Folks at the Large Hadron Collider on the Swiss-French border have always been at the cutting edge of communication technology, keeping the public informed via Web site, podcast, video clips, and a team of bloggers. But now, we regret to say, NASA has leap-frogged ahead: its Phoenix probe, which landed on the surface of Mars Sunday evening, is communing and answering questions from the public via Twitter, the free service that lets you keep track of people (and now spacecraft) via brief messages delivered to your cell phone or computer:
Looking forward to moving arm today. Will bend the wrist and flex the elbow. It’s been stowed for 10 months so I’ll move it slowly/gently. 09:24 AM May 28, 2008
My robotic arm camera got some great shots around my feet. Is that ice right there? http://tinyurl.com/4bf2hj Can’t wait for a closer look!
Yup, I can dig into frozen ground as hard as concrete. The scoop has special blades and a powered “rasp” to scrape ice. Cool!
This is the first official Twitterization of a scientific endeavor we’ve encountered, which gets us thinking: What if the LHC and its constituents–through their handlers, of course–spoke Twitter?
LHCProton: You think your commute is bad? Try sharing a beam with 280 trillion other protons. And talk about speed demons! Sometimes it’s hard to focus.
LHCMagnet: It’s been getting a lot colder over the past couple of weeks. I hear we’re headed for minus 271 degrees. Anyone know how to knit a magnet cozy?
LHCDetectors: Two weeks since the first collisions, and no Higgs boson yet. But that’s fine. We expect it will take a while to flush it out — if it exists.
The question may not be whether the LHC could Twitter, but whether Twitter could handle the bottled-up curiosity that will undoubtedly explode when the big particle accelerator fires up later this year. As of late afternoon Friday, MarsPhoenix had posted 138 twitter updates and had more than 9500 people following its adventures. Earlier, though, when we tried to click back to some older posts, we got this message:
Twitter is stressing out a bit right now, so this function is temporarily disabled.
The particle physics community is always improving its use of the Internet for sharing information and now that goes well beyond preprints of journal articles! There is a wealth of video out there ranging from seminars and lectures to whole series from summer schools.
If you’re interested in getting a little deeper into some physics this summer but can’t make it to one of the summer schools, look through flip’s list and see if one of those takes your fancy. Most summer schools have a theme each year but they generally manage to tie in a wide range of physics so the content usually covers a broad range.
Most of the institutions archive their previous summer schools so keep them in mind if you want to learn more about a particular topic that was the subject of a summer school.
The much-awaited P5 report (Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel) was presented today to HEPAP (High Energy Physics Advisory Panel). The slides of the talk (PDF) have been posted online and I’ll link to the report itself when it is available.
The report is a strategic plan for US Particle Physics for the next decade. It details what the US particle physics community should do over that timescale under four different funding scenarios.
According to the report, “The scientific priorities have not changed since those reports [EPP2010 and others] appeared, but the context for the scientific opportunities they describe has altered.”
The overall recommendations of the report are:
The panel recommends that the US maintain a leadership role in world-wide particle physics.
The panel recommends a strong, integrated research program for US particle physics at three frontiers: the Energy Frontier, using both hadron colliders and lepton colliders to discover and illuminate the physics of the Terascale; the Intensity Frontier, comprising neutrino physics and high-sensitivity experiments on rare processes; and the Cosmic Frontier, probing the nature of dark matter and dark energy and other topics in particle astrophysics.
Detailed recommendations can be read in the slides linked to above.
Here at SPIRES we’ve been worried for quite some time that our software infrastructure was getting old. SPIRES continues to be a useful service for the community, but the time it takes the administrators to change things in the system is increasing, as we continually run up against the cracks of a 30-year-old system. Our recent survey revealed not only a strong user base, but also let us know that our users want more from us that we can currently provide.
Fortunately, CERN, DESY, Fermilab, and SLAC have joined forces to rectify the situation by creating INSPIRE. By combining the successful SPIRES database, curated at DESY, Fermilab, and SLAC, with the Invenio digital library technology developed at CERN, INSPIRE will offer the functionalities and quality of service which the high-energy physics user community has grown to expect from SPIRES. It will develop long-sought improvements providing access to the entire corpus of the HEP literature with full-text Google-like search capabilities and enabling innovative text- and data-mining applications, among a host of other desired features tailored specifically to the HEP community.
