Boozy Marketing Gimmick

I’ve been spending a few evenings at the lab in the last two weeks, and eating a lot at the on-site bistro. While the change in management of on-site food services to Sodexho a year ago has actually increased quality*, its also increased the corporate cheeze-factor by an order of magnitude. Lots of dishes in the bistro have baseless names like the “PETRA** Burger” (just a burger, but it comes with onion “Rings”***). If you’re ever in town, might I recommend for a digestif, the Beschleuniger (Accelerator):

They won’t tell you what’s in it, but it tastes to me like crème de menthe and apple liquor. This doesn’t explain the opacity, but at 2 €, it aint bad.

*In my opinion. Canteen bashing is still a popular method of winning trust among DESY folk.

**Local Synchrotron, but the same tunnel where gluons were discovered in 3 jets by the TASSO collab.

***Get it? Get It? Man, I hate quotation abuse.

Get over it, America. Teabreaks do not inhibit science.

A few weeks ago, while I was in a discussion about young academics and why they choose to stay in science or not, I made a point which I think is perfectly obvious, but which was snorted at by the older academics present.   I said that when a postdoc looks at the people ahead of them in the system, they see stressed tired people who regularly work evenings and weekends, who have to fight continually for their funding (i.e. their job security), and who not make a lot of money for their effort.   This is not something that most people want to look forward to.    The people my age in the group remained quiet and listened to the older ones there pooh-pooh the idea.   The more senior academics asked me, “do you personally see that problem ahead of you?”.  And I said “yes”, and described the unhealthy work ethic that I sometimes see around me.   And the discussion stopped there.   Because the loudest snorter of them all actually said “well, you’re from Britain – you’re not used to working as hard as we do here.    You don’t have money for the really big projects.   And you stop for tea three times a day!”.   I pointed out that it’s only twice a day, but my serious point about the work was no longer taken seriously.

This annoyed me.   So when I went back to my office, I looked a few things up.   Thomson (the academic publishers) publish tables every year of the total number of scientific papers published by each country and also the “Total papers among the one per cent most cited in all fields”.   I then looked up the current populations of each country and so got to the numbers of papers per capita.   Here are the results:

Total papers per capita:    USA:  9.6 per thousand people per year     UK:   10.9 per thousand people per year.

Papers in the top 1%:  USA:   0.18 per thousand people per year.   UK:   0.17 per thousand people per year.

Now, I’m happy to admit that simple statistics may not tell the whole story.   But I’m also pretty confident that this is a strong indication that taking two 15 minutes breaks a day to consume cups of tea and eat biscuits is not doing us any harm at all, thank you very much.   And next time anyone tries to snort at my view of working hours on that basis, I will politely share these data with them and offer to induct them into the world of the tea break.   If they’re nice, I might even give them a biscuit.

False Vacua I: The End of the Universe As We Know it

A few weeks ago, I wrote the first script of what I hoped would become a pop-sci podcast. Since this podcast, if it ever happens, will not happen for a rather long time, I figured it’d be fun to make it a series of blog posts. Many apologies if the post seems too simplistic or condescending….

The subject of false vacua is fascinating in its own right, but also nice because it brings together many different areas of theoretical physics. The discussion encapsulates many current areas of beautiful physical research such as quantum field theory, gravity, cosmology, supersymmetry and string theory. There is also a science-fiction like quality about the subject; After all, we’ll be talking about the possibility that at any second a bubble might form out of nothing and eat you. Hopefully, after these podcasts/blogposts the viewer/reader will appreciate that nowadays science fiction is somewhat superfluous; some of the craziest ideas are found in modern physics.

The fusion of Einstein’s special relativity and quantum mechanics under the heading of “Quantum Field Theories,” which describes things that are both very small and very fast.

Creative Writing Assignment

Before a seminar last week, I was discussing a colleague’s masters thesis, and she told me something I’m fairly jealous of:  She gets to invent her own physics words.  You see, this colleague comes from Ukraine, and her University has recently changed its thesis requirements from Russian to Ukrainian.  The two languages are closely related, but have significant differences in alphabet, vocabulary and grammar.  Ukrainian has been the official language of the Ukraine since 1991, but it was suppressed to varying degrees during the Soviet Era, and the CIA Factbook lists currently at 67% of the population claim it as their native language.  Since it has only recently been officially used at the university level, there are many technological words which are currently loaned from Russian or English.  This isn’t really unique to her situation, as that anyone who studies physics in any language has solved a problem by an ansatz, and heard of bremsstrahlung*.  What is unique is that there is pressure to develop Ukrainian, and therefore pressure to remove these loan words.  She was vague about how many loan words would be officially tolerated, but indicated that some technical vocabulary could be naturally adapted, but some would need to be basically invented from scratch to make them genuinely Ukrainian.  That’s got to be 50% fun, and 50% intractable.

