This is damned peculiar....

There was pretty big hoopla last week about two papers concerning graphene (and it's related material graphene oxide).  In Science, Andre Geim's group reported a remarkable result concerning a membrane made from a "paper" comprising layers of graphene oxide flakes.  This membrane is apparently extremely leak-tight for gases including the notoriously slippery helium, but essentially transparent (!) to the transport of water vapor.  This is very very odd.  The argument made by the authors is that the graphene oxide layers are wet by physisorbed water, which can move across the graphene surface nearly frictionlessly (since graphene itself is hydrophobic - that is, it's nonpolar and doesn't interact particularly strongly with the polar water molecules).  When the water is removed, the layers compress against one another tightly enough that there are no continuous pathways large enough to allow helium diffusion (or they're clogged up with residual adsorbed water).  Assuming this is right, it's pretty cool, and brings to mind the ideal "semipermeable membrane" that's sometimes used as a teaching concept in thermodynamics classes.  (Old joke:  how do you catch a lion in the desert?  A thermodynamicist would take a semipermeable membrane that passes everything except lions, and drag it across the desert to the entrance of a cage.  A mathematician would simply map the exterior of the cage to the interior of the cage.  Etc.)

Now, the other paper that got a decent amount of attention was this one.  The interactions of water with a solid surface are often characterized by a "contact angle", the angle (inside the droplet) with which the water-air interface meets the solid-air interface.  When a droplet on a surface "beads up", that angle exceeds 90 degrees (the surface is hydrophobic), while when a droplet wets the surface well, that angle is much less than 90 degrees (the surface is hydrophilic).  The authors of this paper claim that a monolayer of graphene on a surface leaves the contact angle completely undisturbed (for surfaces where there is not chemical bonding at work between water and the surface).  That's extremely weird, especially in light of the previous paragraph.  You'd have to have a situation where the surface interactions of water with graphene are completely determined by the material under the graphene, not by the graphene itself.  That is, somehow having graphene there doesn't affect the van der Waals interaction much at all.  This is surprising, given past experiments that look at, e.g., the interactions of nanotubes with graphite surfaces, where clearly the van der Waals interaction is nontrivially tied to the graphene geometry, for example.  I have a tough time understanding how the interpretations of both of these papers can be correct, though just because it's unintuitive to me doesn't mean it's not true.

(Bonus question:  can any of the commenters identify the quote that I used for the title of this post?)

Cold atoms, optical lattices, and condensed matter physics

Over the last decade, since this experiment in particular, there has been rapidly growing interest in using optically trapped ultracold atoms, traditionally the tool of what people in the game call "atomic/molecular/optical" or "AMO" physics, to study condensed matter problems.  Using interfering laser beams, it is possible to make a spatially periodic pattern of optical intensity that acts like a spatially periodic potential energy.  Ultracold atoms (they have to be cold so that their kinetic energy is too low for them to fly out of the little potential wells) can be placed in this lattice in a controlled way.  The interactions between the atoms can be tuned using clever approaches, so that the interaction is so large that only one atom will like to sit in each little potential minimum.  It's also possible to tune the overlap of the potential wells to allow tunneling processes so that the atoms can move (virtually and in real space).  With other exceedingly clever modifications, it is even possible to use internal degrees of freedom of the atoms (e.g., nuclear spins), and to introduce effects equivalent to magnetic fields or spin-orbit coupling.

Condensed matter theorists love this stuff - you can actually implement the model problems they've been playing with for ages (e.g., the 2d Hubbard model on a square lattice), and all while maintaining exquisite tunability and control over the microscopic parameters.  Moreover, with spectroscopic techniques, you can probe these systems in real space (no need for diffraction experiments to see the periodic arrangement of atoms - just image them!), and pull out microscopic information (population and energy distributions) that is incredibly hard or impossible to get in solid materials.  These optical lattice systems are particularly great for examining nonequilibrium dynamics in microscopic detail.

This prompts a couple of questions.  First, is this condensed matter physics?  Yes, since the systems being modeled are condensed matter systems - that's how we denote theory, right?  (Empirically, some optical lattice results are now published in the condensed matter section of Phys Rev Letters, so there you go.)  Second, are there condensed matter systems that can't be modeled with these optical lattice methods?  Yes.  For one example, consider a material like VO₂.  First, it's lattice structure is not something readily achievable in an optical lattice.  Second, this material undergoes a spontaneous structural change as a function of temperature, due to coupling between the electrons and the lattice.  In a cold atom system, you would somehow need the optical lattice itself to change depending on the positions of the atoms stored within it - I don't think anyone has figured out how to do such a thing.  I'm sure there are other examples, even in pure single-crystal systems.  Bottom line:  cold atom techniques for studying certain condensed matter problems are amazing and revolutionary, but there are going to be many CM systems that can't be accessed or modeled that way.

"Low energy nuclear reactions" - again.

