Away Note

I’ll be traveling the next two weeks. First to Cambridge to celebrate Stephen Hawking’s 75th birthday (which was in January), then in Trieste for a conference on “Probing the spacetime fabric: from concepts to phenomenology.”  Rant coming up later today, but after that please prepare for a slow time.

Away Note

I have a trip upcoming to Helsinki. After this I'll be tied up in family business, and then my husband goes on a business trip and I have the kids alone. Then Kindergarten will be closed for a day (forgot why, I'm sure they must have some reason), I have to deal with an ant-infection in our apartment, and more family business follows. In summary: busy times.

I have a book review to appear on this blog later today, but after this you won't hear much from me for a week or two. Keep in mind that since I have comment moderation on, it might take some while for your comment to appear when I am traveling. With thanks for your understanding, here's a random cute pic of Gloria :)

Tim Gowers and I have something in common. Unfortunately it’s not our math skills.

Heavy paper.

What would you say if a man with British accent cold-calls you one evening to offer money because he likes your blog?

I said no.

In my world – the world of academic paper-war – we don’t just get money for our work. What we get is permission to administrate somebody else’s money according to the attached 80-page guidelines (note the change in section 15b that affects taxation of 10 year deductibles). Restrictions on the use of funds are abundant and invite applicants to rest their foreheads on cold surfaces.

The German Research Foundation for example, will – if you are very lucky – grant you money for a scientific meeting. But you’re not allowed to buy food with it. Because, you must know, real scientists don’t eat. And to thank you for organizing the meeting you don’t yourself get paid – that wouldn’t be an allowed use of funds. No, they thank you by requesting further reports and forms.

At least you can sometimes get money for scientific meetings. But convincing a funding agency to pay a bill for public outreach or open access initiatives is like getting a toddler to eat broccoli: No matter how convincingly you argue it’s in their own interest, you end up eating it yourself. And since writing proposals sucks, I mean, sucks up time, at some point I gave up trying to make a case that this blog is unpaid public outreach that you'd think research foundations should be supportive of. I just write – and on occasion I carefully rest my forehead on cold surfaces.

Then came the time I was running low on income – unemployed between two temporary contracts – and decided to pitch a story to a magazine. I was lucky and landed an assignment instantly. And so, for the first time in my life, I turned in work to a deadline, wrote an invoice, and got paid in return. I. Made. Money. Writing. It was a revelation. Unfortunately, my published masterwork is now hidden behind a paywall. I am not happy about this, you are not happy about this, and the man with the British accent wasn’t happy about it either. Thus his offer.

But I said no.

Because all I could see was time wasted trying to justify proper means of spending someone else’s money on suitable purposes that might be, for example, a conference fee that finances the first class ticket of the attending Nobel Prize winner. That, you see, is an allowed way of spending money in academia.

My cold-caller was undeterred and called again a week later to inquire whether I had changed my mind. I was visiting my mom, and mom, always the voice of reason, told me to just take the damn money. But I didn’t.

I don’t like being reminded of money. Money is evil. Money corrupts. I only pay with sanitized plastic. I swipe a card through a machine and get handed groceries in return – that’s not money, that’s magic. I look at my bank account statements so rarely I didn’t notice for three years I accidentally paid a gym membership fee in a country I don’t even live. In case my finances turn belly-up I assume the bank will call and yell at me. Which, now that I think of it, seems unlikely because I moved at least a dozen times since opening my account. And I’m not good updating addresses either. I did call the gym though and yelled at them – I got my money back.

Then the British man told me he also supports Tim Gowers new journal. “G-O-W-ers?,” I asked. Yes, that Tim. That would be the math guy responsible for the equations in my G+ feed.

Tim Gowers. [Not sure whose photo, but not mine]

Tim Gowers, of course, also writes a blog. Besides that, he’s won the 1998 Fields Medal which makes him officially a genius. I sent him an email inquiring about our common friend. Tim wrote back he reads my blog. He reads my blog! A genius reads my blog! I mean, another genius – besides my mom who gets toddlers to eat broccoli.

Thusly, I thought, if it’s good enough for Gowers, it’s probably good enough for me. So I said yes. And, after some more weeks of consideration, sent my bank account details to the British man. You have to be careful with that kind of thing, says my mom.

That was last year in December. Then I forgot about the whole story and returned to my differential equations.

Tim, meanwhile, got busy setting up the webpage for his new journal “Discrete Analysis” which covers the emerging fields related to additive combinatorics (not to be confused with addictive combinatorics, more commonly known as Sudoku). His open-access initiative has attracted some attention because the journal’s site doesn’t itself host the articles it publishes – it merely links to files which are stored on the arXiv. The arXiv is an open-access server in operation since the early 1990s. It allows researchers in physics, math, and related disciplines to upload and share articles that have not, or not yet, been peer-reviewed and published. “Discrete Analysis” adds the peer-review, with minimal effort and minimal expenses.

Tim’s isn’t the first such “arxiv-overlay” journal – I myself published last year in another overlay-journal called SIGMA – but it is still a new development that is eyed with some skepticism. By relying on the arXiv to store files, the overlays render server costs somebody else’s problem. That’s convenient but doesn’t make the problem go away. Another issue is that the arXiv itself already moderates submissions, a process that the overlay journals have no control over.

Either way, it is a trend that I welcome because overlays offer scientists what they need from journals without the strings and costs attached by commercial publishers. It is, most importantly, an opportunity for the community to reclaim the conditions under which their research is shared, and also to innovate the format as they please:

“I wanted it to be better than a normal journal in important respects,” says Tim, “If you visit the website, you will notice that each article gives you an option to click on the words ‘Editorial introduction.’ If you do so, then up comes a description of the article (not on a new webpage, I hasten to add), which sets it in some kind of context and helps you to judge whether you want to find out more by going to the arXiv and reading it.”

But even overlay journals don’t operate at zero cost. The website of “Discrete Analysis” was designed by Scholastica’s team, and their platform will also handle the journal’s publication process. They charge $10 per submission and there are a couple of other expenses that the editorial board has to cover, such as services necessary to issue article DOIs. Tim wants to avoid handing on the journal expenses to the authors. Which brings in, among others, the support from my caller with the British accent.

In the two months that passed since I last heard from him, I found out that 10 years ago someone proved there is no non-trivial solution to the equations I was trying to solve. Well, at least that explains why I couldn’t find one. My hence scheduled two-day cursing retreat was interrupted by a message from The British Man. Did the money arrive?, he wanted to know. This way forced to check my bank account, it turned out not only didn’t his money arrive, but neither did I ever receive salary for my new job.

This gives me an excuse to lecture you on another pitfall of academic funding. Even after you have filed five copies of various tax-documents and sent the birth dates of the University President and Vice-president to an institution that handles your grant for another institution and is supposed to wire it to a third institution which handles it for your institution, the money might get lost along the way – and frequently does.

