Nobel Bets 2014

I am breaking my blogging silence to go on record with my predictions for the 2014 Nobel Prize.  The physics prize will be awarded next Tuesday, so place your bets now!.   (Last year was too easy, everyone knew it was going to be Higgs). 

A lot of people think I am placing my money years too early, but I really think the time is now ripe for Topological Insulators to receive a Nobel Prize.   My reasons:

(A)   The topic has been hugely influential, and has very much changed how we think about matter

(B)   The Nobel Committee tends to rotate between fields, and condensed matter last got the prize in 2010 (graphene), so I think the stars are properly aligned.

(C)   There was a “Nobel Symposium” on Topological Insulators this summer, and that is a good sign.

So who will be included on the prize?   This is where things get complicated. Charlie Kane is probably a lock, but beyond this, things are up in the air.

Case 1) Prize emphasizes theory of topology in condensed matter

                                Charlie Kane, for topological insulators

                                Duncan Haldane, for spin chains

                                David Thouless, for topological quantum numbers

Pro:   Thouless is someone who really should have gotten a prize for something by this time!

Con:  Volovik should be included  (I suppose one could swap out Haldane, but the spin chain work was pretty important too!)

Case 2) Prize emphasizes quantum spin Hall physics

                                Shou-Cheng Zhang, for prediction of quantum spin Hall effect

                                Laurens Molenkamp, for experimental observation of quantum spin Hall effect

                                Charlie Kane, for topological Insulators

Pro:  Contains experiment

Con: So what?  This field has been driven much more by theory

Pro:   There is political force in the community behind this one

Con: There is political force in the community behind this one

 Case 3) Prize recognizes discovery of the Z2 invariant in 2D

                                Charlie Kane and Gene Mele for one killer paper.

Pro:  Very simple and focused

Con: Leaves everyone else out.

The 3D topological insulators, would be hard to recognize with a prize simply because too many people were involved both in the theoretical and experimental aspects of the discovery.   

If Topological Insulators is indeed awarded the prize, I will put in a blog post explaining what they are.   I might also add a story about sitting in a bomb shelter with Charlie Kane while being shelled by Hamas in Israel this summer.  And I might explain what this picture is about...

Nobel Bets 2012

It is that time of year again when the brightest of the brightest lie awake at night wondering whether they will get that elusive call from Stockholm.  For the rest of us, it is that time of year when we place our bets and take our chances.

Official betting odds have the Higgs boson as the heavy favorite.  See the official odds here.  The odds stand at roughly 1 in 3 that the prize will be somehow related to the Higgs.  Although at least seven people have some possibility of being included in this prize, the favorite combination appears to be Higgs and Englert. 

That said, betting odds are not everything.   The betting odds for Bob Dylan winning the literature prize are now almost 1 in 10.   However, these odds have apparently been artificially pushed up by many people who like the idea of putting their money on the rebellious bard.   (Still, Murukami remains the odds-on favorite for literature).

So do I think Higgs will win the prize?  Yawn.  Yes, I think that is probably the best bet for this year.     (The atlantic monthly says it is a sure thing). 

Reuters, however,  is betting against the Higgs.  They have listed three alternatives here.

1. Photoluminescence in Porous Silicon, Leigh T.  Canham.   Yawn.   Yes, this started a big field, and has been cited many times.  I just don’t think it is interesting enough.  

2. Slow Light, Steven Harris and Lena Hau.  Yeah, this was pretty cool.  And it would be very nice to have another woman physics Nobel Laureate.   But again, I somehow don’t think this is a likely one.

3. Quantum Teleportation, Charles H. Bennett, Gilles Brassard, and William K. Wootters.  This one is interesting, and potentially possible.  But I think it is slightly the wrong combination.  The teleportation paper was 1993 --- and it had seven authors.  I would instead choose Quantum Cryptography (which came first by many years) and award the prize to Bennet and Brassard (for their 1984 paper) along with Stephen Wiesner, for work in the early 1970s which had some of the key ideas in it.  In some ways the ideas that these guys were working on in the 70's and 80's really launched the quantum information field.   (Also Wiesner is an interesting character --- a bit of a hermit genius.)   

I still have my money on Higgs, but the quantum option an interesting one.

And who else should be on the list?   

For a number of years I've been saying Michael Berry for the famous "Berry Phase".  Yes, I know there were several previous discoveries of Berry Phase before Berry, but no one really nailed the issue  the same way that Berry did.    A possible combination (and one I'd really like to see) with Berry would be David Thouless.   I used to think Yakir Aharonov would be a good combination with Berry until I found out about this paper by Ehrenberg and Siday which was ten years before Aharonov-Bohm and has basically the same result.

Another one that no one besides me seems to think is likely is the discovery of neutrino mass by the Super-K collaboration.  I guess the problem there is that it is not clear which person (or people) would get the prize.  It is certainly deserving though.

Anyone else have opinions?

Graphene

The Nobel Prize in Physics today was awarded for the discovery of Graphene, a single layer carbon sheet. Back in this post in 2009, I mentioned that this was a hot topic at the APS march meeting.

It turns out that the whole trick to producing graphene is Scotch-Tape. If you take a piece of tape and you lightly touch it to graphite (pencil lead) you frequently will pull off just a single layer of carbon. Pretty cool. (This trick for pulling off thin layers with tape has been known for many years to chemists and material scientists).

Back in this post when I was taking bets for last year's Nobel prize, I made the following statement suggesting that it was not actually deserving of the prize:

Reuters proposes Geim and Novoselov (22%) for the discovery of graphene (carbon sheets) and Ijima (14%) narrowly behind for the discovery of nanotubes (carbon sheets rolled up into a tube). Not that I am opposed to carbon but…

I will remind everyone that Buckyballs, yet another form of Carbon, already won the Nobel prize recently – but in chemistry, not physics. I will also remind everyone that not every molecule made of carbon deserves an immediate Nobel prize. I know that the Carbonists have been lobbying hard, and admittedly both nanotubes and graphene are pretty cool. But I don’t think they are so overwhelmingly cool that they need a Nobel prize just yet. And if the lessons of Buckyballs are anything to learn from, we should expect that the hype will far outweigh the actual usefulness of, or interest in, the stuff in the long run.

I'm amused to see that Doug, over at nanoscale views seems to have a similar opinion.

On the flip-side, graphene is pretty cool stuff. If any fraction of the hype turns out to be true in 10 years, then I would certainly support the prize (and simultaneously eat my words). But from the buckeyball experience I would have thought the Nobel committee might have waited a bit longer on this one. It isn't like the winners are old geezers about to croak who have to be given the prize now since they are not going to survive until next year.

