Page 1500 – Physics World

A tale of eternal energy

Most physicists probably realize that their work will not overturn the foundations of science. Some, however, refuse to accept this fate and are convinced that they have discovered how the cosmos really works, even though no one else believes them. Known politely as “cranks” by those who receive their impenetrable but often strangely poetic letters, they operate outside the scientific mainstream. It is one such character — the fictional physicist and Communist Karl Neder — who is at the centre of science writer Philip Ball’s rich and entertaining new novel.

Neder, in common with many of his real-life ilk, has it in for Einstein. He believes passionately that the theories of relativity are wrong and that space–time is, in fact, absolute, and he writes reams of obscure mathematics to show that this is the case. He also claims to have invented that most cherished of maverick devices — a perpetual- motion machine.

Neder’s mission to show the world the error of its scientific ways and to furnish it with unlimited free energy takes place across a changing geographical backdrop, from his youth in postwar and revolutionary Hungary, through a stint as a NASA researcher in the US, and then on to a series of frantic wanderings around central and Eastern Europe as a Soviet dissident a few years before the collapse of Communism there.

Running parallel to Neder’s journey is the story of aspiring but directionless journalist Lena Romanowicz. With just one significant article to her name, she spots a story about Neder in her physicist father’s copy of Natural Science magazine and decides to try and write a profile of him for the Observer newspaper. Given that Neder is constantly on the run, Lena has a challenge on her hands trying to track him down. But when she finally does, she finds herself in a desolate, history-making place.

Ball is a freelance science writer and a consultant editor for Nature, and, in addition to his regular stream of articles in the scientific and popular press, he has written a number of non-fiction books. Fiction, however, is something new for him. Among the acknowledgments in The Sun and Moon Corrupted, he says that his wife has “relished watching me leave the comfort zone of non-fiction”, but he certainly appears at home in his new surroundings.

Ball definitely hits the mark when it comes to maverick scientists. His imagined letters from frustrated physicists and would-be physicists — such as one that informs the reader of how to calculate the length of the sky — would seem utterly fanciful were it not for the fact that science magazines and journals receive letters just like them every week.

Neder’s letters show some of the classic traits of the crank — boundless enthusiasm for his work, utter conviction that he is right, and a refusal to accept criticism or rejection; although his threat to burn himself to death in front of the British Embassy in Prague if his papers are not accepted for publication is perhaps further than most real-life eccentrics would be prepared to go. Through the narrative, Ball gives the reader some idea of why mainstream scientists are rightly reluctant to abandon their existing theories in favour of radical new alternatives, but his story suggests that these apparent cranks should not always be dismissed out of hand.

Combining fictional narrative with science, as Ball attempts to do, is not easy. The physics is a bit dense in places and will not be easy going for those without a scientific background. He can also be a bit over descriptive, and the plot sometimes gets lost amid the chunks of science and history. Nevertheless, he succeeds in giving the reader an idea of how science works and what makes scientists tick, while wrapping it all up in an engaging story.

In writing this science adventure story, as well as displaying an impressive knowledge of physics, chemistry, politics and history, Ball also convincingly portrays personal relationships. His portrait of the relationship between Lena and her father, who is the head of physics at the University of Kent, is particularly good. Lena is a “people person” who is somewhat intimidated by science, while her father loves talking about physics, increasingly so on the radio, but is less adept when it comes to family matters. As Lena sees it, he regards people as “a peculiarly complicated class of fundamental particle”.

The rest of the book contains plenty more to entertain the reader. In particular look out for the amusing dialogue between Lena and the mildly lecherous man from the Observer; the portrayal of the science journalist as outsider; the chaotic scenes from the “International Conference on Space–Time Absoluteness” in Vienna; Lena’s secretive trek across the Transylvanian Alps and Carpathians; betrayal; nuclear weapons; surveillance; and a cameo appearance by Einstein. Then there is the climax, where the title of the book becomes clear. There is certainly plenty to take in, but the book is all the more stimulating for it.

Blog life: Leaves on the Line

Blogger: Andrew Jaffe
URL: www.andrewjaffe.net/blog
First post: July 2004

Who is the blog written by?

Andrew Jaffe is a US astrophysicist who is currently working at Imperial College London’s Blackett Laboratory. His main interest is the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation that pervades the universe, and he was closely involved with the MAXIMA and BOOMERANG experiments to measure fluctuations in this radiation. A recent entry describes a new CMB experiment that Jaffe will be working on, named “PolarBear”. This telescope, which will be situated in Chile’s Atacama desert, is one of a new generation of experiments that will measure the CMB using not just a few tens of detectors but a few thousand, allowing unprecedented sensitivity.

What topics does the blog cover?

The main focus of this blog is cosmology, and in particular Jaffe’s own research. The funding crisis at the UK’s Science and Technology Facilities Council has featured heavily this year, and Jaffe seems relieved that this now seems to be reaching a resolution (particularly as his own group has emerged relatively unscathed). Jaffe also keeps up with other science blogs and often discusses interesting posts, and you can keep up with his day-to-day thoughts and movements via his Twitter feed.

Who is it aimed at?

The subject matter is probably of most interest to Jaffe’s colleagues and other astrophysicists, but he writes clearly and always takes care to explain any scientific terms used. As such, a general reader with an interest in cosmology would have no problem following the blog.

Why should I read it?

Jaffe’s American take on UK life is quite refreshing. (The blog’s title, for example, refers to the common excuse used by UK rail companies for train delays in the autumn). Jaffe’s writing also reveals a good sense of humour, and his research is pretty interesting in itself.

How often is it updated?

It varies — sometimes Jaffe puts up a new post every few days, but often it can be a couple of weeks between entries. His posts are always quite lengthy and structured, however.

Can you give me a sample quote?

I’ve had [a] Fermilab-labeled mug ever since I spent the summer working there in 1990. Today, sadly, I dropped it fumbling with the keys to my office. Actually, that was a pretty fun summer. I was working on an idea to detect cosmic axions, with a setup similar to some ongoing experiments but using somewhat odd ferrimagnetic materials. Axions are one of the possibilities for the omnipresent but difficult-to-detect dark matter. For the first and only time in my life, I got to play with superconducting detectors, RF cavities and old-fashioned strip-chart recorders, and not just for some assigned lab project. Alas, the idea didn’t pan out, and axions still haven’t been detected (despite a couple of claims to the contrary).