In this case they simply forgot to put me on the payroll. Luckily, the issue could be resolved quickly, and the next day also the wire transfer from Great Britain arrived. Good thing because, as mommy guilt reminded me, this bank account pays for the girls’ daycare and lunch. My writer friends won’t be surprised to hear however that I also had to notice several payments for my freelance work did not come through. When I grow up, I hope someone tells me how life works. /lecture

Tim Gowers invited submissions for “Discrete Analysis” starting last September, and the website of the new journal launched today; you can read his own blogpost here. For the community, they key question is now whether arxiv-overlay journals like Tim’s will be able to gain a status similar to that of traditional journals. The only way to find out is to try.

Public outreach in general, and science blogging in particular, is vital for the communication of science, both within our communities and to the public. And so are open access initiatives. Even though they are essential to advance research and integrate it into our society, funding agencies have been slow to accept these services as part of their mission.

While we wait for academia to finally digest the invention of the world wide web, it is encouraging to see that some think forward. And so, I am happy today to acknowledge this blog is now supported by the caller with the British accent, Ilyas Khan of Cambridge Quantum Computing. Ilyas has quietly supported a number of scientific endeavors. Although he is best known for enabling Wittgenstein's Nachlass to become openly and freely accessible by funding the project that was implemented by Trinity College Cambridge, he is also a sponsor of Tim Gowers' new journal Discrete Analysis.

10 Years BackRe(action)

Yes, today marks the 10th anniversary of my first post on this blog.

I started blogging while I was in Santa Barbara, in a tiny fifth-floor office that slightly swayed with the occasional Earthquakes. I meant to write about postdoc-life in California, but ended up instead writing mostly about my research interests. Because, well, that's what I'm interested in. Sorry, California.

Those were the years of the String Wars and of Black Holes at the LHC. And since my writing was on target, traffic to this blog increased rapidly -- a somewhat surprising and occasionally disturbing experience.

Over the years, I repeatedly tried to share the work of regularly feeding this blog, but noticed it's more effort trying to convince others to write than to just write myself. And no, it's not zero effort. In an attempt to improve my Germenglish, I have read Strunk's "Elements of Style" forwards and backwards, along with several books titled "Writing Well" (which were written really well!), and I hope you benefit from it. For me, the outcome has been that now I can't read my older blogposts without crying over my own clumsy writing. Also, there's link-rot. But if you have some tolerance for awkward English and missing images, there's 10 years worth of archives totalling more than 1500 entries waiting in the side-bar.

The content of this blog has slightly changed over the years. Notably, I don't share links here any more. For this, I use instead my twitter and facebook accounts, which you can follow to get reading recommendations and the briefer commentaries. But since I can't stand cluttered pages, this blog is still ad-free and I don't make money with it. So if you like my writing, please have a close look at the donate-button in the top-right corner.

In the 10 years that have passed, this blog moved with me through the time-zones, from California to Canada, from Canada to Sweden, and from Sweden eventually back to Germany. It witnessed my wedding and my pregnancy and my daughters turning from babies to toddlers to Kindergartners. And the journey goes on. As some of you know already, I'm writing a book (or at least I'm supposed to be writing a book), so stay tuned, there's more to come.

I want to thank all of you for reading along, especially the commenters. I know that some of you have been around since the first days, and you have become part of my extended family. You have taught me a lot, about life and about science and about English grammar.

A special thank you goes to those of you who have sent me donations since I put up the button a few months ago. It is a great encouragement for me to continue.

Me, Elsewhere

I'm back from my trip. Here are some things that prevented me from more substantial blogging:

• I wrote an article for Aeon, "The superfluid Universe," which just appeared. For a somewhat more technical summary, see this earlier blogpost.
• I did a Q&A with John The-End-of-Science Horgan, which was fun. I disagree with him on many things, but I admire his writing. He is infallibly skeptic and unashamedly opinionated -- qualities I find lacking in much of today's science writing, including, sometimes, my own.
• I spoke with Davide Castelvecchi about Stephen Hawking's recent attempt to solve the black hole information loss problem, which I previously wrote about here.
• And I had some words to spare for Zeeya Merali, probably more words than she wanted, on the issue with the arXiv moderation, which we discussed here.
• Finally, I had the opportunity to give some input for this video on the PhysicsGirl's YouTube channel:
  
  
  
  I previously explained in this blogpost that Hawking radiation is not produced at the black hole horizon, a correction to the commonly used popular science explanation that caught much more attention than I anticipated.
  
  There are of course still some things in the above video I'd like to complain about. To begin with, anti-particles don't normally have negative energy (no they don't). And the vacuum is the same for two observers who are moving relative to each other with constant velocity - it's the acceleration that makes the difference between the vacua. In any case, I applaud the Physics Girl team for taking on what is admittedly a rather technical and difficult topic. If anyone can come up with a better illustration for Hawking-radiation than Hawking's own idea with the pairs that are being ripped apart (which is far too localized to fit well with the math), please leave a suggestion in the comments.

Service Announcement: Backreaction now on facebook!

Over the years the discussion of my blogposts has shifted over to facebook. To follow this trend and to make it easier for you to engage, I have now set up a facebook page for this blog. Just "like" the page to get the newest blogposts and other links that I post :)

To the women pregnant with my children: Here is what to expect [Totally TMI – Proceed on your own risk]

Last year I got a strange email, from a person entirely unknown to me, letting me know that one of their acquaintances seemed to pretend an ultrasound image from my twin pregnancy was their own. They sent along the following screen capture that shows a collection of ultrasound images. It springs to the eye that these images were not taken with the same device as they differ in contrast and color scheme. It seems exceedingly unlikely you would get this selection of ultrasound image from one screening.

In comparison, here is my ultrasound image at 14 weeks pregnancy, taken in July 2010:

You can immediately see that the top right image from the stranger is my ultrasound image, easily recognizable by the structure in the middle that looks like an upside-down V. The header containing my name is cropped. I don’t know where the other images came from, but I’d put my bets on Google.

I didn’t really know what to make of this. Why would some strange woman pretend my ultrasound images are theirs? Did she fake being pregnant? Was she indeed pregnant but didn’t have ultrasound images? Did she just not like their own images?

My ultrasound images were tiny, glossy printouts, and to get them online I first had to take a high resolution photo of the image, straighten it, remove reflections, turn up contrast and twiddle some other software knobs. I’m not exactly an award-winning photoshopper, but from the images that Google brings up, mine is one with the highest resolution.

So maybe somebody just wanted to save time, thinking ultrasound images all look alike anyway. Well, they don’t. Truth be said, to me reading an ultrasound is somewhat like reading tea leaves, and I’m a coffee drinker. But the days in which ultrasound images all looked alike are long gone. If you do an inverse image search, it identifies my ultrasound flawlessly. And then there’s the upside-down V that my doctor said was the cord, which might or might not be correct.

The babies are not a boy and a girl, as is claimed in the caption of the screenshot; they are two girls with separate placentas. In the case with two placentas the twins might be fraternal – stemming from two different eggs – or identical – stemming from the same egg that divided early on. We didn’t know they were two girls though until 20 weeks, at which age you should be able to see the dangling part of the genitals, if there is one.

If I upload an image to my blog, I do not mind it being used by other people. What irked me wasn’t somebody used my image, but that they implicitly claimed my experience was theirs.