So there you have it... the Nobel prize won with Scotch-tape.

Nobel Bets 2010

It is that time of year again -- the time when the best and the brightest from around the world lose sleep wondering if they are going to get that early morning call from Sweden announcing that they have won the Nobel prize.

Last year I placed my wager on Yakir Aharonov and Michael Berry for geometric phases in physics. This turned out to be a bad bet. From now on I am removing Aharonov from my list of likely candidates. Why? Because I was informed that the 1961 work he is most famous for actually discovered 12 years earlier by Ehrenberg and Siday (Even Wikipedia appears aware of this). The fact that it is called the “Ahanronov-Bohm effect” appears to be a good example of Stigler’s law: The principle that nothing is ever named after its original discoverer. (Stigler’s law itself was discovered by Merton).

Since last year, the prize went to Smith and Boyle and Kao for what many people disparaged as “just engineering” (albeit some pretty amazing engineering). Given that, I think this year the prize might go to something a bit more fundamental. A decent bet would be Sir Michael Berry (without Aharonov).

However, for my money, I think the front-runner is the WMAP experiment (Wilkenson Microwave Anisotropy Probe) which measured the fluctuations of the temperature of the universe – telling us a whole lot about its history. It is a very important experiment. Reuters actually agrees that this one is a pretty good bet. Another really good bet (in my opinion) is the Neutrino Mass experiment from Super-K. I bet on them in 2008 (and lost, as usual).

Another bet on Reuters is Ebbesen for surface plasmons: collective motion of light and electrons together on the surface of metals. While this is nice work, and Ebbesen is a good scientist, I think it is far from a Nobel.

Olaf Smits, in Dublin, mentioned a really interesting possibility. While a bit out of the box for a Nobel Prize in Physics, the fact that last year was a bit out of the box indicates that the Nobel committee is willing to break some rules these days. Olaf’s bet is that the prize will be awarded for the discovery of exo-solar planets. In the star-trek futuristic “this is our moment to discover that we are not alone” kind of way, I think a case could be made that this is worthy.

The Best Physics Lecture Ever

Out in Aspen Colorado, a few times each summer, there are physics lectures aimed at the general public, given in the memory of Heinz Pagels. Many years ago I heard one such lecture on the subject quantum mechanics given by a friend of mine named Shankar (one name only) who is a professor at Yale. The lecture was both entertaining and inspiring and accessible to all (not just to the physics cognoscenti). I remember how impressed I was, and I thought how great it would be to be able to give such a performance.

Last year I was honored to be asked to give one of these Pagels lectures. I spent literally weeks preparing it, trying to live up to the high standard set by Shankar. The lecture went very well, and maybe I got close to his level, but still I have to give credit where it is due: his lectures are still the yardstick by which other physics lectures should be measured. Perhaps we should declare a lecture to be a milli-Shankar if it is one one-thousandth as good as one of Shankar’s lectures.

This summer, Shankar gave yet another lecture --- this time on the subject of relativity – one of the most beautiful subjects in physics. This lecture was even better than his previous one. In fact, it was perhaps the best physics lecture, on any subject, that I have ever heard!

Fortunately, you can find all of these lectures streaming on the web. While sometimes a bit is lost in the translation to low-quality streaming video, nonetheless, I think they are all worth watching.

Here is Shankar’s lecture on relativity.

Here is his lecture on quantum mechanics.

... and in case you missed it last year, here is my lecture

Organization and Lack Thereof: A Reflection on How Research Works

Organization is not my strong point. Anyone who has seen my office, or my apartment can vouch for this. Starting my new life as a professor last year, I was worried that lack of organization – particularly in running a research group - might be my downfall. For me, in fact, the entire concept of research is fundamentally disorganized – and I’ve always felt that this is a good thing, since random wandering encourages random discovery.

Some professors do manage to run large organized groups. I think the larger the group, the more organized it has to be. Some even have detailed hierarchical structures, including lieutenants (pronounced “leftenants” over here), sergeants, and so forth. Each person has a unique and well defined project. Higher rank members oversee lower-rank members. They have group meetings periodically where one person reports on their progress, and research gets done very methodically. The top dog doles out the projects and sets the overall directions. The foot soldiers take their orders and produce the results.

But for many theoretical physicists that I know, this is not at all how research works. A more accurate description is that a researcher has some general field of interest and they simply mess around with ideas in that field until they figure out something interesting to work on. They work on this interesting idea for a while, two steps forward, one step back, and eventually do manage to make progress. But this type of messing around is not something that is easily organized. And it is particularly hard to oversee someone else’s messings and decide whether they are messing around correctly or not. Such researchers tend to have smaller research groups and tend to interact much more closely with their students and postdocs.

Of course when it finally comes time to publish discoveries, I do think it is very important to present a very organized picture of what you have found, and I do agonize over the organizations of my publications and talks. But this is more an exercise in covering your tracks and making it look like you knew where you were going all along.

Just sayin'...

Lecturing

Much of the teaching at Oxford is done in “tutorials”: one, two, or three students at a time with one professor (A similar system exists at Cambridge with the one important difference being that they are called “supervisions.” Oxford students insist that the word “tutorial” is better because you can shorten it to “tute”, which they do more often than not).

The tutorial system is very manpower intensive, but reasonably effective in forcing the students to keep up. I’ve been handling a full load of tutorials since the first day I joined here last year.

In addition to tutorials, there are also regular lectures. Last term, (Hilary 2010) I gave my first lecture course. It was a softball intended to ease me into the hard work of lecturing: a graduate course with only one lecture per week for 8 weeks. (Graduate courses are considered easier to teach as there are fewer students, the students are all very motivated, you can talk about whatever you want, and if you do a bad job there is far less carnage).

For those who are interested, the topic of this course was “Topological Matter”. If you want more details you can check out the web page here. (Feel free to try some of the homework assignments for fun. Many of the problems can be done without having attended lectures, and they are meant to be fun – well, fun for physicists).

As I probably should have expected, in 8 lectures I made it through about a third of my intended course outline. For a graduate course this is not so much of a problem. The course is meant to introduce the students to certain topics that they want to know about. If they learn fewer topics, but learn them better, that is fine too. Maybe another year I’ll teach the remaining two thirds.

