Watch the Stars – Light the Night [buy tickets here]

When: Thursday, September 2, 2010, 7:30 p.m.
Where: The Emory Math & Science Center, 400 Dowman Dr., Atlanta, GA 30322
Proceeds to go to Light the Night – the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society

Dragon*Con [buy tickets here]

When: Friday, September 3 through Monday, September  6, 2010
Where: Atlanta Hilton, Hyatt, Marriott, AND Sheraton
NB I have yet to attend a Dragon*Con where my schedule exactly matched what I got the week before the con, so be prepared for changes!
Don’t forget to check out our fan table in the Hilton! We’ll have T-Shirts for sale!

• Title: Space Trivia!
  Description: Do you know a lot about space & astronomy? Are you good with trivia? Think you know more than our experts? Here’s where you can test your knowledge!
  Time: Fri 07:00 pm Location: 203 – Hilton (Length: 1 Hour)
• Title: Mystery of Hanny’s Voorwerp
  Description: Who’s Hanny? What’s a Voorwerp? How’s Hubble involved? See the World Release of the webcomic that explains it all & the 1st Hubble images.
  Time: Fri 10:00 pm Location: Crystal Ballroom – Hilton (Length: until we’re done )
• Title: The 2010 Parsec Awards
  Description: The Parsec Award is available for original Sci-Fi & Fantasy & Speculative Fiction within the new frontiers of Portable Media.
  Time: Sat 04:00 pm Location: Regency V – Hyatt (Length: 2.5 Hours)
• Title: Astronomy Cast Live!
  Description: Take a facts-based journey through the cosmos with Dr. Pamela Gay and Fraser Cain
  Time: Sun 01:00 pm Location: 204 – Hilton (Length: 1 Hour)
• Title: Skepticism and Education
  Description: JREF now has a Director of Educational Programs – what else is being done out there and how can skeptics help educate the next generation?
  Time: Sun 04:00 pm Location: 207 / 206 / 205 – Hilton (Length: 1 Hour)
• Title: Your Daughter Can Too
  Description: These women have successful careers in engineering & science.  They can tell you how to help your daughters do the same.
  Time: Mon 10:00 am Location: 203 – Hilton (Length: 1 Hour)

Trying to figure out that a random green blob of gas is a light echo was anything but easy. In this comic book, we try and tell the story of what it was like for the people involved and how exactly astronomy – in its not exactly Indiana Jones fashion – can be an amazing adventure. The project was written largely by a team of volunteers from CONvergence, and the art is by two amazing students here at SIUE.

Here is what we wrote over on the Galaxy Zoo Blog:

line art: Elea Braasch, color: Chris Spangler

This past Monday, at about 8pm Central (GMT -4), a Voorwerpish webcomic was delivered to Sips Comics for printing. Tuesday morning we got the page proofs, and now, one by one, they are being made into full color reality.

We could say a lot of things right now: We could tell you about playing round robin with the script, digitally passing it from person to person under the guidance of Kelly, sometimes into the wee hours of the night. We could tell you about watching the art come to life; transforming from line drawings to fully rendered pages in the hand of our artists Elea and Chris. We could tell you how many pencil tips were broken, and how many digital files grew so big our computers crawled.

We could talk a lot, but instead, let us invite you to join us for the World Premier and share with you a few images.

You’re Invited to a World Premier

• Time: 3 September, 10pm Eastern (GMT -5)
• Online: via Hanny’s Voorwerp Webcomic or via direct UStream Link
• In Person: At Dragon*Con
  Crystal Ballroom
  Hilton Atlanta
  255 Courtland Street NE
  Atlanta, GA

Come meet the artists, hear a brief talk by Bill, and generally revel in the Voorwerp’s awesomeness.

And come dressed as a Voorwerp for a chance to win a prize for best costume!

See you in Atlanta?

Pamela, Hanny, Bill, Kelly, Elea and Chris

I’d like to start this blog post by saying just one simple thing I know to be true: I am a scientist. I may spend my days writing software, teaching, and too often doing astronomy communications research, but at the end of the day I’m a PhD Astronomer trained to do research in variable stars and galaxy evolution.

That said, I’d like to say one more thing that isn’t contradictory to me: As much as I’m a scientist, I’m also a Christian.

Being both puts me in a rather horrible position in our currently divided culture. Right now, there are Christians out there eager to condemn me for knowing, based on mulitple-lines of evidence, that we live in a 13.7 billion year old universe (give or take 0.2 billion years). There are also skeptics out there actively condemning me for believing, without evidence that would hold up in any lab, that there is a God.

As a human, I don’t really like knowing that there are people out there actively hating on me because of what I know to be true and what I believe to be true don’t match what they choose to adhere to.

I wish I could put blinders on and focus on educating people about science without needing to address my philosophical detractors, but I can’t do that for one simple reason: The modern culture wars between the New Athiests and Young Earth Creationists are getting in the way of teaching science.

Here’s the problem, summarized quite nicely on Whiskey Before Breakfast (in a post that triggered what I’m writing now because he wrote something that recognized what it’s like for me at times.): There is currently a philosophy that “skepticism is a proper subset of atheism: that is, not all atheists are skeptics but all skeptics are atheists.” Since scientists, if they are good scientists (and I’d like to think I’m a good scientist) have to be scientific-method-employing skeptical thinkers, this philosophy than would profess that since all scientists are skeptical thinkers, and all skeptics are atheists, then (using set theory), all scientists must be atheists, and just as a non-skeptical scientist is a bad scientists, than a non-atheist scientist must also be a bad scientist.

This is false logic. Being a skeptic does not preclude a belief in a God. Being a skeptic simply means I have to admit that there are things I know are scientifically true and based on evidence (such as the age of the universe), and there are things that in the absence of sufficient data I may choose to believe in or not believe in (such as God).

In our classrooms, this distinction between what we scientifically know to be true (vaccines work), and what individuals choose to believe in without sufficient data (that life must exist somewhere else in the universe), has been lost in too many cases. This is harmful because it sours people to learning science.

