Tidbits.

First, I have a guest post on the Houston Chronicle's science blog today.  Thanks for the opportunity, Eric.

Second, here is a great example of science popularization from the BBC.  We should do things like this on US television, instead of having Discovery Channel and TLC show garbage about "alien astronauts" and "ghost hunting".

Third, if you see the latest Sherlock Holmes flick, keep an eye out for subtle details about Prof. Moriarty - there's some fun math/physics stuff hidden in there (pdf) for real devotees of the Holmes canon.

Shifting gears

One of the most appealing aspects of a career in academic science and engineering is the freedom to choose your area of research. This freedom is extremely rare in an industrial setting, and becoming more so all the time. Taking myself as an example, I was hired as an experimental condensed matter physicist, presumably because my department felt that this was a fruitful area in which they would like to expand and in which they had teaching needs. During the application and interview process, I had to submit a "research plan" document, meant to give the department a sense of what I planned to do. However, as long as I was able to produce good science and bring in sufficient funding to finance that research, the department really had no say-so at all about what I did - no one read my proposals before they went out the door (unless I wanted proposal-writing advice), no one told me what to do scientifically. You would be very hard-pressed to find an industrial setting with that much freedom.

So, how does a scientist or engineer with this much freedom determine what to do and how to allocate intellectual resources? I can only speak for myself, but it would be interesting to hear from others in the comments. I look for problems where (a) I think there are scientific questions that need to be answered, ideally tied to deeper issues that interest me; (b) my background, skill set, or point of view give me what I perceive to be either a competitive advantage or a unique angle on the problem; and (c) there is some credible path for funding. I suspect this is typical, with people weighting these factors variously. Certainly those who run giant "supergroups" in chemistry and materials science by necessity have more of a "That's where the money is" attitude; however, I don't personally know anyone who works in an area in which they have zero intellectual interest just because it's well funded. Getting resources is hard work, and you can't do it effectively if your heart's not in it.

A related question is, when and how do you shift topics? These days, it's increasingly rare to find a person in academic science who picks a narrow specialty and sits there for decades. Research problems actually get solved. Fields evolve. There are competing factors, though, particularly for experimentalists. Once you become invested in a given area (say scanned probe microscopy), this results in a lot of inertia - new tools are expensive and hard to get. It can also be difficult to get into the mainstream of a new topic from the outside, in terms of grants and papers. Jumping on the latest bandwagon is not necessarily the best path to success. On the other hand, remaining in a small niche isn't healthy. All of these are "first-world problems", of course - for someone in research, it's far better to be wrestling with these challenges than the alternative.

students and their mental health

There was an interesting article earlier this week in the Wall Street Journal, on mental health concerns in college students. It's no secret that mental illness often has an onset in the late teens and early twenties. It's also not a surprise that there are significant stressors associated with college (or graduate school), including being in a new environment w/ a different (possibly much smaller) social support structure, the pressure to succeed academically, the need to budget time much more self-sufficiently than at previous stages of life, and simple things like lack of sleep. As a result, sometimes as a faculty member you come across students who have real problems.

In undergrads, often these issues manifest as persistent erratic or academically self-destructive behavior (failure to hand in assignments, failure to show up for exams). Different faculty members have various ways to deal with this. One approach is to be hands-off - from the privacy and social boundaries perspective, it's challenging to inquire about these behaviors (is a student just having a tough time in college or in a particular class, or is a student afflicted with a debilitating mental health issue, or are is the student somewhere on the continuum in between). The sink-or-swim attitude doesn't really sit well with me, but it's always a challenge to figure out the best way to handle this stuff.

In grad students, these issues can become even more critical - students are older, expectations of self-sufficiency are much higher, and the interactions between faculty and students are somewhere between teacher/student, boss/employee, and collaborator/collaborator. The most important thing, of course, is to ensure that at the end of the day the student is healthy, regardless of degree progress. If the right answer is that a student should take time off or drop out of a program for treatment or convalescence, then that's what has to happen. Of course, it's never that simple, for the student, for the advisor, for the university.