Next year, however, I will be lecturing Condensed Matter (aka Solid State) Physics for 180 undergraduates (give or take). In this case the syllabus is very constrained, and I am required to cover certain topics –-- as these are the topics that will be examined. An interesting feature of the Oxford system is that the lecturer is not the person to write the exam. Instead, a syllabus is agreed upon before the course starts, and the exam is written based on the syllabus. The lecturers, as well as the tutors, are responsible for imparting the information in the syllabus and hence preparing the students for the exam. If a lecturer does not cover all the material, then the students could be in some trouble, and this makes everyone very unhappy. I have until January 2011 to prepare this course, and it already feels like I’m going to be very squeezed for time!

The number 1

First let me apologize to my readership for not having posted much recently.

Last december I spoke to one avid reader (yes, there is at least one person who claims to be an avid reader of my blog) who says he keeps reading it in hopes of actually learning something about science, but ends up learning about which airport I'm stuck in.

OK, so here is something cool that is sort of about science. It is known as Benford's law, and roughly it can be summarized by the statement:

Most numbers start with a small digit. About 30% of numbers start with the digit 1. Only about 5% of numbers start with the digit 9.

Huh? Yeah, this one drove me nuts in grad school, because it really depends on what you mean by "Most numbers". But here is a test just to prove the point. Write down a bunch of "random numbers" that you generate by looking at meaningful quantities (and this is important -- the numbers have to mean something, otherwise it doesn't work).

What is your housenumber in your address?
What page is the nearest book open to?
What day of the month is your birthday?
How many dollars (pounds, euros etc) are in your wallet?
How many miles do you drive to work?
How many books do you have in your house?

The chances that the answers to any of these questions start with the digit 1 are extremely high. The chance that any of them start with the digit 9 are very low.

Lets take as an example, day of the month for your birthday. Most months have about 30 days. Choosing a random number from 1 to 30, there are 11 numbers that start with the digit 1, and only one number that begins with the digit 9.

How about a random page in a book. Well if the book has exactly 9 pages, then all digits are equally probable. But if the book has 20 pages, then there is more than a 50% chance that the first digit of a random page begins with the digit 1. (and only 1 out of 20 begin with the digit 9). In fact, only if the book has 9, 99, or 999 will a random page be equally likely to start with the digit 1 as with the digit 9. Since very few books just happen to be exactly this long, 1 is always more likely than 9.

Of course you can cook up questions that do not follow this law: How many hands do you have? How many people does it take to tango? ... but for numbers that are "sufficiently" random, the law is very good.

Now for two final questions:

What year were you born?
What month of the year is it now?

LHC or Bell

An interesting post discussing the importance of "the old Bell Labs" and comparing the value it gave society in comparison to the LHC. Don't get me wrong, I'm in favor of the LHC. I'm just also in favor of the old Bell Labs as well.

Hat tip to Gerit Quealy for pointing this link out to me.

What is physics about? And what is college about?

What is physics? I mean, what is it all about? What is the big uber-goal that we are all working for? What are the really important directions of research these days?

If you ask a physicist any one of these questions, you will inevitably get the same kind answer. Every physicist will tell you “What I work on is really important and interesting. What I do is what physics is about.” (Here “I” means whoever you ask, not “Steve Simon”). And I think most physicists passionately believe this. If they didn’t believe it, they probably would have (or should have) switched fields long ago to work on what they think is truly important.

Just for example, if you ask “is physics an experimental science?” chances are if you ask an experimentalist they will say “Of course.” If you ask a string theorist, they might say “Er… not necessarily.”

I think this diversity of views of physics is a good thing. The only thing, we really all share, is the underlying belief (perhaps faith) that the world around us can somehow be understood. However, sometimes diversity of views causes some real problems. Obviously dividing up the limited funding pie is a seriously sore point for many people.

“Why should *THEY* get so much funding when what *I* do is so much more important and interesting.”

“Do we really need to hire another physicist who does X when Y is so exciting these days.”

Or conversely

“That stuff isn’t even physics! Why would we pay to have *that* in our department”

Here at Oxford this diversity of opinion rears its head in some interesting places. One point of conflict (that seems less prevalent in the states) is over the undergraduate syllabus. Here in the UK (indeed in much of the non-US world) the undergraduate syllabus is extremely constrained. This is quite a change from my undergraduate experience (Brown University) – which required only obtaining 28 passing grades for graduation, and had no further detailed requirements: every choice of what to study was left completely to the student. In Oxford, the students follow a very rigid path. [ There are obvious advantages to each system – to be discussed another time.]

So it seems that over here someone is always saying what a travesty it is that a student with an Oxford physics degree might graduate without any exposure to X, Y or Z. Typically the person stating this is someone who has particular interest in X, Y, or Z. Further, getting X,Y,Z into the curriculum boosts the status of those researchers who study X,Y, and Z in the department – as there will always be a need, thereafter, for people to teach the subject.

But do undergrads really need X,Y,Z? How much does it even matter what they learn? Is a college degree about learning a particular topic, or about learning how to learn – about stretching you brain on anything really hard.

I think both answers are valid, although I do have a bias. If you want to guess my bias… here is a hint: For the record, here is a list of courses that I did NOT have as an undergrad:

Statistical Mechanics
Thermodynamics
Solid State Physics
Electricity and Magnetism
(beyond the level of Purcell’s introductory book)
General Relativity
Astrophysics or Cosmology
Advanced/Relativistic Quantum Mechanics
Field Theory
Fluid Dynamics
Optics
Advanced Laboratory

[yes, I did realize upon graduation that I was woefully unprepared for grad school, so I finagled to take some extra courses for a year to make up some of the difference].

Bad Bets... and the Nobel Prize

My grandfather was a bookie – a guy who professionally handles bets. Although a good bookie never needs to risk much of his own money (since his bets are well balanced with just a bit of a margin for profit) most bookies do know what a good bet is and what a bad bet is.

Apparently I have no idea what a good bet is – even when I know a topic extremely well. My predictions for the Nobel Prize in Physics this year were way off*. Even listing everyone I could think of who was in the running, I didn’t even get close. The winners were not even on my radar screen. This is particularly embarrassing since two of the three winners were old Bell Labs guys and I certainly knew very well of their work, and of its importance [ although I never met either one of them since even the younger of the two retired from Bell a decade before I ever arrived ].

The two guys at Bell, Smith and Boyle, are credited with inventing the CCD (Charge Coupled Device). That is the little semiconductor gizmo that turns an optical picture into a stream of electrons which then can be turned into a digital computer file. There’s a CCD in every digital camera. The other guy, Kao, who shared the Nobel with them, developed the fiber optic, which comprises the famous “series of tubes” which carry information through the internet. Bits of information are turned into photons that run down glass fibers called optical fibers.