Eyeballing the universe

Modern astrophysics is a world dominated by large observatories, whether it is the Very Large Telescope in the Atacama desert in Chile or the Hubble Space Telescope orbiting high above the Earth. Access to these facilities is granted only as a result of fierce competition between astronomers, each of whom will have spent years gaining a first degree and a PhD just to be in the game. In the rarefied world of modern research, it may come as a surprise that our project, Galaxy Zoo, is producing science from the work of hundreds of thousands of Web users.

Public participation in science is nothing new, of course. Despite the impressive array of telescopes now strung across the globe, expert amateur astronomers have continued to make contributions over the years: discovering comets, asteroids and, most recently and most remarkably, extrasolar planets. Monitoring the swirling clouds of Jupiter or the changing brightness of variable stars is a job for amateurs too, as they do not have to bid for observing time in order to do the work. They carry out their research with as much dedication as any professional, putting in long hours at the eyepiece and travelling to better observing sites in their free time in the hope of catching special astronomical events.

In the late 1990s a different kind of amateur astronomy emerged that did not require clear skies and a telescope, but rather just an Internet connection. SETI@home, launched in 1999, was the first of a generation of programs that made use of the idle time of users’ computers by taking over the screensavers of millions of eager ET seekers. The program analysed data obtained using the giant Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico, combing through the frequencies for signals that might suggest intelligence. No aliens called, but the idea germinated, and a variety of similar projects followed — such as Folding@home (protein folding) or ClimatePrediction.net (modelling global warming), to name but two.

While these projects have been popular, taking part in them was essentially a passive process. A second set of projects, pioneered by Stardust@Home, required a little more initiative and time on your hands. The idea behind the Stardust@Home project was to get volunteers to sort through images from samples collected by the Stardust spacecraft and identify minuscule interstellar dust grains impacts. Another such project with a similar format, ClickWorkers, required the public to classify craters and other features drawn from an archive of images from NASA’s Mars missions. The common ground between these projects is that they make use of the human brain as a powerful pattern-recognition tool, and one that — despite the advances in automated systems — can still outperform a computer.

Galaxy Zoo is the latest, and now the largest, of such enterprises. The launch of the initiative was announced just over a year ago, with a brief news story on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. Listeners to Today, and those who followed them, were asked to go online in their spare time and help catalogue nearly a million galaxies according to their shape and, if possible, the direction of their rotation — tasks that are much simpler for a human to do than using computerized pattern recognition. As of July this year, almost 150,000 amateur cyber-astronomers had submitted more than 50 million classifications, enabling us to carry out scientific research that would have otherwise been impossible. As a result, we have submitted four scientific papers for publication so far, with the first two already accepted by Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomy (MNRAS). With many more results on the way, there are already telescopes lined up for follow-up studies, including Hubble itself, and a second version of the website is undergoing testing. The project has been an unprecedented success.

User-friendly

A different kind of zoo

Galaxy Zoo grew out of the work carried out at the University of Oxford in the UK by one of us (CJL) with Kevin Schawinski, now a postdoctoral researcher at Yale University in the US. Schawinski, while working for a DPhil, studied the remarkable properties of a set of elliptical galaxies discovered by sorting through 50,000 galaxy images provided by the robotic Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) telescope in New Mexico. In the past, most astronomers selected elliptical galaxies from the SDSS by using a variety of proxies for shape, with criteria such as colour, density profile or spectral features being most common. However, Schawinski found that these methods excluded a small fraction of important elliptical galaxies that were undergoing star formation.

Schawinski’s discovery challenged the traditional picture of elliptical galaxies as being “old, red and dead”. Sites of recent star formation in any galaxy are marked by the presence of young, massive blue stars — think of the arms of a spiral galaxy like the Milky Way. The absence of these blue stars in elliptical galaxies tells us that most, if not all, of these galaxies are long past their peak of star formation. By looking at the fraction that break this rule, Schawinski and CJL hoped to shed light on the processes that govern the formation of all elliptical galaxies.

It became clear, though, that the work we wanted to do would need more than the sample of galaxies that we had to hand. In particular, Schawinski had focused on one slice of the universe. A more local sample was necessary to provide targets for telescopes that might see the molecular gas associated with star formation. That meant going back to the original images and classifying more galaxies.

At about the same time, one of us (KL) and an another Oxford cosmologist, Anze Slosar, were considering results published by Michael Longo of the University of Michigan in the US. Longo had looked at a few thousand spiral galaxies and claimed that there was a preferred handedness to the rotation of the spiral galaxies in the SDSS. The galaxies apparently tended to rotate around a common axis that happened to align with the same direction as the “axis of evil” anomaly — an intriguing non-random pattern of hot and cold spots in the cosmic microwave background — that KL had discovered in 2006. This result was rather hard to swallow as it implied an unexpected preferred direction in the local universe. KL and Slosar were thus keen to follow this up with further analysis, which would involve collecting the observed rotation direction of tens of thousands of spiral galaxies.

Not much brainstorming was necessary to realize that the two problems could be solved by the same solution: build a website to put the SDSS sample online and invite the public to examine the images. A core team was quickly recruited, including Bob Nichol, Daniel Thomas and (later) Steven Bamford, all from the University of Portsmouth in the UK. Nichol was one of the team who helped create the SDSS, and he brought with him Alex Szalay from Johns Hopkins University in the US and the resources of its computing department, which were to prove critical. With no budget, the site was built by pressganged volunteers Phil Murray of Fingerprint Digital Media in Belfast and Dan Andreescu, now of Linklab in New York. On launch day, 12 July 2007, we were joined by outreach expert Jordan Raddick, also of Johns Hopkins. As well as building and releasing an online project, the team also had to get used to working remotely — not only have the entire team yet to gather in a single place, but to the best of our knowledge there is no one person who has met us all.

The site was kept very simple, in the hope of gaining as much data from as many people as possible. The galaxies are separated using the SDSS’s robotic software and then, for each image, a volunteer is asked if the galaxy is a spiral or an elliptical. If it is a spiral galaxy, then the volunteers are asked if they can discern the direction of the spiral arms. There are also the options of “star/don’t know” and merger. The fundamental scientific goal was to obtain a large catalogue of galaxies categorized by simple morphology, i.e. elliptical or spiral. The project also sought to check Longo’s results and to obtain a catalogue of galactic rotation directions that would probe possible correlations between the angular momentum of neighbouring galaxies, as predicted by some theories of structure formation.

