Peter Steinberg

A View of the Horizon

So I'm back from Santa Fe, after two 10+ hour days of workshops and conferences.  But no slowing down yet: I have an interesting thing happening today at work (more on that tomorrow), another post-show of Einstein's Gift tonight, family coming into town for the next 5 days, and even a visit to the Invisible Film Series (preparing for my presentation in January...)

I also learned a bit about blogging over the last few days, when a colleague sent me a piece about blogger motivations, by none other than Scott Adams, writer of Dilbert:

When I see news stories about people all over the world who are experiencing hardships, I worry about them, and I rack my brain wondering how I can make a difference. So I decided to start my own blog. That way I won't have time to think about other people.

People who are trying to decide whether to create a blog or not go through a thought process much like this:

1. The world sure needs more of ME.
2. Maybe I'll shout more often so that people nearby can experience the joy of knowing my thoughts.
3. No, wait, shouting looks too crazy.
4. I know - I'll write down my daily thoughts and badger people to read them.
5. If only there was a description for this process that doesn't involve the words egomaniac or unnecessary.
6. What? It's called a blog? I'm there!

This is what I have to deal with every day, folks -- from colleagues.  Who would have thought?

Do You Know The Way...

...to Santa Fe?  I do now, after braving the many legs of my journey here (Manhattan-->Islip [1.5 hours], Islip-->Chicago [2 hours], Chicago-->Chicago [2 hour layover], Chicago-->Albequerque [2.5 hours], ALbuquerque-->Santa Fe[1 hour] ---> Total  9 hours!).

My friends were really excited for me, getting to go to such a beautiful place for a work trip.  And it certainly is gorgeous here.  But unfortunately, I don't expect to have much time leftover after my main tasks: attending a "satellite" meeting of the PANIC 05 conference here in Santa Fe, on the physics of heavy ions at the LHC, and then attend a couple of days of the conference itself, so see what the PANIC is about. OK, enough of the PANIC jokes: rather than being a mere description of our lives these days, it's actually a respectable conference about Particles And Nuclei In Collision (a nice example of a pure acronym, which includes its prepositions...).  Many folks from particle, nuclear, astro, etc. will be representing and I'm a little sorry to not be able to stay the full term.  But there's a lot to do when I get back (and I have a very important birthday party to videotape.)

OK gotta run.  Photos later.

The iPod and Einstein

I thought I'd reflect for a minute or two on two of my favorite subjects: Einstein, and Apple.  Both have been part of my mental life since childhood, as I remember reading an Einstein biography, and seeing an Apple ][ around the same time (1979, I guess.) 

One of the gadget sites I read pointed me to this Time story on Steve Jobs and the new iPod.  A couple of quotes from the article (by Lev Grossman) really jumped out at me.  Here's one (long one):

So, where does all [the cool stuff from Apple] come from?

Ask Apple CEO Steve Jobs about it, and he'll tell you an instructive little story. Call it the Parable of the Concept Car. "Here's what you find at a lot of companies," he says, kicking back in a conference room at Apple's gleaming white Silicon Valley headquarters, which looks something like a cross between an Ivy League university and an iPod. "You know how you see a show car, and it's really cool, and then four years later you see the production car, and it sucks? And you go, What happened? They had it! They had it in the palm of their hands! They grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory!

"What happened was, the designers came up with this really great idea. Then they take it to the engineers, and the engineers go, 'Nah, we can't do that. That's impossible."And so it gets a lot worse. Then they take it to the manufacturing people, and they go, 'We can't build that!' And it gets a lot worse."

This is all amusing since I was discussing the virtues of Powerbooks to a friend of mine yesterday. The only analogy I could come up with was the interior of my VW Golf. It's not an overly expensive car, but the design of the interior and exterior shows clear evidence that some person actually thought about the place and function of every element.  This is in dramatic contrast to various rental cars I've driven over the last few weeks, where various control elements seem to have no ergonomic logic, but feel like they were there to satisfy a checklist.  With things like Powerbooks and iPods, they've clearly gone further, thinking about the experience you want, and actually pushing the envelope of design and manufacturing processes to make a usable product - one which "works".

Here's the other:

What Jobs has accepted - the truth that he's willing to face and others cower from - is that new things don't want to be born. Innovation causes problems, and it's much easier simply to avoid it. In fact, it's downright tempting.