The prize this year was perhaps an unusual one – it is clearly technology rather than physics, but it is important technology. There has been some grousing around the internet (for example, here) that this prize was not deserving because it is just engineering. (Here I’m repeating here a comment that I posted on Doug’s blog here) The key question is what the Nobel prize should be about --- what the Nobel prize "brand" should mean. There are certainly plenty of important technology/physics advances that could potentially be recognized --- and the original intent of Nobel’s will certainly gave this latitude. It also said that the discovery should be made within the previous year --- a requirement which has been duly ignored ever since ---- which shows mainly that the Nobel committee can do whatever they want to do to promote the "brand" as they see fit. However, by far, MOST of the prizes have been for "fundamental" physics advances, and not for technology advances, which sets a precedent for what the committee thinks it is supposed to be about and this prize does not look so consistent with that interpretation. (The integrated circuit prize was another recent prize for technology --- although I think that this prize was perhaps more agreed upon as being a universal game changer that needed to be recognized).

*I did make the right prediction for the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine, but almost everyone seemed to know that one in advance.

** Added: Obama's Nobel: Yes, I was pretty surprised by this one too. Many people say he hasn't earned it yet, but if you read the explanation given by the committee, it makes sense. I like it.

Nobel-Bets 2009

Well, it is that time of year again – the time when some really smart people start losing sleep worrying about whether they will get the Nobel prize. For the literature prize the official betting odds are listed here. The favorite is Amos Oz, but Bob Dylan is a 25:1 long shot on this list.

For the physics prize, each year, I try to make a few predictions for who will win. Last year’s incorrect prediction is posted on my blog here (Egad, that means I’ve been blogging for a whole year now!). This year I decided to do a bit more homework before making my prediction. While neutrino mass (my prediction from last year) still seems to me to be pretty important, after scanning the web, it seems to me that almost no one thinks that this is a contender. I suppose, like for the Oscars, the opinions of the masses may be important, so this year I am switching my bet to

Yakir Aharanov and Michael Berry

These two studied what are known as “Geometric Phases” in physics. (For the experts, yes, you can think of the Aharanov Bohm phase as being geometric, although you have to expand your picture of geometry a bit). Perhaps the simplest example of an interesting geometric phase is the strange quantum mechanical fact that when you rotate an electron around in a circle by 360 degrees you do not get back to where you started.

The Reuter’s web site gives Aharanov and Berry support from 19% of those polled. (Several other blogs here and here and here and here agree that this is a good bet).

However, according to the Reuters shortlist, the frontrunners for the prize should be recognized for discovering forms of carbon. Reuters proposes Geim and Novoselov (22%) for the discovery of graphene (carbon sheets) and Ijima (14%) narrowly behind for the discovery of nanotubes (carbon sheets rolled up into a tube). Not that I am opposed to carbon but…

I will remind everyone that Buckyballs, yet another form of Carbon, already won the Nobel prize recently – but in chemistry, not physics. I will also remind everyone that not every molecule made of carbon deserves an immediate Nobel prize. I know that the Carbonists have been lobbying hard, and admittedly both nanotubes and graphene are pretty cool. But I don’t think they are so overwhelmingly cool that they need a Nobel prize just yet. And if the lessons of Buckyballs are anything to learn from, we should expect that the hype will far outweigh the actual usefulness of, or interest in, the stuff in the long run.

A few other people who appear to be on many of the shortlists are Cirac and Zoller (too early in my mind, but maybe sometime soon), and Peter Higgs (not until the elusive Higgs boson is actually discovered). Daniel Kleppner is another person frequently mentioned. Some people have proposed John Pendry for metamaterials and the famous cloaking device (while cool, i think this is far from Nobel material). Also the discovery of the top quark is still waiting for a prize and of course my prior mention of neutrino mass I still think is deserving. I'd also like people to think about some of the dark-horse candidates: Thouless, Halperin (my PhD advisor, I'm biased), and Haldane, are some of the people from my community who could potentially be in the running.

Anyway, we will find out within a few days now.

In other Nobel prediction news:

In Physiology and Medicine, one of the names very high on the Reuters list is Seiji Ogawa. He’s an old Bell labs guy, who invented functional MRI (fMRI) - the MRI machines that can see brain activity. For a brief moment, I think he was listed as being a consultant and I was listed as his boss at Bell labs, although in truth by that time he was listed on our roster for publicity only... and he never showed up any more – I suspect he would not recognize me if I bit him (and I have no intention of biting him, whether or not he wins the prize).

Other contenders in Physiology: Telomerase seems to be the front-runner, with stem-cells another good bet.

Hiking and Climbing (and a little Science): Day 2

The next morning, Carissa and I started out at around 8:30 am to climb Castle Peak. (Lin was having trouble with her feet so she did not join us.) Had we known it was going to be difficult we would have opted for a more alpine start.

Castle Peak, at 14,265 feet, is the tallest mountain in the Elk range (the 12th highest in Colorado) and is also one of the most frequently climbed. From the northeast, there is a very “well worn” route that gets you to the top with little trouble. In fact, you can drive to within about 1500 feet from the summit if you have a sturdy jeep.

The standard routes to ascend Castle Peak is along the northeast ridge (shown in blue on the map). We intended, however, to climb the peak directly from the west from the hotsprings (shown red on the map). The hike from the trailhead to the hot springs is along conundrum creek from the north.



According to our guidebook, the approach from the west is a reasonable climb as well, but it turned out to be much more difficult than we expected. In retrospect, scanning around the web there are several reports of people having trouble on this route exactly the same way we did. The problem, in short, is that the mountain is made of bad rock and is simply crumbling away. There is no clear path up the mountain from the west, just one giant steep slope of scree and talus -–- small rocks that have a tendency to avalanche down the mountain, carrying you with them. (In fact, “scree” is from the norse word for “landslide”. Talus, is from french and means roughly the same thing, but sometimes refers to slightly larger rocks).

Physics 1: Angle of Repose. When rocks are piled on a slope, there is some critical angle of steepness of the slope beyond which the rocks starts falling down the slope. This is known as the angle of repose. If the steepness of your slope is much less than the angle of repose, it is unlikely there will ever be much of an avalanche. If the steepness of the slope is greater than the angle of repose, it is completely unstable and is likely to avalanche at any moment. In the photo here, I am walking over a field of talus that is a bit too close to the angle of repose.


Many physicists have spent many years studying rock-piles and avalanches. What is interesting is that such piles have a tendency to tune themselves precisely to the angle of repose -- an example of what is known as "self-organized criticality". If you assume that the rocks are always being added from above (say, from the mountain itself crumbling higher up), then the angle of the slope continually increases as rocks are added until it hits the angle of repose, then there is an avalanche that reduces the angle a little bit, and the angle starts growing again -- such that the angle of the mountain is always near the critical angle of repose. Another interesting feature is that avalanches occur on all length scales -- sometimes small ones, sometimes huge ones. (For the experts, yes I know that sandpile models do not really behave like real sandpiles and rockpiles, but some of the rough ideas are similar).

