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Winton Prize

Greetings from Paris, where we just arrived from London via the technological miracle of the Chunnel. I was in London in part to take place in the award ceremony for the Royal Society Winton Prize for science books. Which, to my honest surprise, I won!

winton Not to everyone’s surprise, as it turned out. As the big moment approached, with all six short-listed authors and their friends sitting nervously in the audience, President of the Royal Society Paul Nurse took the podium to announce the winner. He played up the tension quite a bit, joking that nobody in the room, not even he, knew what name was written in the sealed envelope he held in his hands. Unbeknownst to Nurse, a slight technical glitch had caused a PowerPoint slide showing The Particle at the End of the Universe to be displayed — with the word “Winner.” So actually, he was the only one in the room who didn’t know by that point.

Other than that amusing diversion, however, it was a great event overall. It’s such a pleasure to experience the strong culture of public science that is thriving in the UK, and the Royal Society deserves a lot of credit in helping to bring science writing to a wider audience.

I wouldn’t have wanted to be on the prize jury, however. All of the six shortlisted books are fascinating in their own ways, and at some point it’s comparing apples to pears. I wouldn’t have been surprised if any of the other contenders had walked away with the trophy:

But, you know, someone has to win. I’ll admit I was rooting for me. Hearing all the congratulations from Twitter/Facebook/email etc. has been extremely heart-warming. (And yes, we’re all hoping that there’s more gender/ethnic diversity on future shortlists…)

Recognizing all the while, of course, what I owe to many other people. While writing this book I was as much of a journalist/evangelist hybrid as I was a scientist, helping to spread the word of the amazing work done by thousands of experimental physicists and technicians, and I hope that the book made their contribution more widely appreciated. Most of all, I fully appreciate that I’m not even the best writer in my own house (which only has two people in it). Jennifer is going to quickly tire of hearing me say “Who’s the award-winning author around here, anyway?”

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Paperback Day!

Young books grow up so fast these days, don’t they? It seems like just last November that The Particle at the End of the Universe was born, kicking and screaming. And now it’s all grown up, and there is already a paperback edition. What’s a concerned parent to do? (Now I know how Billy Ray Cyrus must feel.)

I should point out that, not only is the paperback less expensive than the hardcover (and therefore very easy to give as a present or even hand out to strangers whose day you’d like to brighten), there is also a new afterword. Among other things, it mentions the possibility of a phase transition and the end of the universe as we know it. And I corrected the picture of particles moving in a magnetic field, which got the right-hand rule wrong in the first printing. Science is hard!

Particle at the End of the Universe

The response to the book has been enormously gratifying. It got good reviews, was on a couple best-of-2012 lists, and has been longlisted/shortlisted for some prizes. Not bad for an atheist-liberal-cultist screed.

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Erdős-Bacon

This interview with Stephen Strogatz reminded me that I am frequently (well, maybe it happened once) asked what my Erdős-Bacon number is. The Erdős number, of course, is the number of degrees of separation between you and famous mathematician Paul Erdős, as judged by collaborations on research papers. Erdős has an Erdős number of zero; all of his collaborators (and there were many) have Erdős numbers of 1; their collaborators have Erdős numbers of 2, and so on. Bacon numbers work similarly, except that you’re looking at degrees of separation between you and Kevin Bacon, using appearances in movies or TV instead of papers.

Since you’re dying to know: my Erdős-Bacon number is six (at least using the relaxed standards typical in this game, according to which TV documentaries and appearances as “self” are counted). My Erdős number is four: I collaborated with Jim Bryan, who collaborated with Jason Fulman, who collaborated with Persi Diaconis, who collaborated with Paul Erdős. My Bacon number is two: I appeared in a NOVA special narrated by Jay Sanders, who appeared in Starting Over with Kevin Bacon. By the tricky mathematical operation known as “addition,” we end up with six.

That’s pretty typical for people who have finite EB numbers at all. Not as good as Strogatz himself, who has an EB number of four. And while I am tied with Stephen Hawking, I haven’t (as far as I know) appeared on any musical recordings, so I don’t have a finite Erdős-Bacon-Sabbath number. Always something left to shoot for.

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New Video Project

Here’s an experimental project I’m involved in: a prospective web-based video series in which I talk to groups of people about exciting science topics. All very new and untested, but did one recording session, and would love to get feedback.

The topic we tackled was neuroscience, and in particular the idea of brain-machine interfaces. I had three guests, all of whom (unlike me) know something about the field. There was Philip Low, a computational neuroscientist and Founder/CEO of Neurovigil; Crystal Dilworth, a molecular neuroscientist and PhD student at Caltech; and Ricardo Gil da Costa, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Salk Institute. My job was to ask non-expert questions, which shouldn’t have been that hard since I am a complete non-expert.

This is the “main” part of the show, in which we talk about how brains can interface with machines.

Preposterous Universe Episode 1: Thought-Reading in 5 Years?

Then we have a couple of “supplements.” Here we are talking about brain spying:

Supplement: Brain Spying

… and here we’re trying to decide what it means to be a cognitive neuroscientist. (Are there neuroscientists who don’t work on cognition? Of course there are, duh.)

Supplement: What is a cognitive neuroscientist?