In any case, I forgot all about this bizarre story until last week I got another note from a person I don’t know, alerting me that somebody else is going about pretending to carry my children. Excuse me if I might not have made too much effort in blurring out the picture of the supposedly pregnant woman

This case is even more bizarre as I’ve been told the woman apparently had her uterus removed and is claiming the embryos have attached to other organs. Now, it is indeed possible that a fertilized egg implants outside the uterus and the embryo continues to grow, sometimes for several months. The abdomen for example has a good blood circulation that can support a pregnancy for quite some while. Sooner or later though the supply of nutrients and oxygen will become insufficient, and the embryo dies, triggering a miscarriage. That’s a major problem because if the pregnancy isn’t in the uterus the embryo has no exit through which to leave. Such out-of-place pregnancies are medical emergencies and, if not discovered early on, normally end fatally for the mother: Even if the dead embryo can be surgically removed, the placenta has grown into the abdomen and cannot detach the way it can cleanly separate from the rather special lining of the uterus, resulting in heavy inner bleeding and, often, death.

Be that as it may, if you’ve had your uterus removed you can’t get pregnant because the semen has no way to fertilize an egg.

I do not have the faintest clue why somebody would want to fake a twin pregnancy. But then the internet seems to proliferate what I want to call, in absence of a better word, “experience theft”. Some people pretend to suffer from an illness they don’t have, travel to places they’ve never been, or having grown up as members of a minority when they didn’t. Maybe pretending to be pregnant with twins is just the newest trend.

Well, ladies, so let me tell you what to expect, so you will get it right. At 20 weeks you’ll start getting preterm contractions, several hours a day, repeating stoically every 10 minutes. They’ll turn out to be what is called “not labor active”, pushing inwards but not downwards, still damned painful. Doctors warn that you’ll have a preterm delivery and issue a red flag: No sex, no travel, no exercise for the rest of the pregnancy.

At 6 months your bump will have reached the size of a full-term single pregnancy, but you still have 3 months to go. People start making cheerful remarks that you must be almost due! Your cervix length has started to shorten and it is highly recommended you stay in bed with your hips elevated and so you’ll go on sick leave following the doctor’s advice. The allegedly so awesome Swedish health insurance will later refuse to cover for this and you’ll lose two months worth of salary.

By 7 month your cervix length has shortened to 1 cm and the doctors get increasingly nervous. By 8 months it’s dilated 1 cm. You’re now supposed to visit your doctor every day. Every day they record your contractions, which still come, “not labor active”, in 10 minute intervals. They still do when you’ve reached full term, at which point you’ll start developing a nasty kidney problem accompanied by substantial water retention. And so, after warning you of a preterm delivery for 4 months, the doctors now insist that you have labor induced.

Once in the hospital they put you on Cytotec, which after 36 hours hasn’t had any effect other than making you even more miserable. But since the doctors expect that you will need a Cesarean section eventually, they don’t want you to eat. After 48 hours mostly lying in bed, not being allowed to eat more than cookies – while being 9 month pregnant with twins! –  your blood pressure will give in and one of the babies’ heartbeats will drop from a steady 140 to 90. And then it’s entirely gone. An electronic device starts beeping widely, a nurse pushes a red button, and suddenly you will find yourself with an oxygen mask on your face and an Epinephrine shot in your vein. You use the situation to yell at a doctor to stop the Cytotec nonsense and put you on Pitocin, which they promise to do the next morning.

The next morning you finally get your PDA and the Pitocin does its work. Within an hour you’ll go from 1 cm to 8 cm dilation. Your waters will never break – a midwife will break them for you. Both. The doctor insists on shaving off your hair “down there”, because he still expects you’ll need a Cesarean. These days, you don’t deliver twins naturally any more, is the message you get. Eventually, after eternity has come and gone, somebody will ask you to push. And push you will, 5 times for two babies.

I have no scars and I have no stretch marks. The doctor never got to use his knife. I’m living proof you don’t need a Cesarean to give birth to twins. The children whose ultrasound image you’ve used are called Lara Lily and Gloria Sophie. At birth, they had a low weight, but full Apgar score. They are now 4 years old, beat me at memory, and their favorite food is meatballs.

The twins are now 4 years old.

If there are two cases that have been brought to my attention that involve my images, how many of these cases are there in total?

Update: Read comments for some more information about the first case.

Dear Dr. B: Can you make up anything in theoretical physics?

“I am a phd-student in neuroscience and I often get the impression that in physics "everything is better". E.g. they replicate their stuff, they care about precision, etc. I've always wondered to what extend that is actually true, as I obviously don't know much about physics (as a science). I've also heard (but to a far lesser extent than physics being praised) that in theoretical physics you can make up anything bc there is no way of testing it. Is that true? Sorry if that sounds ignorant, as I said, I don't know much about it.”

This question was put forward to me by Amoral Atheist at Neuroskeptic’s blog.

Dear Amoral Atheist:

I appreciate your interest because it gives me an opportunity to lay out the relation of physics to other fields of science.

About the first part of your question. The uncertainty in data is very much tied to the objects of study. Physics is such a precise science because it deals with objects whose properties are pretty much the same regardless of where or when you test them. The more you take apart stuff, the simpler it gets, because to our best present knowledge we are made of only a handful of elementary particles, and these few particles are all alike – the electrons in my body behave exactly the same way as the electrons in your body.

If the objects of study get larger, there are more ways the particles can be combined and therefore more variation in the objects. As you go from elementary particle physics to nuclear and atomic physics to condensed matter physics, then chemistry and biology and neuroscience, the variety in construction become increasingly important. It is more difficult to reproduce a crystal than it is to reproduce a Hydrogen atom, and it is even more difficult to reproduce cell cultures or tissue. As variety increases, expectations for precision and reproducibility go down. This is the case already in physics: Condensed matter physics isn’t as precise as elementary particle physics.

Once you move past a certain size, where the messy regime of human society lies, things become easier again. Planets, stars, or galaxies as a whole, can be described with high precision too because for them the details (of, say, organisms populating the planets) don’t matter much.

And so the standards for precision and reproducibility in physics are much higher than in any other science not because physicists are smarter or more ambitious, but because the standards can be higher. Lower standards for statistical significance in other fields is nothing that researchers should be blamed for, it comes with their data.

It is also the case though that since physicists have been dealing with statistics and experimental uncertainty at such high precision since hundreds of years, they sometimes roll eyes about erroneous handling of data in other sciences. It is for example a really bad idea to only choose a way to analyze data after you have seen the results, and you should never try several methods until you find a result that crosses whatever level of significance is standard in your field. In that respect I suppose it is true that in physics “everything is better” because the training in statistical methodology is more rigorous. In other words, one is lead to suspect that the trouble with reproducibility in other fields of science is partly due to preventable problems.

About the second part of your question. The relation between theoretical physics and experimental physics goes both ways. Sometimes experimentalists have data that needs a theory by which they can be explained. And sometimes theorists have come up with a theory that they need new experimental tests for. This way, theory and experiment evolves hand in hand. Physics, as any other science, is all about describing nature. If you make up a theory that cannot be tested, you’re just not doing very interesting research, and you’re not likely to get a grant or find a job.