At any rate, Carissa is a very experienced climber and is extremely sure-footed and quick over bad surfaces (as well as being very good at trail finding -- to the extent that a trail existed in the first place). At some points I started thinking that she must be half mountain goat. In comparison, I felt very clumsy and slow moving. To make matters worse, there was a great deal of ice, frost, and frozen hail (from the storm the previous night) on many of the surfaces which slowed me down even more.

As shown in red line in the map above, we started by traversing northeast along the side of a smaller mountain (I think called Castleabra) to arrive at a large amphitheater and turn southeast to continue climbing. Half way up the amphitheater, we could finally see the peak, but it was not so obvious how we were supposed to get up from the amphitheater onto the ridge that leads to the summit.

Even from very far away, we could see that there were some people up on the ridge leading to the summit. These people had obviously arrrived on the ridge from the other side of the mountain. A few of them seemed to be looking down at us and wondering how we were planning to get up there. (More likely they were looking to the west to see if any bad weather was heading this way.)

There was absolutely no one else on the west side of the mountain that day. This was actually a good thing. Many times I would accidentally kick a small rock and, with the mountain being at the angle of repose, it would tumble a long way down --- sometimes starting a rather substantial avalanche. I was very careful never to be either directly above or directly below Carissa (although it seemed that she was starting avalanches far more rarely than I was).


Actually, it was not quite true that no one was on the west side of the mountain. Just about at the place where we turned from northeast to southeast, we ran into a large heard of mountain goats. You have to look hard in this photo to see them --- there are about a dozen of them -- they are pure white in the middle of the frame just below the small cliff band. (Maybe they were fooled by Carissa's sure footing and they thought she must have been a mountain goat too so they came over to say hi.)


Our guidebook simply said something like "Continue up to Gain the Saddle between Castle and Connundrum (to the north), then follow the ridge to the summit". This instruction seemed more and more mysterious as we continued up the amphitheater. Here's a picture of Carissa leading the way up a snow field through the amphitheater.

(Yeah, I know, I'm not a good photographer).

Even though we did not have proper snow equipment, the snow was still easier going than scrambling through the nasty scree.

Physics 2: Static and Sliding Friction. Everyone knows this principle: once you are sliding, your friction on the surface goes down and you slide even more. An obvious point here. For God sake, don't start sliding!

Meteorology
The weather pattern in these mountains is that thunderstorms tend to arrive in the afternoon. To add to this, all week long (and possibly all summer long) storms had been rather frequent and severe (as evidenced by the storm the previous evening). The climb had been very slow going, and at about 12:30 we still had a long way to go to the top. There were starting to be some clouds in the west, and we were starting to get worried about how bad the situation would look if a storm rolled in quickly. If we felt exposed sitting in a thunderstorm at 11,200 feet the night before, it could only be worse up on a peak near 14,000 feet.

"Predictions are hard to make, especially about the future" This quote is sometimes attributed to Yogi Berra, and sometimes to Niels Bohr, and on Wiki-Quote it is attributed to Robert Petersen, and I have no idea who that is. Whoever said this, it seems quite true about the weather. The truth is, I know almost nothing about meteorology except the important principle that today's weather is probably going to be like yesterday's. Unfortunately, yesterday's weather (and the day before and the day before) were not so good.


To add to the meteorological concerns, we still did not see how we were going to "Gain the Saddle". Here is a view towards the summit from where we stood. At any rate, given that the path was not at all clear (and perhaps not even possible without more serious climbing equipment), we made the decision to turn around and start heading down. We still had a very long day ahead of us -- as once we reached the campsite we still intended to walk all the way out to the trailhead that night.


Here is a photo of us where we turned around. (Photo was taken by Mr. Timer, not by a mountain goat). You can see a few clouds behind us, and to the south (off left of the photo) there were a few more. Here's another report on the web of another guy who also turned around at roughly the same place.

You might think that the hardest part was over, having done all the up-climbing at this point. Unfortunately, that was far from true. Down-climbing was just as difficult and slow. With tired legs (and suffering just a bit from the altitude) my legs were feeling pretty shaky, and on a number of occasions I lost my footing. Falling on my ass in the rocks is certainly not pleasant, but what I was really worried about was if I started tumbling. You see, according to the principles of self-organized-criticality described above, some tumbles would likely be short ones, but other ones might be longer ones. And according to the principles of sliding friction, once you get tumbling, it is really hard to stop.


Well, sure enough, at one point, I did take a bit of tumble. Luckily I caught myself in only about 10 feet. Beyond scrapes and so forth, I walked away with a rather bruised rib; and four days two weeks later, I still can't sleep on my left side. Not a serious injury, but a bit annoying. After that fall, I decided that I had better start walking even more slowly and more carefully. As a result of my slowness, we did not make it back to camp until after 3pm.

Here's a picture, just as we are getting close to camp and we are finally off of the nasty scree. Do I look tired yet?

We finally made it back to camp, and Lin had very kindly prepared us dinner with lots of water. We then packed up our stuff and started the 8.5 mile hike back to the trailhead that night. We had headlamps just in case, but we were hoping to make it back before dark nonetheless, so we tried to hustle.

From the hike out, we had one last really good look at Castle peak.


To quote Carissa in a classic use of double negative, "Well, it is certainly not unsteep".

We made it to the trailhead by dark.

Hiking and Climbing and Science: Day 1.

Last weekend while hiking with Carissa and Lin, I realized that the great outdoors is actually a great place to learn about science. This blog posting is going to be a combined report of our little weekend adventure, and some fun science along the way.

Conundrum Creek Trail:
The 8.5 mile hike from the trailhead is not a particularly hard one, even with full packs. It rises only a few thousand feet, and the trail is a smooth and beautiful walk. At the end of the hike, at 11,200 feet above sea level, is a campsite with some delightful hot springs which are almost famous according to this article. (No, that is not us in the photo).




Geology: The fact that such geothermal hot springs exist at all simply amazes me, but indeed they do exist, and are not even so uncommon in this part of the country where the ground was once volcanically active. In short, the water flows deep enough underground to get near a geothermal hot spot, and it comes up plenty warm. Sometimes it even comes up steaming as a geyser, or simply as water too hot to enjoy sitting in. The conundrum creek hot springs are particularly nice because they don’t smell like sulfur and they are just about bath temperature. After our hike, we had a nice soak.

