Dead 53 years, Albert Einstein still rakes in the dough

October 31, 2008 | 4:25 pm

Parody by Sandbox Studio

Just in time for Halloween, Forbes has released its annual list of top-earning dead celebrities. There in fourth place–behind Elvis Presley, cartoonist Charles Schulz, and actor Heath Ledger–is Albert Einstein, whose frowsy-haired image earned an estimated $18 million in royalties this year. In 2006, symmetry reported that Einstein was in third place.

Einstein–aguably the most widely recognized and most beloved scientist of modern times–is actually a staple of the list. (The UK’s Guardian news blog playfully referrs to “Albert Einstein’s Theory of Royalty Longevity.”) He earned more this year than each of Marilyn Monroe, Dr. Seuss, Paul Newman, and John Lennon.

Says Forbes:

Albert Einstein probably never thought he would be earning money from making babies smarter. But Baby Einstein, a majority Disney-owned suite of learning tools for infants, keeps expanding. International licensing with Nestle’s Japanese coffee brand, Charge, and an upcoming sneaker campaign with basketball player Kobe Bryant add to Einstein’s rich portfolio of deals.

None of which should surprise readers of symmetry, who in the February 2005 issue found this ode to the great man’s pervasive presence:

 “I Discovered the Theory of Relativity and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt”
by Judy Jackson

His mug’s on mugs,
Bears wear his hair;
Albert turns up everywhere.

His famed equation greets the eyes
From every form of merchandise;
T-shirts and ties he doth adorn.
Is there Albert Einstein porn?

Tots and geezers recognize him;
Every market sector buys him.
The world, it seems, will never weary
Of him and his relativity theory.

Year after year, folks take a likin’
To Einstein as a cultural icon.
Font of a vast commercial venture, he
Made Time magazine’s “Man of the Century.”

Who’d have thought a patent clerk
Would rise above that line of work
To symbolize for humankind
The greatness of the human mind?

That hair, that tongue, that life, that brain–
Remind us of all we might attain.
Would Albert E. have found it rich
To have become the king of kitsch?

Take that, Andy Warhol! (#8 on the list, with a measly $9 million in earnings.)

Glennda Chui

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Materials scientist will take the helm at DESY

October 30, 2008 | 7:13 pm

Helmut Dosch, new director-general of DESY

DESY, the German national research center in Hamburg, announced today that Helmut Dosch has been appointed to replace retiring director Albrecht Wagner.

Dosch is a materials scientist; Wagner is a particle physicist. So the change would seem to reflect a recent global shift in the field.  Labs have been shutting down their particle-physics experiments in favor of collaborating on the next big thing, the Large Hadron Collider on the Swiss-French border. At the same time, many are building or expanding programs in photon science, which uses particle accelerators to generate intense beams of X-ray light. That light can be used to examine all sorts of things, from the proteins that make our bodies function to killer bacteria and exotic materials. You can think of them as super-microscopes, as handy an all-purpose tool as the Swiss Army knife.

DESY

DESY is no exception to the general trend. Last year it closed its HERA accelerator, which in 15 years  of operation produced a suite of remarkable results; see this story in symmetry. Meanwhile, it’s coordinating the construction of the accelerator for XFEL, the European X-ray laser project, which is designed to allow scientists to take stop-motion films of atoms in action, and it’s running three more photon-science projects.

However, Wagner says the change in leadership at DESY is not as jarring as it might seem.

I caught him this morning at a seminar held every three years by ICFA, the International Committee on Future Accelerators, which Wagner chairs. This time around it’s at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

Albrecht Wagner

“I don’t really see it as a dramatic shift, which people sometimes seem to associate with a director who comes from a different field,” Wagner said. “What I can say, having talked with Helmut Dosch very extensively, is that he shares the overall view of what the strength of DESY is, and therefore how DESY should continue.  It’s really built on three pillars–namely the accelerators, which are the core business of DESY, and science in particle physics and with X-rays, from materials science to biology.”