Theoretical physicists, as they “make up theories” are not free to just do whatever they like. The standards in physics are high, both in experiment and in theory, because there are so many data that are known so precisely. New theories have to be consistent with all the high precision data that we have accumulated in hundreds of years, and theories in physics must be cast in the form of mathematics; this is an unwritten rule, but one that is rigorously enforced. If you come up with an idea and are not able to formulate it in mathematical terms, nobody will take you seriously and you will not get published. This is for good reasons: Mathematics has proved to be an enormously powerful way to ensure logical coherence and prevent humans from fooling themselves by wishful thinking. A theory lacking a mathematical framework is today considered very low standard in physics.

The requirement that new theories both be in agreement with all existing data and be mathematically consistent – ie do not lead to internal disagreements or ambiguities – are not easy requirements to fulfil. Just how hard it is to come up with a theory that improves on the existing ones and meets these requirements is almost always underestimated by people outside the field.

There is for example very little that you can change about Einstein’s theory of General Relativity without ruining it altogether. Almost everything that you can imagine doing to its mathematical framework has dire consequences that lead to either mathematical nonsense or to crude conflict with data. Something as seemingly innocuous as giving a tiny mass to the normally massless carrier field of gravity can entirely spoil the theory.

Of course there are certain tricks you can learn that help you invent new theories that are not in conflict with data and are internally consistent. If you want to invent a new particle for example, as a rule of thumb you better make it very heavy or make it very weakly interacting, or both. And make sure you respect all known symmetries and conservation laws. You also better start with a theory that is known to work already and just twiddle it a little bit. In other words, you have to learn the rules before you break them. Still, it is hard and new theories don’t come easily.

Dark matter is a case in point. Dark matter has first been spotted in the 1930s. 80 years later, after the work of tens of thousands of physicists, we have but a dozen possible explanations for what it may be that are now subject to further experimental test. If it was true that in theoretical physics you “can make up anything” we’d have hundreds of thousands of theories for dark matter! It turns out though most ideas don’t meet the standards and so they are discarded of very quickly.

Sometimes it is very difficult to test a new theory in physics, and it can take a lot of time to find out how to do it. Pauli for example invented a particle, now called the “neutrino,” to explain some experiments that physicists were confused about in the 1930s, but it took almost three decades to actually find a way to measure this particle. Again this is a consequence of just how much physicists know already. The more we know, the more difficult it becomes to find unexplored tests for new ideas.

It is certainly true that some theories that have been proposed by physicists are so hard to test they are almost untestable, like for example parallel universes. These are extreme outliers though and, as I have complained earlier, that they are featured so prominently in the press is extremely misleading. There are few physicists working on this and the topic is very controversial. The vast majority of physicists work in down-to-earth fields like plasma physics or astroparticle physics, and have no business with the multiverse or parallel universes (see my earlier post “What do most physicists work on?”). These are thought-stimulating topics, and I find it interesting to discuss them, but one shouldn’t mistake them for being central to physics.

Another confusion that often comes up is the relevance of physics to other fields of science, and the discussion at Neurosceptic’s blogpost is a sad example. It is perfectly okay for physicists to ignore biology in their experiments, but it is not okay for biologists to ignore physics. This isn’t so because physicists are arrogant, it is because physics studies objects in their simplest form when their more complicated behavior doesn’t play a role. But the opposite is not the case: The simple laws of physics don’t just go way when you get to more complicated objects, they still remain important.

For this reason you cannot just go and proclaim that human brains somehow exchange signals and store memory in some “cloud” because there is no mechanism, no interaction, by which this could happen that we wouldn’t already have seen. No, I'm not narrowminded, I just know how hard it is to find an unexplored niche in the known laws of nature to hide some entirely new effect that has never been observed. Just try yourself to formulate a theory that realizes this idea, a theory which is both mathematically consistent and consistent with all known observations, and you will quickly see that it can’t be done. It is only when you discard the high standard requirements of physics that you really can “make up anything.”

Thanks for an interesting question!

Social Media for Scientists

I recently gave a seminar on the use of social media for scientists at an internal event at Stockholm University. It was an opportunity to collect my thoughts, and also to summarize what shortcomings the presently available platforms have. It would be odd if I didn’t share this with you, wouldn’t it?

There are many uses of social media, but three of them are particularly important for science: Networking, Communication, and Outreach.

Networking can best be described as the making and maintain of contacts and the exchange of information. It blends into science communication, which is more generally about discussing your own or others’ research, with your community or with the public. And then there is public outreach, which has a broader aim because you may also want to draw attention to your institution or yourself, or to generally get people engaged in science.

Networking is really unavoidable if you want to work in science today – and you are almost certainly doing it already. Communication is essential for research, and so I think using social media to this end is part of being a good scientist. And I strongly encourage you to try if you like public outreach because of its many benefits. I don’t think every scientist must engage in public outreach; in the first line scientists should do science. But it can be very rewarding and helpful to your science too, so if you have both the time and the interest, you should definitely consider it.

A lot of scientists I know shy away from using social media for no good reason and seem to believe twitter and facebook are somehow not intellectual enough. Or maybe they mistrust their own abilities to withstand the temptation of cat videos. To me twitter, facebook, blogger and, to a lesser extent, Google plus and ResearchGate are simply tools that help me to stay up to date, keep in touch with colleagues, discuss science, get feedback and advice, and share my own research.

There are many other reasons to use social media, but they are all driven by the underlying changes in the communities: We are more people in science today than ever before, collaborations are becoming more international, there are more and more papers being published. Social media is a good way to manage this. If you’re not using social media, you are putting yourself at a disadvantage, it’s as simple as that.

I have the slides of my talk online here, where I have some remarks on the social media platforms presently most widely used by scientists: Twitter, Facebook, ResearchGate, LinkedIn and Google+. In physics in particular there are also the PhysicsForums and the Physics Stack Exchage which are well frequented and can be really useful to ask questions, and give or get answers. These services differ somewhat in their aim and use, so if you are new to this you might want to check these out and see what suits you best.

The existing platforms leave me wanting for the following reasons:

• None of the existing social media sites covers the spectrum from professional to personal contacts.
  
  Presently we either have pages like LinkedIn and ResearchGate that focus entirely on job experience and skills and, in the case of ReseachGate, publications. Or we have sites like Facebook and Google+ where you don’t have this at all. But I know most of my colleagues personally, and I am also interested to hear what is going on in their life beyond the publication record or changes of affiliation. For me, like for many scientists I know, work life and private life blur together. Maybe it’s the shared experience of losing friends during the postdoc time that creates these ties, be that as it may, it’s a reality of research.
  
  I mostly use facebook, because there we also talk about the human side of science, the frustration with peer review, the nuisance of writing proposals, the inevitable rejections, the difficulties of balancing work with family, travel stress, conference experiences, and so on. To me this is part of life as a scientist. Every one of us goes through difficult times every one and then, and using social media is a way to both get and give support. So even if I were using a site like ResearchGate, I would still use other sites in addition to this.
• None of the existing sites integrates a useful archiving function.
  
  This is something I really don’t understand: Why isn’t there a way to tag posts on either of these platforms with keywords or move them into folders for your own reference? On facebook you can now at least do a keyword search on your timeline, but it is working badly. On twitter too you can search your posts, though you have to use a third party service for that. Still, I and others I talked to, often get frustrated not being able to find a particular post or reference or comment.
  