Anyway, I suggest reading the WSJ article if you have access. It's quite thought-provoking.

Universality and "glassy" physics

One remarkable aspect of Nature is the recurrence of certain mathematically interesting motifs in different contexts.  When we see a certain property or relationship that shows up again and again, we tend to call that "universality", and we look for underlying physical reasons to explain its reappearance in many apparently disparate contexts.  A great review of one such type of physics was posted on the arxiv the other day. 

Physicists commonly talk about highly ordered, idealized systems (like infinite, perfectly periodic crystals), because often such regularity is comparatively simple to describe mathematically.  The energy of such a crystal is nicely minimized by the regular arrangement of atoms.   At the other extreme are very strongly disordered systems.  These disordered systems are often called "glassy" because structural glasses (like the stuff in your display) are an example.  In these systems, disorder dominates completely; the "landscape" of energy as a function of configuration is a big mess, with many local minima - a whole statistical distribution of possible configurations, with a whole distribution of energy "barriers" between them.  Systems like that crop up all the time in different contexts, and yet share some amazingly universal properties.  One of the most dramatic is that when disturbed, these systems take an exceedingly long time to respond completely.  Some parts of the system respond fast, others more slowly, and when you add them all together, you get total responses that look logarithmic in time (not exponential, which would indicate a single timescale for relaxation).  For example, the deformation response of crumpled paper (!) shows a relaxation that is described by constant*log(t) for more than 6 decades in time!  Likewise, the speed of sound or dielectric response in a glass at very low temperatures also shows logarithmic decays.  This review gives a great discussion of this - I highly recommend it (even though the papers they cite from my PhD advisor's lab came after I left :-)  ).

Higgs or no

The answer is going to be, to quote the Magic 8-Ball, "Ask again later." Sounds like the folks at CERN are on track to make a more definitive statement about the Higgs boson in about one more Friedman Unit. That won't stop an enormous surge of media attention tomorrow, as CERN tries very hard to have their cake and eat it, too ("We've found [evidence consistent with] the God Particle! At least, it's [evidence not inconsistent with] the God Particle!"). What this exercise will really demonstrate is that many news media figures are statistically illiterate.

I should point out that, with the rumors of a statistically not yet huge bump in the data near 125 GeV, there has suddenly been an uptick in predictions of Higgs bosons with just that mass. How convenient. 

Update - Interesting.  For the best write-up I've seen about this, check out Prof. Matt Strassler.  Seems like the central question is, are the two detectors both seeing something in the same place, or not?  That is, is 123-ish GeV the same as 126-ish GeV?  Tune in next year, same Stat-time, same Stat-channel!  (lame joke for fans of 1960s US TV....)

Nano book recommendation

My colleague in Rice's history department, Cyrus Mody, has a new book out called Instrumental Community, about the invention and spread of scanned probe microscopy (and microscopists) that's a very interesting read. If you've ever wondered how and why the scanning tunneling microscope and atomic force microscope took off, and why related ideas like the topografiner (pdf) did not, this is the book for you. It also does a great job of giving a sense of the personalities and work environments at places like IBM Zurich, IBM TJ Watson, IBM Almaden, and Bell Labs.

There are a couple of surprising quotes in there. Stan Williams, these days at HP Labs, says that the environment at Bell Labs was so cut-throat that people would sabotage each others' experiments and steal each others' data. Having been a postdoc there, that surprised me greatly, and doesn't gibe with my impressions or stories I'd heard. Any Bell Labs alumni readers out there care to comment?

The book really drives home what has been lost with the drastic decline of long-term industrial R&D in the US. You can see it all happening in slow motion - the constant struggle to explain why these research efforts are not a waste of shareholder resources, as companies become ever more focused on short term profits and stock prices.

