Peter Steinberg

The Fight for RHIC

I've been a busy guy lately, with various projects taking their toll on my free time, but with more than my share of fun things in NYC and Chicago to preclude any year-end despair.  That said, all of this has been happening amidst the chilling background story of the surprise attack by Congress on the RHIC funding and the various efforts of the lab, the RHIC community, and our allied politicians to either get some funding restored, and to make sure we don't get a similar treatment in 2007.

While most of that story proceeds behind closed doors, some things have been made public via news articles and press releases.  Among them:

• Two Newsday editorials, one on December 11, and the other on December 19.  These have been extremely positive towards the work at the lab, but chilling in their implications if the budget cuts continue.
• Senators Schumer and Clinton, and Representative Bishop met with DOE's chief science officer Ray Orbach last week.
• A Newsday article on the same meeting, from 12/16, "Brookhaven Nat'l Lab's ion collider shortfall means layoffs". 

Gee, it's tough being the top physics story of the year.  We'll try harder next year, promise!

Einstein, Barber

I've been getting ready for my BNL Lecture this wednesday (more on that in a moment), so I zipped downtown to Astor Place Haircutters for a...well...haircut.  I sit down, and the first thing I see is the framed photo of Einstein above the usual images of various haircuts.  Then I see "Einstein/Scott" above the mirror.  Then I ask the barber, "Why do they call you 'Einstein'?", to which he taps his forehead and answers "because of our brains."  So I stupidly realize what's going on and ask "Is it your name?", and he, politely, nods.  We then return to the haircut, which any of you can see this Wednesday at 4PM.  And I, politely, ask for his photo, but don't have the heart to explain the blog.

All in the name of my last two weeks of Quantum Diaryhood, and a nice haircut, if I say so myself.

Moment of Truth

Who says that no-one cares about basic research, especially the work we do at BNL?  Check out this editorial in Newsday from this past Sunday.  Of course, much of the article is focussed on NSLS-II, but basic science is under attack from all sides, and so must the support be as broad as can be!  As the article nicely puts it:

The lab needs RHIC at full tilt, NSLS-II and the new nanocenter to remain viable.

So, if Brookhaven is to be at the cutting edge, and if America is to stay competitive, this is a moment of truth.

Proof (Erice Article)

Whenever I travel to conferences, I always manage to botch the photo.  Being a tall guy, I'm often in the back, thus showing up as a disembodied head, or eye.  But this time, in a photo which is currently part of a short Cern Courier piece on the Erice Summer School I attended in Sicily this past September, I managed to obscure myself, with my own arm and camera.

And if you're curious how that shot turned out, see for yourself! All in the name of spontaneous blogging, I guess...

Try This At Home

OK, time to fire me.  I got another tip from Collision Detection, just a couple of entries below the one from yesterday.  This time is closer to home (in several ways): another new fluid has been discovered, not of ultracold atoms, or ultrahot quarks and gluons, but...sand.  And air.  Air.  Holding the jet together.

Similar results came out of the University of Chicago and the Universitty of Twente:

“The result is totally unexpected,” Lohse [from Twente] said. “One would think that the effect of air would weaken the jet, but what is the case is just the opposite.”

Systematically reducing the pressure, Jaeger’s team [from Chicago] observed that the jet, in fact, consisted of two stages. Air pressure exerted little influence on the jet’s initial stage, a thin stream of particles that breaks up into droplets. But air pressure played a key role in forming the jet’s second stage, characterized by a thick column of particles with ripples on its surface.

“One of the biggest questions that we have still not solved is why this jet is so sharply delineated. Why are there these beautiful boundaries? Why isn’t this whole thing just falling apart,” Jaeger asked.

Gosh that sounds familiar.  There's something happening here, and I certainly don't know what it is, yet.  But you can help find out, in your very own kitchen:

Jaeger’s team needed advanced scientific equipment and support from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy to conduct this study. To observe the basic effect, however, “You can do this experiment at home,” he said. Take a cup of powdered sugar and pour it into another container to ensure that it is loosely packed. Then, drop a marble into the cup. “Once you drop that marble in there, you see that jet emerging, but you have to look fast.”

Who's Afraid of Physicists?

As some regular readers may have picked up, I can't say enough good things about, or steal great links from, Clive Thompson's Collision Detection.  This isn't just because the name of his blog sounds like something *I* should be doing as a physicist (although it's actually a concept from computer graphics and video games), but because his job as a top-notch science and technology journalist keeps him plugged in to many many interesting stories emerging out of the web and blogosphere.