I’ve just come back from DESY, where we announced this project and got lots of positive feedback from our colleagues at other information services like arXiv, ADS, and journal publishers. I’m excited too, as our team at the four labs is very strong and I’m happy that we will finally be able to deliver many of the services that users have been requesting for years, but haven’t been able to provide.
The first Kavli prizes were announced today in Oslo, Norway. Fred Kavli, a science philanthropist who has been establishing research centers around the world in his main areas of interest, established the prizes as a rival to the Nobel prizes but in the fields of astrophysics, nanoscience, and neuroscience. Each prize is US$1 million shared between the winners.
Symmetry readers are probably most interested in the astrophysics prize: It will be shared by Maarten Schmidt, of the California Institute of Technology, United States, and Donald Lynden-Bell, of Cambridge University, United Kingdom, “for their seminal contributions to understanding the nature of quasars.”
I can already hear the howls of complaint: “You’re writing about a new paper just because it has Stephen Hawking’s name on it?” Well, yes, I guess I am, but I think it’s worth saying something about the paper because not too many people actually hear much about the science that Hawking does. The paper is technical and I can only give the merest flavor of what it talks about. Much of this will be heavy going but I hope that you can get a taste of the kind of work that Hawking is now up to.
His new paper, with other physics heavyweights Jim Hartle and Thomas Hertog, was published the other day in Physical Review Letters. In it, he continues a research direction he started with Hartle back in 1983 in a paper provocatively (for physicists) titled “Wave function of the Universe“. In that paper, H&H suggested that the universe might be finite but have no boundary–the no-boundary proposal.
This might seem like a mind-bending topic at first because surely the only way for something to have no edges is for it to go on forever. However, once you allow the fun of general relativity, in which spacetime can bend in all kinds of interesting ways, you can start to imagine a universe that doesn’t go on forever but has no edges because the universe wraps around from one side to the other. Or, the dimensions of space and time can mix together and turn into each other in odd ways to avoid there ever being an edge. One side effect of all this mixing up of space and time is that H&H also needed to introduce the concept of imaginary time. I’m not going to go into the details here but if you want to know more, you can try on for size the text of one of Hawking’s public lectures, “The Beginning of Time“.
Back to the present paper: Hartle, Hawking, and Hertog, or H3, as I shall geekily call them for now, apply the no-boundary proposal to a class of possible universes in the context of the string theory landscape–the vast number of possible universes that could exist within string theory.
H3 point out that the string theory landscape by itself gives no way to explain why the universe is the way it is out of all the possible options. For that, say H3, “one has to turn to cosmology and to a theory of the quantum state of the Universe.”
The authors go on to apply their no-boundary proposal to the evolution of the universe, building in the result that the universe must evolve to what we actually see today–essentially classical on most scales. In other words, the universe, despite being quantum at its foundations has evolved to a point where the obvious effects of quantum physics hide in the small and the unusual. That alone limits how the universe could have evolved quite significantly within this framework.
With this constraint, H3 predict what type of universe is most likely (and you have to work in probabilities when you are dealing with the string landscape). They find that the most likely universe is one with an inflationary past and one that has a beginning that looks semiclassical (not the singularity that many theories of the beginning of time predict).
The authors go on to predict many properties of what such a universe would look like. One is that the beginning of the universe is characterized by a bounce rather than starting from nothing. However, the arrow of time points outward from the bounce on both sides so there is very little chance that anything from one side of the bounce could influence the other, in contrast to some other versions of bounces.
Also, such a universe should have had lots of inflation bringing it to a nearly flat state such as we observe now. That just means that our universe now doesn’t have much weird curviness and that each of the three space dimensions we’re used to in everyday life really are something like the straight directions we naturally imagine.
There are some other even more complicated ideas the authors discuss but I’ll leave those for professional physicists to ponder. One of the main conclusions of the paper is that the no-boundary proposal is able to provide some kinds of limits on the immense number of possibilities allowed by the string landscape without needing any extra outside rules to be imposed. It’s heavy going but if you’ve stayed with me this far, perhaps you have a small idea of just what sorts of things keep the heavy hitters of cosmology occupied these days.
