hello, poindexter!

August 29, 2008

Today’s post has nothing to do with science.  I just wanted to make good on the threat I made to Annie, Erika, and Christian about posting the pictures I took of us at the New York Renaissance Fair. We weren’t there for long, but still managed to find time to get our faces painted, hair braided, fortunes told, and of course, pick up some new sorcerer boyfriends…and make it back to Brooklyn in time to see Yo La Tengo at the McCarren Pool! It was a very full day.

Coming soon: the rest of the Cassini story, and two interviews which I did in the past week: one was with Holly Larson who is an ex-professional ballerina turned astrophysicist–we talked about black holes and the similarities between dancing and physics–and the other interview was with my good friend, Matthew Perpetua, of Fluxblog.org fame, who always has something interesting to say about literally everything. They should be good-so please don’t let these frightening photographs deter you from ever returning to this site again. 

*H

August 22, 2008

Yesterday was one of those days that remind me how surreal my life is sometimes.

One of the benefits of not having a ‘real’ job is that my mornings are pretty leisurely; they usually involve coffee, a walk around the East Village (my neighborhood), Gilmore Girls reruns (my dirty little secret), and a few hours of writing at my cute wooden desk by the window. It’s a nice, peaceful little routine that keeps me sane. Yesterday morning, however, was spent in the lounge of a bat-cave like windowless bar in the Lower East Side, which was the surprising location of our BlackBook Magazine photoshoot.  I tried to set up a little makeshift office there to do my blogging, but found that the near-deafening levels of Motown music being blasted through the PA was not exactly conducive to creating the kind of focused mental state which the act of writing requires, nor was the migraine-inducing strain of pins in one’s hair combined with the physical agony of wearing a piece of couture which is two sizes too small. There was no coffee, unfortunately, but there was, however, copious amounts of wine (despite the hour) being chugged coffee-like by the various people involved with the shoot.  I tried to take pictures to post on this blog, but the bouncer (yes, a bouncer.) prevented my camera wielding due to my seemingly untrustworthy countenance within the presence of such starlets as a Gossip Girl actress and a handful of NYC Holly Golightlys.  As if I have the number of every trashy tabloid on speed dial or something.

So the Cassini post had to wait. But now I have the whole morning, and a mug of coffee beside me, and can get down to business.

I wanted to write about the Cassini-Huygens mission because, well, I think its really cool and that everyone should be excited about, or at least, understand what’s going on. And I also wanted to write about it because I found that whenever I read a recent NASA or NY Times article about some new Cassini discovery, I would always have to do a ton of backstory reading—chasing old link after old link, just to get the whole story, and then even after reading all of it, I’d still be a bit confused. So I’m going to try to attempt to present the whole thing here, a ‘Cassini-for-dummies’ if you will, that hopefully won’t end up reading like a third grader’s book report.

First things first:

What is the Cassini-Huygens mission?

Cassini-Huygens is a two-part robotic spacecraft made up of the NASA Cassini oribiter (named after Giovanni Cassini) and the ESA Huygens probe (named in honor of Christiaan Huygens’ who was the first to figure out the shape of Saturn’s rings) and its current objective is to check out Saturn. The spacecraft will complete 74 orbits of the gas giant which should permit a pretty good look at Saturn’s seven rings, and additionally make numerous flybys past its sixty satellites, focusing on one particularly interesting moon, Titan.  Cassini-Huygens was launched in 1997 and reached Saturn in 2004—but before it got there it took a bunch of breathtaking pictures of Venus as well as our own moon, and also did a fly-by of Jupiter that yielded some new and exciting atmospheric data. It also tested Einstein’s theory of general relativity and found that he was right on (though I doubt that came as shocking to the scientists…)

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab designed the Cassini orbiter (with some help from the Italian Space Agency in the form of some super high-tech communication gear), and it’s the biggest and baddest spacecraft of all time. Cassini is powered by plutonium instead of solar energy because of the far distances it was meant to travel. In fact, the spacecraft is so far away from us right now that it takes about an hour and a half for one of its signals to even reach us. It has twelve really complex instruments that were designed to analyse and measure more things than I can even discuss in this post.