His piece from Wednesday has an amusing intersection with high energy physics, although it's really a Nature story about hip-hop's social networks.  Reginald Smith of MIT's Sloan School of Business has mapped out 30,000 songs and 6,522 rappers and found

that on average it takes a chain of just 2.9 people in the network to connect one rapper to another; that is, three degrees of separation. This compares with 2.5 people for the network of movie actors (popularized in the Kevin Bacon game ), 3.6 for company board directors³, and 5.9 for collaborations between high-energy physicists⁴.

Great: now among other honorifics (inventing the web, etc.), physicists now have the additional distinction of defining "six degrees of separation".  Maybe we should submit that to NIST?

Of course, my first reaction was that this can't be right: I know a lot of people from a lot of different fields.  But on reflection, I realize that's because of my various interests and because of a few summer schools I attended as a graduate student.  Since then, I do tend to see the same people over and over again, but in far-flung locales.

So what are we afraid of?  Each other?  I plan to read that Newman paper cited above (for the 5.9) ASAP to find out.

The Good (Physics) News

Could we ask for anything more in the current budget climate?  Here's the current issue of Physics News Update where RHIC turns out to be the top story:

Number 757 #1, December 7, 2005 by Phil Schewe and Ben Stein
The Top Physics Stories for 2005

At the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) on Long Island, the four large detector groups agreed, for the first time, on a consensus interpretation of several year’s worth of high-energy ion collisions: the fireball made in these collisions---a sort of stand-in for the primordial universe only a few microseconds after the big bang---was not a gas of weakly interacting quarks and gluons as earlier expected, but something more like a liquid of strongly interacting quarks and gluons (www.aip.org/pnu/2005/split/728-1.html ).

Master Mind: Daniel Charles on Fritz Haber

I am far too late to be helpful in posting this, but any QD readers in the NY area who are interested in Fritz Haber, the anti-hero of Einstein's Gift, should definitely check out Daniel Charles' reading at the Center for Jewish History tonight!  Tonight!  And it seems to really be only $10, not $15 as shown on the Science in the City website.  I'm heading over there just about...now.

(And while the book is called "Master Mind", I'm just having a bit of fun with the accompanying picture.  Used to love this game...but click on the picture to check out Charles' book!)

Dreams of a Final Theory

Happy holidays everyone, a little late and a little early.  In any case, I'm finally back from my long trip home, which was a great chance to see family and old friends, but also an excuse to attend that Einstein day at my old school (which I call my "high school" but I actually spent 14 years there!).  To be honest, I'm still processing the experience, and may well produce a few insightful comments eventually.  At this point, however, it still literally feels like a really wild dream, or at least has the characteristic structure of one.

Of course, I know it happened -- I have over a 100 photos from the experience, both days even. Still, it's typical of dreams to have a gauzy juxtaposition of familiar places and people, from completely different parts of one's experiences, or brain even. blogger So here I am, in the old auditorium (almost unchanged since 1960, unlike basically every other space in the building), with the school motto up above...but on the stage I see (among others) physics luminaries such as uber-blogger and cosmologist Sean Carroll, string theorist James Gates, fellow-QD'er Debbie Harris(*), and Pier Oddone, director of Fermilab.  I used to see talent shows and school plays up there -- not physics.  Excellent, but weird (like I said, insight comes later this week).

(* to whom I wanted to say "it was a joke about death and Chicago-style machine politics")

Disappearing Act

This is a BNL-centric post, but I just noticed today that after a great year being featured in various sectors of the internal and external web pages, they've finally taken me down.  Had to happen eventually -- the World Year is ending after all.  Still, I had to ask the BNL PR people about it, and I ended up getting more than a few reassurances from them that it's not from violating any official or unofficial blogging rules.  Time marches on, indeed.

And yes I'm about to spend a couple of days at my old school to participate with a veritable who's-who of Chicago-area (and world) physics luminaries in their Einstein event.  I've already met a well-known string theorist who recognized me from Quantum Diaries, but I must admit that, not being a well known Chicago physicist or even a cosmologist, I feel a little bit like the Harriet Meiers in the group (except for the exclamation points and various innuendoes), if you know what I mean.  More later, after Leon Lederman's lecture and reception.