Several years ago I had some students come to me with an exam written by another professor. This was an Astonomy 101 class for humanities majors. They had been studying the cosmology chapter of the book, and the final question on the exam – a throw away question with no right answer meant to get easy points – was, “How do you believe the universe will end?” (In similar situations I’ll ask, “Explain why you do or don’t think life on other planets might or might not exist?” *¹ ) The word believe was the word on the exam. There were no further details to the question. It didn’t constrain the students to discuss only the theories taught in class. It actually asked, “How do you believe the universe will end?” This was back in the days before dark energy, before the 1998 discovery that the universe is accelerating apart. Back then we taught that the universe could be open — expanding apart forever — or that maybe it is closed and will someday collapse in on itself. I think we all hoped for a flat universe (that would certainly have made the math a lot easier). This professor had read the students’ answers and given 0/20 points when they described instead of one of these three scenarios the second coming of Christ. With that badly worded question, and those 0/20 grades, a professor placed a wall between himself and his students, preventing them from being willing to listen to the scientific facts that describe how a universe without interference will continue to evolve. To him there was no debate, they weren’t allowed to believe in the second coming of Christ, at least not if they wanted to get a good grade. (Had I been grading, I’d have realized I had written a stupid question and tossed it out)

This is an impossible situation for a student, and not even a rational one for a scientist. Sitting here as an astronomer, I have to acknowledge we could live in a universe that hasn’t yet collapsed to the lowest energy level, and it might tear itself apart doing so someday. I have to admit, we could live in a multi-verse where our universe and another will someday merge, destroying the reality we know. Or, as a person not wearing a teacher hat, I can admit there could be a God that decides to hit the cosmic endgame button (but I won’t teach that in a science classroom). While all these things could be possible, with people believing in the possibility of each, I know based on evidence that, if left alone to continue doing what it’s doing, our universe will expand forever and suffer a rather horrific energy death. Do you see the distinction? Given evidence, and a scientific scenario, I can know a true outcome. But there is still room to believe in non-contradictory possibilities.

Had that Professor simply acknowledged that it was a poorly worded question with no right answer, those two girls could have gone on to continue enjoying astronomy. Instead, I ended up with them upset and angry in my office*^2,3 telling me that they couldn’t even look at their astronomy book without getting mad.

Negative emotions don’t exactly aid learning, and what could have been a positive learning environment was completely destroyed by equating scientifically testable hypotheses with beliefs.

Reality is complicated, and not all questions have answers provided by science. Life would be a whole lot easier if we could run an experiment to prove what is right and what is wrong; to do a chemical assay to assess good and evil. Science can’t do those things. Right now, it can’t even tell me if string theory is true. And in the absence of data, there is room for belief. I don’t have laboratory evidence of a God, but I choose to believe in one, and I will let others hold onto their beliefs as well. We also don’t know if aliens exist on other planets (although that one has a lot more hope of being solved with a telescope), and I choose to believe at least one other world in our great cosmos contains a technology loving society. What is key is I know what are beliefs, and I know what are scientifically based facts. In the realm of data, I am a skeptical thinker. But I am a human whose mind goes beyond the constraints of science to question, and to sometimes, without laboratory data, dare to believe.

I am a scientist: Give me evidence and hear me teach. Give me observations and watch me do research. But I am a human who can have beliefs, and having them doesn’t harm my ability to do science, to teach science, or to communicate science to you.

*(1) The actual wording of the question from last time I used it was “Part 1) Write out the Drake Equation and explain who values for each of the variables can be determined, Part 2) Considering the above, explain why you do or don’t think life on other planets might or might not exist?”
(2) I ended up with them in my office because I was their observational astronomy prof. This was the standard, Prof A didn’t boost my grade, so I’m going to see if Prof B raises my grade. I don’t remember if they knew before hand that I was a Christian. This is a common phenomena. I’m known as a prof who will listen, and at least once a semester someone comes in an tries to get me to go to some other prof to change a grade – this includes being ranted at about an English prof and an Engineering class.
(3) It has been assumed that I took the students’ side, and condemned my colleague to them. No, that would be unprofessional (there was no ethics violation and we all have academic freedom), and since it was a tenured professor, it could also have gotten me in a lot of trouble. I told them they should have asked for clarification during the exam, because while it was unreasonable for them to lie about what they actually believed when being asked what they believe, the fact that they didn’t demonstrate any content knowledge wasn’t useful. I start each semester now by telling my students I will ask at least one dumbly worded question each semester, because historically I know this is true. He or she who points out my dumbly worded questions earns my respect, and probably the adoration of their classmates.

Help me? (© Veronika Vasilyuk | Dreamstime.com)

I haven’t been doing a lot of writing lately. I generally just make the excuses, “I’ve been busy” or say “I don’t make money on my blog and need to focus on paid jobs.” These are just excuses though. I can always find time to write. The truth is, I just can’t find it in me to write positively about science and academia when I look around and see so many things that hurt. This has been a rough year for our community. Colleges in California and Arizona have been shutting down a few days a month here and there (euphemistically referred to as furloughing staff). In the UK, 25% of the fellowships and student grants for PhD students and PostDocs are being removed. Everywhere, universities have cut journal subscriptions, travel and seminar budgets have been zeroed, and even chalk is being cut back on. The situation in academia has gotten demoralizing to the point where somedays the only proper response seems to be crying at my keyboard. Astronomy is a field that should be inspiring to the public, but our economically downtrodden public just don’t have the money needed to live, yet alone the money needed to fund astronomy through taxes. I get it. There are too many people too close to me without jobs to not understand the problem.

Today I saw something that made me decide I needed to talk about what has been bothering me all these months. A local high school teacher came into campus to return some equipment she’d borrowed from the center I work in. As she talked to one of the other women, she blinked back tears as she said (as best as I can remember) “They cut everything. They cut all my programs. It’s all gone.” She went on to detail some of the amazing things she’d been doing. If I mention them, she’ll be identifiable, so let me just say this woman was what everyone who loves science wishes for in a science teacher. She was. And she still could be. But science is getting removed from schools.

To graduate from high school in Illinois, you are required two years of science. That’s it: two years. Some students take earth science and bio, and move on with life, never looking back. Sometimes they want to take physics, chemistry, astronomy, and so much more, and their school says “Take earth science and bio and move on with life – that’s all we’ll teach.” It costs money to teach science, and it is devalued in our national standard. While the “No Child Left Behind” program tests math and reading skills on a yearly basis through grade 8 (and at least once between grades 10-12), science is only examined three times in all 12 years of a student’s education. Since the entire nation is tested the same years, and students in bins of grades all get the same test, what reason do schools even have to teach science in years when exams aren’t being given? At all levels cuts are being made. Math too suffers. Here in Illinois, only two years of math are required to graduate. And foreign languages aren’t even required.