Voorwerpen and preferred directions

Once launched, the Galaxy Zoo website quickly attracted an avalanche of attention from the public and media alike. A story about it on the BBC News website quickly became one of the most e-mailed stories of that day and the initial traffic was such that it temporarily brought the Galaxy Zoo server down in the most catastrophic manner imaginable. Thanks to the hard work of the technical team, we were quickly back online and gaining traffic of over 70,000 classifications an hour. This meant that the million hits that the team initially hoped for were achieved in a matter of days. By the end of November 2007 every galaxy in the sample had been observed by on average 40 people; a signal-to-noise ratio that the team had only dreamed of achieving.

Strange sighting

With multiple independent classifications for the morphology of each galaxy, we thus obtained a statistical error for each one — a unique advantage for this kind of project. For about a third of the roughly 900,000 galaxies online, more than 80% of people agreed on the morphology. From that part of the sample, about 63% of galaxies were found to be ellipticals and 34% spiral. Comparisons with limited samples classified by experts have shown the results to be in excellent agreement, although the catalogue of Galaxy Zoo is considerably larger than any others that exist. Concerns about malicious volunteers are easily alleviated by only allowing each user only one vote per galaxy, which severely limits the effect that an individual can have on the results.

While the initial project had a few well-defined science goals, it was always clear that much additional research could emerge from the results. For example, when images are viewed for the first time, there is always the chance of spotting strange phenomena, such as gravitational-lensing events, supernovae and other unusual objects. Indeed, many more have turned up than originally envisaged. This attracted the attention of dozens of independent groups that requested access to the data and originated various spin-off projects. Bill Keel of the University of Alabama, who is now a member of the Galaxy Zoo team, appeared on our forum asking users to keep an eye out for apparently overlapping galaxies. These coincidental pairs can be used to accurately map the dust distribution in the closest of the two systems, and Keel now has a list of candidates some 20 times longer than the one he started with.

Some individual objects have also gained a lot of attention; the most famous of these is the Voorwerp (the Dutch for “object”), which was discovered by Dutch schoolteacher Hanny van Arkle. Observations with the Isaac Newton group of telescopes in the Canary Islands (by Peter Herbert and Matt Jarvis from the University of Hertfordshire) and Dan Smith (from Liverpool John Moores University) and with a telescope at Lick Observatory in the US (Nicola Bennert from the University of California Riverside) have led us to the conclusion that this object consists of highly ionized gas. With no obvious source of ionization present in the Voorwerp, or in the neighbouring galaxy, we believe that it must come from a light-echo — the reflection of the light from an active nucleus in the Voorwerp’s companion galaxy more than 40,000 years ago. If we are correct, then reflections from different parts of the Voorwerp record the behaviour of the black hole at different times, so the history of the black hole’s shutdown is laid out on the sky for us to see.

Of the spiral galaxies, about 36% had their handedness identified, at the 80% agreement level, resulting in a catalogue of 35,000 galaxies with which to explore the supposed handedness anomaly. Rather surprisingly, the initial results of this study have shown that there are significantly more anticlockwise than clockwise rotating galaxies (with respect to the line of sight). Even with only partial sky coverage (the SDSS covers about a quarter of the sky), this result appeared to be consistent with that of a preferred direction.

To check the result, we included mirrored images of thousands of the galaxies into the sample data in order to monitor any bias in the results. This test did not confirm the original result, which indicated the existence of the very subtle bias in the original census. This bias effect perfectly accounted for the imbalance between the number counts of clockwise and anticlockwise rotating galaxies, and these results has now been published in MNRAS (388 1686). The source of this bias effect is still unclear and could be due to the design of the site and placement of the buttons or, alternatively, it could be a human effect.

Citizen science

One of the most rewarding and successful aspects of Galaxy Zoo has been its power as a positive outreach project. We found the feedback from volunteers incredibly heart-warming, with an overwhelming sense that people loved astronomy and were incredibly excited to be involved in a real science project. Another attractive feature of the project was that these galaxies had literally never been looked at before with the human eye — so people really felt that they were helping with original and unique contributions (see “What contributors said about Galaxy Zoo”).

Initially we tried to keep up with all the e-mails, questions and queries about the site and astronomy in general that we received. But with traffic of thousands of e-mails per hour, we could not keep pace. So instead we launched a Web forum where “Zooites” could share their experiences, images and knowledge, and where the “Zookeepers” could communally answer questions and update the volunteers with important news. Threads sprung up with images of the most weird and wonderful galaxies, while other posts involved the volunteers teaching themselves about galactic spectra! Led by moderator Alice Sheppard, it is fair to say that the Zooites who use the forum have now formed a real community. They regular meet up at amateur astronomy conferences, and arrange group trips, with some travelling from overseas. They also had the opportunity to meet some of the Galaxy Zoo science team.

Throughout the project, we have been keen that the scientific process was clearly elucidated and explained, and that the volunteers were kept up to date with how the project was progressing. In order to do so we set up a blog where updates about analysis, papers, refereeing process and observing proposals are posted. Meetings are streamed live and less-technical versions of the papers are going to be provided. Volunteers are included on papers where their input has directly impacted on the research, and in all cases a link to a thank-you page is included.

A new version of the project is currently in the development stage, and will involve a more detailed classification of a smaller set of galaxies plus a deliberate search for more unusual objects. Looking further ahead, new generations of sky surveys are following on the heels of the SDSS, and it may well be that their data will be made available online to be immediately reviewed by experienced volunteers. The flood of data from modern experiments is a challenge for scientists in a wide range of disciplines, and visual inspection online allows us to make the best of both worlds: the attention to detail of individual classification and the statistical power of large surveys. As we develop the citizen science that powers Galaxy Zoo, we can expect many new discoveries to follow. After all, having 150,000 co-authors is an excellent motivator when it comes to writing papers.

What contributors said about Galaxy Zoo…

“Simply knowing that we can know something about the objects we’re looking at in this amazing project humbles me.”