Biophysics at Altitude 1:As you go to higher altitude the air pressure drops. At 11,200 feet, the pressure is only about 2/3 what it is at sea level. It is kind of surprising that the human body can adapt to such changes so readily. (However at only another few thousand more feet higher, extremely serious altitude sickness becomes common). A frequent word of advice when you travel to altitude is to drink a lot of fluids. This is not just because it tends to be dry up at altitude, but rather has something to do with helping your body develop a new chemical balance with the lower ambient oxygen levels. I scanned the web for a more detailed description of exactly why fluids help you adjust to altitude, but I did not find any good answers. If any biologists or MDs want to leave a comment I’d be much appreciative.

Since I only arrived at altitude in Aspen a few days earlier, I should have been a bit more careful about getting enough fluids. I had some pretty nasty leg cramps that evening (in places I have never had them before) and I think I can place the blame squarely on the altitude and my not taking enough water.

Biophysics at altitude 2: Maybe mosquitoes in Colorado are just plain stupid, or maybe they are genetically different from other mosquitoes – but in short, these critters are about as fast as Slowpoke Rodriguez, the slowest mouse in all of Mexico (i.e., very slow – and I apologize for the politically incorrect reference to one of my favorite bizarre loony tune characters). On the east coast (where people even talk quickly) you have to really have fast reactions to successfully swat a skeeter. However, out in Colorado up at 11,200 feet, swatting skeeters is like racing a running snail. Maybe this is because the air is so thin that they can’t get enough “traction” with their wings to fly away quickly. Or maybe they are just lethargic from lack of oxygen in their blood. Any entymologists want to ring in on this one?

Added: I asked around, and most people seem to think that the average mosquito is this slow and it is the east coast variety that is Speedy Gonzales.


Thermodynamics: As air rises and expands, it gets colder. A rough rule of thumb is that air drops about 5.5 degrees Farenheit per 1000 feet (roughly 1 degree Celcius drop per 100 meters). If you want a nice physics explanation of this phenomenon, see this page. At any rate, since Aspen is at 8000 feet, and at night it gets to be about 50 degrees, I should have expected it to reach about freezing up at 11,200 feet – and indeed, this was just about the temperature at night. Brrrr…

Since it was quickly getting cold out once the sun started to set, we had a quick dinner then jumped into our tents and into sleeping bags to keep warm. Unfortunately, at about 11pm, the weather turned very suddenly nasty and we were hit with a massive thunderstorm complete with violent hail. The thunderstorm hovered overhead for only a few minutes – but being rather exposed up at 11,200 feet – those few minutes passed extremely slowly.

Speed of Sound: When lightning strikes, you see the flash essentially immediately, since the speed of light is extremely high. But the speed of sound is slow, so you don’t hear the thunder until a few moments later. With sound moving at about 300 meters per second it is easy to figure out how close the lightning is striking. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been counting the time between flash and bang to see how far the lightning really is. Every five seconds is a mile. When the time between flash and bang got to be about a second, (and the thunder was sounding awfully loud) I started worrying that we might be in a bit of trouble. Then it got down to half a second. --- then a bit less. Lightning striking within 100 meters from my tent. Yikes!

Electricity: It is hard to overstate the strength of lightning. The temperature of a lightning bolt can reach tens of thousands of degrees Celcius, and lightning hitting a tree can easily cause the tree to simply explode. The electrical power of a lightning bolt can reach a billion watts - on the order of the power output of a large nuclear power plant. And while the power of a single bolt remains “on” for only about a second, it can do an awful lot of damage in that time.

So, given the danger of lightning, what can you do to avoid getting zapped? The principle to keep in mind is to try to avoid having the lightning go through you. The best thing to do is to get inside a modern building or a metal vehicle. The metal in these objects is a great conductor (a so-called Faraday cage) and even if it does get hit, the electricity gets diverted around you. Unfortunately, when camping, this is not really an option. Here are some tips from the physicist for what one can do

(1) Don’t be the tallest thing around. (This should be obvious. You don’t want to be on the very top of a mountain).

(2) Don’t stand near the tallest thing around, like a tree, or anything sharp or metallic that might attract the lightning. (Lightning can strike the top of the tree, run down the tree and then jump to you)

(3) Don’t touch anything conductive like a metal fence, a long wet rope, or a large pool of water. The lightning can strike the object far away and then run along the conductive object to hit you.

(4) Touch the ground at only one point – i.e., keep your feet close together and do not lie down. The point of that when electricity is running through the ground away from a strike, you do not want the electricity to find you to be a more conductive path between two points than the ground is – thus going up from the ground, through you, and back down into the ground. Cows are often victims of lightning because their feet are so far apart.

(5) The thicker the insulation between you and the ground, the better. Wear your thick boots, stand on your backpack, or on a plastic ridge-rest or similar.

So if you are out camping, the best thing you can do in a lightning storm is to get away from tall trees in some low area (but not into the center of a flat field where you are the tallest thing around), stand on something insulating, put your feet together and crouch down.


Anyway, as the lightning storm quickly approached, I started putting on my hiking boots –preparing to follow my own advice. But in the dark, finding the headlamp, to then find my shoes was not so easy, and by the time I had them on, the storm was already receding, and I had already avoided getting zapped. Also, by that time, my tent was almost collapsing from the weight of the hail that had fallen on it. Once the hail stopped falling, I got out of my tent, looked around to see if anything was burning (nothing was), brushed off all of the hail from my tent, and climbed back into my sleeping bag to go to sleep.

Carissa reported that Lin’s first comment in the morning was “I hope Steve is still alive”

Public Lecture

Last night I gave a public lecture in Aspen CO which went over pretty well. It will be streamed tonight at 9pm mountain time, and you can download the whole thing here anytime thereafter (maybe even before). I encourage even the most science-phobic to try watching it (you know who you are).

After the lecture (off camera) I got a lot of good questions from random audience members who were too shy to ask in front of the entire room. There was one question that really stumped me: Does anyone know of a good book about quantum computation for the lay-person? Eddie Farhi (who introduced the lecture) is a mainstay of the field of quantum computation, and he couldn't think of one either. There is a book by Seth Lloyd, but I don't know what it contains (or if I approve of it).

Added: Two minor techincal problems with the video (1) you could not see the laser pointer at all, so when I pointed and said "this thing", you have no idea what I am pointing out. (2) in a few places the resolution of the video is not as good as one would like. Despite these problems, I am reasonably happy with the outcome.