A person at NASA's Langley Research Center appears in a video touting the great benefits that are going to come with the realization of "low energy nuclear reactions", which is a phrase that is meant to be a bit more general (and a bit less tainted) than "cold fusion".  Let me take care of the preliminaries right away:

• The experimental evidence for any of this stuff remains dodgy at best.  I've explained what most scientists would consider a threshold for reproducibility of a real phenomenon, and this just isn't there.  There's always a "secret sauce" or very particular and idiosyncratic surface treatment; there are equivocal claims about the presence or absence of fusion products and radiation; etc.  (This is the point where a true believer will show up and point out the many documents indexed here, and castigate me for not being sufficiently open-minded.  Let's just take that as read.)
• For this to be correct, much of our knowledge of nuclear processes would have to be in severe need of correction, despite the fact that it works pretty darn well for things like nuclear reactors and the description of how the sun works.
• Just because someone at NASA likes this, or because Brian Josephson likes it, doesn't mean it's automatically real.
• Despite claims to the contrary, physicists would love it if something like this turned out to be true - look at the reaction of most physicists to the superluminal neutrino business.  It'd be the story of the century.  There is not some giant conspiracy of The Establishment trying to suppress this.  Again, look at the neutrino situation:  everyone agrees that such an extraordinary claim requires extraordinary evidence, presented for public scrutiny in detail.    

That being out of the way, I want to comment briefly on the supposed explanation implied by the NASA video, "Method for Enhancement of Surface Plasmon Polaritons to Initiate and Sustain LENR".  The proposed explanation, related to "Widom-Larsen theory", is related a bit to muon-catalyzed fusion.  The muon is a cousin of the electron, but 200 times heavier.  The muon can replace an electron in, e.g., a deuterium molecule, causing the two nuclei to be considerably closer to each other, and enhancing the rate of fusion.  Widom and Larsen propose that some collective coupling between nuclei and collective electronic excitations (plasmons) results in electrons with large effective masses, and that this effective mass enhancement allows "heavy" electrons to catalyze fusion reactions.  This is exceedingly unlikely to be correct, because (to paraphrase Morbo from Futurama), "Effective mass does not work that way!".  At the end of the day, while there are collective excitations of many electrons that act, at condensed matter energy scales, like they are heavy (meaning that their energy increases more slowly as a function of their (crystal) momentum than for a free electron), (1) individual electrons are what participate in things like inverse beta decay, and (2) only a small fraction of the total number of electrons in a metal participate in these "heavy" excitations. 

Again, I'd love it if this were real.  Show me reproducibility that does not require prior belief to buy, and then we can talk.

From around the web

While working on several writing projects simultaneously, I've run across some interesting articles and links.

• Here is an interesting discussion about whether our ordinary metrics are doing a good job at measuring scientific impact (and therefore encouraging the kinds of collaborative behaviors that tend to advance science).  One tricky bit not really addressed here is the challenge of distinguishing when a 12 author paper really involves excellent collaborative work, with everyone contributing to a scientific advance; and when a 12 author paper really represents the work of about 3 people, with others included for contributions (intellectual, financial, or political) of varying small degrees.  
• This is a (slightly ad-laden) compilation of many online lectures related to condensed matter physics.
• Likewise, here are a series of continuing education lectures by Lenny Susskind (who taught me graduate stat mech) on statistical mechanics, and another series on quantum mechanics.  I find it very interesting that these are so clearly organized - he must've put a lot of time into planning them.
• Here is Phillip Gibbs with a great article about why c stands for the speed of light.  I'll admit, I was one of those people he mentions that had read (and naively believed) Asimov's assertion that c stood for the Latin celeritas, meaning "speed".  Guess I need to reconsider!
• More evidence that Elsevier is just evil.  Through lobbyists, they're trying to kill public access to data from publicly funded research if that research has been published in a journal of a for-profit publisher.     
  
• And for fun, here is a place (not the only one, I'm sure) that sells serious computer keyboards - the kind with real clicky metal leaf springs and solid metal backplanes.  I got one of these a couple of years ago and love it.  It reminds me of the best keyboard I've ever used, from an old HP 9000 workstation back in my beginning grad school days.

TOEFL scores

This is my first attempt at using a blogging app for the iPad.  Let's see how it goes....

Over the last few weeks, I've received several emails from foreign students who are would-be applicants to Rice graduate programs, asking me whether I'll be looking for students next year.  In these same emails, the students point out that their TOEFL scores fall below Rice's official cutoff of 90, and ask if they can get in anyway.  For some I know that cutoffs like this seem unfair - that only physics ability should matter in terms of getting into a grad program.  However, we don't set these things just to be arbitrary.  Historically, students who cannot meet that language test criterion have a very hard time - they can't generally be put in front of undergrads to teach, they have difficulty in communicating with their instructors, and often the language barrier is sufficiently severe that there is a tendency to hang out with other students who speak their native language rather than to speak English (a situation that can prolong rather than address the issue).  I have enormous respect for someone motivated and bright enough to go abroad to a foreign country for grad school in a non-native language - I couldn't have done it - but the language rules are there for rational reasons.

Underappreciated papers (not yours)

While doing research, scientists and engineers read (at various levels of depth) many papers.  Every now and then, you come across one that is really great, yet somehow doesn't seem to have received the attention or appreciation it deserves.  I'll pick one here, and hopefully some readers will put their examples in the comments.

One that I like a lot is this paper from Wilson Ho's group at UC Irvine.  Here the authors use a scanning tunneling microscope, and demonstrate that when the tunneling current-voltage characteristic, they get rectification of microwaves.  That is, when microwaves are applied to the tip-sample junction, the result is a dc current proportional to the square of the microwave amplitude and to the nonlinearity (second derivative of I with respect to V) of the tunnel junction.  It's a clean, elegant experiment, with quantitatively accurate comparison of experiment and a simple classical theory - very very nice, and really underappreciated in my view.  

Any suggestions of others?

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.