“So, so, so pretty. Even the far away pixelly ones. And very occasionally you get dealt an absolute cracker. Marvellous!”

“It allows me to put forth my knowledge of the universe in a helpful way, it contributes to an important scientific study, and is a lot of fun!”

“Ever since I was a child and I was standing near the television to see the first Moon walk I have had an interest in space exploration. And now almost 50 years old I have not lost that awe and wonder of what is out there. Thanks so very very much (although my husband is now very sorry for telling me about your site) for letting me take part and to see some of the wonders that are out there. It has been years since I have looked through a telescope, but none I ever owned or used could see things as well as this. Thanks!!!”

“This project gives me the opportunity to contribute to an area of science I love, and I get the chance to see galaxies that no-one has seen before (certainly not me!).”

“This project is awesome, in every sense of the word. Like others, I have a lifelong love of science, astronomy and observation, and getting to be the first human to actually lay eyes on a distant galaxy is pretty much a dream come true.”

LHC finally gets ready for action

After nigh-on three decades, scientists at the CERN laboratory near Geneva are on the verge of completing the world’s most powerful particle collider. With all of the 1600 superconducting magnets that will be used to guide protons around the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) having been cooled to 1.9 K, the machine is finally ready to start circulating the first proton beams around its 27 km circumference underground ring.

At 9.30 a.m. local time on 10 September, a team of scientists and engineers will attempt to thread a single, low-intensity bunch of a few billion protons all the way round the €76.3 bn LHC. On the day itself, some 200 journalists from all over the world will be present at CERN to watch events unfold, with live footage of the control room set to be relayed into the lab’s science and innovation “globe”.

The beam will then be passed step by step through each of the LHC’s eight sectors until, by the end of the day, the beam should be fully circulating. After repeating the exercise for protons travelling in the opposite direction around the ring, which could take a further day or so, engineers will then tune the collider’s magnets so that the protons can circulate happily for periods of hours without veering off course.

At some point this autumn, strong focusing magnets will bring the two counter-rotating beams into collision at the LHC’s four interaction points, where the collider’s main experiments are located. If all goes to plan, the LHC will be providing proton–proton collisions at energies of 10 TeV by the end of the year, with a target of 14 TeV by spring next year. Then the real fun starts and the quest to peel back the next layer of nature can begin.

Start-up fever

With the world watching the switch-on — even Fermilab in the US will be having a pyjama party to celebrate, with director Pier Oddone allegedly planning to turn up in full nightwear — a lot is riding on a successful day’s work on 10 September. But two “injection tests” that took place last month bode well for the big start-up. These tests are designed to synchronize the LHC with the smaller accelerators that will feed it with protons. On 22 August scientists successfully injected the first protons in the counterclockwise direction of the LHC. This involved using a pulsed magnet to kick small bunches of protons out of the lab’s veteran Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) and sending them down a 2.7 km-long transfer line towards the LHC. Indeed, scientists even managed to smash protons into a 28 tonne concrete collimator at the entrance to the LHC, which created muons that were detected by the LHCb experiment 200 m along the ring.

An earlier injection test on 7 August of the clockwise beam also proved successful — indeed, it turned out better than expected. After a few hours spent optimizing the injection process, engineers kicked one bunch of protons out of the transfer line into the LHC, where it travelled about 3 km through one of the LHC’s sectors before being stopped by a screen. “The passage of the beam first time caused some excitement in the control room, and the champagne was rolled out,” machine operator Roger Bailey told PhysicsWorld.

The test was then repeated several times to give the operations team lots of data to help make the start-up as smooth as possible. “The tests could not have gone better,” says CERN spokesperson James Gillies. “There are a lot of very happy people here.”

Towards 14 TeV

When it eventually reaches full steam, the LHC will produce the highest energy densities ever created in a lab. As such, it will be able to create fundamental particles that are too heavy to have been produced using existing machines such as the Tevatron at Fermilab. One of these could be the Higgs boson, which the LHC was built to find. If discovered, the Higgs would complete the Standard Model of particle physics by explaining how particles get their wildly different masses. The LHC may even see a “supersymmetric” world, where a new myriad of heavy particles mirror those of the Standard Model. Although based on much more speculative theories, the LHC may even find exotic entities such as mini black holes or evidence for additional dimensions of space–time.

But several steps need to be completed before the LHC can start hunting for new physics. Initially, the beams will have an energy of 450 GeV (the energy at which protons are injected from the SPS), producing 900 GeV collisions. But the target this year, possibly as early as a month after the first circulation, is to provide record-breaking 10 TeV collisions (5 TeV per beam) with 43 bunches each containing a few tens of billion protons. If all goes well, the first LHC data could be streaming out of the experiments just in time for the official LHC inauguration on 21 October, which will be attended by various heads of state.

The LHC will then be shut down for the winter, during which time the main bending magnets will be “trained” to handle beams at the full energy of 7 TeV (producing 14 TeV collisions) beginning in March or April 2009. When the machine is running at full capacity, nearly 3000 bunches each containing up to 100 billion protons will be hurtling around in each direction, producing half a billion collisions every second. However, it is likely to be at least a year before physicists amass enough data to understand their detectors well enough to be sure that what they are seeing is real.

Once a physicist: Umberto Guidoni

How did you first become interested in physics?

As a teenager I was given a small telescope. It was only a toy but with it I could see the rings of Saturn. I was fascinated and decided I wanted to study space.

Where did you study physics and what did you do after graduating?

I graduated with a doctorate in astrophysics from the University of Rome in 1978. I then won a fellowship to do research on nuclear fusion at Italy’s National Agency for Alternative Energy (ENEA) in Frascati south of Rome, and in 1983 I transferred to work on photovoltaic cells at another ENEA site. If I were starting out again today, I might well have stuck with energy, but at the time I wanted to study space. The following year I got a job at the Institute of the Physics of Interplanetary Space, also at Frascati.

How did you then become an astronaut?