Fermilab employees like rare events. They search for rare interactions of particles and attempt to create rare particles such as the theorized Higgs boson.
But sometimes, even for Fermilab employees, enough is enough.
Fermilab always has been a magnet for severe weather. The laboratory sits near a tornado-prone swath of Illinois and its 6800 acres of prairie and mostly low-level buildings offer little to slow or divert high winds.
Employees practice for tornadoes, and take the weather in stride, but last year, a series of rare weather occurrences-a winter tornado and a straight line of wind storms-struck near Fermilab reminding employees that the uncertainty principle doesn’t just work in physics. Anything not forbidden by a quantum rule that can happen will happen. So be ready.
In April, Chicago icon television meteorologist Tom Skilling (photo above) and several National Weather Service experts from regional offices throughout the nation converged on Fermilab for a talk to more than 3000 weather buffs.
During the Severe Weather Seminar, experts analyzed last year’s storm data and offered tips on how to stay safe that apply to you no matter where you live.
The seminar, in its 28th year, serves as an example of the laboratory’s commitment to serving the community. You can learn more about the history of the seminar.
Chad Cowan, a weather enthusiast who spoke at the event, created a storm chaser DVD to raise money for the victims of last May’s Greensburg, Kansas, twister. You can see a sample of the video Storms of 2007 below.
Basic safety tips apply to all types of tornadoes. You should seek cover in something concrete, sit against a sturdy object, and stay away from windows. Cover yourself with a blanket to avoid the glass dust created by exploding windows. The deadliest and longest lasting tornadoes signal their presence with a low wall of clouds close to the ground. The worst of the worst storms, F5s like the one that hit Greensburg last May, occur only once in 7000 tornadoes.
One of the greatest keys to survival is knowing what to believe and what not to believe about severe weather.
The not here myth:
Ed Fenelon, of the Chicago NWS, said the best way to stay safe is to get past the myth that severe tornadoes only happen in places like Oklahoma. On average, once every 10 years an F3 or F4 category tornado hits the Chicagoland area.
Last August, a strong tornado was sighted in Chicago near Lake Michigan but died out before it caused damage. Had it continued, its path would have crossed Fermilab, several major interstate highways, an O’Hare Airport terminal, and Allstate Arena, causing immense damage.
Be prepared, Fenelon warned.
When storm season means nothing:
In the Midwest, tornado probability spikes the highest in April followed by May and June. A slowdown occurs in July followed by an upswing in August and again in March. But tornadoes sometimes forget the date.
Spring-like conditions in winter and moderately strong La Niña conditions, which produce ice storms, forge tornadoes.
Although, mid-winter tornadoes rarely appear-the last one in Illinois was in 1950 and in Wisconsin in 1967- the conditions that accommodate them are occurring more frequently. Winter tornadoes also pack a bigger punch than their spring cousins, with at least F2 super cell intensity, said Jim Allsopp, of the NWS of Chicago.
To predict the unexpected, Allsopp said to look out for rapidly increasing wind speeds heading into an area of ample moisture, with warm surface air of at least 50 degrees.
Those were the conditions that let to the three tornadoes on January 7, 2007, that ripped through northern Illinois and Southern Wisconsin, injuring 19 people. The strongest of the three tornadoes reached winds of 165 mph.
When a storm trumps a tornado:
On August 7, 2007, a series of powerful wind and thunderstorms raged through the area near Fermilab. The National Weather Service issued a severe thunderstorm warning for the area. Many people assumed that signaled a mild storm. Not Fermilab officials. They ordered employees to take shelter. That was the correct move, said Gino Izzi, of the NWS Springfield, Missouri, office.
“Just because it is not a tornado doesn’t mean it is not something to be taken seriously,” Izzi said. “It doesn’t have to spin to kill.”
The storm, called a derecho, lacked the circular spin of a tornado but had wind speeds of 80 to 100 mph near the laboratory. In many places on its half mile wide path from DeKalb County to eastern Cook County, it produced damage equivalent to a mid-level tornado. A West Chicago factory not far from the laboratory had its roof ripped off and dozens of workers were injured. The wind flipped cars in Chicago and falling debris killed one person. Tens of thousands of trees collapsed, damage to electrical infrastructure was the worst remembered since at least 1950, and a “wall of damage” emerged. The wind storms did more damage than a small tornado also spotted that day, Izzi said.