This is a devastating problem. Last semester I taught Physics Concepts, a class for non-science majors. Many had never had math above basic geometry. Chemistry and Physics weren’t even offered in many of their schools. These are students from small towns with high schools of under 100 students per class. With no budget due to the problem of no tax dollars (because unemployment is high and people just can’t pay taxes), these schools just can’t afford to teach math and science. But college entrance requirements don’t match what the high schools teach. Here at SIUE, I regularly have students in my classes who are as smart as the students I’ve worked with at MIT and Harvard, but in many cases their high schools simply didn’t offer the classes needed for them to get into an outstanding university.

MIT, a school whose undergrads I hold in the highest regard, suggests 1 year each of physics, chemistry and biology, math through (and including) calculus, and 2 years of a foreign language. My Alma Mater, MSU, as a public school is less demanding, but it still expects 3 years of math and prefers 4, looks for 2 years of foreign language, and 2 of science. And University of Illinois recommends 4 years of math, science and foreign language. This is what floors me, in some cases high schools in Illinois aren’t even making it possible for their students to attend the flagship state university.

Part of the reason I want to stay at SIUE is I know I can offer our students chances they wouldn’t otherwise have. I have outstanding colleagues in other departments who feel the same. We are here to be the difference we want to see in the world. I have NASA-funded programs that allow students to be part of research programs rather then still working at Starbucks, Home Depot, or Radio Shack. These students are in many cases the hardest working I’ve ever dealt with, and not once has someone complained to me that they deserved a better test grade because of how much tuition they paid or who their daddy is (Things I’ve heard at more than 1 other university). I love my students (even in the moments I want to kill them). But every day things are making it harder to function. First it was the journals. We don’t have 1 astronomy journal at SIUE, so I personally subscribe where I can, and where I can’t I beg PDFs from colleagues at what my students call “Real Universities” (do you know how much that hurts to hear from a student?) Then it was the discount chalk – dusty c*** that breaks easily and covers everything in white while not adhering to the board. Then it was zeroing of all travel budgets – even for student travel. Now it is the Illinois legislated hiring freezes. Our university has departments with no secretary, and now department chairs – PhD academics – are struggling to process payroll sheets, inventory orders, and even class evaluation forms all on top of their teaching, and research, and committee assignments and the too many other duties that are the normal, overly busy life of a chair. Departments aren’t thriving, and depression rules.

And it’s only going to get worse. The state of Illinois is $130 MILLION behind in paying their bills. This is $25,000 in debt per household in a state where the average annual household income is only $56,000 (and if you remove Chicago and its surroundings, this number drops significantly). Here is the southern half of the state, this debt is well over half the typical household’s yearly income.

There simply is no money.

For the past several months, about every 6 weeks we have gotten notice from our university president that says (total total paraphrase) “We now know we can pay salary this month, but we don’t know about next month, but if everyone tightens their belt we hope to make it.” In February, after all the students had paid their tuition, we still didn’t know if the university would be able to stay open all semester. Do you know how hard it is to have a student ask, “But what happens if SIUE shuts down? Will we have to give back our student loans? I already paid my tuition on my loan. What can I do?” I didn’t have answers, and all I could say was, “I’m sorry. Let’s hope Illinois comes through.”

And it’s simply going to get worse.

Illinois still hasn’t passed a budget for 2010-2011. A state bill was passed allowing the university to borrow money. We don’t know if the hiring freeze will end. But we know we can’t make life harder on our students: SIUE has frozen tuition and fees at their 2009-2010 level. Our students will not suffer financially for the failures of Illinois. But I worry about academics. The only way SIUE and our sister school SIUC will be able to survive is by increasing enrollment. We are also cutting faculty lines, reducing the number of non-tenure/tenure track professors (I’m not scheduled to teach in the fall, but hope something may still change), and cutting support staff. This means more students with fewer people contributing to their education. We’ll have larger classes, more multiple choice tests, and more digital homework sets. Students will still get a good education, but the one-on-one moments that matter, all those times when a prof and a student just talk in an office, all the times a real learning problem is identified by a prof going over a hand-written homework assignment, all the things that make good profs great professors are going to go away in the face of too much work and no free time.

Providing a great education is difficult with limited resources and too high a teaching load. It is only possible when faculty make personal sacrifices for the good of their students. Most of us will do that, but we are at our breaking point. We love our students. We will fight to give them a solid education. But somedays I don’t know how much longer we can go on fighting.

Today, a high school teacher fought back tears in the hallway. Her programs are gone.

Without education, there is no future. I understand her tears, and for her and all the students who are having doors closed to their future, I too simply want to cry.

An economic earthquake has shaken our state and our nation. There are some buildings still standing, but I’m afraid everyone has been hurt.

I have to admit, somewhere in the past couple months I went from traveling a lot to traveling too much. I have acquired opinions about the wheels on luggage and the distribution of electrical outlets in different hotel rooms. I have visited cities spread across 4 continents and stumbled through eight times zones to the east and twelve timezones to the west. Everywhere I’ve gone, I’ve gone with friends and we’ve worked to communicate astronomy to the world while drinking local beers and devouring local foods. IYA brought me countless experiences, a now full passport, 1000s of photos, and 20 pounds. Other than the 20 pounds (And sadly I don’t mean Great British Pounds) I wouldn’t change a thing.

Not all my trips have been good. Rio left me saddened that such a great city could decay into such poverty and disarray. Shanghai I see hope for, but today its pollution and construction chaos made the city one I will wait a while before I visit again.

Coming to Cape Town, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I know this is a growing nation with excellent universities. I know that it also has a lot of social issues: huge disparity between the haves and the have nots, lack of consistent infrastructure, high AIDs rates, and is being isolated in geography, and in bandwidth. This is a country that is still recovering from apartheid, but it is recovering.

All my concerns were unneeded. I have to say, Cape Town and its surroundings have continuously impressed me.

Landing Monday, the airport felt somewhat like landing in small town America. It was small, with aggressively friendly taxi drivers, and my rush hour taxi ride across the city carried me past some urban slums (but not ones that terrified me like the post-armageddon like slums in Rio and Shanghai). These slums were houses made from found objects – scraps of aluminum and random wood – that sadly resembled the hovels seen on some native american indian reservations, and in homeless camps in and near some major US cities. But beside these slums were mostly were just stretches of urban housing, condos, factories, shopping districts and all the other signs of middle class and upper class populations.