I had always dreamed of becoming an astronaut but I realized that it would be difficult because I wasn’t from the US or the Soviet Union. However, an opportunity presented itself towards the end of the 1980s when Italy started co-operating with the US in space exploration. At Frascati I was involved in studying the Earth’s ionosphere using satellites and took part in a project to fly a spacecraft tethered to the Space Shuttle. I was then one of two Italians selected by NASA to be “payload specialists” — essentially scientist-astronauts — for this mission. When the mission initially launched in 1992 I was the reserve, but fortunately (for me), there was a technical problem while trying to deploy the tether. The flight was relaunched in 1996 and I was on board. I then became a fully fledged astronaut, training at NASA for almost five years before flying to the International Space Station in 2001.

What is it like being in space?

You have to be able to carry out a wide range of different tasks, such as fixing electronics and looking after your body, and you have to be able to deal with whatever comes your way. Normal activities such as sleeping and going to the bathroom become pretty involved in space because of weightlessness.

How did you get into politics?

I was still an active astronaut until 2004, but after NASA decided to close the Shuttle programme by 2010 it meant I probably wouldn’t fly again and so I decided that it was time to move on. While based at the European Space Agency’s ESTEC centre in the Netherlands, I visited Brussels a couple of times, where I saw how the European Parliament worked.

I have always been interested in politics, and with science-based issues — such as space, climate change and energy — becoming increasingly important politically, I decided to run in the European elections in 2004 and was successful.

Have you enjoyed your time as a politician?

Overall, yes. It can be frustrating when you do so much work and the European Council then decides not to go ahead with whatever you’ve proposed, but it is rewarding to see Europe taking shape. I would like to move towards a real federal state, with the Council disappearing and less power in the hands of the member states. It is frustrating that federalism isn’t happening more quickly, but if you go ahead too fast, people won’t follow.

Do you keep up with developments in science?

Yes. I don’t read scientific journals any more because they are so specialized, but I follow developments in fields like cosmology via more popular articles. As a politician I try to give young people a sense of the beauty in science, which is easier to do using astronomy and cosmology than, say, particle physics.

Quantum of culture

Its name is Quantum Cloud. Visitors to London cannot miss it when visiting the park next to the Millennium Dome or taking a cruise along the Thames. It rises 30 m above a platform on the banks of the river, and from a distance looks like a huge pile of steel wool. As you draw closer, you can make out the hazy, ghost-like shape of a human being in its centre. It is a sculpture, by the British artist Antony Gormley, made from steel rods about a metre and a half long that are attached to each other in seemingly haphazard ways. Framed by the habitually grey London sky, it does indeed look cloud-like. But “quantum”?

The word quantum has a familiar and well-documented scientific history. Max Planck introduced it into modern discourse in 1900 to describe how light is absorbed and emitted by black bodies. Such bodies seemed to do so only at specific energies equal to multiples of the product of a particular frequency and a number called h, which he called a quantum, the Latin for “how much”. Planck and others assumed that this odd, non-Newtonian idea would soon be replaced by a better explanation of the behaviour of light.

No such luck. Instead, quantum’s presence in science grew. Einstein showed that light acted as if it were “grainy”, while Bohr incorporated the quantum into his account of how atomic electrons made unpredictable leaps from one state to another. The quantum began cropping up in different areas of physics, then in chemistry and other sciences. A fully fleshed out theory, called quantum mechanics, was developed by 1927.

Less familiar and well documented, though, is quantum’s cultural history. Soon after 1927 the word, and affiliated terms such as “complementarity” and “uncertainty principle”, began appearing in academic disciplines outside the sciences. Even the founders of quantum mechanics, including Bohr and Heisenberg, applied such terms to justice, free will and love. Quantum has made unpredictable leaps to unexpected places ever since. The next James Bond film, for example, is to be called Quantum of Solace.

The quantum moment

The dean of my university at Stony Brook, James Staros, who is a scientist, sometimes refers to his faculty as being “quantized”. When budgets need to be cut, for example, he points out that it is impossible to reduce one department by, say, 0.79 positions and another by 1.21 positions, even if those numbers are perfectly proportionate to the cut. As Staros explains, “it has to be one from each, even if the departments are somewhat different in size”. This is a precise and effective rhetorical use of quantum language.

And when I asked Gormley about his sculpture’s name, he gave me a cogent response. “The development of quantum mechanics,” he told me, “represents the shift in science from the study of even more discrete entities to increasing attention to flow and field phenomena in which emergent forms are seen as evolving out of their contexts. Quantum Cloud evokes this.”

While both Gormley and Staros deploy quantum language in a fairly precise fashion, on other occasions it is badly abused, bringing to mind James Clerk Maxwell’s observation that “the most absurd opinions may become current, provided they are expressed in language, the sound of which recalls some well-known scientific phrase”. The word quantum, for instance, appears regularly in pseudoscience, self-help and quack-medicine discourse.

Now ewe see it?

Yet if we think scientifically rather than judgmentally, all uses of quantum language – whether precise or pretentious, technically correct or ill-informed and designed to impress – are interesting. After all, each is motivated by some conception of the meaning of the quantum. But what patterns can we find in those conceptions? And what do these patterns say about culture and how it understands science?

My colleague Fred Goldhaber and I have raised these questions in a course called “The quantum moment”, which we have given several times to students at Stony Brook. We stole the name from Mordecai Feingold’s book The Newtonian Moment: Isaac Newton and the Making of Modern Culture, which sprang from an exhibition at the New York Public Library in 2004–5 that examined Newton’s impact on the culture of the late 17th and early 18th%nbsp;century. In a similar vein, Goldhaber and I were keen to gauge what impact the word quantum has had on today’s culture.

We discovered that the answer is complicated, for quantum has spread across the world in various ways.

Pattern #1: irreducibly statistical processes

One pattern involves applying quantum terms to irreducibly statistical processes. For about a quarter of a century, physicists have applied mathematical constructs developed for quantum phenomena to economics. For example, in his book Quantum Finance: Path Integrals and Hamiltonians for Options and Interest Rates, physicist Belal Baaquie of the National University of Singapore notes that he is not applying quantum theory itself to finance. “Instead,” he writes, “the term ‘quantum’ refers to the abstract mathematical constructs of quantum theory that include probability theory, state space, operators, Hamiltonians, commutation equations, Lagrangians, path integrals, quantized fields, bosons, fermions, and so on. All these theoretical structures find natural and useful applications in finance.” The word quantum here refers not to quantization as such, but to the application of its statistical methods to stochastic processes such as interest rates and stock-price fluctuations.