“We really can’t diminish the power storms have,” Izzi said.
While you should always take severe thunderstorm warnings seriously, you can get a feel for whether the storm will pack a bigger punch than usual by looking for a few wind storm ingredients: A large pool of moist air, a lack of clouds, and a sunny day heating up the atmosphere make unstable conditions for incoming storms. Strong winds of 60 mph that descend low in the atmosphere-10,000 feet that day-set the stage for the derecho.
In an upbeat all-hands meeting at Fermilab today, director Pier Oddone announced that a $5 million donation from an anonymous donor in combination with a number of early retirements and resignations will help allow Fermilab to cease their furloughs (in which all staff had to take approximately 10% of their time off with no pay) at the end of May.
You can watch the video of the meeting held in the auditorium at Fermilab.
Oddone began by literally taking his (borrowed) hat off to the staff for their continued excellent achievement in operating the Tevatron, which has broken many records in recent weeks. He also congratulated the laboratory on its continued good safety record.
He announced that Fermilab will now have a voluntary layoff program starting in June followed by an involuntary layoff program starting in July. The voluntary program will be “structured,” which means that certain job functions are not eligible for voluntary layoffs. However, the majority of the lab will be eligible.
Oddone explained that an anonymous family in Illinois will donate $5 million to the University of Chicago (a partner in managing Fermilab for the US Department of Energy) to help support the future of high-energy physics. “I find it quite encouraging, quite astounding,” Oddone said.
Turning to current Congressional actions, Oddone spoke of the Senate bill that includes supplemental funding for high-energy physics attached to the war spending bill. However, the House bill has no such domestic spending. He cautioned that “the probability of this funding going through this year is not great.” Despite that, Oddone said he is optimistic for the future and appreciative of the effort by the community in achieving this level of support.
Oddone returned to the topic of furloughs and said the combination of more-than-expected retirements and resignations along with the new donation would allow Fermilab to stop furloughs at the end of May. He says he needs to confirm this plan next week but that staff should plan to not have any furlough after May 31. Staff will still be required to take their full vacation allowance by the end of the fiscal year.
As a result of the all-hands meeting, the mood at the lab seems to have improved appreciably, according to some Fermilab staff.
Now that Web “cloud” computing and data storage are available through Amazon, Sun Microsystems, and IBM, is it time for high-energy physicists to ditch their traditional, custom-built computing networks in favor of commercial services?
A new study looks at this question in detail for perhaps the first time. The conclusion: Not yet. In a paper available here, the researchers outline a number of things that would need to change before Amazon’s S3 data storage and EC2 computing services could meet the sophisticated data-heavy needs of physicists.
The researchers traced 27 months’ worth of data usage by DZero, one of two experiments at Fermilab’s Tevatron accelerator, to see how physicists actually handle and crunch data. The study analyzed 113,062 DZero jobs executed between January 2003 and March 2005. These involved nearly a million hours of computation and processed more than 5.2 million gigabytes of data.
The authors are Mayur Palankar and Adriana Iamnitchi of the University of South Florida, Matei Ripeanu of the University of British Columbia, and Simson Garfinkel of Harvard. The study will be presented at the Data-Aware Distributed Computing Workshop being held in late June in Boston.
The commercial utility computing services work like this: The service provider buys the computers and servers and other equipment. They hire the people needed to keep it all running. You pay only for the amount of storage space or computer time you actually use. Amazon Web Services makes three promises: It will never lose your data, you’ll always have access to it, and that access will be quick.
But when it comes to computing, high-energy physics is a tough customer. It was an early adopter of the Grid–the idea that computing could be spread among many computer networks in widely scattered places and function as a utility, with users submitting jobs that could run anywhere. (See our story on Grid computing and physics in the November 2005 symmetry.) Further, physicists have a tradition of custom-building their own computer networks to meet the rigorous demands of experiments, which may involve hundreds of collaborators in dozens of countries. And they have a unique way of approaching data, says Gabriele Garzoglio, head of the Open Science Grid group at Fermilab. Unlike the Internet as a whole, where huge numbers of people try to access a few very popular files, physicists access and analyze the same data over and over again. In fact, they may consume seven or eight times as much data as they store.