The city is very modern looking, with impressive shipping yards, docked cruise ships, and a safe and tourist filled water front. The dollar is of value here, and food and hotels are very affordable (Internet is not! I have spent a fortune on internet, which is charged by the megabyte, after forgetting to turn off my remote backup). The people are friendly and tolerant of stupid tourists, and I have to admit, this particular trip I seem to be demonstrating the definition of stupid tourist. The first day I was here, I was so tired that somehow I managed to get from the conference room to my hotel room with my laptop and purse, but not my computer bag. When I realized this mistake after a later dinner – somewhere around 11pm – the hotel found someone to let me search the conference room. My search was to no avail. I restlessly slept, trying to come to terms with my lost beloved tumbuk2 bag. I decided it was 9X% odds I left the bag in the room, open and showing the money in its front pocket, and it had wondered, or X% that I had left it in the conference room and it had wondered. I got up the next day, accepting the fact that it was gone, and asked some locals I know how to handle the problem. Our conference organizer, the amazing Kevin Govender, disappeared, talked to his contact with the hotel staff, and reappeared with my bag. A friendly soul had seen it and locked it away safe. Having been reunited with my bag, I promptly forgot that I shouldn’t put my iPhone in the pockets of one specific pair of black trousers I own because it will fall out. My last iPhone explored both Hawaii and NY by taxi thanks to those pants, and it has landed in my sofa cushions more times than I care to think about. Nonetheless, in a moment of jet lagged exhaustion, the phone went in my pocket, we both went into a taxi, and only one of us got out. Since I just got in a taxi with a bunch of others at the curb, we have no idea what taxi company it was. The front desk of the hotel, however, has tried really hard to figure out who we should call, and has left all sorts of messages. I have to admit, I’ve lost hope on the phone. No matter – this happens – Nonetheless, I’m impressed at the honest effort the hotel has given this exhausted to the point of stupidity American. I’ve stayed in hotels more nights than I’ve stayed at home in recent months, and this level of service is rare and deeply appreciated.

Beyond the friendly humans and the overall city impressions, I have to say the geography is amazing. Hotels.com somehow managed to get me in a corner hotel room for the same price as a tiny single at the conference rate. Out my windows I have a view that spans from the ocean to the fabulous hills.It is amazing to wake each day to see cargo ships and cruise ships coming into the harbors.

Yesterday, the conference released the whole lot of us to go out and explore, and along with several new and old friends, I went on a wine vineyard (and chocolate and cheese) tour of the area. It was a fabulous day and of being in awe of geography, observing goats (a source of cheese), and drinking samples of over a dozen wines and champagnes. Our night wound down, watching the mountains fade away as the stars – Orion upside down – winked into sight behind the dramatic mountains. With the coming darkness, we went to a tourist trap for dinner, and enjoyed a buffet of African foods from across the continent and the performance of dancers doing local tribal songs and dances. (It was pointed out that the dances we were seeing shared a lot of elements with hula dance. I wonder if anthropologists can track native dance styles as a way of looking at cultural migrations). It was a good night. This weekend I’ll be going up to Sutherland to see SALT. My hope is too see an animal other than a bird that I’ve never seen before.

If you are looking for a fabulous place to visit and get offline, come to Cape Town. (And if you’re looking for a semester abroad, Cape Town Uni. is solid, so add it to your list of possibilities!)

Looking around the room, I see PhD astronomers, journalists, educators, amateur astronomers, and business managers, all involved in making people look up and learn. That we are all here – let to travel by our departments and funded through our grants and institutions – is a demonstration that times are changing and what we are doing is valued at some level.

When I was a graduate student, in the 6.5 years I was in Texas, two different astronomy education researchers come and give colloquium talks. On a third occasion, three of us in the department gave a talk. In all three instances, people came out of the woodwork (or at least up from the physics department) to heckle the speakers, making it clear they didn’t think statistical results from education research could be valid because they always knew some example that was an exception to the average. This was horrible logic. According to their logic, I can say that the average 1st grader (6 year old) can’t do algebra based on research, but because I know one first graders who can do algebra, all my research is invalid. This is horrible logic! But, when your goal is to invalidate someone, logic doesn’t have to be good, it just has to be good enough to caste doubt in an audience. And that’s what these people wanted to do – discredit and side line astronomy education research (heck, even Sagan was mocked for spending time communication astronomy).

This sidelining of education and communication conveys a horrible message: It tells young scientists with a passion and an ability to communicate and/or teach that they are wasting their time when they do anything other than research on astronomical objects. I’ve heard it said, those who can’t do research teach.

The only way I know to change this attitude is to raise the professionalism of our field. We need to demonstrate that communicating astronomy online isn’t just playing online. We need to demonstrate that teaching based on educational theory and prepared interactive class plans actually has a better impact than the traditional lecture from notes (I remember being told to keep all my college notes because they would form the core of my future lecture teaching notes). At the end of the day, we as a field of astronomy educators and communicators have to demonstrate that what we learn from our work matters and that we are changing lives.

This is what I do. When I first started podcasting back in 2005, I dealt with a lot of “Your wasting your time” comments. And I heard a lot of “Having fun playing online?” comments. Since then, I’ve been working one paper at a time to show that while yes, I am playing online, what I’m doing matters. And I’m just one of many people working to do this. In recent years, two new journals, the Astronomy Education Review journal, and the Communicating Astronomy to the Public journal, have been created for the group of us working to demonstrate the results of our work. Yes, I’m a trained variable star astronomer and galaxy researcher (and I’ve promised myself to publish papers on each this year to clean out my data backload). But while I’m a astronomy object researcher, I’m also working to become an astronomy communications researcher.

As the population of us doing this work has been growing and gaining momentum, we’ve been taking on larger and larger projects, from becoming the voices for space missions (or twitter feeds), to recruiting and training citizen scientists, to all the things in Caroline Odman’s talk (which will go online soon and get linked to here), we are doing more and studying the impact of everything we do as we go.

In someways, the International Year of Astronomy was our two new fields’ opportunity to shine. We were given a chance to go out and play with the entire planet and make a difference, and this week we are reporting back about our successes, and we are planning how to make the best of what we’ve done last beyond 2010.

I have to admit, I have been too jet lagged to keep up with the numbers and graphs that have gone flying past. All the talks from this meeting will go online (including my jet lagged talk). Rather then do a poor job summarizing things here, I’d encourage you to look at the twitter messages under hash tag #CAP2010 and watch for the results to be posted. Read the journals. Get things first hand.

I know a lot of science communicators – journalists, amateur observers, spacetweeps, teachers, and others – read this blog. You too are part of changing this field. The journals I named above to not require a PhD to publish results. As we build our new field, I would challenge all of you to evaluate what you do, track outcomes, learn what triggers people going from passively paying attention to astronomy that randomly appears in front of them (go go guerrilla sidewalk astronomers) to actively seeking astronomy content (and maybe even becoming sidewalk astronomers themselves).