  There are of course apps like for example Evernote that allow you to basically archive anything you want in categories of choice with keywords, and to a lesser extent you can do this on Feedly too. But then if you archive a reference, you will not have the discussion about it in the same place.
• The professional sites are too public.
  
  Michael Nielsen in his book “Reinventing Discovery” has a charming analogy in which he describes a scientist with an unfinished idea as someone owning only one shoe, looking for a match without wanting to show the shoe to anybody. Nielsen describes how awkward and hesitant scientists can be before they start talking about their lonely shoes, and I find much truth in this analogy. It’s all well and fine if you have a question and ask it at the Stack Exchange or ResearchGate or facebook or wherever. But that really isn’t how it works if you are looking for a collaborator.
  
  To begin with you might not know exactly what the question is, or what you are looking for isn’t somebody explaining how to do a calculation but somebody interested enough to actually do it in exchange for being coauthor. There is also the prevalent academic paranoia of getting scooped. Especially in fields where competition is high, people don’t normally go around and publicly distribute their half-done research projects. And then, maybe most importantly, both the person asking and the person answering might have some misunderstandings and they might be afraid of their mistakes being publicly documented. Michael in his book lays out a vision for the matching of shoes, and I think what is really important in this is to allow scientists to find others with similar interests and then give them a private space to discuss off the record.
• None if the existing services has an integration of bibliometric or scientometric data.
  
  There is plenty of data about coauthor networks within communities and also their evolution over time, mutually quoted references, and various ways to visualize research topics and their relation. I think this is relevant for scientists to know how many other people are working in their area, how it connects to other fields, who is working on making these connections, and how the field develops. Research has shown that many breakthroughs in science originate at the intersection of fields that weren’t previously known to be related, so these maps are interesting from a purely scientific perspective already. But they are also of personal use because they give researchers an idea about how their own research fits into the larger picture.
  
  Here is for example an interesting paper about pivot points in string theory. I know, the visualization isn’t all that great, but note that the paper is more than a decade old!

I could go on about how I hope that webinars will become better integrated and that conferences will come to have a better online presence since I find it extremely annoying and cumbersome that every institution is using their own registration system, but I can see that for what the software solution is concerned these are difficult to address by any one service.

What social media do you use to discuss science and how has your experience been with that?

Social Media for Scientists from Sabine Hossenfelder

Open peer review and its discontents.

Some days ago, I commented on an arxiv paper that had been promoted by the arxiv blog (which, for all I know, has no official connection with the arxiv). This blogpost had an aftermath that gave me something to think.

Most of the time when I comment on a paper that was previously covered elsewhere, it’s to add details that I found missing. More often than not, this amounts to a criticism which then ends up on this blog. If I like a piece of writing, I just pass it on with approval on twitter, G+, or facebook. This is to explain, in case it’s not obvious, that the negative tilt of my blog entries is selection bias, not that I dislike everything I haven’t written myself.

The blogpost in question pointed out shortcomings of a paper. Trying to learn from earlier mistakes, I was very explicit about what that means, namely that the conclusion in the paper isn’t valid. I’ve now written this blog for almost nine years, and it has become obvious that the careful and polite scientific writing style plainly doesn’t get across the message to a broader audience. If I write that a paper is “implausible,” my colleagues will correctly parse this and understand I mean it’s nonsense. The average science journalist will read that as “speculative” and misinterpret it, either accidentally or deliberately, as some kind of approval.

Scientists also have a habit of weaving safety nets with what Peter Woit once so aptly called ‘weasel words’, ambiguous phrases that allow them on any instance to claim they actually meant something else. Who ever said the LHC would discover supersymmetry? The main reason you most likely perceive the writing on my blog as “unscientific” is lack of weasel words. So I put my head out here on the risk of being wrong without means of backpedalling, and as a side-effect I often come across as actively offensive.

If I got a penny each time somebody told me I’m supposedly “aggressive” because I read Strunk’s `Elements of Style,’ then I’d at least get some money for writing. I’m not aggressive, I’m expressive! And if you don’t buy that, I’ll hit some adjectives over your head. You can find them weasel words in my papers though, in the plenty, with lots of ifs and thens and subjunctives, in nested subordinate clauses with 5 syllable words just to scare off anybody who doesn’t have a PhD.

In reaction to my, ahem, expressive blogpost criticizing the paper, I very promptly got an email from a journalist, Philipp Hummel, who was writing on an article about the paper for spectrum.de, the German edition of Scientific American. His article has meanwhile appeared, but since it’s in German, let me summarize it for you. Hummel didn’t only write about the paper itself, but also about the online discussion around it, and the author’s, mine, and other colleagues’ reaction to it.

Hummel wrote by email he found my blogpost very useful and that he had also contacted the author asking for a comment on my criticism. The author’s reply can be found in Hummel’s article. It says that he hadn’t read my blogpost, wouldn’t read it, and wouldn’t comment on it either because he doesn’t consider this proper ‘scientific means’ to argue with colleagues. The proper way for me to talk to him, he let the journalist know, is to either contact him or publish a reply on the arxiv. Hummel then asked me what I think about this.

To begin with I find this depressing. Here’s a young researcher who explicitly refuses to address criticism on his work, and moreover thinks this is proper scientific behavior. I could understand that he doesn’t want to talk to me, evil aggressive blogger that I am, but that he refuses to explain his research to a third party isn’t only bad science communication, it’s actively damaging the image of science.

I will admit I also find it slightly amusing that he apparently believes I must have an interest talking to him, or in him talking to me. That all the people whose papers I have once commented on show up wanting to talk is stuff of my nightmares. I’m happy if I never hear from them again and can move on. There’s lots of trash out there that needs to be beaten.

That paper and its author, me, and Hummel, we’re of course small fish in the pond, but I find this represents a tension that presently exists in much of the scientific community. A very prominent case was the supposed discovery of “arsenic life” a few years ago. The study was exposed flawed by online discussion. The arsenic authors refused to comment on this, arguing that:

“Any discourse will have to be peer-reviewed in the same manner as our paper was, and go through a vetting process so that all discussion is properly moderated […] This is a common practice not new to the scientific community. The items you are presenting do not represent the proper way to engage in a scientific discourse and we will not respond in this manner.”

Naïve as I am, I thought that theoretical physics is less 19th century than that. But now it seems to me this outdated spirit is still alive also in the physics community. There is a basic misunderstanding here about necessity and use of peer review, and the relevance of scientific publication.

The most important aspect of peer review is that it assures that a published paper has been read at least by the reviewers, which otherwise wouldn’t be the case. Public peer review will never work for all papers simply because most papers would never get read. It works just fine though for papers that receive much attention, and in these cases anonymous reviewers aren’t any better than volunteer reviewers with similar scientific credentials. Consequently, public peer review, when it takes place, should be taken as least as seriously as anonymous review.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that all scientific discourse should be conducted in public. Scientists need private space to develop their ideas. I even think that most of us go out with ideas way too early, because we are under too much pressure to appear productive. I would never publicly comment on a draft that was sent to me privately, or publicize opinions voiced in closed meetings. You can’t hurry thought.

