The Templeton Foundation

There was an interesting story this morning on NPR about the Templeton Foundation and their efforts to fund physics research. The Templeton folks are interested in the interface between science and spirituality, and sponsor the Templeton Prize (which is intentionally larger than the Nobel). The occasion for this story is an upcoming conference at Berkeley in honor of Charles Townes' 90th birthday, sponsored by the Templeton Foundation. I know about this because, like pretty much all of my peers, I received an announcement about a Young Scholar's competition being held at this meeting.

I have no problem with increased dialog between science and religion, as long as people remember where the boundaries are. "God did it" is a rather inquiry-ending proposition to hold in a scientific investigation, so I prefer to assume that non-supernatural explanations exist for the world around me and go from there.

Anyway, the story is interesting food for thought. Physicists talked to who are skeptical of the Templeton Foundation's motives include Sean Carroll and Lawrence Krauss.

Science and today's politics

Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX), chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, has decided to threaten NSF-funded scientists who authored a peer-reviewed, published study on climate change that suggests that fossil fuel consumption influences global warming. Specifically, he has requested that these scientists turn over all records of their work to his committee, where (quoting Barton's letter to the director of the NSF) "The term 'records' is to be construed in the broadest sense ... whether printed or recorded electronically or magnetically or stored in any type of data bank, including, but not limited to ... summaries of personal conversations or interviews ... diaries ... checks and canceled checks ... bank statements." For more information, see the New York Times and BBC articles on the subject.

It is a huge understatement for me to say that I find this disturbing. Asking scientists to essentially open their personal financial records to him because he doesn't like their research is appalling. We all sign "conflict of interest" disclosure forms when we accept research funds - threats of congressional subpoenas are not the appropriate way for Barton to voice concerns about the objectivity of researchers! Indeed, given that Barton's campaigns through the years have been massively financed by the oil and energy industries, if anyone's objectivity should be of concern, it's not that of the scientists.

I am genuinely concerned that even writing about this in a public forum potentially puts my future funding at risk. It is only a short step from Barton's current actions to some future move to political litmus tests for research funding (i.e. Why should tax dollars go to someone who holds views contrary to those of the current administration?). To some degree this is already happening. Read this (go to the full report link (pdf) and read page 26.).

The whole point of the peer-review system is that scientists have the appropriate training to evaluate the work of other scientists! At a time when American preeminence in science and engineering is slipping (pdf), and when research funding in real dollars (let alone as a percentage of GDP) is being cut, is politicizing the process at all a smart thing to be doing?

Interesting recent papers....

Here are a couple of interesting papers I've seen in the last week or so:

Doh et al., Tunable supercurrent through semiconductor nanowires, Science 309, 272 (2005).

Very pretty use of InAs semiconducting nanowires grown by the now-usual VLS approach, and contacted by aluminum pads. When the Al goes superconducting, carriers in the InAs (controlled via field effect with a gate) become superconducting, too, via the proximity effect. Basically this results in a tunable Josephson junction with the InAs nanowire as the controllable weak link. Gorgeous, as is most of the stuff that comes out of Delft.

Ghosh et al., Zero-bias anomaly and Kondo-assisted quasi-ballistic 2d transport.

A preprint out of the Cambridge folks that looks at very clean mesoscale 2d GaAs/AlGaAs systems and argues that there is evidence (a temperature-dependent zero-bias peak in the differential conductance) that points to Kondo-assisted transport in these systems. The remarkable thing is that the orthodox Kondo effect relies on localized spin degrees of freedom, and there shouldn't be any in these materials. The authors suggest a more exotic (2-channel!) Kondo effect involving localized two-level defects. Very intriguing data, though the interpretation is likely to be controversial, if past 2-channel Kondo reports are any indication.

People who annoy me.

You know what really ticks me off? People with no technical background who have nonetheless become nanoscience and nanotechnology "talking heads". A lot of this is our fault - those of us who actually do research at these length scales. Why? Because we've done a lousy job of making sure that journalists can tell the difference between reality and hype. People on my "irresponsible talking head" list:

1) The Center for Responsible Nanotechnology. These folks act like a group who have put careful thought into the benefits and risks of nanotechnology. In fact, these folks don't have a physical science degree between them. I don't care how sincerely motivated you are, or how bright: if your idea of nanotechnology comes from reading nontechnical articles, you don't really know what's going on, and if you don't have the technical background to understand real technical articles, I am highly skeptical of your opinions.

2) Josh Wolfe. When he sticks to what he knows - giving investment advice about high technology companies - Josh Wolfe is as solid as they come. Very sharp. However, lately I've seen him making the rounds on CNBC and MSNBC talking as if he really is technically knowledgable about nanoscale science. He's not.

3) Michael Crichton. Apart from the massive plot holes in Prey, what really annoys me about Crichton is that he writes "nonfiction" articles about his novels' topics that get widely circulated (like in syndicated newspaper inserts). He's such an egomaniac that he thinks doing research for one of his novels makes him as qualified as a real expert to expound on science. This is true of his nano novel Prey, and true of his environmentalism novel State of Fear. Dude: you're an author, not a polyglot genius of science. Get over yourself.

"More" really is different.

Condensed matter physics gets a bum rap sometimes. Murray Gell-Mann referred to it as "squalid state" physics. Wolfgang Pauli called it "Physik der Dreckeffeckte", or "the physics of dirt effects". (That's particularly ironic since it's the Pauli principle that makes condensed matter at all tractable.)

In addition to being at the heart of essentially all modern electronics technology, condensed matter is actually much more intellectually profound than "junk" effects. As Phil Anderson pointed out in his now famous essay, "More is different". That is, large systems of smaller entities interacting through relatively simple rules can exhibit very surprising emergent, collective properties. For example, a single iron atom is pretty simple, but put a bunch together, and you end up with a rigid solid (!) that is also a metal (!) and, at ambient conditions, a ferromagnet (!). Try predicting all that a priori from the Standard Model of particle physics....

One of my former professors, Bob Laughlin, has written a good book on this subject. As a physicist it's tough for me to judge just how well it'll read to a lay audience, but I enjoyed it thoroughly. It's vintage Laughlin (who I once saw ask a seminar speaker, "It's late. We're all tired. Why should we care about any of this?!"), even if some of the Stanford anecdotes have some minor inaccuracies. Here's a review from the New York Times. I don't agree with everything he says (pretty much he thinks "nano" work is, in general, buzzword-laden crap rather than addressing real scientific questions. Oh wait - maybe I do agree with him.), but it's a fun read.

A condensed matter physicist blog: why not?

I was googling around for something the other day, and came upon physcomments.org, a website that purports to be the home of "scholarly discussions of physics" on the web. Upon going there, I discovered that the definition of physics used there apparently referred only to high energy physics (e.g. string theory, loop quantum gravity, accelerator-based experiments) and astrophysics/cosmology.

I assumed that this was due to intellectual snobbery on the part of that community, and set off to find all the condensed matter / AMO physics blogs out there, only to discover that, as far as I could tell, there aren't any.

So, here we are. I'll try to start one, and we'll see where this goes. I'll try to clearly delineate between science-related posts and other stuff (my comments on the weirdness of junior faculty life, or public science policy, or humor). If there are a bunch of you out there blogging the interesting things in condensed matter, nanoscale science, or AMO physics, please post and let me know, so I can link to your stuff....

Now back to the omnipresent task of proposal-writing....