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Hither and Yon

Best intentions (put nose to the grindstone, get these papers finished) notwithstanding, I do have a few more public lectures and whatnot coming up over the next few weeks. Would love to see you there! And if not, I recently did an episode of the Rationally Speaking podcast with Massimo Pigliucci and Julia Galef, where we talked about naturalism, science, philosophy, and other things I’m marginally qualified to speak on.

Wednesday May 22: I’m giving a public talk on the arrow of time at UC Davis. This is in the midst of a conference on the early universe, which should also be fun.

Wednesday May 29: I’ll be talking with Jim Holt, author of Why Does the World Exist?, at the LA Public Library. It’s possible this is will be sold out, but I think they’re going to tape it.

Sunday June 2: I’m the keynote speaker at the American Humanist Society annual conference in San Diego. 10:30 a.m. on a Sunday, so this one might be easier to get into! In fact you can get in for free even if you didn’t register for the conference, by following these simple steps:

1. Go to the website here: http://ahacon13.eventbrite.com/#
2. Click the orange “Enter Promotional Code” link.
3. Enter FREECON in the field that appears and click Apply.
4. The list of items should then include the free “Free to the Public: Matt Harding & Sean Carroll” option.
5. Choose that one (and any others) and then complete the registration.

Thursday June 6: Opening night at the Seattle Science Festival features Brian Greene, Adam Frank, and me, under the stern but fair moderation of Jennifer Ouellette. Adam and I will give short talks, and Brian will show us the West Coast premiere of the multimedia performance Icarus at the Edge of Time.

Wednesday June 12: I’m giving a public lecture at Fermilab on particles, fields, and the future of physics. It’s part of the Fermilab Users’s Meeting, as well as a workshop on the International Linear Collider. Not sure if I’ve ever given a public talk that will have so many people ready to correct my mistakes.

After a couple more trips in July, my calendar actually does clear up, and I can look forward to uninterrupted vistas of productivity. Watch out!

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Closer to Truth

A couple of years ago at the Setting Time Aright conference, I sat down for an interview with Robert Kuhn, who has a program called Closer to Truth. Time passed, as it will, and I never knew what happened to the interview. But apparently it’s up on the web now, freely available to anyone wishing to click (although apparently not embeddable).

So go here if you want to see some short clips of me sitting in a dark, atmospheric setting, declaiming earnestly about various profound topics, from atheism to infinity.

Oh, and I suppose it’s possible you might want to hear other people as well. They’re all here — there are some great people, from Nima Arkani-Hamed to Marvin Minsky. (More than a few clunkers, as well, but you get what you pay for.)

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Virtually Speaking Science

In a couple of hours (6pm Pacific, 9pm Eastern) I’ll be joining Alan Boyle and Matt Strassler for a chat in Virtually Speaking Science. You can listen along on BlogTalkRadio, or the more adventurous among you can join us in Second Life. After consulting the Twittersphere (and our own inner dialogues), we’ve settled on the topic “Curious things that may or may not be true.” Should be fun.

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This is what Jennifer and I would look like if First Life were more like Second. For one thing, apparently we’d be like nine feet tall.

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Hello England!

Just a word to folks in the UK, I’ll be breezing through next week and the week after and giving a handful of talks. First up is a visit to Oxford, where I’m participating in a miniseries called “Is God Explanatory?” (Not really, I will point out.) The workshop proper includes me, philosophers Lara Buchak and John Hawthorne, and astronomer/theologian William Stoeger. The conference dinner on the 10th will feature brief talks by me and philosopher/theologian Keith Ward. I think it will all be interesting and useful discussion, largely free of sputtering and invective. While I’m there I hope to sneak in some chats about quantum mechanics and cosmology with the local physicists and philosophers. (Very sad I’ll be missing A Theory of Justice: The Musical.)

After that it’s off to London, where I will briefly pretend to be Michael Faraday and give a lecture at the Royal Institution. I’ll be talking about the Higgs boson. It’s a pretty new particle, you probably haven’t heard of it. </hipster>

Then it’s off to the wilds of Nottingham, where I’m giving both a colloquium on the 16th on the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, and a public lecture on the 17th. The latter is, you know, open to the public, so please stop by. (The colloquium is presumably also open, but it’s for folks who are already familiar with the basics of QM.)

Unless you already went to the RI lecture, in which case don’t bother, since they’re on the same topics. Seriously, even the jokes will be the same. The trick is to make it sound like I just thought them up.

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Merry Christmas

I couldn’t find any of Julianne’s awesome list of holiday presents for inquisitive youngsters. But we did get my nephew a chemistry set (hopefully he will explore it more systematically than I did when I was his age), and my niece an erector set that lets you build different kinds of moving vehicles. Her first reaction, “Was this supposed to be for my brother?”, gave away very quickly to “I have never been more excited!!!” when she built a little car that zoomed around on its own using nothing but salt water for fuel.

waronxmas

Have a warm and safe holiday season, whether your tradition includes exchanging presents with family members or ordering Chinese food and watching videos.

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Colbert Redux

Last night I had the privilege of once again appearing on the Colbert Report to talk with our nation’s leading pundit about the frontiers of modern science. Here’s the clip. I’m not sure you’d want to use it to help explain how the Higgs mechanism works, but I think we had fun. The joke about “massive” at the end makes sense only if you know that Colbert has a running gag, referenced earlier in the show, in which he has been trying to get people to say “massive” as a synonym for “cool.”

The Colbert Report Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Sean Carroll
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog Video Archive
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