The amount of data those experiments churn out is staggering–and rapidly increasing. DZero, for instance, has processed about 45 petabytes, which is 45 million gigabytes, of data since it began in 1999; nearly half of that–20 petabytes–was in the past year alone.
“The most valuable thing experiments have is their data,” Garzoglio says. “The amount of data consumed grows almost exponentially with time. We haven’t seen any business-provided external system that can handle this amount of data. For now, we like the idea of having the situation in our hands.”
Amazon’s S3 service stores data in “buckets,” which are essentially folders that hold unlimited numbers of “data objects” of up to 5 gigabytes each. Storage costs 15 cents per gigabyte per month in the US–slightly more in Europe–and uploads and downloads cost between 10 and 18 cents each. Computer time on the EC2 system costs 10 cents per CPU-hour, and there is no bandwidth charge to send data between EC2 and S3, so handling data through EC2 potentially could save money.
The system appears to be as reliable as advertised, Iamnitchi said. No data was permanently lost in 12 months of experimentally transferring data in and out of Amazon storage using S3, although the researchers add that their study spanned too short a period to make an adequate assessment.
It appears that the Amazon services would cost significantly more than the system now in place for DZero, Iamnitchi said. But because it’s difficult to separate DZero’s costs from the rest of the lab’s computing budget, the study was not able to quantify that.
Handling the amount of data produced by DZero through Amazon would cost $691,000 per year for storage and $335,000 for transfer, for a total of about $1 million per year at US rates, the study found. It outlined possible ways to reduce this cost. For instance, only half of the data files the experiment generated were still being actively accessed after one month, and only 35 percent after five months; the rest could be archived in some cheaper form of storage. Or Amazon could separate the three performance characteristics it offers and charge users only for the ones they want; the person who values durable storage over instant availability should be able to pay less for an agreement in which their data is available only three weeks out of the month.
“One significant problem, I think, is the matter of trust,” Iamnitchi tells me. The S3 service agreement says users will be compensated for system failures, but “there is no way you can prove to a court, for example, that they lost your data,” she says. Further, since your account is linked to your credit card, “if somebody breaks into your account, not only can they steal your data but they can drain your credit card.” The money would go to Amazon rather than to the thief, but no matter, Iamnitchi said; the loss is the same.
Another inconvenient aspect of the Amazon service is that it doesn’t allow you to search across all your buckets of data; to find something, you have to know which bucket it’s in.
“Clearly these technologies are very, very young,” says Fermilab’s Garzoglio, who assisted the researchers but was not a study author. “So while on one hand we want to keep being informed and participating in these studies, we feel it’s not the right time at this point to trust these new models. People here know how to develop these technologies and operate theses technologies. Essentially we know what we are doing, and the experiments trust us to safeguard their data.”
In the new issue of symmetry, just out online, we have a commentary by Lesley Stone, executive director of Scientists and Engineers for America. (Alert readers will know we previewed this on symmetry breaking a few weeks ago.)
The latest issue of Nature has a story about the workshop that SEA ran for scientists. About 75 scientists showed up for the workshop and heard from congressional staffers, political advisors, and representatives of scientific societies about why and how to run for public office. It’s worth reading to find out more about the event.
Stone tells me that this will happen again next year but there will also be more resources available through SEA and I see that the Web site has expanded significantly since we last mentioned it here in symmetry breaking.
On the cover:
As symmetry celebrates its 50th issue, big changes are afoot at Fermilab.
The lab’s Tevatron Collider, once the most powerful particle collider in
the world, is shutting down, and a new project is on the horizon: Project X.
This proposed $1.8 billion accelerator complex would keep Fermilab at
the forefront of high-energy physics, this time at the Intensity Frontier—a realm
in which scientists bring incredible numbers of particles into collision to
search for extremely rare processes with a big physics impact. It’s exactly
the kind of place where discoveries may lie. See “Solving for X”.
Photo illustrations: Reidar Hahn, Fermilab and Sandbox Studio
Chad Cowan, a weather enthusiast who spoke at the event, created a storm chaser DVD to raise money for the victims of last May’s Greensburg, Kansas, twister. You can see a sample of the video Storms of 2007 below.