Like most particle physics labs around the world, DESY is deeply involved in the LHC, which just began operation at CERN (although a mishap promptly shut it down again until next spring or summer.)  And after developing key technology for the proposed International Linear Collider, it’s now the biggest test bed for that technology.

Dosch, who will take over as director on March 1, is director of the Max Planck Institute for Metals Research and chair for Experimental Solid State Physics at Stuttgart University. He’s known for his research on nanomaterials and solid-state interfaces.

But he’s also quite familiar with DESY. He served on the DESY Scientific Council, which advises the lab’s director, and as a member of the German Science Council helped to evaluate some of the lab’s key programs. Those programs led DESY to its major role in developing technology for the International Linear Collider and to the development of XFEL, which is scheduled to start commissioning in 2013.

The DESY leadership nudged the lab in its current direction seven or eight years ago, with the decision to close HERA. Now it’s about to submit a proposal for the next five years. When it became clear last summer that Dosch would likely be the new director, he was brought into the conversation about the lab’s future.

“He was included in all the major strategic discussions,” Wagner said. “I’m very pleased, by the way, by how the process went. I clearly see that this will be a very smooth transition.”

For his part, Dosch had this to say in a press release issued by DESY:

DESY is a brand name standing for top research worldwide. With the new accelerator facilities which are currently built in Hamburg, DESY will shed light on so far unexplored dimensions in nanospace and will continue to play a leading role in the international top league of large-scale research. Particularly, we will further strengthen the collaboration with CERN and the University of Hamburg and create a magnet for junior scientists.

Glennda Chui

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SLAC's drag strip for particles

October 30, 2008 | 12:11 pm

Photo courtesy of SLAC

As part of this week’s New Horizons in Science conference in Palo Alto, 40 science writers took a tour of SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. MSNBC’s Alan Boyle was among them, and wrote a vivid wrap-up on the lab and its work on his Cosmic Log blog:

Most atom smashers are built like racetracks, with powerful magnets bending subatomic particles into circular routes. The SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, built in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley, is something completely different: It’s basically a 2-mile-long dragstrip  that whips up electrons to shed light on the structure of matter.

SLAC’s straight-shot structure hints at the shape of atom smashers to come - such as the future International Linear Collider. And it makes for one heck of a jogging trail.

“There’s actually a race where they go down to the accelerator and back - it’s four miles,” said SLAC graduate student Chris McGuinness, who is an avid mountain climber as well as a researcher working on the next generation of laser-powered particle accelerators.

Next month’s 37th annual SLAC Run and Walk will take place outside the accelerator’s housing. But at the same time, 25 feet beneath the surface, electrons and positrons will be running their own races down SLAC’s straight track.

Glennda Chui

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Brookhaven arcade celebrates one of the world's first video games

October 27, 2008 | 12:42 pm

Brookhaven physicist Peter Takacs, who helped recreate the original game, with Tennis for Two.

On Friday, October 24, 2008, Brookhaven National Laboratory employees and visitors exercised their thumbs to celebrate the 50th anniversary of one of the world’s first video games.

Fifty years ago, before either arcades or home video games such as Pong or Pac-Man, visitors waited in line at Brookhaven Lab to play “Tennis for Two,” an electronic tennis game first introduced on October 18, 1958, at one of the Lab’s annual visitors’ days. This two-player, electronic tennis game had separate controllers connected to an analog computer and an oscilloscope screen. Players saw a side view of a tennis court and used the boxy, aluminum controllers to serve and volley the “ball,” a bright dot that leaves trails as it bounces from one side of the net to the other.

The game’s creator, William Higinbotham, was a nuclear physicist who had worked on the Manhattan Project and lobbied for nuclear nonproliferation as the first chair of the Federation of American Scientists. As head of the Brookhaven Lab’s Instrumentation Division, Higinbotham wanted to “liven up the place” for the visitors and “convey the message that our scientific endeavors have relevance for society.”

Brookhaven science writer Kendra Snyder and science-communication intern Satya Shanmugham test out Tennis for Two.

Although the original game was dismantled soon after its premiere, a group of scientists and engineers re-created it about 10 years ago for Brookhaven’s 50th anniversary celebration.