Priorities

My colleagues at Texas A&M University must be so happy to hear that in these troubled economic times, their university is rumored to be offering the current University of Houston football coach a $4M/yr salary to come to College Station. I like college sports as much as the next person, but what does it say about higher education in the US that a public university, dealing with tight budgets, thinks that this is smart?

Antennas for light + ionics at the nanoscale

A (revised) particularly excellent review article was posted on the arxiv the other day, about metal nanostructures as antennas for light. This seems to be an extremely complete and at the same time reasonably pedagogical treatment of the subject. While in some sense there are no shocking surprises (the basic physics underlying all of this is, after all, Maxwell's equations with complicated boundary conditions and dielectric functions for the metal), there are some great ideas and motifs: the importance of the optical "near field"; the emergence of plasmons, the collective modes of the electrons, which are relevant at the nanoscale but not in macroscopic antennas for, e.g., radio frequencies; the use of such antennas in real quantum optics applications. Great stuff.

I also feel the need for a little bit of shameless self-promotion. My colleague http://physics.ucsd.edu/~diventra/ and I have an article appearing in this month's MRS Bulletin, talking about the importance of ion motion and electrochemistry in nanoscale structures. (Sorry about not having a version on the arxiv at this time. Email me if you'd like a copy.) This article was prompted in part by a growing realization among a number of researchers that the consequences of the motion of ions (often neglected at first glance!) are apparent in a number of nanoscale systems. Working at the nanoscale, it's possible to establish very large electric fields and concentration/chemical potential gradients that can drive diffusion. At the same time, there are large accessible surface areas, and inherently small system dimensions mean that diffusion over physically relevant distances is easier than in macroscale materials. While ionic motion can be an annoyance or an unintended complication, there are likely situations where it can be embraced and engineered for useful applications.

Nano"machines" and dissipation

There's an article (subscription only, unfortunately) out that has gotten some attention, discussing whether artificial molecular machines will "deliver on their promise".  The groups that wrote the article have an extensive track record in synthesizing and characterizing molecules that can undergo directed "mechanical" motion (e.g., translation of a rod-like portion through a ring) under chemical stimuli (e.g., changes in temperature, pH, redox reactions, optical excitation).  There is no question that this is some pretty cool stuff, and the chemistry here (both synthetic organic, and physical) is quite sophisticated.  

Two points strike me, though.  First, the "promise" mentioned in the title is connected, particularly in the press writeup, with Drexlerian nanoassembler visions.  Synthetic molecules that can move are impressive, but they are far, far away from the idea of actually constructing arbitrary designer materials one atom at a time (a goal that is likely impossible, in my opinion, for reasons stated convincingly here, among others).  They are, however, a possible step on the road to designer, synthetic enzymes, a neat idea.

Second, the writeup particularly mentions how "efficient" the mechanical motions of these molecules are.  That is, there is comparatively little dissipation relative to macroscopic machines.  This is actually not very surprising, if you think about the microscopic picture of what we think of as macroscopic irreversibility.  "Loss" of mechanical energy takes place because energy is transferred from macroscopic degrees of freedom (the motion of a piston) to microscopic degrees of freedom (the near-continuum of vibrational and electronic modes in the metal in the piston and cylinder walls).  When the whole system of interest is microscopic, there just aren't many places for the energy to go.  This is an example of the finite-phase-space aspect that shows up all the time in truly nanoscale systems. 