Be part of the dialogue. Together, we are astronomers.

But tonight I gave a talk that began with the reading of Bible verses I selected, read from the pulpit in Asbury Seminaries Chapel. My brief talk was meant to contextualize our place as humans in the cosmos. Aiming for just 15 minutes, it is quite short, after after receiving a few requests via twitter, I’m going to post it here.

Please, please, don’t flame. Please.

“]

Hubble Ultra Deep Field [credit: NASA / STScI

Genesis 1:1-5
1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was [a] formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. 3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. 4 God saw that the light was good, and He separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.

John 1:1-5
1In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning. 3Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. 4In him was life, and that life was the light of men. 5The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood[a] it.

Colossians 1: 16-17
16 For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. 17He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.

Romans 1:20
20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.

Good Evening. I have to admit this was perhaps the hardest 1500 words or so I have ever prepared. I am a Christian, and I am a scientist, and most days I find myself dancing a careful dance where I try to avoid verbal bullets from atheist scientists and Christian young earthers. I have learned how to speak safely and when to speak unsafely to scientists, but this is my first time speaking before Theologians. I don’t know how far out of your comfort zone astronomy may take some of you. No matter what ideas you come to this conference with, I’d ask you to open your mind to learn new ideas, and in the breadth and magnificence of this universe which cosmology allows us to understand, find God in what is clearly seen.

Here on the surface of the Earth it is easy to see our universe as small and understood. Each year the seasons tick past in explainable ways, and 400 years after Kepler, the motion of the planets is just something we take for granted. Solar eclipses no longer make people tremble as the Asseryians trembled before the 763BC eclipse of Amos 8:9. Instead eclipses are just a roughly twice a year things that thousands of people turn into vacations.

From the surface of the Earth, it is easy to feel safe, and in control because we have the knowledge to understand the universe.

We have science to explain the supernovae, the comets, the ever twinkle and gleam in the sky.

But we are small, and life is fragile in this vast universe, and there are more things in heaven and earth waiting to be discovered than are dreamt of in our sciences.

Our human minds struggles to grasp at the scale of our universe. Any number over a million is simply large, and in discussing the cosmos, we discuss the billions and billions of galaxies, the billions and billions of stars, and distances so vaste that light has not yet had time to travel from most distant galaxies we see in the north to the most distant galaxies we see in our Southern skies.

“]

Saturn with Earth tucked in the Rings (left side, small blue dot) [credit: NASA / Cassini

Carl Sagan referred to the earth as Pale Blue Dot and in this image taken by the Cassini space probe, we can see the distant Earth in its smallness. Sagan wrote of our world, “Look again at that dot. That’s here, that’s home, that’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, … every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ’superstar,’ every ’supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”

Not only do we struggle to grasp at our smallness, but we also struggle to understand our place in time.

Our planet is a transitory thing. Formed roughly 4.5 billion years ago, it will be able to support life for only another 50 million years before the Sun’s slow increase in temperature makes life intolerable on Earth. In roughly 5 billion years our Earth will be destroyed entirely as our Sun bloats into a red giant and either consumes the planet or simply broils it with intense solar winds. We live in the twilight years of our world, and time is ticking.

But our planet is just part of a cycle.

We live on a rocky world orbiting a star that is rich in heavy elements. If you shine sunlight through the most amazing of prisms to make a rainbow, you will be able to single out dark stripes mixed in the light, many of which arise from Iron, Titanium, and other metallic atoms in the sun’s atmosphere.

To get at this richness of atomic diversity, our universe had to be created, and generations of stars had to live and die, all before our own Sun could be born.

When our universe formed, 13.7 billion years ago, it was pure energy – pure light. Within the first fractions of a second, that energy began to solidify into particles. Mass and Energy are just two faces of the same thing, and as the universe cooled, the mass divided from the light. At first there was matter and anti-matter, but through the miracle of asymmetry, for every 1 billion anti-matter particles there was a billion and 1 matter particles. The particles collided – they destroyed one another, and they left behind matter. And that matter, at that moment, and for almost the next 3 minutes, was as hot and as dense as the center of a star and nuclear fusion was able to take place. Protons combined. Neutrons were created. Hydrogen nuclei grew into deuterium, which in turn fused to helium and trace amounts of lithium and beryllium. Our theories tell us the ratios of these reactions, and when we look out at the oldest stars, we find the correct fractions fossilized in the elemental abundances of these ancient stars’ light. This is just one of many lines of evidence proving the big bang.

After the first 3 minutes, nuclear reactions shut off, but the universe was still too hot for neutral atoms to form. Everything was an opaque mash of nuclei and electrons and light, colliding. It stayed too hot, and it stayed opaque for nearly 300,000 years, but then one day it cooled enough that the electrons could bond with the atomic nuclei, and when that happened the light was released. Today we see this escaping light as the cosmic microwave background.

The cosmic microwave background demarks the point beyond which we can never observe. It is like the barrier beyond which your headlamp just can’t reach when scuba diving, or that place in the fog your candle cannot illuminate because it’s just to far away. Our universe, within this shell, is 93 billion light years across, but what we can see is likely no more than a few percent of the whole. But it is all the universe we will ever know.

And after the light separated from the atoms, our universe slowly cooled and expanded some more, but now structures began to form. It was only about 30 million years after the big bang that we believe the first stars lit up the then dark universe. The first stars lit up, the largest of them living and dying in the briefed million or so years. When these first stars died, they rained heavy elements on the gas and dust that was preparing to form future generations.

That stars could form is another miracle of our universe. There is no reason we can identify that the density had to be just right for stars. It could have been denser – and everything could have collapsed straight into black holes. It could have been less dense, and no stars would ever have formed. But it was neither of these things. The universe was just right to support stars, and those stars embedded in the darkness are what allowed life here to exist today.

We live on just one small pale blue dot orbiting a metal rich star. We exist because matter and anti matter were formed in unequal parts. We exist because the universe’s density was just right. We exist, because other stars formed, created heavy elements, and died, distributing the elements back into space to form our world and others.

And most amazingly of all, we live in a universe that is at once something we can learn to understand and something that is beyond our imagining.

Every day we are finding new things that defy our theories and force us to expand our ideas – We now know 26% of the universe is made of dark matter – a material like nothing experienced here on earth – and 70% of the universe is contained in dark energy – something we know so little about all we can really do is say we have a name for this rather large blank are in our scientific understanding. And every day we discover new planets in places we never imaged. New galaxies. New types of objects – all things we would have never imagined in our wildest science fiction.

