If you have a curiosity about quantum mechanics, classical mechanics, or the Theory of Everything, then not only will David Deutch’s new book ‘The Fabric of Reality’ be of interest to you, but I would urge you to delve into a very thoughtful book review by Allan Angus.

I had the fortune to do my graduate degree in electrical engineering with Allan at Calgary.

We both went to work for Noval Technologies, an R&D shop for Nova, an Alberta Corporation, where we worked on spinoffs of Allan’s physics MSc research in non-invasive capacitive flow rate measurements of hydrocarbons (my paraphrasing !).

Allan went on to work in the cellular phone industry and thence on to the development of paging systems. He is one of the brightest people I have ever had the pleasure of getting to know.

He now enjoys making beer, running a photography business, and thinking about the world in general from his home outside of Denver, Colorado.

I hope that some of us here can read Allan’s book review and perhaps initiate a good conversation on this topic on his blog or on ours!

OK, not the physics of how the website works (although that would be interesting too) but “what kind of interesting physics videos can I find on YouTube?” I was thinking about this as I was trying to find videso about motion in a non-point-mass potential and kept finding things about how to paint your fingernails with a galaxy design. Really.

But there are gems out there, and surely what I could turn up in half an hour only scratches the surface. Of course there are course videos from universities and the like. Check out the first-year course taught by Walter Lewin from MIT, and Leonard Susskind’s Modern Physics course at Stanford. There are lots of videos of galaxy collisions and some scary ones about MRI safety.

There are several YouTube channels which have good stuff: there’s Minute Physics, the University of Nottingham has Sixty Symbols, “videos about the symbols of physics and astronomy”, and the American Physical Society has a Physics Central channel.

And then a few random ones that I found amusing:

Space telescope physics (not for cat lovers)

Ruben’s Tube (most of us should not try this at home)

Lego man in space

Spitzer Space Telescope — the Musical

Add your own!

There were a couple of times as a child when I would have died without modern medicine. I am not alone.  Most people used to die young and it was only the genetically tough and/or lucky that won the crapshoot and got to the point where they could reproduce. This has to have consequences.  I am passing on a lousy immune system to my kids; someone else may be passing on a more serious genetic disease.  Well, the human race is actually moving towards dealing with this for the first time, as has been seen by a recent debate on medical ethics in the UK.

Mitochondria, small energy powerhouses that in the beginning of life were separate organisms before some bacteria took them over and made them work for a living, have their own DNA that has nothing to do with our 26 chromosomes. Basically the idea is to use the mitochondrial DNA from a third parent for test tube babies whose parents have genetic conditions passed on via the mitochondrial DNA.

It is not quite yet the genetic engineering of human beings, but it is very close.  This technique is not what is needed for dealing with the vast array of genetic ailments that plague modern society, but it certainly opens the door.

Many people seem to be outraged by the idea of it happening, but for me the question is not really whether it should happen, but rather how.

The first thing that likely comes to a physicist’s mind when I say “turn the crank” is problem sets, and the student desire to find an equation or set of equations into which one can plug numbers and then, well, turn the crank. More about that some other time.

But what about the other kind of crank who turns up in physics: a person with an alternative theory of gravity who is convinced that he [I have yet to hear of a female physics crank] is right and Einstein was wrong? I’m talking about people typically without an academic background in the subject, whose ideas are, shall we say, non-mainstream. They often want their ideas to be validated by professionals in the field, and sometimes feel persecuted when they are not.

Since becoming a professor in a Physics & Astronomy department, my level of contact with cranks has definitely gone up. In the past year I have chatted on the phone with a pleasant older man who earnestly informed me that there was a “spirit world” hiding on the other side of Jupiter, talked in my office to a young man with a new theory of quantum spacetime, and deleted (mostly unread) more odd e-mails than I care to count. Their e-mails or treatises often have some physics-related vocabulary in them, and sometimes even equations, but put together in ways that make no sense. Certainly I haven’t yet seen a case where one of these folks proposed an experimental test of his ideas.

My question is – how should we, as members of the establishment, deal with such folks? Many of them are very thoughtful, polite people, and I think it’s only reasonable to treat them with courtesy. (If nothing else, they are fellow members of the society which supported our many years of training and now funds our research.) In general they are harmless, unlike cranks in medically-related fields, who can do serious damage to themselves or others. And of course there is the off chance that one of them will be right; there certainly have been cases in the history of science where “what everybody knows” turned out to be incorrect.  But I think it is fair to say that most of these people are expending their energies on something that is unlikely to ever pan out. Should we tell them this? Attempt to set them straight about the scientific method? Or ignore them and just be happy that they are interested enough in [their idea of] science to spend their time on it?

Discuss.

Everyone else and their cousin has discussed Neil Armstrong and  the influence of his life and work. I hope many of you took the chance to wink at the Moon over the weekend — I did while waiting to watch the International Space Station pass overheadon Saturday night, wondering what those six people were thinking and feeling.

I can’t give the usual story of being woken up to watch Armstrong and Aldrin’s moonwalk and deciding that I was going to be an astronaut. Profs may seem older than dirt, but in fact the most recent(more optimistic than “last”) moon mission ended a few days before I was born. Instead I want to talk about the famous words: “one small step”.