The Huygens probe was given to the mission by the European Space Agency, and was designed to separate from the Cassini orbiter once it arrived at Titan.  It detached from Cassini on December 25^, 2004, and touched down on the surface of Titan about three weeks later. The probe was equipped with six instruments which were meant to analyse a whole range of Titan’s properties, such as the temperature, pressure, chemical components and radioactivity levels of its atmosphere, the speed of the wind, the presence (or lack of) electromagnetic waves, the sounds heard on the surface, the electrical conductivity of its surface materials, and (best of all) it had a gadget on it called the ACP (Aerosol Collector and Pyrolyser) which, among other things, could analyse the composition of any organic matter that happened to be cycling through the atmosphere. (I like to imagine it behaving like Eva from Wall-E, though I doubt it was as cute.

What’s so interesting about Saturn that we have to spend $3.26 billion to study it?

Well, the mission may have cost $3.26 billion bucks—but the opportunity to learn a little more about this unique and wondrous solar system that we live in? Priceless.

Saturn is a pretty weird planet, and what we’ve already discovered about its even weirder moons makes it a fascinating place that is well worth exploring. We’ve visited Saturn three times before—the first time was with Pioneer 11 in 1979, and then again with Voyager 1 in ’80, and Voyager 2 in ’81.  Pioneer discovered the magnetosphere around Saturn, as well as two of its rings. The Voyager probes confirmed the seventh of Saturn’s rings, and the existence of nine moons.  Cassini-Huygens has already eclipsed the other missions in terms of data gathering, but then, that’s the point of the thing. If you’d like to see a full timeline of everything that Cassini has done to date, then I suggest reading this:

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassini–Huygens_timeline

Although there is a lot of interesting stuff to be said about Cassini’s observations of Saturn’s rings, it’s the observations of Titan, and more recently, Enceledus, that really interest me because of their unique potential for organic matter—so that’s what I’m going to focus on for the rest of this post, which, is already much too long, so I’ll continue with that later.

Later:  “Enceledus and Titan” (ie. where our distant microbial relatives may live!)  

 *H

I had three hours to kill before I had to get on my plane back to JFK. So I took the tube 1 hour and 20 minutes from my hotel near Heathrow to Piccadilly Circus, took this photo of a protest, walked for seven minutes to Leicester Square, then got back on the tube for the 1 hour and 20 minute journey back. Who says a layover can’t be fun?

August 20, 2008

Wow-I didn’t anticipate being away from my blogging for this long, but then, a tour that didn’t end with some kind of drama just wouldn’t be a real tour.  Last summer, it was my bitter war with British Airways, which all began with a misplaced Aeroflot ticket. This summer, it was a (albeit less maddening) war with Delta. Now, I don’t want to talk too much about touring on this blog, but in light of all the hard lessons I’ve learned while on the road, I feel that its my duty to inform you of certain useful travel wisdom that I’ve picked up along the way. And my first piece of advice is:

NEVER FLY WITH AEROFLOT.

Why? Because, according to Aeroflot ticketing agents at Narita Airport in Tokyo, Aeroflot doesn’t use the internet, like, at all, ever. They keep no records of who is supposed to be on the flight, and they still only issue paper tickets, and if you lose the ticket, then you are massively screwed. My particular brand of massive screwing came in the form of being stranded at Narita Airport in Tokyo—no phone, no money, no ticket—just a lot of heavy luggage in a pile and a tenuous grasp of formal conversational Japanese—the kind that’s better suited for such prosaic affairs as politely accepting business cards from elders, and not for more delicate social manoeuvres like frantically bargaining with ticket agents for a seat on a plane that was already paid for.

So I pleaded with the ticketing agents for hours, slowly moving up the chain of authority until I reached the manager, to whom I then showed an email from my travel agent containing the receipt of the ticket.  At that point, most airlines might be convinced that maybe, just maybe, you actually had purchased a ticket for the flight. But not Aeroflot—they’ve got to have the ticket in the flesh, run their methodical little fingers along the cardstock and eyeball the seat assignment to believe it–and I’d be lying if I said a bit of the materialist in me didn’t respect such pragmatism on their part. But that made it no less infuriating when the manager just continued to stare blankly at me while cruelly reciting the ‘no ticket-no fly’ mantra of evil.