Superluminal neutrinos - follow-up

The OPERA collaboration, or at least a large subset of it, has a revised preprint out (and apparently submitted somewhere), with more data on their time-of-flight studies of neutrinos produced at CERN. Tomasso has a nice write-up here. Their previous preprint created quite a stir, since it purported to show evidence of neutrino motion faster than c, the speed of light in vacuum. The general reaction among physicists was, that's really weird, and it's exceedingly likely that something is wrong somewhere in the analysis. One complaint that came up repeatedly was that the pulses used by the group were about 10000 nanoseconds long, and the group was arguing about timing at the 60 ns level. You could readily imagine some issues with their statistics or the functioning of the detector that could be a problem here, since the pulses were so long compared to the effect being reported. To deal with this, the group has now been running for a while with much shorter pulses (a few ns in duration). While they don't have nearly as much data so far (in only a few weeks of running), they do have enough to do some analysis, and so far the results are completely consistent with their earlier report. Funky. Clearly pulse duration systematics or statistics aren't the source of the apparent superluminality, then. So, either neutrinos really are superluminal (still bloody unlikely for a host of reasons), or there is still some weird systematic error in the detector somewhere. (For what it's worth, I'm sure they've looked a million ways at the clock synchronization, etc. now, so that's not likely to be the problem either.)

Update:  Matt Strassler has an excellent summary of the situation.

So you want to compete w/ fossil fuels (or silicon)

Yesterday I went to an interesting talk here by Eric Toone, deputy director of ARPA-E, what is supposed to be the blue-sky high-risk/high-reward development portion of the US Department of Energy. He summarized some basic messages about energy globally and in the US, gave quite a number of examples of projects funded by ARPA-E, and had a series of take-home messages. He also gave the most concise (single-graph) explanation for the failure of Solyndra: they bet on a technology based on CIGS solar cells, and then the price of silicon (an essential component of the main competing technology) fell by 80% over a few months. It was made very clear that ARPA-E aims at a particular stage in the tech transfer process, when the basic science is known, and a technology is right at the edge of development.

The general energy picture was its usual fairly depressing self. There are plenty of fossil fuels (particularly natural gas and coal), but if you think that CO₂ is a concern, then using those blindly is risky. Capital costs make nuclear comparatively uncompetitive (to say nothing of political difficulties following Fukushima). Solar is too expensive to compete w/ fossil fuels. Other renewables are also too expensive and/or not scalable. Biomass is too expensive. Batteries don't come remotely close to competing with, e.g., gasoline in terms of energy density and effective refueling times.

The one thing that really struck me was the similarity of the replacing-fossil-fuels challenge and the replacing-silicon-electronics challenge. Fossil fuels have problems, but they're sooooooo cheap. Likewise, there is a great desire to prolong Moore's law by eventually replacing Si, but Si devices are sooooooo cheap that there's an incredible economic barrier to surmount. When you're competing against a transistor that costs less than a millionth of a cent and has a one-per-billion failure rate over ten years, your non-Si gizmo better be really darn special if you want anyone to take it seriously....

Bad Astronomy day at Rice

Today we hosted Phil Plait for our annual Rorschach Lecture (see here), a series in honor of Bud Rorschach dedicated to public outreach and science policy. He kept us fully entertained with his Death from the Skies! talk, with a particularly amusing litany of (a small subset of) the scientific flaws in "Armageddon". There was a full house in our big lecture hall - there's no question that astro has very broad popular appeal (though it did bring out the "Obama should be impeached immediately because he's not protecting us from possible asteroid impacts!" crowd).

Teaching - Coleman vs. Feynman

As pointed out by Peter Woit, Steve Hsu recently posted a link to an interview with (the late) Sidney Coleman, generally viewed as one of the premier theoretical physicists of his generation. Ironically, for someone known as an excellent lecturer, Coleman apparently hated teaching, likening it to "washing dishes" or "waxing floors" - two activities he could do well, from which he derived a small amount of "job well done" satisfaction, but which he would never choose to do voluntarily.

It's fun to contrast this with the view of Richard Feynman, as he put it in Surely You Must Be Joking, Mr. Feynman:

I don't believe I can really do without teaching. The reason is, I have to have something so that when I don't have any ideas and I'm not getting anywhere I can say to myself, "At least I'm living; at least I'm doing something; I am making some contribution" -- it's just psychological.... The questions of the students are often the source of new research. They often ask profound questions that I've thought about at times and then given up on, so to speak, for a while. It wouldn't do me any harm to think about them again and see if I can go any further now. The students may not be able to see the thing I want to answer, or the subtleties I want to think about, but they remind me of a problem by asking questions in the neighborhood of that problem. It's not so easy to remind yourself of these things. So I find that teaching and the students keep life going, and I would never accept any position in which somebody has invented a happy situation for me where I don't have to teach. Never.