TV Interview

On this web site I am interviewed as a preview for my public lecture on wednesday. I haven't watched the interview yet.

I apologize in advance for the shirt. Due to travel difficulties (getting to be a theme in my life), I literally walked off the airplane and into the tv studio.

The file takes a long time to download on my computer -- maybe it will work better on yours. I think it is also being streamed tonight at 8:30PM mountain time here.

Added: I just watched the interview.. and after being horrified by my shirt as well as my big hiking boots, I actually kind of liked it.

Added: Jeremy Bernstein pointed out to me that it was more von Neumann who wrote down all the pieces of the modern computer, not Alan Turing. Although Turing still gets credit for the concept of the Turing machine.

Physics Report from Dresden

The TOPO09 conference in Dresden last week (I dare you to find me in the group photo on that page... like where's waldo) was full of extremely good talks. I missed the first day of the conference, so I can’t comment on that. But in the remainder of the conference, there were two topics that stood out as themes: topological insulators and 5/2 physics.

Topological Insulators:

As everyone knows there are metals and there are insulators. In metals, the electrons can move around and conduct electricity, whereas in insulators, they can’t. When you have an insulator, the electrons can be non-mobile for any one of a number of reasons . But at some level their lack of mobility always comes down to the same type of story: The electrons fill up all of the low energy orbitals (like orbitals in an atom) – and the next lowest energy orbital is at some higher energy (i.e., there is an energy gap). So in order for an electron to move around, it needs to first jump up to a higher orbital, which at low temperatures, it cannot do (room temperature can be “low” compared to the relevant energy spacing).

Now consider the simplest possible model of an insulator: A simple crystal, with no disorder, and non-interacting electrons, such that all the low energy orbitals (bands) are filled and there is a gap to the next lowest state for the electrons (this is known as a band insulator). Since the physics of insulators was first described about 80 years ago, it was assumed that all such insulators are more or less the same. Well, we have recently discovered that they are not all the same. Some fundamentally new physics can occur when the constituent chemical elements of the insulator are down near the bottom of the periodic table.

What happens near the bottom of the periodic table is that relativity becomes important. (HUH?). Yes, that’s right – Einstein. Electrons in heavier elements are moving “faster” than electrons in the lighter elements. When they move fast enough you have to think about relativistic effects, and one of the first relativistic effect is that the spin of the electron and the orbital motion of the electron become coupled (so-called spin-orbit coupling --- in fact, you can argue that the existence of electron spin is relativistic in the first place). If the spin-orbit coupling is strong enough, the insulator can develop some completely new properties. However, unless you know what to look for, you won’t notice that it has changed, because it is still an insulator. I suppose this is why it took 80 years for us to figure out that all insulators are not the same.

Among the cool properties these new “topological” insulators is that they have conducting surface states that cannot be eliminated with any amount of disorder or structuring of the surface. This is extremely unusual and leads to all sorts of new possibilities.

At the Topo09 conference last week, Charlie Kane, a prof at UPenn, gave a super talk about these new topological insulators and all the cool stuff you can do with them. Kane is perhaps the person most credited with figuring out that this whole new class of materials exists. However, one of the other people who is highly credited for developing this new field is Rahul Roy – a lowly graduate student at the time he started making important contributions to the young field. I've managed to recruit Rahul to come to Oxford for a postdoc next year. I hope to work with him a lot on this new and exciting field.


5/2 physics:

I’ve blogged about this before. here and here, so I won’t belabor the point. But in brief: there are an increasing number of people discussing whether the new experiments on the “5/2 quantum Hall interferometer” is really showing evidence of a new type of particle – the nonabelion. I won’t say that I know what to make of the data – I certainly don’t know. The one thing I do think, however, is that the “orthodox” interpretation – what people want to see – is probably not what is going on. There are just too many problems with the story. In fact, the more I look at the data, the more nothing seems to fit. Add to this issue that the data is pretty ratty to begin with, and I think the evidence for the orthodox theory starts to look vanishingly small. I don't think the data is just noise though -- so something interesting is happening. But I think it will take a lot of headscratching to figure out what it is though -- and probably a whole lot more data.

No Satisfaction

There are some computational problems in computer science which are known as NP complete problems. One famous example is the traveling salesman problem, where a map is handed to you and you try to find the shortest continuous path that visits a particular set of N cities. (Strictly speaking the NP-complete version is determining whether there exists a path shorter than a certain length). There are quite a few problems in this computational complexity class, and it turns out that if you manage to solve one of them, you can essentially solve them all. It is not known, as you make the problem bigger, whether the difficulty of solving these problems grows polynomial with the size of the problem (ex, with the size of N above) or exponentially with the size of the problem. In fact, this question is viewed as so important that there is a million dollars waiting at the Clay mathematics institute for anyone who can prove either that it is polynomial or it is not.

A few years ago, a group of physicists at MIT proposed that a quantum computer might be able to solve such NP complete problems in polynomial time (In fact, this would not win them the million dollars by the precise definition of the challenge set out by the Clay institute, but it is still extremely interesting). Their scheme was to find pose an NP-complete problem such that it is essentially equivalent to finding the ground state (lowest energy state) of an appropriately designed quantum system. Then the way they want to actually find this ground state in practice would be to deform the parameters of the system smoothly until it becomes a simple quantum system where the ground state is already known – then initialize the quantum system in this known ground state – then adiabatically (slowly) deform the system back to the system we are interested in. Now according to the so-called adiabatic theorem of quantum mechanics, if a system is put in its ground state and the system is deformed sufficiently slowly, it will always remain in its ground state. So at the end of the process, we are in the ground state of the system we want, and we have our solution.

Well, unfortunately, there is a catch. The catch is the words “sufficiently slowly”. The time scale that determines what “sufficiently slowly” means is the lowest energy of the first excited state at any point along the path between the initial and final state of the system. If this first excited state happens to come down to be exponentially close to the ground state, then one needs to deform the system exponentially slowly to stay in the ground state and the process will take an exponentially long time.

Since the proposal of this scheme many (if not most) of the people in my community have assumed that this catch is precisely what ruins this idea completely. Nonetheless, the idea has been floating around for quite a while now and the issue still had not been nailed down very well. This week at the INSTANS conference in Amsterdam, Boris Altshuler gave a pretty solid looking proof that this “catch” does indeed happen and such a computer would take exponentially long to finish. To do this, he focused on the the so-called 3-satisfiability (or 3-satisfaction) problem, which is one of the famous NP-complete problems. And since all the NP-problems are essentially equivalent to each other, this seems to kill the idea at last.