Great Big Sea, the most famous band from Newfoundland that our esteemed former chair has never heard of, had a recent song called “Walk on the Moon.” While I quibble with some of their orchestration choices (chimes? glockenspiel?), I really like the lyrics, which talk about the moon landing as a metaphor for being afraid to do something and doing it anyway. I apologize in advance if you hear me singing this in the hallways this week:

I don’t care, my foolish fear
Won’t get the best of me …
I’m alive; I’ve come to realize
Not a moment too soon
This is my one small step
This is my walk on the Moon

Besides winking at the Moon, I think the best thing we can do to honour the legacy of Armstrong and others like him is to each take our own small steps. We can hope that eventually they add up to giant leaps.

I’m going to declare my own planned small steps here, in the hopes that making them public will hold me accountable for not giving up on them. In my teaching, I’m going to solicit feedbackfrom my students after each and every class. In my research, I’m going to spend a few minutes every day thinking not about the tiny slice of the project I’m now working on, but about the big picture. In my service work, I’m going to organize at least one off-campus outreach event this year. And in my personal life I’m going to bike at least half as many kilometres as I drive.

We’re about to start a new school year, so it’s a time of new pencil crayons, new beginnings, and new ideas. What are your new small steps going to be?

The first man to step on Moon has passed away today at the age of 82. He passed away after the complications from a heart surgery earlier this month.

He will be remembered for one line that rings in everyone’s ear every time anyone talks about the first step on Moon “One small step for man, a giant leap for mankind”. He inspired many and will always be remembered for his contributions to human race!

RIP Neil Armstrong!

As you know, Bob, the telescopes used by observational astronomers are almost always shared facilities. Many of these are public: owned and/or paid for by governments of one or more countries, through their science funding agencies. In Canada, the main funding agency is the National Research Council (NRC), with some money also from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC). In the US, the federal science funding agency for ground-based telescopes is the National Science Foundation, NSF. No prizes for guessing what the one for space-based telescopes is.

Since we spend public money on telescopes, and there is never enough money to do all the nifty things we can think of, we have to set priorities somehow. In Canada the astronomical community writes a Long Range Plan every 10 years. In the US the astronomical community does a Decadal Survey every 10 years as does the planetary sciencecommunity. As inputs to these reports, scientists write  “white papers” which explain Why Their Science is Cool and what facilities are needed to do it. Scientists representing new or existing facilities also write white papers explaining why their thing is the best thing since sliced bread. The committee in charge of writing the Long Range Plan/Decadal Survey/whatever takes all these white papers, plus input from “Town Hall” meetings and whatever other channels are available. They then try to figure out what new facilities will give the biggest bang (the most exciting new science) for the (hopefully reasonably estimated) buck. And produce a report that makes at least some people happy, and probably some angry.

Both the Canadian and US communities have had some issues to deal with after their most recent decadal reports. The problem, as usual, is money. The previous Long Range Plan report in Canada had lots of great ideas, but only about half of them were funded. The current plan recommended phasing out funding for the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, which has finally got its long-awaited SCUBA-2 camera working but has no current prospects for funding after 2014. Some Canadian astronomers are trying to figure out how to keep it going for longer. In the US, it became clear that the budget envelope used by the 2010 Decadal Survey was, shall we say, optimistic. So a new committee got convened to tell the NSF what existing facilities should be shut down  in order to fund new ones. They released their report last week and, unsurprisingly, many people were unhappy with the results, which called for closing most of the Kitt Peak optical telescopes as well as the Green Bank and VLBA radio telescopes. Similar things happened in the UK a couple of years ago when they joined the European Southern Observatory; my understanding is that in fact the JCMT closure is related to both this and to the inception of the ALMAtelescope.

How did we get ourselves into this mess? Part of the problem, and a part which is not unique to science funding, is that it is easier to sell a shiny new facility than to sell refurbishing or maintaining an existing one. Another part, which may well be astronomy-centric, is that the last decade or two have been a “golden age”, with many wonderful facilities like HST, Spitzer, Keck, Gemini, etc — and when one is at the top like this, there’s nowhere to go but down. [I think I heard this argument first from Bob Kirshner at the CfA.] Andy Lawrence said it well on his blog: “the US has done such wonderful  things in the past, that if we keep them all going – especially the very newest things like ALMA – that uses up all the money forever”.  And of course science with these golden facilities leads to new questions that can only be answered with platinum facilities, which maybe the citizens of Earth just can’t afford. Martin Elvis recently had something to sayabout the virtue of asking “answerable” questions.

And how do we get out of the mess? If I knew, I would run for CASCA and AASpresident and fix it myself. Creative public-private financing, better outreach efforts so the public understands why we want to build big telescopes, more efficient operations — all of these look to me like drops in the bucket. Maybe our fields is going to have to contract. That would stink.

But it could be worse! Every so often, I pull out my copy of Greg Egan’s Quarantine: a science-fiction novel that has as its premise the idea that the solar system has been surrounded by a giant opaque bubble (Why? Read the book.) Inexplicably, Egan doesn’t discuss the effects of the Buuble on observational astronomers, but it would of course mean there’d be no point in building more telescopes, because there would be no more new photons. Not that I think this scenario is likely to  come to pass, but I wonder just how creative we could be with our petabytes of existing astronomical data, if we knew there were never going to be any more. Maybe it’s this kind of out-of-the-box science-fictional thinking which can make things work for astronomy.
I sure hope so.