We have been placed in a wonderful universe that is like a palace we have been allowed to explore. The rooms are many, and we can each find our own corner to ask our own questions concerning this creation.

But living in a universe with an amazing underlying physics that guides its evolution, does not preclude free will, or the occasional needed intervention. While A may lead to B it does necassarily dictate 200 years from now we will have D, E, and F occur. We live in a universe not dictated my certain outcomes, but rather one guided by probabilities, and in each possibility there is a chance for the future to be changed, either through the batting of a butterflys wing, through our own decisions, or through the intervention of a greater power – Our God – even if it is just a small voice in the dark reminding us that even in science we should have faith and believe while we look up and explore this amazing universe we live within.

Please don’t flame. Posting this was hard, but it was something people asked to read.

5:10pm A presentation will be by Dr Laurie Leshin, Deputy Associate administrator, Exploration Systems Mission Directorate. Title : “New Oppurtunities in the President’s FY2011 Budget”

5:12pm Speaker is not dressed in back. While there are people downstairs pre-lecture drinking in the bar, I don’t think it will be too awful. I fear for man (or at least manned space exploration) but I trust in science (or at least Obama’s support of science and science ed)

5:14pm This liveblog is made possible by my Verizon 3G cell card and the power strip under the mixing board (and the help of the friendly person manning the mixing board).

5:19pm They are now micing people up and the room is filling.

5:24pm New slide show on screen “Planetary Science Division Program Status” by James L Green, Director, Planetary Science Division

5:33pm Getting started with about 950 people in the room.

5:34pm Jim Green speaking first, then Laurie (introducer had to double check titles since everyone at NASA is moving around HQ)

5:35 Many changes in NASA HQ. Some friendly faces retiring: Marilyn Lindstrom I’ll miss, along with Karen McBride, Tom Morgan and Dave Lindstrom. Coming in are Kristen Erickson, Jeff Grossman, Amy Kaminski, Tiffany Nail, and Andrea Razzaghi. There are likely to be more hires in future.

5:38pm Three New Frontiers announced: MoonRIse (SPA Basin Sample Return), OSIRIS-Rex (Asteroid Sample return), SAGE (Venus Lander) Go forth and steal rocks!

5:42pm Top Line budget: Earth Science +29%!

5:45pm Total SMD Budget Increased (FY11-10) by $512M. New Initiatives: New Climate initiative at $380M & Planetary Science growing $145M! This is not costing other directorate’s budgets

5:46 Bugets

Approved Cassini “Solctice” mission through 2017

• NEO identification and characterization not at $16M/yr – major increase in funding
• Cost sharing arrangement with DOE to restart Pu-238 production
• Continues to operate 11 planetary missions including LRO
• Fully funds: Juno, GRAIL, MSL, LADEE, and MAVEN
• Develops Advanced Sterling Radioactive Generators for 2014-2015 launch readiness
• Continues funding for Europa Jupiter mission

5:54pm Congress upset that NASA keeps money unspent to long. It turns out that while grants are 5% of NASA expenditures, 50% of these expenditures are billed by universities months and months after work actually happened. (will need to check with my grants office…)

5:56 Upcoming highlights:

• Nov 4, 10 EPOXI  at HArtley 2
• Mar 18, 11 MESSENGER orbit insertion
• July Juno launch Oct MSL Launch
• Aug 2012 MSL Lands on Mars

5:59pm Dr Laurie Leshin, Deputy Associate administrator, Exploration Systems Mission Directorate now on podium

6:00pm You are here now: NASA has 4 directorates ARMD (Aeronautics Research), SMD (science), SOMD (Space Operations), ESMD (Explorations Systems. This talk focuses on ESMD

6:01pm The Presidents FY 2011 Budget Request takes a new approach to goals – “focusing on capabilities that will allow us to reach multiple destinations including the Moon, Asteroids, Lagrange points, and more.”

6:03pm “PResident’s Budget challenges NASA to embark on a new human space exploration program that invests near term in obtaining key knowledge about future destinations and demonstrating critical enabling technologis for human space flight and exploration” It requires NASA to show tech works, show returns are worth it, and then build tech for people.

6:06pm New efforts to expand links to commercial space flight are a different way to same manned-spaceflight goal. Yes, Constellation is cancelled, but that is not the end of manned spaceflight. Just the end of a program. The people behind Constellation made the best of an underfunded situation; the worked hard and did well with what they had. But Obama wants to take a different path.

6:10pm Just as NASA helped facilitate development of commercial cargo rockets (Go SpaceX – your Falcon 9 is pictured), NASA will now help commercial space craft get crew (=people) to ISS. Commercial groups build, NASA procures.

6:11pm by investing in new technology (and demonstrating new technology) we can bring down costs/masses/worry concerned with future missions. This is tied in Flagship Technology Demonstrations. “Mars destination is a driving case for high leverage demonstration and technology”

6:16pm Exploration Precursor Robotic Missions “rovide venue for flight validation” While Mars is a goal, practicing on the Moon is in the “slides”. Partnerships span gov’t+commercial+international – everyone welcome

6:18pm While LRO + LCROSS had no followup projects in old budget, the new budget allows this. These missions proved that precursor missions are needed in so many ways. The example shown is how LRO’s CRaTER (cosmic ray detector) demonstrated that the Moon reflects Galactic Cosmic Rays – a form of radiation we’ll need to account for when humans land

6:24pm Asked about termination costs of Constellation. These are still being determined. So far $9B spent, but cost to actually get to Moon was going to be much much more.

6:35pm Several people asking questions that point out that we’ve gone from NASA having a series of very specific goals and very specific timelines to general goals and no timelines. There is concern and a desire for specificity. Leshin asks for patience. Honestly, I’m ok with NASA hitting the reset button and starting from scratch to define their future in a way we will believe

Gravity Probe B orbits earth, captured in its gravity well

Sometimes analogies just feel right. For instance, “as hard to find as a needle in a hay stack” is often a good way to describe trying to find a needed quote in a half-remembered book. The mental image and the actual task just fit. In physics, I sometimes feel like the hardest part is finding the perfect analogy that will make it possible for everyone in the class to visualize the concept I’m trying to explain. In the case of gravity, Einstein kindly provided the needed analogy. He said the way we need to think of gravity is as a divot in the 4-dimensional space-time reality, where orbiting objects simply roll around the inside of the well, like bicylcists racing around the sides of a velodrome. Ok, so maybe that analogy is a bit more challenging to follow. Nonetheless, in all its complexity this analogy points us toward one idea: If space were a surface instead of volume, the surface would curve down toward anything with mass, and it would curve more for high mass objects than low mass objects (and black holes may just tear a hole in that surface).