This is the thing: that innovative products are often not the most complicated to use.  More importantly, they are successful because they are elegant, and "just work" (as many of my colleagues in physics like to brag about detectors they've built, or software they've created).  Similarly in physics, innovative theories like Special Relativity (and especially the General Theory...) are often subtle, and thus hard to get your mind around at first: but then people realize that they "just work" in describing and predicting aspects of nature.  But like Grossman says, ideas like relativity cause problems for some people, e.g. when people start realizing that space and time aren't what they seem, and that nature imposes an ultimate speed limit.  One can imagine that many people would rather have avoided these consequences.  But in the end scientists are practical people, and can distinguish better ideas from worse ones through experience.  Most people are too, and I'm hoping this is the decisive factor in the Intelligent Design debates (since rational arguments don't seem to be cutting it for some...) 

Unfortunately, technology companies aren't always so adaptable.  For every VW Golf we do get a Pontiac Aztec once in a while, and for every iPod, we get an 8-track tape...

Ironically, truly innovative things require truly "intelligent design" but often feel thoroughly natural in their form and function.  And things that evolve randomly and thoughtlessly often feel absurd, insulting to one's intelligent (and one's wallet).  But this is certainly not a defence of I.D. - it's really a statement about the inability of the marketplace to prefer the right ideas at the right time! 

Ghost in the Machine

Maybe I'm still delirious from my 50+ mile ride yesterday, or maybe I'm just bored waiting for my VW service to finish, but I just do not understand what's going on with this paper by Hsu and Zee:

We argue that the cosmic microwave background (CMB) provides a stupendous opportunity for the Creator of our universe (assuming one exists) to have sent a message to its occupants, using known physics. The medium for the message is unique. We elaborate on this observation, noting that it requires only careful adjustment of the fundamental Lagrangian, but no direct intervention in the subsequent evolution of the universe.

Is this science, or parody, or a genuine yearning to find intelligent design amidst normally-credible physics, or maybe a bald-faced attempt to attract the attention of those groups that give out money to support "religious" investigations in physics (as suggested by this guy)? Hm, it seems everything I notice these days belongs in a Cosmic Variance comment....

I'm also quite psyched about this apprently-new feature of arXiv.org: trackbacks! 

Einstein off-Broadway, Elephants under Bridges and Endless Biking

Busy weekend:

• Friday: I dragged some friends and family to see Einstein's Gift and participate in the post-show.  Both went well, despite the pouring rain, the challenges both in bringing scientists' lives to the stage, and the usual slow start to getting discussions rolling after performance between people who don't know each other.  The director, Ron Russell, and I have gotten to know each other's opening salvos (Ron - that scientists have a responsibility both as individuals and as a community to monitor the potential dangers of their discoveries, Peter - that scientific discoveries are intrinsically non-moral, but that societies and individuals must carefully monitor the dangers of government and industry using scientific discoveries for inhuman ends) but neither of us expected Michael Greenspan, a scientist and jewish historian.  Michael brought a particular wisdom and humor, and knowledge about other scientists in Haber's era, to bear on several questions -- which was a real pleasure to watch, sitting right next to him!
• Saturday: after a training run for Sunday's fun, I hopped down to D.U.M.B.O., a developing gallery neighborhood in Brooklyn just Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass (d.u.m.b.o. - get it?).  My friend Abraham Brewster was having an open studio as part of the "Art Under the Bridge Festival 2005".  I got there pretty late, as evidenced by a nearly-empty box of apples that had been offered to visitors.  Anyway, I've spoken about Abe's work before, which meticulously blurs human figures into complex and compelling backgrounds.  Have a look at his site (especially since he tracks where the clicks come from - show some QD presence in NYC everyone!).  I also saw Noah Baumbach's "The Squid and the Whale", about a family going through a divorce in 1980's Park Slope, Brooklyn.  A little too emotionally precise for comfort, but charming and funny nonetheless.
• Sunday: the centerpiece of the weekend was the MS NYC Bike Ride, raising money to fight Multiple Sclerosis.  It was a fantastic riding day (after last week's biblical rains) for our team, the Asymptotic Freedom Riders, made better by the tradition of keeping cars off the road for the morning.  Nothing like riding the highways without fearing for your life.  Several of us did the full 60 mile ride, but I had a more modest run on the 45-mile route (plus another 8 miles home - that's over 50 miles: ow!).  Jeff unfortunately popped a tire just as we entered the Lincoln Tunnel, ending his day way too early.

So now it's back to work for the evening.  Deadlines await!

And by the way, feel free to contact me if you want to sponsor me for this ride.  I'm trying to raise $500 in the next few months, and I don't even have to promise to complete the ride: it's already over!