However, the moment you make your paper publicly available you have to accept that it can be publicly commented on. It isn’t uncommon for researchers, even senior ones, to have stage fright upon arxiv submission for this reason. Now you’ve thrown your baby into the water and have to see whether it swims or sinks.

Don’t worry too much, almost all babies swim. That’s because most of my colleagues in theoretical physics entirely ignore papers that they think are wrong. They are convinced that in the end only truth will prevail and thus practice live-and-let-live. I used to do this too. But look at the evidence: it doesn’t work. The arxiv now is full with paid research so thin a sneeze could wipe it out. We seem to have forgotten that criticism is an integral part of science, it is essential for progress, and for cohesion. Physics leaves me wanting more every year. It is over-specialized into incredibly narrow niches, getting worse by the day.

Yes, specialization is highly efficient to optimize existing research programs, but it is counterproductive to the development of new ones. In the production line of a car, specialization allows to optimize every single move and every single screw. And yet, you’ll never arrive at a new model listening to people who do nothing all day than looking at their own screws. For new breakthroughs you need people who know a little about all the screws and their places and how they belong together. In that production line, the scientists active in public peer review are the ones who look around and say they don’t like their neighbor’s bolts. That doesn’t make for a new car, all right, but at least they do look around and they show that they care. The scientific community stands much to benefit from this care. We need them.

Clearly, we haven’t yet worked out a good procedure for how to deal with public peer review and with these nasty bloggers who won’t shut up. But there’s no going back. Public peer review is here to stay, so better get used to it.

Merry Christmas :)

I have a post about "The rising star of science" over at Starts with a Bang. It collects some of my thoughts on science and religion, fear and wonder. I will not repost this here next month, so if you're interested check it out over there. According to medium it's a 6 minutes read. You can get a 3 minutes summary in my recent video:


We wish you all happy holidays :)

From left to right: Inga the elephant, Lara the noisy one, me, Gloria the nosy one, and Bo the moose. Stefan is fine and says hi too, he isn't in the photo because his wife couldn't find the setting for the self-timer.

Away note and Interna

Lara

I'll be traveling the next three weeks, so please be prepared for little or unsubstantial action on this blog. Next week I'm in Reykjavik for a network meeting on "Holographic Methods and Applications". August 27-29 I'm running the Science Writers Workshop in Stockholm together with George, this year on the topic "Quantum Theory." The first week of September then I'm in Trieste for the 2014 conference on Experimental Search for Quantum Gravity, where I'll be speaking about space-time defects.

Unfortunately, this traveling happens just during the time when our Kindergarten is closed, and so it's quite some stress-test for my dear husband. Since you last heard from Lara and Gloria, they have learned to count, use the swing, and are finally potty trained. They can dress themselves, have given up requesting being carried up the stairs, and we mostly get around without taking along the stroller. Yes, life has become much easier. Gloria however still gets motion sick in the car, so we either have to drug her or pull over every 5 minutes. By and large we try to avoid long road trips.

The girls have now more of a social life than me, and we basically can't leave the house without meeting other children that they know and that they have to discuss with whether Friday comes before or after Wednesday. That Lara and Gloria are twins apparently contributes greatly to their popularity. Every once in a while, when I drop off the kids at Kindergarten, some four foot dwarf will request to know if it's really true that they were together in mommy's tummy and inspect me with a skeptic view. The older children tell me that the sisters are so cute, and then try to pad Gloria's head, which she hates.

Gloria

Gloria is still a little ahead of Lara when it comes to developing new skills. She learned to speak a little earlier, to count a little earlier, was potty trained a little earlier and learned to dress herself a little earlier. Then she goes on to explain Lara what to do. She also "reads" books to Lara, basically by memorizing the stories.

Lara on the other hand is still a little ahead in her physical development. She is still a bit taller and more often than not, when I come to pick them up at Kindergarten, Lara will be kicking or throwing some ball while Gloria plays in the sandbox - and afterwards Gloria will insist on taking off her shoes, pouring out the sand and cleaning her socks before she gets into the car. Lara takes off the shoes in the car and pours the sand into the seat pocket. Lara uses her physical advantage over Gloria greatly to take away toys. Gloria takes revenge by telling everybody what Lara did wrong again, like putting her shoe on the wrong foot.

The best recent development is that the girls have finally, after a quite difficult phase, stopped kicking and hitting me and telling me to go away. They now call me "my little mommy" and want me to bake cookies for them. Yes, my popularity has greatly increased with them figuring out that I'm not too bad with cakes and cookies. They don't particularly like my cooking but that's okay, because I don't like it either.

On an entirely different note, as some of you have noticed already, I agreed to write for Ethan Siegel at Starts With A Bang. So far there's two pieces from me over there: How the experiment that claimed to detect dark matter fooled itself and The Smallest Possible Scale in the Universe. The deal is that I can repost what gets published there on this blog after 30 days, which I will do. So if you're only interested in my writing, you're well off here, but check out his site because it's full with interesting physics writing.

8 Years Backreaction!

Thanks to all my readers, the new ones and the regulars, the occasionals and the lurkers, and most of all our commenters: Without you this blog wouldn't be what it is. I have learned a lot from you, laughed about your witty remarks, and I appreciate your feedback. Thanks for being around and enriching my life by sharing your thoughts.

As you have noticed, I am no longer using the blog to share links. To that end you can follow me on twitter or facebook. I'm also on G+, but don't use it very often.

If you have a research result to share that you think may be interesting to readers of this blog, you can send me a note, email is hossi at nordita dot org. I don't always have time to reply, but I do read and consider all submissions.

Should you write a science blog?

I get asked a lot how I keep up the blogging. It might be the second most asked question right after “What happened to your hair?” (Answer: It’s a natural disaster, get used to it.) The third frequently asked question, especially by students, is “Do you have any advice if I want to start blogging?” Yeah, I do, but I’m not sure you want to hear it.

I used to think there should really be more scientists blogging. That’s because for me science journalism not so much a source of information but a source of news. It tells me where the action is and points into a direction. If it seems interesting I’ll go and look up the references, but if it’s not a field close to my own I prefer if somebody who actually works on the topic offers an opinion. And I don’t mean a cropped sentence with a carefully chosen adjective and politically correct grammar. In some research areas, quantum gravity one of them, there really aren’t many researchers offering first-hand opinions. Shame on you.

So yeah, I think there should be more scientists blogging. But over the years I’ve seen quite a few of them starting to blog like penguins start to fly. If I had a penny for every deserted science blog I’ve seen I’d be wondering why some deranged British tourist stuffed their coins into my pockets. What’s so difficult about writing a blog, I hear you asking now. You’re asking the wrong person, said the flying penguin, but what blogger would I be if I only had opinions on things I know something about? So here’s my 5 cents (about 4.27 pennies).

As everybody in quantum gravity knows, first there’s the problem of time. So here’s

Advice #1: Don’t start blogging if you don’t have the time.