I definitely lean toward the Feynman attitude. Teaching - explaining science to others - is fun, important, and helpful to my own work. Perhaps Coleman was simply so powerful in terms of creativity in research that teaching always seemed like an annoying distraction. In these days when there are so many expectations on faculty members beyond teaching, I hope we're not culturally rewarding a drift toward the Coleman position.

Science - what is it up to?

Hat tip to Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer, for linking to this video from The Daily Show.  My apologies to non-US readers who won't be able to watch this.  It's a special report from Asif Mandvi, complete with remarks from a Republican "strategist" / Fox News talking head, who explains how science is inherently corrupt, because only scientists are really qualified to review the work of scientists.  Seriously, she really makes that argument, and more.

Update:  I've decided to ditch the embedded video.  Here's a link to the video on the Daily Show's site, and here's a link that works internationally.

Faculty search process, 2011 version.

As I have done in past years, I'm revising a past post of mine about the faculty search process. My thoughts on this really haven't changed much, but it's useful to throw this out there rather than hope people see it via google.

Here are the steps in the typical faculty search process:

• The search gets authorized. This is a big step - it determines what the position is, exactly: junior vs. junior or senior; a new faculty line vs. a replacement vs. a bridging position (i.e. we'll hire now, and when X retires in three years, we won't look for a replacement then). The main challenges are two-fold: (1) Ideally the department has some strategic plan in place to determine the area that they'd like to fill. Note that not all departments do this - occasionally you'll see a very general ad out there that basically says, "ABC University Dept. of Physics is authorized to search for a tenure-track position in, umm, physics. We want to hire the smartest person that we can, regardless of subject area." The danger with this is that there may actually be divisions within the department about where the position should go, and these divisions can play out in a process where different factions within the department veto each other. This is pretty rare, but not unheard of. (2) The university needs to have the resources in place to make a hire.  In tight financial times, this can become more challenging. I know anecdotally of public universities having to cancel searches in 2008/2009 even after the authorization if the budget cuts get too severe. A well-run university will be able to make these judgments with some leadtime and not have to back-track.
• The search committee gets put together. In my dept., the chair asks people to serve. If the search is in condensed matter, for example, there will be several condensed matter people on the committee, as well as representation from the other major groups in the department, and one knowledgeable person from outside the department (in chemistry or ECE, for example). The chairperson or chairpeople of the committee meet with the committee or at least those in the focus area, and come up with draft text for the ad.  In cross-departmental searches (sometimes there will be a search in an interdisciplinary area like "energy"), a dean would likely put together the committee.
• The ad gets placed, and canvassing begins of lots of people who might know promising candidates. A special effort is made to make sure that all qualified women and underrepresented minority candidates know about the position and are asked to apply (the APS has mailing lists to help with this, and direct recommendations are always appreciated - this is in the search plan). Generally, the ad really does list what the department is interested in. It's a huge waste of everyone's time to have an ad that draws a large number of inappropriate (i.e. don't fit the dept.'s needs) applicants. The exception to this is the generic ad like the type I mentioned above. Historically MIT and Berkeley had run the same ad every year, trolling for talent. They seem to do just fine. The other exception is when a university already knows who they want to get for a senior position, and writes an ad so narrow that only one person is really qualified. I've never seen this personally, but I've heard anecdotes.