For something completely different, consider Quantum Sheep, the brainchild of Valerie Laws, a writer who lives in the north of England. In 2002 she spray-painted words onto the fleeces of sheep from a nearby farm. As the flock milled about, the words rearranged and a new “poem” was created every time the sheep came to rest. A spokesperson for Northern Arts, which provided £2000 of funding for the project, said that the result was “an exciting fusion of poetry and quantum physics”. Here is one of the resulting “Haik-Ewes”:

Clouds graze the sky
Below, sheep drift gentle
Over fields, soft mirrors
Warm white snow

Talking to the BBC at the time, Laws explained why she felt the project was worth pursuing. “Randomness and uncertainty is at the centre of how the universe is put together, and is quite difficult for us as humans who rely on order,” she said. “So I decided to explore randomness and some of the principles of quantum mechanics, through poetry, using the medium of sheep.”

There is, of course, a world of difference between calculating interest rates and setting a herd of painted sheep loose in the countryside. But both of these cases were motivated by the role of randomness in quantum theory: the former case involves an actual use of its statistical methods, while the latter invokes quantum as a symbol of irreducibly random processes.

Pattern #2: complementary beer

Quantum Man is a sculpture by Julian Voss-Andreae currently installed in the City of Moses Lake, Washington (Physics World September 2006 p7; print version only). Made of steel sheets 2.5 m high that lie parallel to each other, the sculpture changes in form as you walk around it. From one perspective it reveals the outline of a human being, while from another the human form disappears entirely.

The sculpture, says the artist, is “a metaphor for the counterintuitive world of quantum physics”. Voss-Andreae should know. He studied physics as an undergraduate in Berlin and Edinburgh, and did graduate research in Vienna with Anton Zeilinger on the double-slit experiments involving the quantum interference of carbon-60 buckyball molecules (Physics World November 2006 p44; print version only).

The metaphor is thus grounded in complementarity, Bohr’s name for the fact that, in the quantum world, two features of a description can be necessary but mutually exclusive — a particle having a definite position and momentum being the standard example. However, Bohr and several other leading physicists of the time felt that complementarity could also be extended to areas other than physics, an idea that has often been ridiculed. Yet after reviewing some of Bohr’s applications of complementarity to the social world, one of Bohr’s biographers, the hard-nosed physicist Abraham Pais, found that while such applications were clearly metaphorical, they often helped him think “outside the box”. Pais declared that “Personally, I have found the complementary way of thinking liberating.”

I do not know how liberating Pais would have found the psychotherapist Lawrence LeShan’s more fanciful defence of mysticism in his book The Medium, the Mystic and the Physicist. Mystics seek the comprehension of a different view of reality, LeShan wrote, before adding that “I use the term ‘comprehension’ here to indicate an emotional as well as an intellectual understanding of and participation in this view…In physics this is called the principle of complementarity. It states that for the fullest understanding of some phenomena we must approach them from two different viewpoints. Each viewpoint by itself tells only half the truth.”

And while quantum terminology can be well grounded or fanciful, it can also be simply tongue-in-cheek. Take, for example, the Quantum Beer Theory website (wohlmut.com/beer) created by Kyle Wohlmut, a translator and dedicated beer fanatic who lives in the Netherlands. Wohlmut, who last studied physics in high school, explains that underlying his theory is the fact that “the essential experience of beer flavour arises from conflict”. In each beer, he claims, two sides of taste — hops and malt — struggle for supremacy. “These two sides wage a war to dominate your palate,” he says, “and the best beers happen when the two sides become entrenched in defensible positions, protracting the battle into epic proportions.”

Different perspectives

When I asked why Wohlmut uses the word “quantum”, he explained to me that it was to underscore the “level of seriousness” that he feels ought to be attached to the analysis of beer. Another reason is that, despite his best efforts, he has found it almost impossible to make home-brewed beer consistent in taste and quality – forcing him to conclude that some mysterious, unknown factors in beer production must be operating at the quantum scale.

I am sure that Pais, who liked a good laugh, would drink to that.

Pattern #3: by leaps and Bonds

Another interesting use of the word quantum appears in Ian Fleming’s story Quantum of Solace, which first appeared in Cosmopolitan magazine in 1959 and was reprinted in his collection For Your Eyes Only. It is not a spy thriller, but a serious short story that he wrote while his marriage was failing. The main character, the governor of Nassau, tells Bond late one night in the course of a heart-wrenching story that human relationships can survive even the worst disasters if both partners retain at least a certain amount of humanity. When partners stop caring, and “the quantum of solace stands at zero”, then the pain can not only end the relationship, but also cause the partners to destroy each other.

Fleming’s use of the word “quantum” is close to Planck’s and to the original Latin: it means a finite amount of some quantity. However, the upcoming movie is said to share nothing but the title with the original story, which begs the question: exactly what does the word refer to in the title of the film? I guess we will all have to wait until November when the film is officially released.

The critical point

These are only three of the patterns that Goldhaber and I found. There are others, involving such things as acausality, nonlocality and cats, but there must be more besides. So what manifestations of quantum language have you spotted in popular culture? What patterns do these reveal? And what do these patterns reveal about the social world? Let me know your thoughts and I shall devote a future column to the responses.

What are your favourite examples of quantum, and its affiliated ideas such as complementarity and the uncertainty principle, in popular culture? What patterns do these reveal? E-mail your contributions to rcrease@notes.cc.sunysb.edu.

Rewards of renewables

In 1987 an American-style fridge freezer would use about 950 kW h of electricity and cost about $150 (£80) a year to run. Two decades on, a comparable appliance uses half the electricity and costs less than half as much to run. In 1975 there were about 3,780,000 cars on the streets of Los Angeles, whereas today there are more than 5,200,000 — yet air-pollution levels have fallen by half and an increasing number of those vehicles are hybrids or rely on renewable fuels like biodiesel. Last year, half a million homes in Southern California were receiving direct solar power, either from solar electricity plants or from rooftop photovoltaic panels.

These are changing times. Students, workers, consumers, business leaders and government officials are increasingly aware that we humans have been placing enormous stresses on the environment, as global warming, water shortages, mass extinctions of plant and animal species, and the dwindling supply of fossil fuels attest.