The cheapest Aeroflot ticket to Paris was $5000, (it was hearing the number which started the tears, if I remember correctly) and considering that the band had already spent about $2000 on the (now missing) ticket, I was unwilling to have the total cost reach near-college-tuition levels. So I needed to find another ticket on another airline immediately. But without a phone or credit card, and about 1000 bucks on my checking card, how could I do this?

Second piece of advice: when stranded in a strange country with no money or cell phone,

SKYPE IS YOUR BFF.

It’s the cheapest and most convenient (no foreign currency involved!) way to make international emergency phone calls. I skyped my manager to see if he could negotiate with Aeroflot, and then my boyfriend, who used Orbitz to find (and purchase) another ticket out of Narita—at a fraction of the Aeroflot’s price, and with my favorite airline (at the time), British Airways.  It seemed as though my prayers had been answered.  Alas, I couldn’t foresee the treachery ahead—the dreaded Heathrow layover.  Still worse—a Heathrow layover before Paris’ Charles de Gualle Airport—a double threat. (C.D.G’s employees really take the ‘’laissez-faire’ attitude to heart which isn’t exactly comforting when you’ve got shit to do, like find lost luggage, or your gate number). My third piece of advice:

NEVER HAVE A LAYOVER IN HEATHROW, ESPECIALLY WHEN FLYING BA.

I made it safely to Paris, and comfortably too, because British Airways has the best coach seats of all. My luggage, however, was not so lucky. It was lost in the Bermuda-triangle-esque vortex that is Heathrow, where it still orbits today.  (I like to believe that it exists in the kind of improbability field imagined in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe-floating around, changing from a piece of luggage, to a tulip, to a clown nose, to a sniffling orphan, and then back to a piece of luggage again…)

Anyway, I was obviously miffed about having lost all the cute and irreplaceable Japanese souvenirs that I collected, as well as several nice tour outfits, but what really killed me was that my Roland SPDS drum machine was in that bag, aka, my baby. A baby that is an essential part of our performance, and I still had about ten big festival shows ahead of me. What followed after the layover was a few hellish weeks dedicated to through the procurement and reprogramming of a new drum machine, while avenging the loss of my old one through a series of letters, visits to Heathrow’s terminal four, and general petulance towards both the British and French BA offices, who as far as I could tell, delighted in my panic. I noticed my first grey hair that summer, and I can thank them for that, as well as the dizzying sum of money I haemorrhaged on new equipment. On the bright side, I had the good fortune to work with a sound engineer in Belgium who was best friends with the inventor of the Roland SPDS. So when I finally got a hold of another SPDS, the sound engineer called the inventor and had him personally walk me through the entire reprogramming process, which was (for me) akin to having John Lennon teach you how to write a song.  Another stroke of serendipity was getting to play along with a few incredible drummers like Lee from Camera Obscura and Francis from Teenage Fanclub, both who happened to be performing at the same festivals as us and who kindly took pity on our situation. (It was at the festivals where I discovered that I wasn’t the only one who had been injured by British Airways—many bands had been equally screwed that summer.)

and you don’t have to take my word for it! 

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_20080220/ai_n24312839

Thankfully, this summer tour ended without me losing anything besides a little sanity when I was the unfortunate victim of Delta and Iberian Airline’s mutual uncooperativeness. Iberian Airlines got me into Heathrow twenty minutes late, causing me to be too late to check in for my Delta flight, but Delta had to cancel the flight anyway due to technical problems, and neither airline felt like taking responsibility for the situation. Eventually, Iberia agreed to put me up in a hotel for the night in London, and Delta reissued the ticket for the following day—but that agreement was made only after the two airlines jockeyed me three times between terminal two and four with all my luggage. At one point, I was afraid that Delta had lost my luggage, but they assured me that they hadn’t, adding, “Who do you think we are? British Airways!?’ and laughed. Unbelievable. (I passed the BA lost baggage department, and considered asking someone about my drum machine, but decided not to out of exhaustion.) 