On Friday, Tennis for Two–the guts of which are contained in a computer about the size of a microwave oven–was dusted off and set up in the lobby of the Lab’s Research Support Building. Throughout the day, roaming gamers tested out the rudimentary game alongside more modern games from Atari, Nintendo, and Wii, temporarily turning the building into an arcade showcasing the evolution of one of America’s favorite pastimes.

Read more about Tennis for Two.

Kendra Snyder

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Computing in a grid or a cloud

October 24, 2008 | 11:32 am

In the past year or two, cloud computing (in which computing services are all extracted from the “cloud” of the Internet) has garnered a lot of attention in the press. We talked about its application to high-energy physics here back in May.

Meanwhile, high-energy physics has been working hard to develop grid computing, and one fruit of that development is the Worldwide Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid, which just launched on October 3, 2008.

With two relatively new models of computing floating about, many commentators have been discussing the pros and cons of each, as if it were a face-off with only one likely to be the victor in a fight for dominance, and with cloud computing being a newer concept, some even argue that cloud computing will supersede grid computing. However, an analysis by Ignacio Martín Llorente of the Distributed Systems Architecture Research Group in Madrid, argues that the two technologies are different and complementary. (Thanks to International Science Grid This Week for the link.)

He says that grids are all about interoperability, allowing a lot of different resources to be federated–that is, to come together to work effectively. A cloud, on the other hand, is principally a way to virtualize services (such as computation power or data storage), or take them away from your local place of work and put them wherever they most conveniently sit but still available to you at all times.

I’d recommend Llorente’s post to help understand this better, but we also have a few relevant resources here at symmetry about grid computing:
The Grid in 60 seconds
Meet the Grid (An introductory feature)
What is the Grid? (A conversation between some leading particle physics computer scientists)
Sciences on the Grid (Case studies of science being performed on existing grids)

David Harris

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Seven more science questions for McCain and Obama

October 23, 2008 | 4:39 pm

Presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama have responded to seven questions regarding gender and racial diversity in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). The Association of Women in Science and the Society of Women Engineers posed the questions to the candidates earlier this summer.

Questions include, “As President of the United States, how do you plan to address the need for more women in STEM?” and “As President, how do you plan to maintain and/or strengthen existing NSF programs targeted to increasing diversity in STEM education?” Many of the questions mention specific programs, laws and initiatives already aimed at addressing these issues.

The questions follow Science Debate 2008’s 14 key science questions for the candidates; see our earlier post on those.   The new questions are more socially oriented than the previous 14.  They help round out the picture of how the candidates view the state of science in the United States, and how that affects our position in the worldwide scientific community.

Calla Cofield

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Particle physics and the evolution of superconductivity

October 23, 2008 | 12:15 pm

Here’s an interesting and educational photo and graphic essay on the history and uses of superconductors. The story focuses on the use of superconductivity to improve electrical grids, IT networks, and enable Maglev trains. The story also explains the involvement of Fermilab and Stanford University in the technology’s development.

Tona Kunz

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Large Hadron Collider's ATLAS in Second Life

October 22, 2008 | 1:29 pm

A couple of years ago, a few of us were throwing around the idea of building the Large Hadron Collider in Second Life (SL), the virtual world that has been pretty popular in recent years. I was hoping that we could build a virtual collaboration of people to construct the whole LHC in SL (and try to beat the real thing to construction).

Once it was running, the idea would be to feed real data from the LHC to the SL version, and have a really detailed 3D virtual tour of the facility, which people won’t be able to get into once beams are running. Unfortunately, like so many plans, I didn’t have time and resources to really pursue it.

However, I see that a dedicated LHC fan has created the ATLAS experiment from the LHC in SL. Unfortunately, he couldn’t keep it built in place as he did it on somebody else’s land for a while and it’s a pretty intensive simulation, with 1300-1500 individual 3D elements. Perhaps one of our readers out there has some SL land they would we willing to provide to the entity known as Professor Panda (SL name Ryushimitsu Xingjian).