• In the meantime, a search plan is formulated and approved by the dean. The plan details how the search will work, what the timeline is, etc. This plan is largely a checklist to make sure that we follow all the right procedures and don't screw anything up. It also brings to the fore the importance of "beating the bushes" - see above. A couple of people on the search committee will be particularly in charge of oversight on affirmative action/equal opportunity issues.
• The dean usually meets with the committee and we go over the plan, including a refresher for everyone on what is or is not appropriate for discussion in an interview (for an obvious example, you can't ask about someone's religion, or their marital status).
• Applications come in and are sorted; rec letters are collated.  Each candidate has a folder. Every year when I post this, someone argues that it's ridiculous to make references write letters, and that the committee should do a sort first and ask for letters later.  I understand this perspective, but I largely disagree. Letters can contain an enormous amount of information, and sometimes it is possible to identify outstanding candidates due to input from the letters that might otherwise be missed. (For example, suppose someone's got an incredible piece of postdoctoral work about to come out that hasn't been published yet. It carries more weight for letters to highlight this, since the candidate isn't exactly unbiased about their own forthcoming publications.)  There is a trend toward electronic application review, and that is likely to continue, though it can be complicated if committee members are not very tech-savvy.
• The committee begins to review the applications. Generally the members of the committee who are from the target discipline do a first pass, to at least wean out the inevitable applications from people who are not qualified according to the ad (i.e. no PhD; senior people wanting a senior position even though the ad is explicitly for a junior slot; people with research interests or expertise in the wrong area). Applications are roughly rated by everyone into a top, middle, and bottom category. Each committee member comes up with their own ratings, so there is naturally some variability from person to person. Some people are "harsh graders". Some value high impact publications more than numbers of papers. Others place more of an emphasis on the research plan, the teaching statement, or the rec letters. Yes, people do value the teaching statement - we wouldn't waste everyone's time with it if we didn't care. Interestingly, often (not always) the people who are the strongest researchers also have very good ideas and actually care about teaching. This shouldn't be that surprising. Creative people can want to express their creativity in the classroom as well as the lab.
• Once all the folders have been reviewed and rated, a relatively short list (say 20-25 or so out of 120 applications) is formed, and the committee meets to hash that down to, in the end, four or five to invite for interviews. In my experience, this happens by consensus, with the target discipline members having a bit more sway in practice since they know the area and can appreciate subtleties - the feasibility and originality of the proposed research, the calibration of the letter writers (are they first-rate folks? Do they always claim every candidate is the best postdoc they've ever seen?). I'm not kidding about consensus; I can't recall a case where there really was a big, hard argument within the committee. I know I've been lucky in this respect, and that other institutions can be much more fiesty. The best, meaning most useful, letters, by the way, are the ones who say things like "This candidate is very much like CCC and DDD were at this stage in their careers." Real comparisons like that are much more helpful than "The candidate is bright, creative, and a good communicator." Regarding research plans, the best ones (for me, anyway) give a good sense of near-term plans, medium-term ideas, and the long-term big picture, all while being relatively brief and written so that a general committee member can understand much of it (why the work is important, what is new) without being an expert in the target field. It's also good to know that, at least at my university, if we come across an applicant that doesn't really fit our needs, but meshes well with an open search in another department, we send over the file. This, like the consensus stuff above, is a benefit of good, nonpathological communication within the department and between departments.

That's pretty much it up to the interview stage. No big secrets. No automated ranking schemes based exclusively on h numbers or citation counts.

Tips for candidates:

