit America’s east coast.

New York, Washington, Boston and Miami would be hit by successive waves abound 20 metres high. Tens of millions of people could die.

Although the volcano could erupt any day – it has been dormant since 1971 but tends to erupt every 20 to 200 years – funding to British scientists investigating the threat has been stopped.

I like “They also fear southern England could be hit.” And this is a British scientist, in a story reported by the London Telegraph.

But there’s good news, as well: hysteria about being hit by an asteroid has somehow managed to decrease that risk from “microscopically small” to “really so miniscule that we can relax a little.” Thank goodness about that.

As Jennifer mentions in the comments, one of the instruments on the Hubble Space Telescope has apparently broken down: the Imaging Spectrograph, used to (obviously) take images with simultaneous spectral information, for example of black-hole candidates. This is too bad but not a complete catastrophe (unless you had time on the instrument); it had already lived past its expected lifespan, and there are still three instruments working on HST. Sure would be nice to have a servicing mission, though.

As far as I can tell, our track record of reaping long-term benefits from our support of repressive and authoritarian regimes is pretty dismal. Yet, we keep on doing it, mostly for short-sighted reasons. Saudi Arabia is the example that has been drawing increasing scrutiny.

The latest charming anecdote: three reformers (Ali al-Demaini, Matruk al-Faleh and Abd Allah al-Hamed) have been arrested for “calling for adopting a constitutional monarchy and using western terminology,” among other heinous offences. These are not exactly anarchists we’re talking about here — their role model is Jordan.

I wonder what Western terminology they were using? “Radical, dude”?

This weekend I had a chance to visit Chicago’s latest attraction, the somewhat-misnamed Millennium Park. This is a parcel of land just north of the Art Institute, adjacent to Grant Park, that had been languishing as a railroad yard, until the city powers decided to spruce it up as part of a celebration for the year 2000. Somewhat behind schedule and substantially over budget, the project has finally been completed, and has garnered rave reviews from visitors thus far.

Easily the most talked-about component of Millennium Park is the large reflective statue by Anish Kapoor, officially named “Cloud Gate” but universally dubbed “The Bean.” (Click for full-sized version.)

Now, I had actually seen a model for the park a couple of years ago, and had no doubt that this abstract beast was going to be a complete disaster. Let me publicly state that I was completely wrong; the full-sized bean is strangely compelling and irresistible. Reflecting the skyline and the sky itself with a gentle distortion, this simple shape grabs your attention and holds it with an eerie fascination.

You can also walk underneath the bean, where Kapoor has manipulated the reflections to produce interesting multiple images. Viewers can happily alternate between looking for images of themselves in the interior of the bean, and wondering at the ease with which their fellow visitors are entertained.

Photos don’t really do the bean justice, but you can’t help but taking many pictures when you are in its presence; I predict with confidence that within a short time this sculpture will be recognized as the most-photographed object in the world. (Note that the sculpture is actually not complete; the visible seams are to be welded to form an unbroken smooth surface.)

To be honest, the simplicity of the bean is also its limitation; it only provides perhaps fifteen minutes of contemplation before you are ready to move on to something else. Fortunately, the Art Institute is just to the south, so a pilgrimage need not be exclusively beanocentric.

The other new attractions in the park are also worth attention. An interesting, although less obviously successful, art installation is the computerized fountain designed by Barcelona artist Jaume Plensa. It consists of two rectangular towers that gently spray water in all directions, and project moving images of faces (apparently supposed to be representative citizens of Chicago). At occasional intervals the faces appear to spit water from their mouths, in a reference to more classical fountain designs.

While the fountains don’t have the immediate and universal appeal of the bean, they are a big hit with kids, who can frolic around in the water to their heart’s content. An obvious worry is the upkeep associated with the fountain systems — these would be a complete disaster if they were allowed to fall into disrepair.

Before the bean captured everyone’s heart, the centerpiece of the Millennium Park project was a new band shell designed by Frank Gehry. It brings to mind giant chocolate shavings on the top of an especially elaborately decorated cake (if chocolate shavings were made of stainless steel).

This photo isn’t a very good view of the band shell itself, because I wanted to note a cute science fact about the trellis extending out from the shell and covering a wide section of park in which visitors can relax and listen to concerts. You will notice the speakers hanging from the trellis itself; often attempts to amplify outdoor musical performances result in acoustic nightmares. To prevent this from happening, the designers calculated the time it would take sound to reach from the stage to different points in the audience, and have built in an appropriate delay in the signal sent to the speakers so that the sound reaches the listener from both sources simultaneously. Now that is good planning.