[ For the experts (and very briefly) the issue really boils down to whether there is any gap opened up by anticrossings between multiple low energy solutions. But since for NP problems the different low energy solutions are extremely different from each other, there is exponentially low tunneling between them, hence no gap opens up. ]

So it seems that the quantum computer will not be getting any satisfaction this way. No no no. Hey hey hey. That’s what I say. It can’t get no…

An Opinion on How Science Works

I've always thought that there are really two types of people in the
productive physics community. There is a very very very small set of people who generate 95% of all the really meaningful progress. Then the rest of us are trying to pick up the pieces and help the leaders make progress by pushing here or there on some ideas that really come from the leaders anyway -- maybe extending this or examining that. It is not that we are being useless, in fact some of the stuff the rest of us do is pretty cool also, but we are more like support staff helping the truly brilliant.

In a bicycle racing team there are riders called "domestiques" who ride only for the sake of the overall team – they do nothing but keep up with the pack so they can cut the wind in front of the team leader and hand him water when he needs it. Their entire job in life is to assist the real leader - who then breaks away to win at the end. I think the vast majority of the theory community are more like domestiques. (Anyone who knows more about cycling can clarify.)

I tried out this analogy on Eva Silverstein, an official genius by the auspices of the MacArthur committee (Her typically modest comment on winning a MacArthur was “the whole thing was kind of ridiculous”). Anyway, Eva said, "yes, but…" as compared to biking the final result is not scripted. There is always a chance that you will be the one to make the next really big breakthrough. I guess that is what keeps it exciting for all of us.

Fraud

When I travel to conferences and universities around the world, when I mention that I used to be at Bell labs, inevitably someone wants to talk about Jan Hendrik Schön. Schön was one of the largest scientific frauds in history – and he was in the office two doors down from me for several years.

Over the span of several years, Schön published about one scientific paper per month in the world’s top two scientific journals –Science and Nature. He was the young star – everything he touched turned to gold. At age 32 he already had an offer to be the director of a Max Planck institute in Germany – which is about the biggest job any scientist in Germany could ever hope to get.

One morning in 2002, I was sitting in my office and my boss’s boss, Cherry Murray, called me on the phone. This was unusual - she had a lot of responsibilities at the time and she rarely called randomly. She sounded worried “Could you come down to my office right now?”. It sounded pretty serious, but I had no idea what it was about. At the time, Bell Labs was downsizing – maybe there was another cut?

When I arrived in her office, the rest of the management team of the Physical Sciences research lab was sitting around a large table in Cherry’s office. Cherry started the meeting “We have a serious problem.” She then explained that over the last two days, the Schön fraud had come to light. It turned out that his huge body of scientific work was all fiction.

There had certainly been some claims that one or the other of his papers were scientifically questionable for one reason or another. Discussions frequently went along the lines of “this paper doesn’t make sense – probably he is measuring X when he thinks he is measuring Y”. This kind of error in scientific reasoning is common, and given the large number of papers he was publishing, it was not surprising that some of his work did not quite have all the i’s dotted and t’s crossed yet. But these were honest scientific discussions – there are lots of papers that turn out to be wrong in the end that do not constitute fraud.

There had also been one serious internal accusation at Bell that some of his data had been dishonestly manipulated. Schön cooperated with this investigation and was actually exonerated from wrongdoing. Much later it turned out that he was exonerated because he was a very clever liar and managed to come up with a better lie to cover up the first. (No one doubts that he was actually quite brilliant in a fiendish way). But finally, enough data had accumulated that it was clear that he had just been making things up all along.

After Schön’s fraud was discovered, the rest was damage control. A blue ribbon panel was appointed to investigate what happened in great detail (the full report is available online here). Schön was eventually fired and Bell ended up with a bit of a black eye. The truth, however, is that in the 10+ years that I was at Bell, while this was certainly a memorable black eye, it was far from the worst thing that happened to us. In fact, considering all the downsizings, layoffs, and restructuring we went through over those years, the Schön fiasco, while embarrassing, was barely a blip.

Like any newsworthy event, the Schön fiasco certainly generated a lot of opinions. And inevitably, there will be some loudmouths making stupid comments on the subject – some of them in public places like the New York Times (You can google for yourself, I’m not going to embarrass these people by linking to the relevant articles). Since the fiasco, I have also heard a lot of stupid comments from other scientists about the Schön affair. Many of these comments were from people who really did not know much about what actually happened – and some from people who thought they knew what was going on, but really didn’t. I’ve also heard a fair amount of revisionist history around the community. Certain people have also apparently taken great pleasure in saying “this would not have happened if..” , or “we knew all along..”, or “this happened because..”. Which in almost every case, I disagree with. There was also this rather absurd pseudo-documentary by the BBC which tried to connect Schön to grey goo that is going to take over the world.

It is certainly worth asking, as a community, “why did this happen and how do we prevent it from happening again”. But I am certain there is no simple single answer to why - it was a combination of many factors – a perfect storm of conditions that allowed such mistakes to go undetected. The blame lies everywhere - his collaborators, his managers, the journals, the downsizing at Bell, how certain types of experiments are not easily reproduced, how many scientists can be gullible, how the community has a bit of a lemming mentality, how the scientific community depends on trust, and so forth. I am certain that our community could very easily be duped by another Schön. As in that case, eventually fraud would be discovered, but it could take quite some time. In fact, had Schön not been so brazen in his fraud, he could easily have kept it going for many more years before being discovered. Most scientists just don’t want to work in a world where they cannot trust their colleagues, so we assume that most people are not pathological liars, and we accept the fact that once in a long time a Schön will come along and fool everyone – at least for a while.

The reason I am telling this story again is because this month a new book by Eugenie Reich is being released that describes the details of the Schoen fiasco and how it happened. A brief article appears this month in Physics world, which you can find here. I was interviewed by Ms. Reich last year for this book (with the permission of Bell) and I was also quoted in the Physics world article. I hope that this book will be a reasonably accurate and level-headed portrayal of what took place without too much hype and without trying to create villains out of people who were at least trying to be honest. Schön was obviously not being honest, but most of the others were trying.

I intend to order this book from Amazon and I’ll report back what I think (not sure when I will get around to reading it though).

PS: Considering that I was only two doors down from him, I was surprisingly decoupled from most of the events of this story. I was never Schön’s manager, and I had only a few scientific discussions with him. I did assign one unlucky student a summer project about thinking about some of his “puzzling” data, but we never figured much out (and I think she ended up rather frustrated by it – I’m not sure where she is now). I was also involved in the earlier internal investigation that I mentioned above. As with much of my job for those years at Bell mainly I was there to keep the peace and duck when things got too rough.