In this visualization of the universe, objects’ masses define the shape of space, and acceleration of a small object (like a space craft) toward and deceleration away from a larger object (like a planet) is just a side effect of the small object rolling “downhill” into a gravity well and “uphill” out of the gravity well.

This image of space leads somewhat naturally to a series of complex ideas. For instance, if you suddenly remove a mass from or change a mass on the space-time surface, you can imagine the surface rebounding, with waves moving across the surface as a result of this sudden rebound. We believe this is part of the reality of gravitational waves, which have there definition in much more complicated mathematics. Frame dragging, as well, can be imagined as a rotating body catching at space, a swirling it about itself, forcing a beam of light trying to return to its origins to fly farther to go in one direction than the other. You can think of this like a person trying to run around an in-motion merry-go-round; race in the direction of motion and you are partially carried to your point of origins, but if you go against the flow of carousel horses you’ll have to go an added distance as the the merry-go-round tries to carry you the wrong way from where you want to go.

The next consequence is light gets reddened as it climbs out of the gravity well. You can explain this as losing energy (getting redder) as the light fights its way out against gravity, or if you want to think geometrically, this is just like a person climbing up a hill covers a larger distance, using more energy on foot, if they walk 1 mile as the crows flied than that 1 mile the crow flew. Light changes colour because it transverses hills.

From gravity waves, to frame dragging, and all the way out to the reddening of light rising out of a gravity well, this geometric idea of space is the one my brain understands, and it is the one that Einstein geometrically built for us.

This plays against the ideal of gravitons carrying the news “This way lies a mass, come be attracted” as they fly out from the stars and the planets reminding everything to orbit politely.

Now I have to admit, I don’t read theoretical gravity papers for fun on a regular basis. Life is short, and the numbers of papers coming out each week is in the hundreds. I may have missed something, but one thing I haven’t seen yet is a way that allows one to understand gravity as geometry while still invoking gravitons as the force communicators. It is my hope that either this happens or someone finds a way to detect gravitons soon. Gravitons are massless and so weak that right now we just don’t have a way to detect them. This means we can’t prove they are there. We also can’t mathematically build a theory that unites Quantum Mechanics – the science behind a lot of particle physics – with gravity. As an observational astronomer, I have to admit, I have a certain hunger for someone to explain to me why gravity can’t be the shape of space and time while everything else is particle based.

Hmmm, maybe I should hunt a theorist and ply them with chocolate. Or coffee. Or something stronger.

But for now I split my head between two ideas – particles and geometry – while I dream of a unifying analogy.

All packed up

Okay, so this is a bit off topic, but … There are a series of questions I keep getting, “How do you stay connected while you travel?” “What is your recording set up?” “What books do you…?” “How do you…?” So, I’m going to (in a desperate attempt to force myself to blog better) work on launching “Monday Must Haves” posts centered on answering these questions.

I travel a lot. In 2009 it was over 100,000 miles (sadly not all on one airline), and in 2008 it was about 50,000 miles (also, not all on the the same airline). With my time split between short 2-day dashes somewhere random in America, and longer trips to more distant destinations, I’ve developed a survival schema that keeps me sane (or at least functional) when my brain is no longer sure where I am.

Luggage

I have gone through 4 sets of luggage in as many years. Most bags only made it a few trips before a wheel broke or worse. With many bad bags behind me, I now swear by SwissGear luggage (found at Target or on Amazon) When it comes to rock solid construction and ability to stand up in the face of cobblestone sidewalks, these bags take a licking and don’t spill your underwear on the sidewalk.

That said, their are trips when tiny matters. For those trips I turn to Travelon.

I own 2 bags from each of these companies, and here is how I use them.

The Quick Trip: For a trip of 4 days or less (if you pack like I do), a Travelon underseat bag can be your best friend. Pros: These little bags actually do fit under the seat! I was flying to Atlanta on a tiny American Eagle flight – I think I was on an ERJ-145 or similar – and all the standard wheelie bags were taken away from their owners and put under the aircraft while I got to keep my bag!  It did fit nicely under my seat! Cons: They don’t always fit in the overhead! Fully packed, they are a bit too potbellied. Here are the two I have and why I love each:

• Travelon Ladies Wheeled Carry-On: This bag is really easy to pack, is very stylish (in my nerd opinion), is curved and quilted in a way that makes it a great pillow when you spend the night in O’Hare, and it has a really comfortable handle for carrying it up and down stairs when public transit fails to have escalators and ramps. At the emotional level, its polka dots cloth lining just makes me happy. The only thing I hate about this bag is that it is more fragile than I’d like. An evil Italian on an air Iberia flight was able to tear off one side of one of the handles while forcing (with great force) his bag into the overhead bin beside mine.
• Boeing-branded under seat Carry-On: This is not a girly bag. It is not pretty. It is not stylish. It just behaves well in airports (unless you need it to be a pillow). It is designed with a built in cooler for food, with a pull out cup holder for a travel mug or water bottle, and the bag has an expandable pocket in the back perfect for shoving a wrap from Au bon Pain or that book you can’t be bothered to put away. One issue: The bag doesn’t open all the way up, so getting things in and out can be a pain.

A long(er) Trip: For anything requiring a more substantial bag I reach for my SwissGear. I have two bags again, this time picked for their sizes and nothing else. Both bags are part of the SwissGear Zurich series. The smaller of the two is a Carry-On, Rolling, 20″ laptop friendly bag. The second is a Carry-On, Rolling, 20″ laptop friendly bag The smaller bag is just (barely) big enough for a 1 week trip with an extra pair of shoes and formal and play attire. The smaller bag can fit inside the larger bag (for those times you are coming or going with more (or less) than you started with). While the 20″ has a laptop compartment as its bonus feature, the larger bag offers an area for suits on hangers on the inside flap. While I would never use hangers, this section keeps my suits perfectly protected and flat. As near as I can tell, you can do these bags no harm. I’ve overpacked them. I’ve let them get rained and snowed on. They have experienced cobblestone, and they have experienced Denver and Heathrow 5 luggage handling. They are still perfect.

Luggage Accessories for all trips
Let’s face it, there are some things that just make travel easier.

