Andrew Jaffe: Leaves on the Line

The summertime British music scene is taken over by a series of festivals up and down the country; the biggest and most famous is Glastonbury, but the same weekend London’s Hyde Park holds the somewhat scaled-down (no sleeping over in tents) “Hard Rock Calling”. I arrived too late for the Pretenders, whom I had last seen play Radio City Music Hall in New York in, I think, 1984. The acts on offer meant that the crowd skewed toward the gray and/or bald, which put me reassuringly away from the upper age envelope. (Although it was a refreshing change to see people wearing Ramones t-shirts who could possibly have seen them live!) I made it in for Seasick Steve, fun in his cartoony way, and Ben Harper with his more antiseptic blues, We drank beer out of plastic bottles, huddled under umbrellas during the brief storm, and Fleet Foxes were lovely but a bit overmatched by the surroundings.

But Neil Young can handle a crowd of a few hundred thousand. Especially Neil Young with Crazy Horse, the hard rock version. So we got loud and crunchy with “Hey Hey, My My”, “Everyone Knows this is Nowhere”, “Cinammon Girl”, “Mansion on the Hill”, and an acoustic set with “Heart of Gold” and “Old Man”. Unlike The Who or the Stones, he hasn’t made himself irrelevant through a combination of prostitution and crappy music; with the exception of some 80s meanderings, his career doesn’t fit neatly into a few phases like Dylan; and unlike the members of the Beatles (more on them in a moment) he’s continued to produce great music even until now — although he probably hasn’t produced a masterpiece since Ragged Glory, his latest Fork in the Road shows him at his surly best. And after all these years, like his fellow headliner (in London and Glastonbury) Bruce Springsteen, despite all the complications, Neil Young still seems to believe in the power of rock ’n’ roll.

After a too-short main set proving the point with the anthemic “Rockin’ in the Free World” (with a half-dozen false endings for us to sing along to), I was hoping for an encore of “Powderfinger” (does anyone know what that song’s about, by the way?). But instead we heard the familiar opening to the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life” which I then remembered that he had been playing for the past year or so. Despite the context, it still surprised all of us when a figure joined Neil on stage for the middle eight: Paul McCartney. I’m pretty jaded about rock ’n’ roll by now, and the guy (McCartney) hasn’t written a great song in about 35 years, but the fucking hairs on the back of my neck stood up.

The annual Meltdown festival took over London’s South Bank Centre this week. I saw Yo La Tengo’s rock ’n’ roll Q&A, and unfortunately missed a performance by David Murray, one of my favorite saxaphonists.

But the highlight was curator Ornette Coleman himself, in an evening dedicated to his “Shape of Jazz to Come”, the record which marked the transition from the era of Bird and the “cool” Miles Davis to the much wilder 60s.

Coleman shuffled on stage in a shimmering suit, playing from his 50 years of songs, and reaching back to an amazing version of the the famous prelude to Bach’s Cello Suite, as well as a take on “Rite of Spring” via his own “Sleep Talking”. He played with the current incarnation of his quartet, his son Denardo on drums, and Tony Falanga and Al MacDowell on acoustic and electric bass. Bill Frisell joined them on guitar for most of the evening, and rock goddess Patti Smith sang/spoke/chanted on Ornette’s 80s track, “In All Languages”. The Master Musicians of Jajouka (Not to be confused with “Joujouka”) came on for an almost unbearably intense jam on Lonely Woman, and I don’t think I’m exaggerating about “unbearably” — the droning Moroccan wind instruments put out a pretty ferocious but wonderful noise.

The performance reminded of a morning almost exactly twenty years ago. I was living in New York City, and my friend Marc and I got up before dawn to take the subway down to Battery Park, the southern tip of Manhattan. There, we got to hear Sun Ra and his Arkestra along with trumpeter (and one-time Ornette Coleman sideman) Don Cherry greet the sun for the 1989 Summer Solstice. I don’t remember much from the event, just Sun Ra and the Arkestra playing and chanting “the sun…. the sun… the sun…” and Don Cherry sitting down, leaning against a wall, playing his pocket trumpet. I must have spent the day in a sleepy attempt at working at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies where I spent a year studying the Antarctic ozone hole, and I vaguely recall ending the night at Central Park’s Summerstage dancing away to Tito Puente.