But in all times of trouble and uncertainty there are opportunities. People all over the world are increasingly realizing that we can bring the most important power of all to bear on the problem of where our power comes from — brain power. Physics graduates have an abundance of this eminently renewable resource and are skilled at problem-solving. Indeed, the world awaiting the class of 2008 and beyond is, for all its dark clouds, full of opportunities in almost every niche of the renewable-energy business.

According to the Environmental Business Journal, the green industry in the US in 2005 was worth about $265 bn and employed 1.6 million people. Green businesses in the country have been growing at a rate of about 5% annually since then. The All-Renewable Index (ARI), an economic gauge of activity in that sector, projects steady growth even as most other areas of the international economy would seem to be cooling, while business leaders throughout the alternative-energy sector are reporting that there are simply not enough educated applicants to fill the available jobs.

Earth, wind and fire

Although it contributes a comparatively small amount of energy to the present mix, the solar industry is growing in importance. Firms that specialize in photovoltaic research, such as Switzerland’s Unaxis and Germany’s Sulfurcell, report a need for clear-thinking problem-solvers to make ever more efficient systems. Condensed-matter and materials physicists are particularly sought after in this area. For example, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory of the US Department of Energy recently advertised a postdoctoral fellowship in photovoltaics, which was to be awarded to a recent physics PhD with “a strong background in ink-based materials, solution patterning, liquid processing and thin film deposition”. According to the Economics Research Institute, as of December 2007 a PhD physicist working in the solar-industry field could expect to earn an annual salary of about $80,000–$120,000.

As a comparatively new field, wind energy has not yet settled into easily defined career paths. As is true elsewhere in renewables, a technician is often expected to know something of the big picture, with an understanding of trends in the business and of promising research. A salesperson, similarly, needs at least a basic understanding of the technologies involved and of the challenges and benefits associated with, say, putting a wind turbine in place, while a technical writer will need to know about pretty much everything in the wind-power business, almost as much as a chief executive officer.

An engineer or physicist working in wind power certainly needs to have practical grounding in how a system that looks good on paper can be built and maintained without bringing the people who do that work to despair. In short, a successful career in wind energy is going to involve a little bit of everything. A person with wide-ranging interests and abilities will thrive in this new green-collar world, and physics is an ideal training ground — particularly since some of the major problems in the field lie in understanding the physics of moving air and its interaction with motors and turbines.

Similarly, well-rounded geophysicists are in great demand in the growing field of geothermal energy, and in the US can command annual salaries of up to $135,000. Countries such as Canada, Iceland, Italy, Japan and New Zealand have been at the forefront of geothermal development, but the industry is rapidly growing elsewhere, especially in the US and Scandinavia. Hydroelectric power and marine energy also offer many opportunities for physicists, along with some of the most vexing challenges — for example, no one has quite figured out how to harness the inexhaustible power of oceanic tides. The ideal candidate to solve that puzzle might hold a degree in physics and have a solid understanding of geophysics, mechanics, materials, aquatic biology, atmospheric sciences, oceanography, geology, mathematics and computer science — not necessarily all these fields, mind you, but at least a number of them in combination.

Premium rate

Nuclear energy, strictly speaking, is alternative but non-renewable. For many reasons it is also controversial. Still, it is part of the energy mix that is likely to become more important, at least in the near term, until other, truly renewable forms of energy production are brought on-stream. In the US alone, the nuclear industry will need at least 90,000 professionals in the next 10 years simply to replace retirees; France, Italy and several Eastern European nations project similar growth as their nuclear plants are revived or renovated, even as other European nations (particularly Germany and Spain) have committed to phasing out nuclear power. For the moment, it would appear that nuclear plants will continue to operate in the UK, with plentiful opportunities. Nuclear physicists are at a premium, with median annual earnings for those working in the US of $81,350 in 2007.

Hydrogen power is increasingly important, particularly in the automotive industry. A promising area of research is the use of photochemical molecular devices to produce hydrogen gas from water. Hydrogen power is also being used to provide building heat as well as electrical energy, in the UK at least. Research scientists within the field can expect salaries that begin at just over $51,000 and rise to about $100,000.

Physicists have every opportunity to flourish in the renewable-energy field, in these and in many other areas, including energy management, building design, “green transportation”, life-cycle engineering and energy education. As Scott Sklar, president of energy consultancy The Stella Group, notes: “The green industries are growing at an unforeseen rate, and they are concerned with meeting their growth potential.” Physicists can help them do so — and enjoy a seller’s market at the same time.

Surprise return

Every so often a new scientific discovery is made that catches researchers by surprise. That is exactly what happened earlier this year when scientists in Japan reported a new high-temperature superconductor containing a layer of iron and arsenic sandwiched between layers of lanthanum and oxygen. The material, known as an “iron oxypnictide”, was found to carry electric current without resistance when cooled below a transition temperature (T_c) of about 26 K. By tweaking the new superconductor’s composition, other researchers had, within weeks, boosted the T_c of the oxypnictides to as high as 55 K (see “Rebirth of the hot”).

Over 100 papers have so far been written about these materials. One reason for this interest is that we now know that the cuprates, discovered in 1986, are no longer the only type of high-temperature superconductor. And if there are two classes of such materials, there may well be others. Moreover, the behaviour of the oxypnictides could shed much-needed light on why the cuprates superconduct — a riddle that has left theorists stumped.

Researchers are also fascinated because the doping, composition and structure of these new materials can be almost endlessly modified. With suitable alchemical tinkering, their T_c could possibly be boosted to above the all-important temperature of liquid nitrogen (77 K). That could allow such materials to be used in commercial applications such as lossless electricity transmission lines — provided they can be fashioned cheaply into wires, that is. More fundamentally, researchers are mystified as to why the presence of iron, which is magnetic, does not destroy the superconductivity of the oxypnictides; magnetic fields are usually the death knell for supercurrents.

Cynics will say that we have been here before. There was, after all, similar excitement after the discovery in 2001 that magnesium diboride (MgB₂) could superconduct, yet interest faded fast after its T_c stalled at about 39 K. Moreover, the oxypnictides, which contain arsenic, can be dangerous. But iron oxypnictides are different from MgB₂: they have a higher T_c, their behaviour is more mysterious, and their chemical structure can be varied. The challenge now is for experimentalists to grow good-quality single crystals of the oxypnictides, so that their physical properties can be measured more accurately, while theorists should try to explain why the materials superconduct. It is highly unlikely that the oxypnictides will ever superconduct at room temperature, but many more surprises are sure to lie in store.