• Don't wrap your self-worth up in this any more than is unavoidable. It's a game of small numbers, and who gets interviewed where can easily be dominated by factors extrinsic to the candidates - what a department's pressing needs are, what the demographics of a subdiscipline are like, etc. Every candidate takes job searches personally to some degree because of our culture and human nature, but don't feel like this is some evaluation of you as a human being.
• Don't automatically limit your job search because of geography unless you have some overwhelming personal reasons.  I almost didn't apply to Rice because neither my wife nor I were particularly thrilled about Texas, despite the fact that neither of us had ever actually visited the place. Limiting my search that way would've been a really poor decision - I've now been here 12 years, and we've enjoyed ourselves (my occasional Texas-centric blog posts aside).
• Really read the ads carefully and make sure that you don't leave anything out. If a place asks for a teaching statement, put some real thought into what you say - they want to see that you have actually given this some thought, or they wouldn't have asked for it.
• Research statements are challenging because you need to appeal to both the specialists on the committee and the people who are way outside your area. My own research statement back in the day was around three pages. If you want to write a lot more, I recommend having a brief (2-3 page) summary at the beginning followed by more details for the specialists. It's good to identify near-term, mid-range, and long-term goals - you need to think about those timescales anyway. Don't get bogged down in specific technique details unless they're essential. You need committee members to come away from the proposal knowing "These are the Scientific Questions I'm trying to answer", not just "These are the kinds of techniques I know". I know that some people may think that research statements are more of an issue for experimentalists, since the statements indicate a lot about lab and equipment needs. Believe me - research statements are important for all candidates. Committee members need to know where you're coming from and what you want to do - what kinds of problems interest you and why. The committee also wants to see that you actually plan ahead. These days it's extremely hard to be successful in academia by "winging it" in terms of your research program.
• Be realistic about what undergrads, grad students, and postdocs are each capable of doing. If you're applying for a job at a four-year college, don't propose to do work that would require an experienced grad student putting in 60 hours a week.
• Even if they don't ask for it, you need to think about what resources you'll need to accomplish your research goals. This includes equipment for your lab as well as space and shared facilities. Talk to colleagues and get a sense of what the going rate is for start-up in your area. Remember that four-year colleges do not have the resources of major research universities. Start-up packages at a four-year college are likely to be 1/4 of what they would be at a big research school (though there are occasional exceptions). Don't shave pennies - this is the one prime chance you get to ask for stuff! On the other hand, don't make unreasonable requests. No one is going to give a junior person a start-up package comparable to a mid-career scientist.
• Pick letter-writers intelligently. Actually check with them that they're willing to write you a nice letter - it's polite and it's common sense. (I should point out that truly negative letters are very rare.) Beyond the obvious two (thesis advisor, postdoctoral mentor), it can sometimes be tough finding an additional person who can really say something about your research or teaching abilities. Sometimes you can ask those two for advice about this. Make sure your letter-writers know the deadlines and the addresses. The more you can do to make life easier for your letter writers, the better.

As always, more feedback in the comments is appreciated.

Science, communication, and the public

This week's issue of Nature includes an interesting editorial emphasizing how crucial it is that scientists and engineers learn how to communicate their value to the general populace.  This is something I've thought about for quite some time, as have a number of other people - see this article in Physics Today (subscription only, I'm afraid), this related blog post, and a discussion in the Houston Chronicle's science blog. 

It's hard not to get down about this whole topic.  Industrial R&D funding (for projects with more than a year lead time) is a shadow of what it used to be, and looming fiscal austerity may well cripple federally funded basic research.  If companies aren't willing to invest for the long term, and government is unable or unwilling to invest for the long term, then technological innovation may shift away from the US.  If more of the general public and politicians appreciated that things like the iPad, XBox, the internet, and flat screen TVs didn't come out of nowhere, maybe the situation would be different. 

By the way, I find it interesting that the Nature editorial discusses looming cuts to Texas physics departments, a topic I mentioned here and was discussed in the New York Times, and yet our own Houston Chronicle hasn't bothered to write about them.  At all.  Even on their online science blog.  Yes, they're aware of the topic, too.  Clearly they've had more newsworthy things to worry about.

A few fun links.

I'm buried under a couple of pieces of work right now, but I did want to share a couple of fun science videos.

Here is a great example of magnetic levitation via superconductivity.

Those Mythbusters guys had a great time trying to make a giant Newton's Cradle using wrecking balls.  It didn't work well (and I assigned a homework problem looking at why this was the case).

I just heard yesterday that there's a full-length version of the theme song to the Big Bang Theory.  Pretty educational, though the lyrics imply that there'll be a Big Crunch, and we now know that's unlikely (see this year's Nobel in physics).

Here is a cool collection of videos, from minutephysics.  Good stuff! 