I got home two nights ago, and discovered that my internet is down, so I now have to blog out of the local internet café. I also saw a mouse run across my living room floor, which is troubling. But in general, I’m very happy to be home!

In science news, this was a big week for the Cassini-Huygens mission, which I plan on talking about tomorrow. And I’m also still trying to wrangle an interview to post before Saturday. In A.R.S news, we’re doing a kind of last-minute photoshoot for Blackbook magazine tomorrow, which is followed by a cocktail party that we’re DJing at. The three of us have all been getting into DJing lately, which seems to be the inevitable fate of all off-touring musicians these days—but I don’t mind. I like forcing people to dance to the music of my choosing.  Perhaps all DJs have god-complexes? I need to find a real DJ to interview about this…

August 11, 2008

Hello from Cadaques, Spain. I’m on vacation in a sickeningly adorable fishing village with my boyfriend. After wandering up and down many decrepit little streets using an Iphone as a WiFi detector, I eventually stumbled upon the only internet café in town and am now posting yesterday’s post, which was written on the drive between here and Barcelona. Since I’m in this remote fishing village, I won’t be able to post daily. But I’ll continue to write, and will hopefully get to interview someone—maybe one of the guys that puts those little wooden ships in the bottles—there’s got to be a science to that.
In the mean time, thanks so much to the people who have left comments–I’m going to get back to you very soon! Happy to hear that you’re enjoying the interviews…my next one (post-whomever I can find in Cadaques) will most likely be Holly Larson—a brilliant Astronomer who used to be a professional ballerina. She obviously has a lot to say about being a real renaissance woman.
Till then…

*H

August 10, 2008

Sometimes it astounds me how much of a bubble you can end up living in when on tour. In fact, sometimes I’m afraid that there is a direct correlation between the length of time I spend on the road and the magnitude of stupidity I achieve. Even now as I write this, I’m questioning whether or not that last sentence even makes sense—can stupidity even have a magnitude? And if so, is it ‘achieved?’ In the past few years of touring, I’ve lost much of my ability to articulate my thoughts and write coherently, spell (embarrassingly simple) words and use them properly in sentences, and, worst of all, my vocabulary has been reduced to the point where I have to pause mid-sentence just to summon up such scrabble-winning descriptive adjectives like ‘peculiar’ from the rusty recesses of my brain. And even worse—half the time this happens when speaking with someone for whom English is a second language, and yet they can manage to find the word before I do.
I suppose that one could hypothesize that since music is a kind of language, perhaps it has begun to encroach on the part of the brain where less-abstract languages live, and maybe in becoming better versed in one language, I’m losing a bit of my fluency with the other. But this thought is depressing for two reasons: the first being that it’s vital for me to be able to both make music and speak English well, and the second is the observed fact that none of the multi-lingual musicians I know suffer from this, which sadly suggests that this handicap is specific to me. So if any other touring musicians are reading this and can relate, I’d really appreciate a shout out here. Maybe we can start a support group.

Anyway, I’ve digressed from the point of today’s post without ever having introduced it in the first place. I’d like to express my gratitude for the New York Times Online addition, which has allowed me to retain at least some sense of being worldly and informed from within the confines of my tour bubble. I know that there are a lot of other sources where I could get my news from, but I often only have an hour a day to do internet stuff and between my email and (recently) this blog, I don’t have that much time to research. When I’m home, I spend way more time online reading everything. But while on tour, the NY Times suffices.
So first thing this morning I checked it out, and saw this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/06/science/space/06mars.html?

ex=1219032000&en=fc574f54f0cbceda&ei=5070&emc=eta1

After a weekend of rumors that the White House had been informed of a major discovery bearing on the possibility of life on Mars, NASA held a hasty telephone news conference on Tuesday to announce the tentative identification of a class of minerals that has nothing directly to do with the habitability of Mars.

“We are here today to announce a nonannouncement,” said Michael Meyer, chief scientist for the Mars Exploration Program. The nonfindings come out of data from the Phoenix Mars lander, which is examining whether the northern plains of Mars could ever have been habitable.

