Random notes

Janna Levin is someone else without answers to how to find time for writing:

I imagine that full-time research and teaching at a university doesn't leave much time for much else - how do you fit in your writing?

I have no idea. I'm open to advice.

I haven't figured out a smooth method. For long stretches I write as though that's all there is and then I research for long stretches as though that's all there is. And I teach. And I have two babies. Open to advice.

But she published two books, so I guess it works. I guess this is reality.

I can name several scientists, some of them pursuing academic careers, who also write novels. (I'm not sure if Janna Levin knows anything about science fiction, because she seems to think that she's more or less the only one -- at least she doesn't mention that it happens.)

And speaking of science fiction: I'm sure it's great fun to be able to teach a course where you can discuss things like the implications of sex and androids. This is staple food of sf, nothing new or special, but fun as a discussion tool. Why not base a whole course on discussion of possible future technologies and the implications for society? I would want to take a course like that!

I'm travelling too much now. After this week I might be back online ;-)

Update: I found a Book about love and sex with robots. Nonfiction. People write books about everything.

Communication frustration: time?

How do people find the time to blog? I always have ideas about things I want to write, for one of my blogs (there is the one in Swedish for example) or for a fanzine, or just letters. I always carry a little notebook, where I fill pages with notes about interesting things I want to think about later. There are also times I start writing a blog post, save it as a draft and think that I will finish it another time.

Maybe I'm just not managing my time very well. Work, travel, parenting... I'm not sure how I could organise it any other way than I do. There are people with kids and with full time jobs who blog every day, but I have no idea how they do it.

Benjamin Rosenbaum wrote: "Still, writing time is there to be had if I want it, mostly before 9 am, in a cafe on my way to work." I tried this, but it doesn't work very well for me. It's really difficult to get out of the house even 20 minutes earlier than usual, and mostly I would need much more time than this to really think about something. I also find it difficult to shift focus to my actual work if I warm up my brain with thinking about something else.

Needles in haystacks are easy to find

Do you know what attracted me to particle physics in the first place? It was the challenge of detection. How to you design experiments to see those unbelievably small things? How do you make sense of the signals or images from a detector? How can you be sure that you see what you think you see, that it was not something else that you had not thought about?

That's what I'm interested in, and as you might imagine it's often not a simple task. The analysis of data from an experiment can take years.

I found this explanation of the ATLAS "spam filter" nice. (ATLAS is one of the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) which will be turned on next year.) Here about 40 million reactions will occur per second (40 million events in the detector!) and of these only 200 will be stored for analysis. We know most of the physics already, and the people working with this are not interested in looking at a lot of the well-known old stuff. Already this trigger system is impressive!

I hope the world will turn out to be arranged in a way that is not too difficult to make sense of from the data we will get soon. Perhaps we will learn what the dark matter really is. As you might know, the most popular candidate for the dark matter particle is the lightest neutralino, a particle that arises from supersymmetric theory. Supersymmetry is one of the first things to look for at LHC, and if this is a correct description of the world it will probably be discovered soon.

And if not, we might still get clues to what the dark matter particles can be.

Why do we think that there is dark matter in galaxies?

Via Uncertain Principles i found this one minute explanation of why we think there is dark matter. This is a video of a Scientific American editor telling us that stars in galaxies do not rotate as crumbs in a cup of coffee, but as the text on a cd disk.

It's always easy to be a besserwisser when it comes to your own field of research, but I'm going to give in to the impulse to try my own explanation since I've made a promise to myself to write more about science. It is not strictly correct that the stars in a galaxy move as if they were attached to a solid disk, and I would be happier with a demonstration that did not introduce that notion.

Here follows Åka's (really short) explanation of why we think galaxies contain dark matter:

When we measure the velocities of stars in galaxies, we find that the stars far from the center move too fast. The gravitational force caused by the matter we can see is not enough to hold stars with those velocities bound to the galaxy. There is a well known relationship between the velocity in an orbit and the pull of the gravitational force, known since Newton. Therefore we conclude that there must be more mass, and more gravitational force, to hold the stars to the galaxy. This excess mass that the visible stars can not account for is the mysterious dark matter.

I still have to think of a way to demonstrate this with things found in my office ;)

Why we know that this invisible matter is not just dust or clumps of ordinary atoms (the "baryonic matter" mentioned in the video is just physics lingo for atoms, or more stricly atomic nuclei) is a different question. Maybe I'll return to that another day.

Banana Wings!

When I came home today an envelope was waiting for me. Not a boring envelope, but a big, friendly envelope with british stamps on it. A real fanzine! For me!

This probably means that I'm really a part of English-speaking fandom. That's nice! Now I have to remember to write a LoC.

And I vaguely remember talking to Mark and Claire about an article I wanted to write. The Alvar Appeltoft fanzine archive, now donated to the Royal Library in Stockholm. Maybe. Maybe I'll put it back on my list of things I want to write soon.

But first I want to read Banana Wings 32.

Engineering dreams

Sometimes I think I should have studied engineering, then I might have had better chances of actually doing some hardware work. Then again, probably not. Many engineers I know are much less interested in working with their hands than some people with purely theoretical background. So what is the secret to being included among those who get to actually hold a screwdriver now and then?

I hope to find the answer to this question soon. But I think that one of my problems is that I'm too nice and polite and just leave the lab when I'm told that there is nothing I can do there. I probably should hang around and get to know things (with the risk of being in the way or annoying people).

I seldom work with my hands at all nowadays, except maybe for replacing a lost button. I need a reason to do things, and I prefer to do things that others are interested in as well. Just wait until my daughter is old enough (soon!). I recently discovered Howtoons, and remember that I used to want kids to have someone to build fun things with. I might even build some electronic circuits with her one day!

Darker matters

I recently learned that there is another type of dark matter than the one we are usually searching for. Apparently "dark matter" in electronics jargon refers to some kind of dirt that accumulates on circuit boards and other equipment. So dark matter sometimes gets in the way of the seach for dark matter! (Wikipedia does not now this second meaning of the expression. At least not yet.)

By the way, Sean Carrol in a recent post at Cosmic Variance concludes in a somewhat sarcastic tone that dark matter still exists. This is a comment to a science news story about modified gravity. The efforts to explain some of the observations with modified gravity seem far fetched compared to the explanatory power on all scales of the hypothesis of dark matter. Sean Carroll:

Don’t get me wrong: I’m happy that some people are continuing to work on a long-shot possibility such as replacing dark matter with modified gravity. But it’s really a long shot at this point.

Talking about dark things I wonder if goth is very different over here. You might have a hard time to be taken seriously in a black velvet dress if it's automatically considered to be a Halloween costume. But maybe it's safe if you wear it at another time of the year. (I'm not very goth, but I do own a long black velvet dress. And it's not a costume. At least it didn't use to be.)