Andrew Jaffe: Leaves on the Line

(Warning: this post is pretty far outside of my usual bailiwick…)

I was reading today’s Guardian and came across Zoe Williams’ sketch (in UK newspapers, this is a short, often humorous, descriptive piece, usually about an event like a parliamentary debate or court proceedings), “Rebekah Brooks lays bare the secret of her success”, recounting the appearance of former News International CEO Rebekah Brooks at the Leveson Inquiry into “phone hacking” and the too-cozy relationship between the media and politicians.

The sketch was mostly remarkable for what it couldn’t say. Williams writes

But ultimately, this is a ridiculous person. You couldn’t live a life with this bad a memory. Never mind that you’d never be able to do a demanding job, you wouldn’t be able to pass your GCSEs.

And that makes the whole business grating to watch. “I can’t remember” is the defence of a person who wasn’t really concentrating, whose mind was somewhere else.

And this makes the whole business grating to read. I don’t think this is only an indulgence in some old-fashioned British circumlocution: Williams really means “I think Rebekah Brooks was lying”. But I assume she can’t write that, because that would be accusing Brooks of the crime of lying under oath, and Brooks would be free to sue for libel — and under UK libel law, the burden of proof is on the defendant to prove the statement true, impossible in this case. (I am not a lawyer, but this is my understanding.)

This is just one of the minor repercussions of the current state of UK libel law, which the government may be overhauling soon — it was discussed in last week’s Queen’s Speech (another amusing tradition in which the Monarch reads a speech written by the government recounting its plans for the next parliamentary session). Simon Singh, a science writer who was sued for liable by the [redacted] of the chiropractic industry, writes that the proposal still doesn’t go far enough, especially in its lack of distinction between individuals and corporations. (Americans may think this sounds familiar from a different context.)

This week I received the results of the “Student On-Line Evaluations” for my cosmology course. As I wrote a few weeks ago, I thought that this, my fourth and final year teaching the course, had gone pretty well, and I was happy to see that the evaluations bore this out: 80% of the responses were “good” or “very good”, the remainder “satisfactory” (and no “poor” or “very poor”, I’m happy to say). I was disappointed that only 23 student (fewer than half of the total) registered their opinion on subjects like “The structure and delivery of the lectures” and “the interest and enthusiasm generated by the lecturer”.

The weakest spot was “The explanation of concepts given by the lecturer” with 5 for satisfactory, 11 for good and 7 for very good — I suppose this reflects the actual difficulty of some of the material. In the second half of the course I need to draw more heavily on concepts from particle physics and thermodynamics that undergraduate students may not have encountered before, concepts that are necessary in order to understand how the Universe evolved from its hot, dense and simple early state to today’s wonderfully complex mix of radiation, gas, galaxies, dark matter and dark energy. Without several days to devote to the nuclear physics of big-bang nucleosynthesis, or the even longer necessary to really explain the quantum field theory in curved space-time that would be necessary to get a quantitative understanding of the density perturbations produced by an early epoch of cosmic inflation, the best I can do is give a taste of these ideas.

And I really appreciated comments such as “Work with other lecturers to show them how it’s done”. So thanks to all of my students — and good luck on the exam in early June.

Somehow I’ve managed to forget my usual end-of-term post-mortem of the year’s lecturing. I think perhaps I’m only now recovering from 11 weeks of lectures, lab supervision, tutoring alongside a very busy time analysing Planck satellite data.

But a few weeks ago term ended, and I finished teaching my undergraduate cosmology course at Imperial, 27 lectures covering 14 billion years of physics. It was my fourth time teaching the class (I’ve talked about my experiences in previous years here, here, and here), but this will be the last time during this run. Our department doesn’t let us teach a course more than three or four years in a row, and I think that’s a wise policy. I think I’ve arrived at some very good ways of explaining concepts such as the curvature of space-time itself, and difficulties with our models like the 122-or-so-order-of-magnitude cosmological constant problem, but I also noticed that I wasn’t quite as excited as in previous years, working up from the experimentation of my first time through in 2009, putting it all on a firmer foundation — and writing up the lecture notes — in 2010, and refined over the last two years. This year’s teaching evaluations should come through soon, so I’ll have some feedback, and there are still about six weeks until the students’ understanding — and my explanations — are tested in the exam.