To mirror that evening, albeit with many more skinny, pasty-faced white people in ironic t-shirts, I went back to Meltdown the next night for some post-rock jazz with Kieran Hebden, Steve Reid and others. Actually, the post-rock moniker doesn’t do it justice. If Ornette was playing the future of jazz in 1960, this is the future we’ve got now: undoubtedly jazz, but taking advantage of technology and forms of music that were barely contemplated fifty years ago.

Not all CMB (Cosmic Microwave Background) experiments get launched on a rocket.

There’s a long history of telescopes flown from balloons — huge mylar balloons floating over 100,000 feet in the air. MAXIMA and BOOMERaNG, the first experiments to map out the microwave sky on the sub-degree scales containing information about the detailed physical conditions in the Universe over the first few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang. The Planck Satellite will close out that era of CMB experiments, by giving us a complete picture of the microwave sky down to less than a tenth of a degree.

But there is still more to be done, even beyond what Planck is capable of. By measuring the polarization of the microwave background at even higher sensitivities than Planck, we hope to observe the effects of gravitational radiation in the early Universe.

Last week, EBEX, one of a new generation of balloon-borne experiments designed specifically with this goal, had its maiden flight from Fort Sumner, New Mexico.

EBEX Launch, 6/11/09 from asad137 on Vimeo.

It’s worth remembering, of course, that even with a parachute, these telescopes hit the ground pretty hard. But these things are amazingly well-built, and the EBEX crew have managed to recover most of the hardware and all of the data. So now the team have some time to get the hardware and software ready to fly for a couple of weeks over Antarctica next year.

And let’s not forget that New Mexico is also the home of Roswell, where conspiracy theorists and other wackjobs have been trying to find the government cover-up of UFO sightings. Indeed, the EBEX balloon was spotted, but at least in neighbouring Arizona, they can tell the difference.

Meanwhile, another CMB experiment, PolarBear, is about to start its first set of important tests. PolarBear is a ground-based telescope, which means it can watch the sky for far longer than a balloon, at the cost of being at the bottom of the atmosphere and all of the extra noise that adds to the signal. So despite some hard times (especially here in the UK), the next generation of CMB experiments are on the way, hoping to probe all the way back to the epoch of inflation.

The students in my cosmology course had their exam last week.

There’s no doubt that they found the course tough this year — it was my first time teaching it, and I departed pretty significantly from the previous syllabus. Classically, cosmology was the study of the overall “world model” — the few parameters that describe the overall contents and geometry of the Universe, and courses have usually just concentrated upon the enumeration of these different models. But over the last decade or two we’ve narrowed down to what is becoming a standard model, and we cosmologists have begun to concentrate upon the growth of structure: the galaxies and clusters of galaxies that make the Universe interesting, not least because we need them for our own existence. Moreover, that structure directly teaches us about those contents which make them up and the geometry in which they are embedded. I wanted to give the students a chance to learn about the physics behind this large-scale structure, not traditionally at the heart of undergraduate cosmology courses.

Unfortunately, this also meant that the traditional undergraduate textbooks didn’t cover this material at the depth I needed, and so the students were forced to rely on my lectures and the notes they took there (and eventually a scanned and difficult-to-read copy of my written notes).

I sensed a bit of worry in the increasing numbers of questions from students in the weeks before the exam, and heard rumors of worries. But the day of the exam rolled around, and indeed when I re-read the questions it didn’t seem too bad, although there were some grumbles evident in the examination room.

Later I learned that there was a “record-breaking” number of complaints about the exam. I gather it was perceived to be difficult and unfamiliar.

So marking the exams in the past week, I was happy to find that the students performed just fine: the right “bell-shaped curve”, the correct mean, etc. (Of course I should point out that all results are subject to final approval by the Physics Department Examiners Committee.) I admit some puzzlement, therefore, about the reaction to the exam. Were they worried because the questions were different from those they had seen before? That, I admit, was the point of the exam — to test if they have actually learned something. Which, I am happy to point out, it seems that they had!

