Symmetry factor

Ouch! What a news from the UK! PhysicsWorld reported that due to a funding crisis in the UK science (aren’t we always in crisis when it is about funding science? It’s much easier to give out subprime loans and then moan about the crisis when peoople default on those), the country is pulling out of the International Linear Collider project. And not just pulling out because of the lack of funds — here is the exact text from the Delivery Plan, the document that is produced by the UK’s Facilities Council (which is “… [the organization that] operates world-class, large scale research facilities and provides strategic advice to the UK government on their development. It also manages international research projects in support of a broad cross-section of the UK research community. The Council also directs, coordinates and funds research, education and training.” — see the website):

“We will cease investment in the International Linear Collider. We do not see a practicable path towards the realisation of this facility as currently conceived on a reasonable timescale. “

How about that? And this is with all the ideas and plans that are already on the table (including projects that were chopped because of the ILC)… The International Linear Collider just became a chunck less international… This is really bad timing — as we learned recently, the real cost of ILC would also likely to go up…

P.S. One can find the complete text of the Delivery Plan here.

As I predicted here, Persis Drell has been named the fourth director of Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. She is a great physicists and, I’m sure, will lead SLAC to a brighter future (which can be read as you wish — especially since SLAC will soon have no on-site particle physics experiements, but will have a very bright X-ray source). We interacted a bit what I was a postdoc at Cornell (she was a professor there for 14 years). She helped turn SLAC into an active astrophysics lab and resisted attempts to argue for building of a super-B factory there.

Hmm… maybe I should do predictions for money… wait, I actually do that — I’m a theorist…

Ever since the invention of carbonated water by Joseph Priestley and Torbern Bergman, people wanted to find new uses for this refreshing drink — uses that are unrelated to its primary function of actually providing refreshment (Russian-speaking readers of this blog might remember popular children’s fiction novels “Neznaika” of Nikolai Nosov where carbonated water was used to propel cars and rockets).

Now, everybody knows that carbonated water is obtained by dissolving carbon dioxide gas in water - the result is the formation of carbonic acid (chemical formula H₂CO₃) that effectively “traps” the carbon dioxide. It is also known that carbon dioxide is one of the anthropogenic greenhouse gases, whose overconcentration is not really good for this planet. Putting two and two together, researchers from the University of Leeds Stephanie Houston, Bruce Yardley, P. Craig Smalley, and Ian Collins proposed storing CO₂ in water that is being pumped into oil reservoirs to enhance the flow of oil. Read more about it here. Here is their published paper.

This morning I learned that former Vice President Al Gore not only invented the Internet, but also won a Nobel Peace Prize (the later claim is not an urban legend but indeed true). Well deserved!

This year the Ig Nobel prizes were awarded by the Annals of Improbable Research earlier than the regular Nobel Prizes. I was looking for some space themes (after all, 50 years ago on Oct. 4 was the day when people sent the first artificial sattelite in space), but alas… Nevertheless, here are some of the laureates:

MEDICINE: Dr. Brian Witcombe and Dan Meyer for their report “Sword Swallowing and its Side Effects.”

PHYSICS: L. Mahadevan and Enrique Cerda Villablanca for studying wrinkle patterns in sheets.

BIOLOGY: Dr. Johanna E.M.H. von Bronswijk for her census of all the mites, insects, spiders, pseudoscorpions, bacteria, algae and ferns found in our beds.

CHEMISTRY: Mayi Yamamoto for developing a way to extract vanillin — vanilla fragrance and flavoring — from cow dung.

LINGUISTICS: Juan Manuel Toro, Josep Trobalon and Nuria Sebastian-Galles for demonstrating that rats can’t tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backward and a person speaking Dutch backward.

LITERATURE: Glenda Browne for her study of the definite article “the” and the ways it causes problems when alphabetizing.

PEACE: The U.S. Air Force’s Wright Laboratory for their proposed “gay bomb,” a chemical weapon to make enemy soldiers sexually attracted to each other.

NUTRITION: Brian Wansink, whose experiment with a bottomless bowl of soup showed that humans eat more when presented with more food.

ECONOMICS: Kuo Cheng Hsieh for patenting a device that drops a net over bank robbers.

AVIATION: Patricia Agostino, Santiago Plano and Diego Golombek for discovering that hamsters recover from jet lag faster when given Viagra.

I don’t know of any practical use of putting hamsters on Viagra (I think they do well without), but the prize in chemistry has enormous economic and philosophical value, as it shortens the “circle of life” famously described in the movie “Lion King.” I can also relate to the literature studies and suggest the author to enlarge her study by investigating the troubles that article “the” brings to (the?) Russian-speaking population. Contrary, the nutrition prize is given for an obvious result. Gosh, even Ig Nobels become controversial!

It’s this time of the year again. The Nobel Prize in Physics will be awarded by the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences and Nobel Foundation on October 9 2007. Who will get it? That’s the question. Once again, Thomson Scientific is trying to predict the outcome of this year’s selection. They try to combine “worthy discoveries” with number of citations and “predictor prizes” to form their predictions. Or maybe they just want to show that the actual selection process is nothing of the above (after all, they totally got it wrong last year)? So far, their top three candidates are:

1. Sumio Iijima (carbon nanotubes)

2. Arthur McDonald and Yoji Totsuka (neutrino physics)

3. Martin J Rees (cosmology)

Personally, I think that the chances of Sumio Iijima look better then the rest — they just gave out an astrophysics prize last year with AMO and particle physics in the preceeding years…

I’ve been neglecting my blog for a while. Of course, I have good reasons: our Fall semester has started, I’m teaching a course that noone in our Department has taught before (including me — it’s good that I only have 12 students, it’s an advanced undergraduate class), my Mom is visiting, … Anyways, here are a couple of things that caught my attention recently.