Next year, I’ve got the frankly daunting responsibility of teaching second-year quantum mechanics: 30 lectures, lots of problem sheets, in-class problems to work through, and of course the mindbending weirdness of the subject itself. I’d love to teach them Dirac’s very useful notation which unifies the physical concept of quantum states with the mathematical ideas of vectors, matrices and operators — and which is used by all actual practitioners from advanced undergraduates through working physicists. But I’m told that students find this an extra challenge rather than a simplification. Comments from teachers and students of quantum mechanics are welcome.

Imperial Astrophysics is sponsoring a new series of public lectures, “The Sensual Universe: Astrophysics for the Five Senses”.

The first will concentrate on touch: The Impact of Sex In Space, presented by Dr Saralyn Mark (and unlike most of us around with a “Dr” in front of our names, Dr Mark really is an MD). Despite the name, it should be completely Safe For Work, and will happen next Tuesday, 17 April 2012 at 18:30, in Blackett Laboratory Lecture Theatre 1 here at Imperial. Attendance is free but registration is essential: email astro-outreach@imperial.ac.uk or call 020 7594 7531 stating the number of required tickets.

The next one will be given by our own Dr Subu Mohanty, on taste: Beer in Space, on 23 May 2012.

I’ve recently become involved in TimeWave, a theatre, art and technology festival to be inaugurated up in Manchester this coming November 19-24.

It has been set up by the excellent lonyla (London-NY-LA) artists’ network founded by J. Dakota Powell, another American transplanted to London, taking advantage of the connections that we rootless cosmopolitans have gathered over years of transatlantic and intercontinental living and travel. How do we tell stories to each other across such vast distances in space and in culture?

TimeWave itself will try to realise these long-distance links. One event, multiple locations, multiple points of view, even within a single piece:

Each day of the festival will consist of a two-hour event, knitting together 8 to 10 short pieces from playwrights, poets, composers and transmedia creators to form a kaleidoscopic tapestry. Over a five-day run, the programme will resemble a prism shifting every few minutes to reveal a unique voice, style or viewpoint.

In some pieces, we will use telepresence. For example, American actors will be live-streamed on to a projection screen to interact with British actors on stage. Or audiences in Hong Kong can discuss what they’ve seen with audiences in Manchester, sharing thoughts and ideas.

The festival has already got the support of an amazing group of writers, filmmakers and directors, including Neil LaBute and David Henry Hwang.

So, please come see the festival up in Manchester this Autumn. But before then, if you can, please consider donating to the cause and help make TimeWave happen.

I’ve been lucky that almost everything I know about hospitals comes from fiction. But last week, having done something unpleasant to my Achilles tendon running, my local doctor sent me over to the local A&E (“accident and emergency”, the UK equivalent of the ER) to see if they could fix me up.

Having been healthy and not particularly accident-prone, this was the first time since age 6 or so that I’ve been to the hospital for myself, although I’ve accompanied or visited a few friends and loved ones over the years. Britain’s NHS is, of course, a remarkable institution: universal health care with outcomes that are overall as good as the much more expensive American system. But that very size means that patients don’t always get exactly the treatment they might like.

Before heading to the doctor that morning, a few minutes online indicated that I probably had something like insertional Achilles tendinitis, a pretty common complaint especially amongst runners. My GP couldn’t help much, but got much the same information from the computer on her desk, and decided that it required more work — possibly a cast — than she could handle there.