Which is a somewhat depressing follow-up from this article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/01/science/space/01mars.html?fta=y

The main goal of the (Phoenix Mars) lander is to analyze ice in the northern arctic plains. Since it arrived on the planet on May 25, scientists have visually seen what they were almost certain was ice: a flat, shiny patch beneath the lander and tiny white chunks in a trench dug by the lander’s robotic arm.

…Signs of vast quantities of underground ice in the polar regions were first spotted from orbit by the Mars Odyssey spacecraft in 2002. With the up-close analysis by the Phoenix Mars lander, scientists hope to determine, from tell-tale signs in the minerals, whether the ice had ever melted and whether the region was ever habitable for life.

So, the good news it that there is ice, and ice is water, and water could obviously mean life. And the other good news is that they found perchlorates, which are salts derived from perchloric acid, which could end up telling us something about Mars’ climate, but perchlorates are also found in rocket fuel, so…yeah. The little green men are still in hiding.

In other news, the Large Hadron Collider has a start date of September 10th! Let the ‘food fight’ begin!

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/08/science/08physics.html?ex=1375934400&en

=43be6c9c08a9eacb&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

(And to the guy that wrote in about where the rest of the interview with Subodh was–I’m afraid thats all I’ve got! But I’ll definitely do a follow-up interview with him when he gets back from CERN.)

August 9, 2008

Although this may look like it was torn right out of some obscure and awesome Chris Ware graphic novel, its actually just a random newsprint page of weird Russian space program memorabilia. I bought it for 5 Euros, which seems worth it just for the cartoon rendition of cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin.

August 8, 2008

BOV (back of van)—driving from Madrid to Barcelona, but currently stuck in some mean traffic—am feeling very grateful for the a.c. right about now. Last night we played a small venue called ‘The Moby Dick.’ It was the first time that we’ve ever headlined in Madrid; the last time we were here was with Air. I wasn’t sure how many people to expect at the show considering that performing with an internationally successful band like Air doesn’t exactly give you a good indication of your own popularity. But happily, the venue was packed.
We’ve been trying out four new songs from our next album (to be released in January) and have found the audience’s reactions to be very informative about which songs still need structural/instrumental work. The response has been positive, although I can tell that the beats still need some help since some of the songs seem to lose momentum halfway through. For the last album, I experimented with adding 808 kicks and various other straight-out-of-the-box sounds to loops that I sampled off of really old vintage drum machines. Our producer, Rod Sherwood, also added some delays and blips which can be heard most prominently on songs like “A Violent Yet Flammable World” (which gives an obvious nod to Bjork’s “Hunter”) But lately, we’ve been going for a cleaner, more minimal sound (if that’s even possible), so we’re foregoing lots of beat layering for just the pure Rhythm-Ace loops. It’s hard to find fault with such classic, simple beats, but I still find them somehow lacking—I guess because they can be so generic sounding. I think that this time around, I’d like to experiment with removing rhythmic layers from a song rather than just adding more, which can often have the consequence of making a song veer in a more techno direction.
With these thoughts in mind, may I present a woman whom I believe epitomizes the model ‘Hello, Poindexter’ interviewee. Her pioneering work with synthesizers helped to define the sound of electronic music and her perseverance made it possible for future generations of women to be taken seriously in the genre: Delia Derbyshire.
I can’t interview her because she died at 64 years old from complications from breast cancer, but I can provide parts one and two of an interview that she did for Radio Scotland.
You can also find out more about her at www.delia-derbyshire.org.

August 7th, 2008

I’m currently in the back of the tour van, (which I should abbreviate from this post forward as “BOV” or perhaps the reader can just assume that is where I reside for all perpetuity…) which is driving from Lisbon to Madrid. The six-hour drive through the Spanish countryside has provided me with ample time to extract something more ‘blog-friendly’ from an interview that I did with Dr. Subodh Patil. The transcript of the interview when viewed in Word (at a 10 point font, no less!) spans a daunting 35 pages, thus classifying it as more of a light screenplay than casual chat. Hey, it was my first interview! And he’s a pretty interesting guy.
Here is the cliffs notes version:

“My name is Subodh, and I am a theoretical physicist, though some of my friends still do not believe me.”