Forgive Me (and Einstein's Gift III)

...for being so incommunicado during the end of Einstein Week and Career Week.  Oh wait - Yom Kippur is over so it's too late to be forgiven.  Oh well, I'll bug everyone next year about this.

Anyway, I've been making great loops again: to Chicago and back, to BNL and back, and tonight to Brooklyn and back.  And that last one was done in the pouring rain, after fasting all day, while working on a proposal with some colleagues.  I'm a little scared to look at that work tomorrow after I've eaten a proper breakfast.  Yow.

And tomorrow, I'm going another round with the Epic Theatre Company and their Off-Broadway staging of Einstein's Gift.  I have some friends and family coming to see the show (which has been reviewed widely and blogged about in this space) and then I'm going to do my 3rd panel discussion with them, which has been amazing the other two times.  I'm hoping I don't get my overdue stage fright tomorrow - fingers crossed.  In the meantime, I've been catching up on my Haber reading, with Daniel Charles' excellent Haber biography "Master Mind : The Rise and Fall of Fritz Haber, the Nobel Laureate Who Launched the Age of Chemical Warfare".  It's been especially useful to see where Vern Thiessen, playwright of Einstein's Gift, goes off-script from Haber's real life.  It's all in the name of good drama, so I approve, but I'm glad to have the real lowdown now.

Quantum Diaries Convention

Well, at least a small one.  Caolionn and I met for the first time and I introduced her to the joys of Long Island cuisine (lobster, I mean.  And bear witness to CoC's excellent photo...).  Great evening, and needless to say, as with the last time a similar event occurred, the world continues in its orbit, undisturbed.  Still, like Caolionn, it was both strange and oddly normal spending time with a fellow blogger of whom you knew lots of their stories, but little about the person. And I found it reassuring to realize that after 2005 ends, and QD is just a memory, we former bloggers will still be out there -- and some of them will be commuting from California to BNL quite a bit -- so we can remind ourselves of our blogging glory days.

A Matter Darkly

This is odd.  It seems that after 2.5 months languishing on the arXiv.org server with one reference to its name, a paper by F. Cooperstock and S. Tieu ("General Relativity Resolves Galactic Rotation Without Exotic Dark Matter") is starting to make the round of the science web sites.  I noticed this on slashdot yesterday, who themselves pointed to this CERN Courier story.  And now major sites like space.com and MSNBC.com have jumped in, almost guaranteeing a pile-on effect from other sites (you heard it here first, folks...) 

It's a neat argument, that the rotation curves normally used as in-your-face evidence of dark matter can be understood by using full General Relativity (Einstein's *really* big idea) instead of  Newtonian mechanics.  This so-simple-why-didn't-anyone-else-do-it-type of innovation seems to account for the rotation curves, thus obviating the need to introduce dark matter.  Unfortunately, despite this sounding like a fairly major discovery, with much of astrophysics and particle physics starting to reorganize itself around the study of dark matter for years to come, it's interesting that none of the 3 stories mention this rebuttal which appeared a few weeks after the original paper.

Can any of our Cosmic Variance friends chime in on this, or have I missed this already?

The Least Perfect Fluid

For those who find the Nobel prize winners' research hard to appreciate, everyone can usually find something to laugh at among the Ig-Nobel Prize winners, who were celebrated at Harvard on Thursday.  For the life of me, I still can't figure out why I never stopped by one of these things when I was a student at MIT in the mid-90's.  Maybe I didn't have the incentive of blogging about it?  And maybe it's because 2005 Nobel winner Roy Glauber (pictured at left) hadn't yet been drafted into sweeping paper airplanes off the stage (weird but true...)

Anyway, here are the 2005 Winners and one particularly (the physics prize, naturally) caught my attention (despite obvious competition from the Nigerian "short stories" distributed by email, the humans swimming in syrup and the penguin "studies"):

PHYSICS: John Mainstone and the late Thomas Parnell of the University of Queensland, Australia, for patiently conducting an experiment that began in the year 1927 -- in which a glob of congealed black tar has been slowly, slowly dripping through a funnel, at a rate of approximately one drop every nine years.
      
REFERENCE: "The Pitch Drop Experiment," R. Edgeworth, B.J. Dalton and T. Parnell, European Journal of Physics, 1984, pp. 198-200.
      
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: John Mainstone

After all the talk of the most perfect fluid last spring, it's quite humbling to be faced with the least (check out the data table in that 1979 photo!)  As they say, they're talking about one oversize drop every 9 years.

(From Slashdot)

"Big Idea" Posts

It's a busy week, but I'm trying to do my part on the "Einstein's Big Idea" special blog.  Have a look, if you have a moment!