So after hobbling over to Charing Cross hospital, relatively nearby in London (and nowhere near Charing Cross), I was told to sit and wait, possibly for about two hours — and I was a lucky one, having come with a doctor’s note enabling me to skip the triage step and get directly on the list. So a couple of hours later, I finally made it in to see someone, a very nice nurse practitioner. I was surprised, however, when he looked at my heal and said that he had never seen anything like that before. He waved a nearby doctor into the examination room, but the latter clearly just wanted to go home after a long shift, and didn’t have much to add beyond the frankly strange suggestion of a “foreign body”. The pair were about to send me in for an x-ray when another nurse practitioner walked by, looked down, and said, “oh, that’s bursitis”, an inflammation of the bursa, the sac of fluid which keeps the joint between the tendon and the bone lubricated. This seemed altogether more plausible (although a condition I tend to associate with my now-101-year-old grandmother). And, fortunately or otherwise, the suggested treatment was just ice, anti-inflammatory painkillers, and rest. To facilitate the latter, I got a new pair of accessories, pictured at right (taken at my local, hoping that alcohol was not contraindicated).

As a not-terribly-old, not-terribly-infirm, male, I am used to deferring to pretty much everyone except teenagers for positions on lines (queues) and seats on public transport. So the crutches work a weird psycho-physical magic on me and the people around: lots more saying “sorry”, getting up or moving out of the way for me. I don’t like it.

Things are, happily, looking up. I can walk only a bit asymmetrically and without too much pain (and without the crutches for the last day or so). Let’s hope I’m running again before my next half-marathon.

Among the many other things I haven’t had time to blog about, this term we opened the new Imperial Centre for Inference and Cosmology, the culmination of several years of expansion in the Imperial Astrophysics group. In mid-March we had our in-house grand opening, with a ribbon-cutting by the group’s most famous alumnus.

Statistics and astronomy have a long history together, largely growing from the desire to predict the locations of planets and other heavenly bodies based on inexact measurements. In relatively modern times, that goes back at least to Legendre and Gauss who more or less independently came up with the least-squares method of combining observations, which can be thought of as based on the latter’s eponymous Gaussian distribution.

Our group had already had a much shorter but still significant history in what has come to be called “astrostatistics”, having been involved with large astronomical surveys such as UKIDSS and IPHAS and the many allowed by the infrared satellite telescope Herschel (and its predecessors ISO, IRAS and Spitzer). Along with my own work on the CMB and other applications of statistics to cosmology, the other “founding members” of ICIC include: my colleague Roberto Trotta who has made important forays into the rigorous application of principled Bayesian statistics to problems cosmology and particle physics; Jonathan Pritchard who studies the distribution of matter in the evolving Universe and what that can teach about its constituents and that evolution; and Daniel Mortlock, who has written about some of his work looking for rare and unusual objects elsewhere on this blog. We are lucky to have the initial membership of the group supplemented by Alan Heavens, who will be joining us over the summer and has a long history of working to understand the distribution of matter in the Universe throughout its history. This group will be joined by several members of the Statistics section of the Mathematics Department, in particular David van Dyk, David Hand and Axel Gandy.

One of the fun parts of starting up the new centre has been the opportunity to design our new suite of glass-walled offices. Once we made sure that there would be room for a couple of sofas and a coffee machine for the Astrophysics group to share, we needed something to allow a little privacy. For the main corridor, we settled on this:

The left side is from the Hubble Ultra-Deep field (in negative), a picture about 3 arc minutes on a side (about the size of a dime or 5p coin held at arm’s length), the deepest — most distant — optical image of the Universe yet taken. The right side is our Milky Way galaxy as reconstructed by the 2MASS survey.

The final wall is a bit different:

The middle panels show part of papers by each of those founding members of the group, flanked on the left and right side with the posthumously published paper by the Rev. Thomas Bayes who gave his name to the field of Bayesian Probability.

Of course, there has been some controversy about how we should actually refer to the place. Reading out the letters gives the amusing “I see, I see”, and IC² (“I-C-squared”) has a nice feel and a bit of built-in mathematics, although it does sound a bit like the outcome of a late-90s corporate branding exercise (and the pedants in the group noted that technically it would then be the incorrect I×C×C unless we cluttered it with parentheses).

We’re hoping that the group will keep growing, and we look forward to applying our tools and ideas to more and more astronomical data over the coming years. One of the most important ways to do that, of course, will be through collaboration: if you’re an astronomer with lots of data, or a statistician with lots of ideas, or, like many of us, somewhere in between, please get in touch and come for a visit.

Unfortunately we don’t yet have a webpage for the Centre..