There was one question that almost all students got wrong, however. I asked about the “Cosmological Constant Problem” and whether it could be solved by the theory of cosmic inflation. The Cosmological Constant is a number that appears in General Relativity, and, although we can’t predict it for certain, we are pretty sure that if it’s not strictly zero, in most theories we would estimate that it ought to have a value something like 10¹²⁰ (that is 1 followed by 120 zeros!) times greater than that observed in the Universe today. I suppose I didn’t write on the board the words “Cosmological Constant Problem” next to that extraordinarily large number. (In the end, I reapportioned the small number of marks associated with that problem.) Inflation involves something very much like the cosmological constant, but occurring in the very early Universe — so inflation can’t help us with the 120 zeroes, alas.

Next year, I’ll be sure to spell all of this out, but I’ll also show this movie of my old grad-school friend, collaborator, and colleague Lloyd Knox, now a professor at the University of California, Davis, singing this song about Dark Energy (of which the cosmological constant is a particular manifestation):

The scientifically-accurate lyrics are sung to the tune of Neutral Milk Hotel’s “In the Aeroplane over the Sea”.

Finally, I’d welcome comments on the course or the exam, anonymous or otherwise, from any students who may come across this post.

Despite my almost eight years in Britain as an astronomer, I suppose I have to be embarrassed to admit I’ve never actually watched “The Sky At Night”, apparently the longest-running show on television (possibly in the whole world, not just the UK). But I’m watching this evening’s episode, mostly because I’m on it. I was filmed during last month’s trip to the Planck launch. As always, it was painful to realize the fat figure with the bad posture and annoying voice was actually me. But it was fun to watch Patrick Moore do his studio interviews, with a style and on a set neither of which seem to have changed since the 1970s.

But it was beautiful and moving to see the launch again, and to watch the much closer movies and pictures than I was able to get on the day. Since then, parts of Planck have been slowly turned on, cooled down, and checked out. Everything is working well so far; we’re looking forward to the first data in a little more than two months. It’s going to be a long summer.

The episode will briefly be available on BBC’s iPlayer, but more of my cringeworthy discussion of Planck in a different context is up on YouTube; check out the next post for much cooler cosmology video from a more photogenic cosmologist with a better voice.

Before it happened, I would have said slim. But since it happened, 100%.

(This goes well with Ted Bunn’s exegesis of the Daily Show’s brief foray into probability theory for their segment filmed at CERN.)

I know this is a tired topic, but I am unable to resist using this as an opportunity to slag off Stanley Fish’s idiotic attempt to equate “faith” in religion with “faith” in science. In both cases, we are talking about conditional probability, P(hypothesis | information ), which is read as “the probability of the hypothesis given the information”. I suppose that when the religious discuss “faith” in science, they are referring to the fact that something needs to go on the right side of the bar — all probabilities are conditional on something. But a crucial difference between religion and science is that the religious only put a couple of things on the right side: the words of a holy book (and don’t ask me why one should choose one book over another), or just the effects of some vaporous conversion experience which leaves all such probabilities as tautologies — god exists since I know god exists. For science, however, we get to condition our probabilities on, well, pretty much anything and everything. And the more we learn, the better it gets.

Cross-posted on Andrew Jaffe’s Blog and the Planck Mission Blog.

Planck and Herschel are en route to their orbit at L2!

We were about 7.5 km from the launch, at the “Agami” viewing site. Here is my golden ticket:

We all milled around for half an hour, snapping pictures of friends, eminent scientists, and at least one Nobel prize winner, but it all went silent when they announced the last few minutes before launch. The inevitable 10.9.8.7.6.5.4.3.2.1 and ignition was followed by a still, silent seven or so seconds, and then we saw the smoke and flames.

(Apologies for the poor quality; there were many people there with far more powerful zoom lenses than my meagre 2.5x.)