*Bremsstrahlung is in firefox’s En. spell checker.  Thats awesome.  Ansatz isn’t, but ersatz is?

The end of the affair….

I’m part of a collaboration that built and operated a particle detector at a collider which finished taking data in July of last year. I wasn’t here to build it by a long shot, but I did run and repair part of it during last two years of data taking. Now I’m only analysing data for my thesis, not doing any hardware work anymore, and I’m finding its a mixed blessing.

Live Fast, Publish Hard

Ever hear the quip that a mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into proofs? Well, maybe if you up the input, you up output….

Bubble Bath

I had a Eureka moment this week. Fortunately I was not sitting in a bath at the time and so I did not have to decide whether to suppress the urge (apparently written into the laws of physics for moments like this) to run around the streets naked, shouting happily about my discovery. Thinking about it though, if I’m ever going to try that, it should be while I live in southern California near the beach. In my neighbourhood, such behaviour would probably just count as part of the social background noise rather than anything significant.

The Eureka itself was to do with how bubbles behave acoustically when fragmenting in turbulence (for example underneath a breaking wave). It turns out that some bubbles are disguising themselves acoustically as other bubbles (because the dominant resonance is not at their natural frequency). This explains a gap in the data which was previously unexplained, and I am very happy because my model matches the data pretty well. Or, it matches it pretty well up to now. There are still lots of things to be tested, but the fact that it explains this major feature is very encouraging. So I worked all this out, plotted most of the relevant stuff and hopefully this is sufficient for the time being to exorcise the bubbles-on-the-brain demons. Just before I worked out what was going on, piles of ideas were sitting untidily round in my head, overflowing into corners that they really didn’t belong in (for example, the ones associated with eating yogurt and inventing cocktails). They jostled each other and squeaked and squawked and squeezed and generally wouldn’t leave me alone. So now they’ve been put in order and I can get on with some other things. Good ideas. Sit. Stay…

Making the tea

I went to a discussion about women in science last week. I don’t normally do things like that, since such events have been known to bring on side effects such as the Horrified Hiccups and mysterious aches in the Being Patronised (or should it be Matronised) Brain Cell. When compared to women throughout the ages, I am very privileged in the attitude that my co-workers have to my gender, i.e. that it is a non-issue. I recognise that there are not as many women doing science as men (for reasons which are many and complicated), but I really don’t think that it’s due to prejudice any longer. There may well be isolated cases when this is true, but I can’t quite believe that they are at all representative. However, this change in attitudes is still newly hatched, and this is my only explanation for the persistance of “Women In Science” workshops when I was a teenager. I felt patronised at all of them. And I felt that women were almost being told to have problems, when really the issues being discussed could apply just to much to men as women. Not all men are assertive and confident and they will have problems when dealing with over-assertive and excessively confident co-workers, just as shyer females might. The problem is with the way people are, not their gender.

So. I have not been to any of these events since, and I thought it was about time to see how things have changed. And it was very interesting. The women there found it extremely difficult to come up with instances where they had been discriminated against, even though they were being actively encouraged to talk about them. Now, there is obviously one very important difference between men and women. Women can bear children and men, however much they want to help, do not have to go through the physical process associated with this. The point where the number of women in science really drops off is at the point where they have a family and have tended not to come back to science aftewards. I believe that this is the only time period that really matters in the gender debate. I also have a theory on this, based on talking to other female scientists. Institutions no longer stand in the way of new mothers coming back to work as they once did. But science itself has problems for researchers at that stage that apply both to men and women. Ask any postdoc. We look at the PIs in our departments and we see very stressed people, who work far too many hours on weekdays and on weekends, who have to struggle for funding, fight for lab space and also deal with teaching responsibilities and committees and so on. It’s not just women who look at this mess and question whether their love of science is enough for them to carry on. Men do too. No-one wants a permanently stressed lifestyle and a guaranteed heart attack at 55. But I think that partly because of having some time off to have children and getting some perspective on it all, and partly because they are used to talking about problems more than men, women look at it and decide to do something else. Men still have a bit of a macho attitude to problems and tend to deny them and just keep struggling along, feeling as though it would be failing to admit to the struggle. Women tend to be a bit better about admitting problems. And science shouldn’t be like this. The system should not punish enthusiastic and intelligent people for being enthusiastic and intelligent. So I think that the gender split during the postdoc years has more to do with
the big problems in how science works and the unfair pressure that researchers are often under, at least until they get tenure. This is not to do with prejudice against women in science. This has to do with women identifying the problems in science and refusing to play by those rules. You only have one life. Why should you be miserable in it, just because someone else defines that misery as success?