Despite the last decade and a half or more of the internet, I’ve never bothered to actually work out the meaning and history of my surname, “Jaffe”. Somehow I always thought it was connected to the town of Jaffa, near Tel Aviv. But in fact, 30 seconds of searching turns up information that the name comes from the Hebrew yafeh (יפה, meaning “beautiful”) and dates at least from Rabbi Mordecai Jaffe in 16th-century Prague. I was also happy to discover that, with at least half a millennium behind us, there are plenty of interesting Jaffes in history and today (although I had to be careful not to be waylaid by the possibility that we’re actually Irish…).

Of course there are a lot of physicists: Arthur and Robert, as well as several astronomers who don’t quite rate a wikipedia page (yet!): Walter, Daniel and Tess (who is one of my collaborators on Planck). But also actors — Sam, Nicole and Marielle, composers — David and Stephen, and even athletes — Peter and Scott. And there really is an Irish connection: Sir Otto, once the Lord Mayor of Belfast, born in Hamburg, lived and worked in New York as well as Ireland.

I was saddened to receive a message that my friend and colleague, Roman Juszkiewicz, died earlier today.

Roman was a Polish cosmologist who began his career in the Russian school, working with Ya. Zeldovich, probably the most eminent Soviet cosmologist and astrophysicist of the 20th Century. Roman himself went on to work in Paris, Berkeley, Geneva, Princeton, and of course back in Poland in both Warsaw and more recently in Zielona Gora, always doing his best to find friends and collaborators in places worth a visit.

He specialised in trying to understand the growth of structures in the universe. I was lucky enough to work with him on a series of papers over the last decade and a half, mostly examining how the motions of galaxies respond to the distribution of matter, and how we can use that to measure the total density of matter. Most recently, in one of Roman’s very last papers, we tried to clear up some confusion about the relationships amongst different ways of measuring and describing the clustering of the matter and of the galaxies that we directly observe.

As much as I will remember and miss Roman as a collaborator, I and most of his friends will surely miss him even more as a companion: Roman liked to enjoy his friends’ company as much over food and wine as over a good scientific discussion. Ideally, of course, we managed both at the same time, often well into the night and leaving many empty bottles and plates behind.

Tonight, I will try to leave at least a couple of empty glasses behind in Roman’s memory and honour.

Many plays about science suffer from trying to do too much, telling a story while teaching science, but Nick Payne’s two-hander “Constellations”, now on at the Royal Court Theatre in London, has science and a scientist at its center, adding to the drama, not distracting us with jargon or science fictional twists.

“Constellations” is the story of Roland and Marianne, a beekeeper and a cosmologist. Without giving away too many spoilers, I’ll say that the play tells us the story of their relationship, as it might play out in the myriad possible universes of the multiverse, each one subtly different from the rest (while of course there would be vastly many more that are not subtly, but radically, different — but a play about empty, boring Universes would be less compelling). In one, Marianne tells Roland “I sit in front of the computer all day and analyse data from the Cosmic Microwave Background” which readers will know is pretty much exactly what I do. In others, she is still an astrophysicist, sometimes more theoretical, sometimes more observational (or she is the same, just choosing to highlight different parts of her work to impress Roland or drive him away). Sometimes we see their relationship end, sometimes continue, sometimes restart, as the play pushes forward in time and between the universes. And we return, repeatedly, to one particular version of their story, towards a climax in the future of one or more of the Universes, which puts the comedy of many of the situations into tragic relief.

Playwright Nick Payne needs one of his characters to be a scientist, able to describe the underlying ideas, but manages to avoid too much heavy-handed exposition, limiting the explicit discussion of cosmology to flirty conversations early on in their relationship (I don’t know about my peers, but I find cosmology very good for flirting, at least with the right people). Sally Hawkins’ Marianne and Rafe Spall’s Roland are improbably attractive but manage to get across at least some of the neediness and nerdiness of someone burrowed so deeply into both the technical problems and the broad themes of something like cosmology or beekeeping, making us care about them and their fate (or fates?).

Thanks to my Sussex University colleagues Andrew Liddle and Kathy Romer, who both acted as consultants for the play, for inviting me along to see this excellent production.