Collected links, moldering in my bookmarks:
- Eszter Hargittai writes about a new book by her father, István Hargittai, called The Martians of Science. It’s a heartwarming tale of five Jewish-Hungarian kids who studied physics and changed the world: Theodore von Karman, Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann, and Edward Teller. (Okay, so I’m guessing that the Teller story isn’t completely “heartwarming.”)
- Coturnix announces a Science Blogging conference to be held in North Carolina on January 20, 2007.
- Rob Knop gives an example of egregious scientific male misbehavior, in case anyone was skeptical that any such examples existed. The truth is, the number of senior male physicists who regularly hit on attractive younger women physicists is … well, it’s a very long list. And that’s only one kind of misbehavior. I once had a professor who wondered out loud (to a group of male students in his class) why the female students were doing better than they were on the problem sets. The possibility that the female students in that particular sample were just smarter, and that this was not really cause for a news bulletin, had apparently never occured to him.
- An archive of the Top 100 Images from the Hubble Space Telescope. This one is my favorite:
but this one and this one ain’t too shabby. The big news this week was that there will be a servicing mission to HST, which should keep it alive for several more years. I have slightly mixed feelings about this. HST has been an amazing instrument, and I was pushing to save it from my earliest blogging days. It does cost money, though, and NASA is in the midst of a budget crisis that is leading it to dismantle much of its astrophysics program. I was part of the committee that set up the original Beyond Einstein program, which proposed a program consisting of five near-term and mid-term missions: Constellation-X (an X-ray satellite), LISA (gravitational waves), Dark Energy Explorer (using either supernovae or weak lensing), Inflation Probe (looking for tensor modes in the CMB), and Black Hole Finder. Now we have a National Academies panel that will be looking over all of these to decide which one of them to actually go forward with. Still, the money spent on science is not a zero-sum game, so I’m happy to see Hubble saved for a while. - Best Google search to ever lead someone to Cosmic Variance (and there have been some doozies, let me tell you): sex. Apparently we are about the 320th best place to look on the web for information about sex. Whereas, for information about “physics,” we’re not in top 500 or so (I stopped looking). A lot of you suspected this, but now Google has provided incontrovertible proof.
Proof that God does exist and care about the universe, after all! He has partly wrapped a few stars in a giant sheepskin (or other animal fur, or I suppose maybe a fur-shaped dust cloud) to keep them warm, how kind …
Thank you for the plug for the conference. I hope to see some Cosmic Variancers there in January!
Jan 20… let’s see…
Google maps claims that that is a 10 hour drive. And I don’t teach on Friday next semester.
Maybe I’ll go! Gonna have to think about it a bit more first, though.
-Rob
Sean,
Where can I read more about this national academies panel? They’ve announced that only one of those five missions is to go forward?
-Sam
As a Hungarian-American, I have to say that the title to the Hargittai book is awesome. (Those who understand why get a gold star.) I actually have a copy of the book, my mom passed it on to me, but I haven’t found the time to read it…
Sam Gralla:
Sean probably knows more, but my understanding of the situation at NASA is this: a funding “wedge” (incremental increase in funding, year-on-year, leading to a launch) will open in the next few years to cover ONE of the five Beyond Einstein missions. The National Academies panel is a group of senior astrophysicists who have been asked to advise NASA about which mission to fund with this wedge. This doesn’t mean that the other four will never happen, necessarily; it just means they won’t have funding in the foreseeable future.
It is worth pointing out that the status of the “foreseeable future” vis-a-vis funding is subject to change without notice, especially, say, this Tuesday.
will any of you be attending the Blogging Conference in January?
AstroCook, I know that I won’t be attending — don’t know about anyone else.
Sam, I think Brian is basically right. These are not decisions that are typically discussed in public very much, so I don’t know of any place (other than the link above) to read about it. Right now they’re trying to decide which one mission to do, which may or may not be followed by doing other missions. All of this is subject to change without notice.
Save the Hubble for the sake of fine art!… 😉
Seriously, I can’t even believe the rationale for not fixing it, unless you’re planning to replace it with something better, maybe.
Seriously, I can’t even believe the rationale for not fixing it, unless you’re planning to replace it with something better, maybe.
Well, if you took the total amount of money that would go into the servicing mission, and instead used that amount of money entirely towards a different astronomical mission, the money probably could be better spent (i.e. with a higher scientific return).
But, as Sean points out, that’s utterly unrealistic. It’s not a zero-sum game. If the servicing mission doesn’t happen, the money (effectively) disappears for astronomy.
-Rob
I understand the reasoning, but it seems like you’d have to go a comparitively long-way to get a better return. It may just be romantic, but it sadens me to think that the servicing mission might only be for the lack of better projected return.
Such is the life of “progress”, I guess.
Sam Gralla, I don’t know the answer to your question, but for solar system exploration, I can offer the latest best information. Recently an independent panel followed up on the decadal study to advise NASA. Here’s the Solar System Exploration Roadmap for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate (date: September 15, 2006).
Even Bush uses “the Google” to surf “the Internets” these days 🙂
Thanks for all your responses. I couldn’t see anything on the official beyond Einstein site about any of this. So I guess you guys are “in the know”. Do you also know who is on the panel, or what the timetable is for their decision? If LISA isn’t funded, I may have to consider changing fields…