1. DOE and NSF lauched a new website “…to tell the story of the U.S. role in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)”. Here it is: http://www.uslhc.us. It has lots of info written for non-physicists: stuff about experiments, links to “LHC blogs” (hmm…), images from all LHC detectors: ALICE, ATLAS, CMS, LHCb, LHCf… Now, I must admit that I didn’t know anything about the LHCf experiment (shame on me), so I googled “LHCf”. To my further embarassment, it comes up almost on the top of Google search page, second only to this LHCF… Certainly worth looking at. I mean, the USLHC website…

2. SLAC appointed Persis Drell as Acting Director (here is the press-release) while they continue to search for the permanent Director. My guess is that she will be the next SLAC Director. She is a great physicist.

3. I’m on sabbatical leave next semeter — will spend most of it at the University of Michigan. So I started preparing by going there once a week. They gave me Finn Larsen’s office for the next year (who is also on sabbatical) — Finn, I promise to return it to you in the same shape and form I got it two weeks ago…

There is a curious article that I read on CNN’s website. It is called “Chimps on treadmills offer evolution insight” (given here via Reuters, as CNN promptly removed it from its website (to conserve diskspace?)). The basic premise of this investigation (here is the original article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) was to study energy consumption of humans vs. primates in a treadmill exercise. The conclusion was that “…people walking on a treadmill used just a quarter of the energy relative to their size compared to chimpanzees knuckle-walking on four legs.” Which in turns implies that this reduced energy consumption steered pre-humans to evolve into bipedal humans.

As far as physics is concerned, the conclusion of this study is “nearly flawless.” An analogy can be found in quantum mechanics: a particle trapped in a “false vacuum” state will eventually leak out into a lower-energy “true vacuum” state. So, in a sense, it is nice to have minimization of energy as a guiding principle of evolution. But surely not a dominant one. Otherwise people would still have been jumping on trees — why walk (and use more energy) if you can just sit on a tree! Well, maybe that is how prehistoric sloths evolved into modern-day sloths… but yet again, maybe all technological evolution is built on a principle of Total Laziness (minimization of energy) — people got tired of walking — so they invented horseback riding; they got tired of rough riding on those smelly horses — so they invented cars; … well, you got the idea…

There is a lesson that can be applied to everyday life: if you exercise regularily and want to use your treadmill time more effciently, walk on all four of your limbs. And don’t tell me that evolution is not applicable to today’s world.

I am leaving for CHARM-2007 conference in beautiful Ithaca tomorrow. It is always nice to come back to Cornell where I did my postdoc some while ago. I will try to blog from there to cover the conference activities, if anyone is interested. I also wanted to add a couple of links here

1. This comes via Peter Woit’s blog: apparently the only problem with the intermediate-scale and time project (i.e. something that would be done at Fermilab before ILC is built — in other words, what BTeV was supposed to be) is its name. So very appropriately it is now called “Project X“. They are even asking commnity input for name proposals. Personally, I like SNuFL (Superconducting Neutrino and Flavor Linac), but can also propose “High intEnsity Proton aCcelerAtor PUT at FNAL.” What do you think?

2. There is a new peer-reviewed journal in High Energy Physics called “Advances in High Energy Physics” (here is its Editorial Board). It will publish both reviews and research articles in HEP. They employ a different concept from journals available so far: access to the content is free anywhere in the world (which is great for people in developing countries), but there are old-good per-page publication charges (not so great for people in developing countries). It will be interesting to see how well this publication model works.

3 . Terrible news from Minneapolis (I-35W bridge collapse). This bridge is located right next to the University of Minnesota. I might be mistaken, but it is what people take to get to/from the airport (I’ve been doing it every two years during the Continuous Advances in QCD conference at the Univ. of Minnesota)…

So that’s the question I asked myself today when I walked in to one of the At&T stores. My contract with AT&T is up, so I wanted to explore my options. And of course, with the recent iPhone craze (and being somewhat of a gizmo geek), I wanted to check them out. So here is how the real thing looks like (I’ve got to play with it for about five minutes while in the store):

It’s thin, light and, to me, has a physical feel of an iPod (well, the redone one, with metal outer shell) and “virtual” feel of a Mac. Very intuitive controls. Lots of functions. Huge screen… What can I say, Apple makes very nice products. So if I were looking for an expensive toy to play, I’d have definitely gotten one — com’on, this thing also makes phone calls! But at $5oo up front and somewhat expensive data plans I think I’ll wait this one over. I’m seriously thinking about Blackberry Pearl… what do you think?

P.S. BTW, no crazy people running around in (or waiting outside of) that store, I’d say, they had a usual day.

P.P.S. They also had no iPhones to sell — only the working display units — so they said that if I wanted one, I’d have to wait 3-5 days — and the lady clerk was sooo0 apologetic… I guess, some things make you feel like a kid again: “But I want it NOW!”