Obama takes a stand on science

In his campaign to become president of the US, Barack Obama has outlined a plan to boost funding for scientific research and base policy decisions on advice that is “expert and uncoloured by ideology”.

Obama, who accepted the role of Democratic nominee for the US presidency last week, revealed his stance on science and technology on Saturday in response to questions put forward by the ScienceDebate 2008 organization. According to the ScienceDebate team, John McCain, the expected Republican nominee, has said he will answer the same questions in due course.

Although Obama says US innovation “is still the envy of the world”, he admits that the country faces “unprecedented challenges”, such as competing with China’s growing presence in the technology market. Expanding on promises made previously, he says he will double funds allocated for basic research over the next decade as well as provide more support for high-risk, high-payoff research portfolios.

The route to economic growth

The same is true for cash research into defence, which Obama will “put on a path” to double. Recalling the drive to stimulate education in maths and science after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957, he recognizes the benefit that national-security and space programmes can have on economic growth and innovation. “Our nation is again hearing a threatening ‘ping’ in the distance,” he says, “this time not from a single satellite in space but instead from threats that range from asymmetric conflicts to cyber attacks, biological terror and nuclear proliferation.”

To act on his view that humans are affecting the Earth’s climate, the Democratic nominee insists that the US should “take a leadership role” in designing technologies that reduce greenhouse emissions by 80% below 1990 levels by 2050. He says this can be achieved in part by investing $150 billion over a decade on clean energy research, development and deployment.

Given an Obama administration, scientists could expect their views to be aired by an “impressive team of science advisors”. These would apparently include Nobel laureates, though it is not known who. Obama also plans to introduce the nation’s first “chief technology officer” to oversee the technologies, infrastructure and practices used across all agencies. Moreover, he vows to “restore the science integrity” of the government by only releasing publications that “are not distorted by the ideological biases of political appointees”. This promise will be backed up by bolstering support for whistleblowers who want to publicize instances of malpractice.

Hopes for live debate

In a written statement, Matthew Chapman, president of Science Debate 2008, said: “We are grateful for Senator Obama’s detailed responses and look forward to receiving the same from Senator McCain.” He added that he still hopes the two candidates will agree to attend a televised debate on science policy, which was the original motive of the organization.

ScienceDebate 2008 was formed towards the end of last year by a group of six people who wanted science policy to be debated by the presidential candidates in the run up to the November election. Since then the organizers have gathered the signatures of some 37,000 supporters including university presidents, the representatives of scientific institutions and Nobel laureates.

• You can read Barack Obama’s full responses to the questions posed by ScienceDebate 2008 here.

Memory device could store data using heat

Heat has long been regarded as useless or even harmful in electronic circuits. But some researchers think that it might be possible to build computers that process phonons — pulses of vibration that carry heat — rather than conventional electrons.

Physicists in Singapore and China have now taken a step towards such thermal computation or “phononics” by devising a model for storing thermal information. Although their scheme has yet to be tested experimentally, the researchers claim that bits of information could be read out without destroying the stored data (arXiv:0808.3311v1).

In a conventional electronic circuit, the states “0” and “1” are usually defined by standard voltages. In thermal circuits, however, the states are defined by two arbitrary temperatures. In-line with the second law of thermodynamics, a temperature drop leads to a heat current flowing from a hot to a cold area. Generally, the larger the temperature drop the larger the heat current, which is known as positive differential thermal resistance.

These currents are carried by phonons, which are difficult to control because as they are bundles of energy that have no electrical charge and therefore cannot be manipulated using electromagnetic fields.

Missing memories

Researchers have already managed to build a thermal diode and have even shown that it could be possible to build thermal transistors and logic gates — all standard components for functional thermal devices. But memory is required to store the output after performing logical operations.

Now, Baowen Li from the National University of Singapore and Lei Wang from Renmin University of China in Beijing have devised a theoretical model for such thermal memory. Their model takes into account a key element in thermal logic gates — yet to be demonstrated experimentally — by generating a “negative differential thermal resistance” (NDTR). An NDTR means that a large temperature drop leads to a small heat current and a small temperature drop leads to a large heat current.

In their model of thermal memory, Li and Wang considered two heat baths, held at a constant temperature, each sitting at the end of a rod. The other, free ends of the rod do not touch each other, but are nevertheless weakly coupled so that there is an NDTR between them. The final component of their model is a “particle” that sits at the end of one the rods, near the gap between the pair.

Reading and writing

Li and Wang then consider what happens when an object — connected to its own heat bath — cools this particle down to an arbitrary temperature, dubbed “0”. This is what they call the “writing” process.

To “read” out the temperature of the particle they use another object — dubbed the “reader” — which is set at a temperature halfway between “0” and another temperature, defined as “1”. The particle then warms up when this reader is brought into contact with it, which causes a large heat current to flow from the particle, down the rod to the heat bath.

However, there is only a small heat flow in the other rod as it is connected via NDTR. In other words, the current in the second rod minus the current in the first rod is negative. This draws heat away from the particle, which cools back down to “0”. As the reader is in contact with the particle, the reader also moves into the “0” state. In other words, it has read out the original “0” state of the particle.

In a similar manner, Li and Weng also showed that if the particle is prepared in the “1” state which is hotter than the reader, then it can also be read out without the state being destroyed.

Data cannot be stored for a long time before the heat leaks away. Li calculates that thermal memory will have to be refreshed every 100 μs if the rods were made of carbon nanotubes. This is much more frequent than electronic DRAM currently used in computers today that require refreshing every 64 ms.

Not so instant recall

The speed of thermal memory is a key issue that needs further investigation Baowen Li National University of Singapore

Another difficulty with thermal memory is the slow access times. “The big difference is between the speed of electromagnetic waves and phonons,” Li told physicsworld.com. Phonons travel at speeds around 1000 ms^-1, hundreds of thousands of times slower than electromagnetic waves. “The speed of thermal memory is a key issue that needs further investigation,” he says. Once and if, NTDR is experimentally realized, Li and colleagues are confident that thermal memory will be the next step towards thermal computers.

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