What's wrong with modern American economics.

According to this, Google stock may take a hit because their revenues only grew year-over-year by 30% this past quarter. Specifically, analysts are worried because Larry Page said that he cares more about the long term health of the company than goosing the stock price.  

What the hell is wrong with these people?  It's not enough that Google is making enormous profits.  It's not enough that Google's enormous revenues are 30% larger than they were last year.  Rather, apparently the free market will penalize Google because they expected the earnings to be 32% larger than last year, and it's apparently a bad thing that the management has talked about prioritizing long-term health and growth.   How is this attitude by the financial sector at all a good thing?  This attitude is exactly why corporate long-term R&D has been nearly obliterated in the US.

Quasicrystals

I was going to do a post about quasicrystals and this year's chemistry Nobel, but Don Monroe has done such a good job in his Phys Rev Focus piece that there's not much more to say.  Read it!

The big conceptual change brought about by the discovery of quasicrystals was not so much the observation of five-fold and icosahedral symmetries via diffraction.  That was certainly surprising, since you can't tile a plane with pentagons; it was very hard to understand how you could end up with a periodic arrangement of atoms that could fill space and give diffraction patterns with those symmetries.  The real conceptual shift was realizing that it is possible to have nice, sharp diffraction patterns from nonperiodic (rather, quasiperiodic) arrangements of atoms.   The usual arguments about diffraction that are taught in undergrad classes emphasize that diffraction (of electrons or x-rays or neutrons) is very strong (giving 'spots') in particular directions because along those directions, the waves scattered by subsequent planes of atoms all interfere constructively.   Changing the direction leads to crests and troughs of waves adding with some complicated phase relationship, generally averaging to not much intensity.  In particular symmetry directions, though, the waves scattered by successive planes of atoms arrive in phase, as the distances traveled by the various scattered contributions all differ by integer numbers of wavelengths.  Without a periodic arrangement of atoms, it was hard to see how this could happen nicely.

It turns out that quasicrystals really do have a hidden sort of symmetry.  They are projections onto three dimensions of structures that would be periodic in a higher dimensional space.  The periodicity isn't there in the 3d projection (rather, the atoms are arranged "quasiperiodically" in space), but the 3d projection does contain information about the higher dimensional symmetry, and this comes out when diffraction is done in certain directions.  The discovery of these materials spurred scientists had to reevaluate their ideas about what crystallinity really means - that's why it's important.  For what it's worth, the best description of this that I've seen in a textbook is in Taylor and Heinonen.

A modest proposal for Google, Intel, or the like.

A post on quasicrystals will be coming eventually....

Suppose you're an extremely successful tech company, and you want to make a real, significant impact on university research for the long term, because you realize that you need an educated, technically sophisticated workforce.  Rather than endowing individual professorships, or setting up one or two research centers, I have a suggestion.  Take $250M, and set up research equipment endowments at, say, the 50 top research universities.  Give each one $5M, with the proviso that the endowment returns be used for the purchase or maintenance of research equipment, and/or technical staff salary lines, as the institution sees fit.  That could buy one good-sized piece of equipment per year, or pay for several technical staff.  This would be a way for universities to replenish their research infrastructure over time without being dependent on federal equipment grants (which are undoubtedly useful, but tend to favor the exotic over the essential, and are likely to become increasingly scarce as fiscal austerity takes over for the foreseeable future).  Universities could also charge depreciation on that equipment when assessing user fees, making the whole system self-sustaining even beyond endowment returns.  Alternately, critical staff lines could be supported.  Anyone at a research university knows that a good technical staff member can completely reshape the way facilities (e.g., a cleanroom; a mass spec center) operate.  You put all the decision making on the university, with the proviso that they can't spend down the principal.   This strategy would boost research productivity across the country over time, get more and better equipment into the hands of future tech workers, and be a charitable write-off for the company that does it.  It could really make a difference.

I'm completely serious about this, and would be happy to talk to any corporations (or foundations) about how this might work.