Do you really want to invest the time you could be teaching your daughter basketball? Do you really think it’s more important than rewriting that grant proposal for the twentieth time? If you had the time to write a blog wouldn’t you rather use it to learn Chinese, train for a marathon, or become an expert in power napping? If you answered yes to any of these questions, thank you and good bye. Also, give me my money back. If you answered yes to all of these questions, I suggest you touch base with the local drug scene.

But how much time will it take, is your next question. Depends on your ambition of course, said the penguin and flapped her wings. You should produce at least one post a week if you ever want to get off the ground, which brings me to

Advice #2: Don’t start blogging if you don’t like writing.

The less you like writing, the longer it will take and the more time becomes an issue. The more time becomes an issue, the more you’ll hate blogging and esp those people who seem to produce blogposts, seemingly effortlessly, 5 times a day, apparently while cooking for a family of twelve and jetting around the globe in a self-made, wooden plane sponsored by their three million subscribers.

Are you sure you like writing? No, I didn’t mean you gave it a thumb up on facebook. Are you really sure you like the process of converting thought into keyboard clatter? Ok, good start. But just because you like it doesn’t mean it’s easy.

I’ll admit it took me years to realize it, but evidently I have a lot of colleagues who fight with words. Did you notice that this blog has a second contributor? Yes, it does. It’s just that the frequency of my posts is a factor 300 or so higher than his. He can be forgiven for making himself rare because he’s got a full-time job and two kids and a wife who blogs rather than doing the laundry. But mostly the problem is that he’s fighting with words.

Words – Once upon a time I went to a Tai Chi class. The first class was also the last because I realized quickly that my back problem wasn’t up to the task of throwing people around. I used the opportunity though to punch the trainer straight into the solar plexus a second before he had finished his encouragement to do so. I hope he learned not to use more words than necessary. But I also took away a lesson, one that’s been useful for my writing: Don’t try to take hits frontally, deviate them and use the momentum. So here’s my

Advice #3: Don’t be afraid of words.

Words aren’t your enemies. It they come at you, use their momentum and go with it. That’s easier said than done, I know, especially if you’re a scientist and have been trained to be precise and accurate and to decorate every sentence with 20 references and footnotes. But don’t think you actually have to be a good writer. Because most likely your readers aren’t good readers either, which is only fair. If you can really write well, you shouldn’t blog, you should… you should… write my damned grant proposal. What I mean is if you try to blog like you write research articles, you’ll almost certainly turn out to be a flying penguin, so don’t overthink it.

However, nobody is born flying, so here’s

Advice #4: Be patient.

It takes time until you’re integrated into the blogosphere. You can help your integration by using social networks to make yourself, your expertise, and your blog known. Unless you are already well known in your field, it will probably take at least a year, more likely several years, till readership catches on. Until then, make contacts, make friends, learn from others, have fun. Above everything, don’t call a blogpost a blog, it’s mistaking the weather for the climate.

If you still think you want to write a blog, then go ahead. I honestly don’t think it takes more than that: Time, and a good relation to the written word, and patience. The main reason I’m still blogging is that I like writing and verbal TaiChi doesn’t take me a lot of effort. It arguably also helps that since 2006 I’ve been employed at pure research institutes and don’t have teaching duties, see advice #1.

Then let me address some worries. This might be more an issue for the, eh, more senior people, but it should be said

Advice #5: Don't be afraid of the technology.

As with everything in life, you can make it arbitrarily complicated if you want, but as long as you have an IQ above 70 you'll find some way to blog. It really is not difficult. Another worry that newcomers seem to have is that they’ll run out of ideas, so let me assure you

Advice #6: Don’t worry that you’ll run out of things to say.

Topics will come flying at you faster than you can get out of the way. There’s always somebody who’s said something about something that you also want to say something about. There’s always some science writer who got it so totally wrong. There’s always somebody’s seminar that was interesting and somebody’s paper that you just read. And if all of that fails, there’s always somebody who has thrown sexist comments around, ten things you wish you had known when you were twenty, and down at the very bottom of the list there’s blogging advice. So don’t worry, just take notes when you come across something interesting or have an idea for a blogpost. I pin post-its to my desk.

Yes, in principle you can fill your blog otherwise than with words. This might work if you have a lot of visual content, pictures, videos, infographics, applets, etc. Alas, the way things have developed the primarily visual stuff has migrated to other platforms and blogs are today the format primarily used for verbal content. And since the spread of twitter, facebook and Google+, sharing links with brief comments has also left the blogosphere. Blogging started out mostly being about writing, and it boomeranged back to this.

Having said that however, blogging of course isn’t only about writing, it’s also about reading. So here’s my

Advice #7: Care about your readers.

They’ll give you feedback as to whether you’re expressing yourself clearly. If the comments don’t have any relation to the content of your posts, you’re not expressing yourself clearly enough. If insults pile up in your comment section, you’re expressing yourself too clearly. If you’re not getting any comments, see advice #4. However, please

Advice #8: Don’t be afraid of your readers.

If everybody would like what you write, somebody would hate it just because everybody likes it, so it’s futile. If I’ve learned one thing from blogging, it’s that misunderstandings are unavoidable. They’re part of the process and that’s a two-way process. Just don’t take hits frontally, use their momentum. That misunderstanding really makes a good topic for your next blogpost, no?

You’ll have noticed that I didn’t say anything about content. That’s because the content is up to you. It really doesn’t matter all that much what you write because blog readers are self-selecting. The ones who’ll stay are the ones who like what you write. If it matters to you to attract a sizeable audience then you should spend some time thinking about content, but I’m not the right penguin to give advice on that. I basically just write what comes to my mind, minus some self-censorship for the sake of my readers’ sanity. You don’t really want to know how I lost my virginity, do you?

So should you write a science blog?

You and I both might think you should blog, but that’s wishful thinking. Be honest and ask yourself if you really want to write a blog. Without motivation it’ll be painful both for you and your readers. I wouldn’t want to eat in a restaurant where the cook hates cooking and I wouldn’t want to read a blog where the writer hates writing. If you’re not sure though, I want to encourage you to give it a try because writing might just change your life.

For me the blogging has been very useful, especially because it has taught me to quickly extract the main points of other people’s work and to coherently summarize them, which in return has made it much easier for me to recall this information later. I have also over the years made many friends through this blog, some of whom I have met in person and whose friendship I value very much. I see a lot of cynicism these days about the emptiness of social networking. But I appreciate social media for making it so much easier to stay in touch with people I know who have distributed all over the planet.

Homework assignment: Open the book closest to you on a random page and take the first noun that you see. Imagine it’s a chapter title in your autobiography. Write that chapter.

How do science blogs change the face of science?

The blogosphere is coming to age, and I’m doing my annual contemplation of its influence on science.

Science blogs of course have an educational mission, and many researchers use them to communicate the enthusiasm they have for their research, may that be by discussing their own work or that of colleagues. But blogs were also deemed useful to demonstrate that scientists are not all dusty academics, withdrawn professors or introverted nerds who sit all day in their office, shielded by piles of books and papers. Physics and engineering are fields where these stereotypes are quite common – or should I say “used to be quite common”?