So I think that women here are in a position to help both themselves and the men in science. Let’s face up to it and sort it out. Let’s change this system where the only security comes with tenure, when the best years of your life are behind you. It’s not a “gender” issue. It’s right at the core of how science is organised. We should find ways to fix it. Systems are huge, but their rules are not written in stone. There is hope.

Right, I’ve made my political point. Back to the cheerful flippancy next time….

Anybody got a keyless entry car?

Want to open any car or garage door? Seems the algorithm used in the Keeloq security system, used for keyless entry into several makes of cars and garage doors is fundamentally flawed. I love reading stuff like this:

1. Closed source security algorithm has a weakness in it, by accident or intent.
2. Someone finds the weakness.
3. Someone notifies the vendor, and the weakness is patched.
4. Someone publicizes an exploit to the world.

Often, 2. happens inside the vendor, and 4. never happens. Sometimes, like the google mail hijack bug, 2., 3. and 4. are the same person, who is just trying to warn you your security shoe is untied. Sometimes, 2. and 3-4. are different people, the weakness gets maliciously exploited for a while before 3. happens. Some times, like in the present case, the algorithm goes unpatched for 20 years, and is hard coded millions of devices, so a fix becomes completely infeasible. The exploit may be only a proof-of-concept right now, but perhaps master-keys for luxury cars are only a few weeks away on eBay….. Oh, the “intent” part came from the time back in ‘97 when the NSA was accused of intentionally designing a weakness into the cell phone cryptography CMEA. Bless those grey-hats.

Oh, this algorithm was exposed to be flawed before, but this one is a bit worse, because “That [previous] method took closer to a day to crack the device key and required close proximity to the remote for about an hour. ” This one “..can be done from a distance of 100 meters or more and requires the capture of just two messages.”

Generalized PDFs Imply a Gravitomagnetic Moment!?!?!?

Today I’m writing conference proceedings, which are boring me to write, so they will probably be inhumanely boring to read, and lethally boring to publish. I may try to write them so the first letters spell out a hidden message, just to stay focused.

Part of the way I’m constructively procrastinating is skimming a review paper on Generalized Parton Distributions. They’re a pretty cool idea. So QCD can’t be perturbatively calculated at arbitrarily soft scales, so nobody knows how to directly calculate from first principles whats happening inside of hadrons. The lattice folk are making progress here, but that technique takes a lot of power, so those calculations can’t easily get incorporated into general calculations.   You can parametrize what’s happening in a hadron, measure it, and the factorization theorem tells you your resulting functions are universal, modulo an evolution of the factorization scale. So we can measure parton distributions functions here at HERA, and then you can roll them up to the LHC/TeVatron scales or down to a fixed target, and everyone agrees on what these functions are and do. If you are operating at first order, the vanilla type of PDFs naively tell you what the probability of finding a quark or gluon of a certain type and certain longitudinal momentum is. At higher orders the interpretation isn’t so clear, but they still return a real scalar. There’s no interference, no helicity, no transverse momentum. You can tack on spin or other stuff, but its always a bit of a blunt object.  How the proton gets its spin out of the quark-gluon shimmy is still a big mystery, so theorists have been experimenting with difference ways to combine PDFs and form factors, to include interference terms, and understand all components of nulceon spin. The situation is stabilizing a bit, and this paper seems to imply that the parameterization they describe is widely used.

I got a bit shocked by the following couple of lines:

…according to an extension of the equivalence principle of general relativity to describe the interaction of the nucleon with the external gravitational field one arrives to the interpretation of B(0) as an anomalous gravitomagnetic moment being the analog of the anomalous magnetic moment [47]. There is also evidence supporting the conjecture that the equivalence principle is valid separately for quarks and gluons resulting in exact equipartition of momenta and angular momenta in the nucleon. The most precise numerical support comes from lattice calculations [48].

AH!  What!!?!?!  Who said anything about gravity!?!?!  But it’s not really what it looked like at first glance.  B(0) is zero, btw, so whatever you want to call it is moot, but the cool thing is that [47] paper, where the author sees a relationship similar to the equivalence principle, and this cancels out that B(0) thing at all orders.  I can’t do GR, so I can’t comment on the validity of the approach, but its a cool idea…..