“Lately I’ve been worried about what if our universe is a bubble in a percolation of bubbles.”

Youtube links I provided when asked to produce something ‘awesome’:

“Self explanatory, a favorite among physicists, I imagine.”

“Love that Manchester sound…my vote for the best house tracks of all time. Plus the music video is not half bad.”

Favorite writing implement:

Heather (in italics from here on):
So you’re the first person that I’m interviewing for HelloPoindexter. How do you feel about having that honor bestowed upon you?

Subohd (in bold from here on):
Truly honoured…you’re the first person to ever want to interview me for anything; I don’t think that many scientists are interviewed all that often. Promise you won’t twist my words and take them out of context and make it sound like I support creationism?

I’m afraid I can’t do that. In fact, I want to fit your interview to the profile of a very old widow in PA who makes faceless dolls.
Guess I could live with that!
Yes, you will. So what are you/were you doing right now?
Trying to look up an integral of this annoying function so that I can finish off this calculation I’m working on…
Does this calculation warrant a new number-scribbles page in your notebook?
Yeah, well, this one calculation has taken up to a month…so more like, an entire notebook. I go through maybe one notebook a month depending if I’m in the ‘doing’ phase or not…
One calculation per notebook—that’s the worst math problem I’ve ever heard of. Does problem solving keep you from getting a good sleep?
Well, yeah, in a lot of ways! Many times if you get obsessed with a problem, it just always churns away no matter what. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and I run to my desk—I get so excited that I can’t get it out of my system. But mostly, work is usually a lot of doldrums followed by bursts of inspiration. An old professor of mine once told me, “A good theoretical physicist is also an intrinsically lazy person”, which means that being a good physicist means knowing when to exert him or herself, and when not to. Anyone who knows the math can churn the handle with the math, but it takes a rare mind to cut through the cheese of the problem immediately and solve the thing with as little work as possible. Often the answer to a problem is always like, “Of course, why didn’t I see that before?”
Oprah would call that an ‘ah-ha’ moment. Are you close to your ‘ah-ha’ moment?
I’m working on this idea that perhaps the graviton has a slight mass, which would cause gravity to shut off at large distances. I think I’m almost done. The theory is someone else’s but I’m just trying to apply it to the ‘cosmological constant’ problem to see if this slight mass of the graviton can cause the universe to accelerate ever so slightly as we do today.
Ah, the old cosmological constant. Wasn’t that the bane of Einstein’s life?
Yes, it was! Einstein proposed the cosmological constant, because without it, the universe could not be static! And we all knew that the universe is static…until we saw that the universe was expanding. Einstein then realized that he didn’t need this constant and that his equations rather beautifully explained the large-scale structure of the universe we observe—from the bending of light, to the decaying orbits on binary pulsars due to gravitational radiation. His theory appears to work in many different contexts. But unfortunately, the more we look out there, the more we realize that we’re having to invent all this weird stuff to explain what we see. So the job is to go out and keep looking.
Right now, we’re in an in-between period in science (in theoretical physics anyway) and these are the moments where real science gets done—when mysteries abound. We see the universe behaving in such a way that it appears as if 70% of the stuff of the universe is in the form of this thing called dark energy, which no one has ever seen, or has any idea what it is. Theorists have 10000000001 models as to what it might be, but none to have convinced us. It has the properties (i.e. an equation of state) that make it look a lot like a cosmological constant, but therein lies the problem. It is a riddle wrapped up in an enigma as the cliché goes.
Do you find that you and your colleagues mostly agree about this stuff?D
There is a consensus in the orthodoxy that there is something out there called dark matter that makes up 25% of the universe and that there is something out there called dark energy that makes up 70% of the universe, and these have been tested in MANY ways, but all of these tests depend of certain assumptions, and there will always be people who will question these assumptions. Of course, until we make a direct detection, which may not be so far off…
When will we possibly make a ‘direct detection’?
Perhaps at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva in a few months, if one of these particles goes blip in one of the many underground caves where we’re set up detectors for these guys, who knows? There’s a lot of effort going on to try and find these particles.