Recently I’ve been wondering if not the perception of science that the blogosphere has created is replacing the old nerdy stereotype with a new stereotype. Because the scientists who blog are the ones who are most visible, yet not the ones who are actually very representative characters. This leads to the odd situation in which the avid reader of blogs, who otherwise doesn’t have much contact with academia, is left with the idea that scientists are generally interested in communicating their research. They also like to publicly dissect their colleagues’ work. And, judging from the photos they post, they seem to spend a huge amount of time travelling. Not to mention that, well, they all like to write. Don’t you also think they all look a little like Brian Cox?

I find this very ironic. Because the nerdy stereotype for all its inaccuracy still seems to fit better. Many of my colleagues do spend 12 hours a day in their office scribbling away equations on paper or looking for a bug in their code. They’d rather die than publicly comment on anything. Their Facebook accounts are deserted. They think a hashtag is a drug, and the only photo on their iPhone shows that instant when the sunlight fell through the curtains just so that it made a perfect diffraction pattern on the wall. They're neither interested nor able to communicate their research to anybody except their close colleagues. And, needless to say, very few of them have even a remote resemblance to Brian Cox.

So the funny situation is that my online friends and contacts think it’s odd if one of my colleagues is not available on any social networking platform. Do they even exist for real? And my colleagues still think I’m odd taking part in all this blogging stuff and so on. I’m not sure at all these worlds are going to converge any time soon.

Six years Backreaction

It's been six years since I sat in my Santa Barbara office on a Friday morning, clicking the "publish" button on Blogger's editor for the first time. It's been six eventful years, and I want to take the opportunity of this anniversary to thank all our readers and especially the commenters for their contributions!

Over the years, the content of this blog has slightly changed. At present it's mainly a reprocessing of books/papers/articles I read and find interesting enough to discuss, mixed with the occasional family update. I have diverted most of my link dumps to Twitter, Google plus, and Facebook.

Some months ago, I finally updated the template and I've found it's an improvement. Unfortunately, the comment count in the sidebar wasn't possible with the new template. But the archive list is much cleaner now and the labels now work properly.

I was looking at our blog archive the other day, and was wondering if not it would be interesting to recycle some of the older posts (with updates if applicable). I don't want to bore you with repetitions but my guess is that most of our readers have no been around for six years and very few people ever look at the archive. Can you give me some feedback on that? Would you be interested if I'd pick out the occasional post from the archive and brush it up for a new discussion?

New Template

As you can see, we have finally switched to the new blogger template. Feedback is welcome!

Theory Carnival: Phenomenological Quantum Gravity

[Geek Mommyprof from Academic Jungle is hosting a carnival on real people's work in theoretical or computational sciences, and what that work entails. She asked me to contribute some lines about what I do for a living, so here we go.]

I am a theoretical physicist and I work on the phenomenology of quantum gravity. Phenomenology is the part of theory that makes contact with experiment. (For more read my earlier post On the Importance of Phenomenology). Quantum gravity is the attempt to resolve our problems in formulating a common treatment for the quantum field theories of the standard model and Einstein's general relativity. Quantum gravity has for a long time been dominated by theory, and it's only been during the last decade or so that more effort has been invested into phenomenology.

I like working in this area because it offers interesting and still unexplored topics, and if there will ever be an experimentally confirmed theory of quantum gravity there's no way around phenomenology. My work requires keeping track of what the theorists are doing and what the experimentalists are planning and trying to find a way to connect both. Since gravity is a very weak interaction, finding evidence for its quantum effects is difficult to do, and so far there has been no signature. In fact, it can be quite frustrating if one puts in the numbers and finds the effect one considered is 40 orders of magnitude too small to be measurable, which is the normal state of affairs. I've joked on occasion I should write a paper "50 ways you can't measure quantum gravitational effects," just so all my estimates will finally be good for something. But there are areas, early universe and high energy densities, high energies and large distances, where it doesn't look completely hopeless.

Lacking a fully established theory of quantum gravity, phenomenology in this area requires developing a model that tests for some specific features, may that be extra dimensions, violations of Lorentz Invariance, antigravitation or faster-than-light travel. Model building is like having a baby. While you work on it, you have an idea of how it will be and what you can do with it. Yet, once it's come into life, it starts crying and kicking and doesn't care at all what you wanted it to do. Mathematical consistency is a very powerful constraint that is difficult to appreciate if one hasn't made the experience: You can't just go and, for example, introduce antigravitating masses into general relativity. It sounds easy enough to just put in stuff that falls up, but once you look into the details the easy ways are just not compatible with the theory, and it turns out to be so easy not. (I should know, since I spent several years on that question and out came a paper that I doubt anybody read.)

You might ask now, well, what has antigravitation got to do with phenomenological quantum gravity? Nothing actually. It's just that people always ask me what I work on and I used to say: A little bit of particle physics and a little bit of cosmology and my recent paper was about this-and-that and I'm also interested in the foundations of quantum mechanics and organizational design, and then I wrote this paper on the utility function in economics and so on. But I figured that what they actually wanted was a three word answer, so that's why I work on phenomenological quantum gravity. On the institute's website it says I work on "high energy and nuclear physics," which isn't too far off, still, 5 is larger than 3.

But no matter what the headline, what my work looks like is like this: I start with an idea and try to build a model that incorporates it while maintaining mathematical consistency, after all that's what I sat through all these classes for. In addition, the model should be compatible with available data and ideally predict something new. The failure rate is high. But there's the occasional idea that turns out not to be a failure. It gets written up and submitted to a journal and, if all goes well, gets published. I usually publish in Classical and Quantum Gravity, Physics Letters B or Physical Review D.

In the process of working on a paper, I almost always have an ongoing exchange with some people who work on related topics. If the finances allow it, I might visit them or invite them to come here. I might also attend a workshop or conference, or organize one myself. In addition, my work brings the usual overhead like writing or reviewing grant proposals, attending or giving seminars, coming up with a thesis topic, reading applications, reviewing papers, attending faculty meetings and so on. I presently work at a pure research institute, the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics in Stockholm, and have no teaching duties, which has advantages and disadvantages. And if you are following this blog you know that I'm only just back from parental leave.

For more on what my work is like, see also What I am is what I am and One day. You can also follow me on Twitter, or Google+.

Five years Backreaction

Five years ago I wrote the first post for this blog. Since then I've moved from Santa Barbara to Canada and from Canada to Sweden. I've organized and attended multiple conferences and workshops, written a bunch of papers and reviewed a pile of books. Stefan finished his thesis and graduated, started a new job and moved to Heidelberg. We married, I got pregnant, and Stefan moved into a larger apartment. Presently, I am on parental leave and our little girls are almost two months old. During all this time, our blog has been a constant companion and we want to thank all our readers and commenters for the company!

Blogger Bug

Hi All,

There's something seriously wrong with Blogger's comment feature. The problem is not restricted to this blog and has already been reported by many others on the help pages. As you will notice, the recent comments features doesn't work, and in fact new comments don't appear - including my own. There is nothing I can do about it. I do receive your submitted comments by email, but I don't know when they will appear. I'll let you know when the problem has been resolved.

PS: Here is the forum thread where you can report your problem.

Update, July 6, 6:20 pm CET: Comments seem to be working again... At least partly. The comment count still doesn't work.

Update, July 7, 7:00 am CET: All is working again.