The rocket then pierced the clouds:

Soon after, the booster rockets separated (which those 200x telephoto lenses could capture), and soon all left to see with the naked eye was the rocket’s trail:

Huge thanks to the instrument teams for their hard work for more than the last decade. Soon, the hard part for us scientists and data-analysts begins: four or so years of data coming down from the satellite, being cleaned and calibrated, building and rebuilding our (computer) model of the instrument, letting us build and rebuild our models of the Universe.

Thanks also to the HFI Instrument Principle Investigator and co-PI, Jean-Loup Puget and Francois Bouchet (and especially Hélène Blavot) for arranging this extraordinary opportunity for us scientists to see this part of the fruits of our work.

Cross-posted on Andrew Jaffe’s Blog and the Planck Mission Blog.

Today we saw the rollout of the gargantuan Planck/Herschel Ariane 5 rocket, when they move it from its assembly building to the launchpad. Spectacular!

There are plenty more pictures, and some movies, which I’ll try to edit and post shortly. At the end of the day, I was interviewed and inadvertently kidnapped by Chris Lintott and the BBC Sky at Night team. But I am here to tell the tale (and better fed for it) and ready for the — very — big day tomorrow.

Live coverage of the launch, scheduled for 2:13pm on 14 May, at:

• http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/herschelplanck/SEM9V3ZVNUF0.html
• http://www.videocorner.tv/videocorner2/liveflv/index.php?langue=en

Cross-posted from Andrew Jaffe’s Blog and the Planck Mission Blog

Today was spent in Cayenne — the capital of French Guiana, where most of the hotels are located, and Kourou — home of ESA’a Centre Spatial Guianaise. We climbed up a nearby peak for a look over the Spaceport, but mostly we saw hand-sized spiders and a hazy view of what some very large if indistinct structures.

Closer up, we (about a hundred scientists, obviously more than the ESA staff were used to) got a tour of the facilities, starting in the “Jupiter II” control room where the launch will actually be, um, controlled:

We also saw the launch sites for the Vega and Soyuz rockets, and of course for our own Ariane 5:

But better will be tomorrow, when we get to see the rocket — our rocket — rolled the few kilometers from its current building to the pad in preparation for Thursday’s (hoped-for) launch.

With less than a week to go before its planned launch, The Planck Surveyor Satellite has been loaded into the fairing of its Ariane 5 rocket along with its sister satellite, Herschel. It is scheduled to be rolled out to the pad on May 13, and the launch window opens on May 14 at 13:12 GMT. Within three months, it will be at the Lagrange 2 (L2) point, from where it can watch the sky with the Sun, Earth and Moon all comfortably shielded from view.

Once there, Planck will scan the sky for at least 14 months. But don’t expect to see much out of the mouths (or blogs, or printers) of Planck scientists for a while: we’ve got a full year thereafter to analyze the data, followed by a year’s “proprietary period” during which we’ll do our best to extract the most exciting science. But until then — the first rule of Planck is: you do not talk about Planck. The second rule of Planck is: you DO NOT talk about Planck. (Luckily, Herschel expects to release its pictures of the infrared and submillimetre universe much more quickly.)

For now, the European Space Agency, the UK’s Science and Technology Facilities Council, and of course us Planck scientists ourselves have been gearing up both for the scientific data — and the press.

ESA has a Herschel and Planck launch campaign page with a nifty live countdown (which users of Apple’s Safari browser can make a dashboard widget out of). Last week, STFC held a pre-launch press event in London, which got us some coverage in The Independent, The Daily Mail, The Telegraph, The Times, as well as BBC Radio and TV news. (And Sky at Night will have coverage from the launch.) We’ve also been covered in New Scientist (complete with always-exciting quotes from me).

If this media saturation isn’t enough, you can check out the page dedicated to Planck in the UK, Follow Planck on Twitter (and Herschel too), read the Planck Mission Blog (there’s one for Herschel, too).

As for me, I’m taking a break from this term’s teaching — off to French Guiana next week for the launch (barring further delays). For those of you less lucky, it will be visible on satellite tv and streamed by ESA. I’ll do my best to keep up the twittering and blogging, probably cross-posting from here to the Planck Mission Blog. Wish us luck!