Of course, not everything is scientifically accurate–this is done in the spirit of fan art–but I can tell you from having been in the ATLAS cavern while it was being built, that this does a very good job of the look and feel of the real detector.

Xingjian has made a video of his construction while it was still standing. Let’s hope that it can find a permanent home and that LHC construction in SL might continue. Get in touch with me if this is a project you are interested in.

Also Wagner James Au at New World Notes, a Second Life news publication, has a lot more info on this project here.

David Harris

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Physicist parent, musician child, and a documentary about the Everetts

October 21, 2008 | 6:29 pm

Many people have observed the connections between science research and musical aptitude. Today a more specific example of a connection between physicists and musicians hit me: physicist parent (PP) with musician child (MC). Here I’m most interested in musicians who have made a significant international name in their genre, not just anybody who picks up a guitar in their garage.

Two prominent examples are:

PP: Prof. Tunstall (lecturer in physics at the University of St Andrews–if you know more about him, let me know!)
MC: KT Tunstall (broke through with her track “Black Horse and the Cherry Tree” on Jools Hollands’ show in the United Kingdom, and had that song covered by Katherine MacPhee on American Idol in the United States)

PP: Hugh Everett (creator of the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics)
MC: Mark Everett (frontman of the Eels)

Mark Everett has also produced a documentary called Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives, which airs tonight on PBS’ NOVA. Hugh revolutionised quantum physics with his dissertation and key paper but then pretty much disappeared from the academic scene and did classified work at the Pentagon.

Everett’s story is a fascinating but tragic one. It’s well worth looking into.

And if you know some more examples of PP-MC combinations, let me know in the comments.

Update: Another example from the comments:

PP: Albert Baez (developed the X-ray reflection microscope)
MC: Joan Baez (American folk singer who ought not need any introduction)

(Thanks to both Jean Deken and Blake Stacey who submitted this one. I’ll also add that mathematical physicist John Baez is Albert’s nephew/Joan’s cousin.)

I also remembered other examples but in reverse with the renowned musician parent and famous physicist child:

MP: Vincenzo Galilei (Italian lutenist)
PC: Galileo Galilei (Yep, that guy)

MP: Constantijn Huygens (Dutch composer–and lutenist–but perhaps better known for his literature)
PC: Christiaan Huygens (demonstrated the wave behavior of light)

Bonus trivia question:

Which National Book Award winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist wrote a book with a physicist father and two musician sons? What is the title of the book and what are the characters’ names?

Physicist parent, film/TV child

Peter Steinberg responded to this post with his own parallel list of famous film and TV people who have physicists for parents. Some examples: Irene Jacob, Gore Verbinski, Jon Stewart. (You can read his original to find out the other halves of these pairings. And let Peter know if you have more to add to his list.)

David Harris

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The life and times of gamma-ray bursts

October 21, 2008 | 4:49 pm

This week, a gamma-ray burst (GRB) symposium is being held in Huntsville, Alabama, hosted by the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope (FGST) Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) team. Regular readers of symmetry will have heard plenty about the FGST mission, a joint project of NASA, the US Department of Energy, and other international partners, but we have focused more on the Large Area Telescope (LAT), the primary instrument aboard FGST.

The GBM is the secondary instrument, capable of viewing the whole sky at once, and able to detect the direction of sudden gamma-ray bursts, albeit with low resolution. That information can be used to then tell the Telescope to reorient within a matter of minutes to point the LAT at the gamma-ray source for more detailed study.

In combination, these two instruments provide a fantastic new tool for understanding gamma-ray sources throughout the cosmos. Recent results from the LAT have shown its potential to uncover a whole new class of sources, gamma-ray-only pulsars, which LAT team members tell me could make up the majority of those objects currently listed as “unknown” in previous gamma-ray surveys of the sky.

One new result presented at the GRB symposium concerns the kinds of galaxies that tend to be home to gamma-ray bursts. Dauna Coulter has an excellent treatment of the topic, so hop on over to a NASA Web feature about the new results.

David Harris

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