Can you put to bed those fears that the universe-as-we-know- it will be obliterated when that thing starts?
No worries! There is very little chance that the LHC will destroy us for the simple fact that there is nothing we could produce in there that our planet doesn’t get bombarded with frequently from outer space. The highest energy the LHC will reach is 10 trillion electron volts (some measure of energy particle physicists like to use), but we have seen cosmic ray showers that appear to have been triggered by photons from outer space with tens of million times that amount of energy, so no need to duck and cover. Interestingly, this isn’t the first time we’ve had this collective worry. Before the ‘trinity’ test at Los Alamos during the war, Hans Bethe and his team had to allay the fear that the nuclear bomb might cause the Earth’s atmosphere to catch fire.
It’s hard to imagine 10 trillion electron volts.
Sure…the electrons coming out of your TV light typically have energies of a few thousandths of an electron volt. Getting hit by one of these ultra high energy cosmic rays would be like being hit by a baseball pitch, even though the thing causing it is tens of thousands of times smaller than any atomic nucleus. What we make in the LHC would be of much lower energy that that. I think the first science run will be in a few months.
So what does this thing look like? Does it spin? Whirl? Are there lights?
It’s been refit with some super duper new technology designed to take us to energies 10-100 times higher than what Fermilab has accomplished. But really the way to think of it is in terms of reproducing the conditions not seen since the beginning of the universe, and the higher the energy, the further backwards we can go.
If you were to explain the process in recipe terms, could you? Like, you put a particle in a blender and it spins and suddenly a baby universe is created…
Well, maybe more like you had a giant food fight, except you’re not trying to make something…like you already have some really exquisite quiche and you wanna find the recipe…except the person who made it won’t tell you. So you throw it around the room against other stuff, like fruit or custard pies, and hope that the crap that flies out gives you some hint of the fine herbs and spices used. And yeah, with any luck…black holes and baby universes!
Will you be visiting this beast? Will you go with other scientists? Like a field trip?
Yeah, I’ll be working there around April because there’s a theory division at CERN. I hope I get to see the control room—I hear it’s just like the command room on the Starship Enterprise! CERN is gonna rule simply cause it’s the modern-day pyramids of Giza; it is without comparison the greatest experiment human kind has ever undertaken in terms of its scale and the number of people, countries, and scientists involved.
Who inspires you most right now?
I’d say that right now I’m very inspired by this physicist named Subir Sarkar, who is at Oxford. I saw him speak a few days ago in Heidelberg. He is a physicist’s physicist.
So you have a man-crush on him?
Maybe! I’d say more like a physics boner. He’s been worrying about what if the universe wasn’t the same everywhere; perhaps we live in a local bubble which is somewhat under dense, then we could re-analyse the data in ways that appear to do away with dark energy. Lately, I’ve been worried about what if our universe is a bubble in a percolation of bubbles…
And that’s going to be the title of this interview! So, do you think that studying all of this stuff informed/influenced your personal beliefs/philosophy? Sorry, I know that’s a rather meaty question!
That is a big one. Well, in a short sentence, the more I study the universe and physics, the more and more humbled I become at the order and beauty of it. I also realize that in our desire to impose a narrative onto our surroundings that we have perhaps erred as humans into projecting a lot of anthropomorphic nonsense onto our universe, when really, the thing itself is of such staggering beauty and simplicity, and of such symphonic order, that until now we have missed out on how we really don’t need to invent things like ‘God’ to satisfy our longing for a narrative. All we have to do is look. It is there, and it doesn’t give a shit about who you are, but that doesn’t make it any less beautiful or awe inspiring to me. I certainly feel myself to be someone who used to long for answers to such existential questions that caused people in the past to turn to theology, perhaps religion—and in a way, a lot of scientists are acting on what (for lack of a better) word, others might refer to as the ‘religious’ impulse. Isidor Rabi said, “In life there’s two types of physicists: one who turns to physics because in their early life, something was wrong with their radio, and the other who turned to physics because in their early life, something was wrong with their God.”
I love that quote. And you’re the later?
I also felt that broken radio thing. I think ultimately, curiosity is curiosity.