• Toiletry Containment:Once upon a time I thought it was sufficient to use the little bag for toiletries that comes comes with every bag I’ve ever bought, and once upon a time I simply purchased travel size this, that and the other thing. Then I started traveling so much that I was rotating between bags and never really unpacking. At a certain point, you just want to grab your toiletries and go, and at a certain point travel sized shampoos are no longer an option. To combat the little bottle blues, I bought a set of Humangear GoToob Silicon Travel Bottles. They come with rotating rings that can be used to high-light what is in the container, and they are easy to squeeze. No more shaking the bottle to get the shampoo out! I filled these bottles with my shampoo, conditioner, soap, and lotion, and tossed them in clear zipper bag from Walgreens. These bottles, a baby toothpaste, fancy face cream (that only comes tiny), toothbrush, and deodorant fit perfectly in this TSA sized bag.
• Makeup Containment: You’re on your own. I have fantasies of an all in one kit, like this one from Lancome, but in reality I throw 4 random small mismatched cosmetic containers into random places in my bag.
• Luggage Tags No One Else Has: All bags look alike. Really. No matter how unique you think your bag is, someone else has it too. So… I bought bright pink and red poppy luggage tags that I found on a bottom shelf of an eclectic little store that I won’t tell you where is. I recommend finding your own little place to purchase from. Then do something to your luggage. The next step for me was wrapping my luggage handle in a 2dollar polyester scarf of the bright (but pleasant) pink variety. Now, while I’m not exactly a pink kind of girl, I’ve never struggled to spot my luggage.
• Travelon Bag Bungee Black If you’re like me, you stack your carryon / computer bag on your roller bag while rolling from A to B. Sometimes you may try to add a jacket to this pile. Or shopping bags. Or maybe even the kitchen sink. After having a bad moment with an escaping winter jacket, I invested in a Travelon bag bungee, and life is much safer for me, my belongings, and anyone following too close on the jetway.

Computer friendly Carry-On Bags and Toys

Never one to only travel one way, I again have two options: netbook trips and notebook trips. In either case, I always carry my handy-dandy Verizon dongle for instant online access from (almost) anywhere.

Fossil probably didn't know they made a laptop bag

Traveling Tiny: There are times when the only thing I have to do on a trip is live blog and work on email. My back loves these trips. For these glorious moments I take my handy dandy ASUS Eee PC 1000HE, throw it in my Fossil Sutter Flap bag, and I’m ready to go. This tiny bag can hold my Eee PC, its power cord, a tiny camera, my iPhone, a thin book, my deflated travel pillow and mask, my passport, credit cards, and a few random things like chapstick and a pen. The best part is, it doesn’t look like I’m carrying a laptop! As someone more likely to be in a social situation with a computer than a, well, anything normal, its kind of nice to not always look as nerdy as I am. Pro: It is all so nice and tiny! Con: My international power adaptor doesn’t fit, nor does my travel power strip. (more on those below)

Traveling with my WHOLE office: I work with people all over the world, and when I settle in to work hard I don’t want to be without the comforts of home, so I’ve been known to take it all with me. Making this possible is my Timbuk2 medium-sized custom laptop bag. This is the second of these bags I’ve had, and the first one is still in perfect condition after being used almost daily for 4 years. I simply got sick of the bright colors (red, orange, and yellow – why did I do that?!?) and bought a second one that was a bit more mellow (see pcit above). Into this bag I toss my 15″ MacBook Pro along with:

• Belkin Mini Surge Protector Dual USB Charger: Charge everything at once, cords or USB, and let’s me be ready for the hotel room with only 1 outlet.
• Kensington All-in-One Travel Plug Adapter: This is an anything to anything adaptor that works anywhere in the world. Loan it to visiting foreign friends or keep yourself powered abroad.
• Random Bits: An 8MB USB stick, an 8MB SD card, an SD to USB adaptor, a tiny USB hub, and an iPhone cable
• Neoprene Cable Pouch: Filled with all the above! It fits, although the zipper hates me.
• A camera & charger (you’re on your own here). I have both a Casio Exilm and a Panasonic Lumix (two because I realized I left my camera at home while traveling in Europe). I’d like to get a Canon PowerShot SX20IS, but that camera is a bit bigger and a large bit more expensive than I can justify (when “want” meets “logic”, cool cameras stay in someone else’s camera bag.
• Goldtouch ergonomic keyboard and a Logitech Marble Mouse: I told you I sometimes take my whole office with me! I’m fighting RSI, and this is how I fight it. (Well, this and MacSpeech)
• Plantronics Folding Headset: These aren’t as nice as the Sennheiser HeadsetI live in at home, but they work with Skype and Dragon Naturally Speaking / MacSpeech.
• A small wristlet (because I’m a girl) that can fit a flip wallet and my passport along with some cash, my iPhone, and a pen. I admit it, I like Coach products. I can be a girlie girl. The wristlet is nice because it is easy to pull in and out of the bag, and when the bag does get locked in an office or a hotel room, I’m left with something small, and hard for a pick pocket to reach into because, well, it’s attached to my wrist.

Apps for Airports, Trains, & Travel

Travel (and other needed) Software

I am an iPhone user, and my iPhone makes my travel a little more sane. Here are the apps that keeping me going from gate to gate:

• Xpense Tracker: An easy way to log how much you actually spent while away. (In my case, it allows me to answer the age old question of how much did my Illinois State per diem not pay for). Best Feature: You can take photo’s of receipts. Photos won’t work for all accounting departments, but…
• Trip Deck: This travel software helps you find gates, baggage carrousels, check on delayed flights, and it even helps you find alternate flights so that when you look sadly at the gate keeper you can ask “Can you please rebook me on flight X” rather then simply asking “Can you get me there today?.” This software can be tied to a TripIt account (be my friend?) and allows you to input all your travel plans just by emailing your flight plans from your airline or online service to TripIt (works with flights, hotels, and rental cars). This software has saved me from digging through emails for confirmation numbers while standing in line, and that alone makes it worth it. (Don’t want to pay for TripDeck? Check out FlightTrack)
• Best Camera: Take pictures with your phone? Want to tweak them before you Twitter them? Best Camera does what you need. It links directly to social media sites like Twitter and Facebook.
• Stanza: I love real books, but sometimes they are impractical. (Like those trips when I’m already carrying my whole office with me and have lots of walking to do). For times when digital is my only option, I click on Stanza. Get both new titles for a cost, and thousands of older (or independent) books for free. (They have the Guttenburg Project books all online to download for free!) I also use the free Classics app, but it has limited titles.
• Wordpress: Sometimes you just gotta blog while standing on a crowded train.
• Twitterific (for simple needs) and TweetDeck (for lists and tracking too many things at once): May the twitter be with you. There are many options. These are ones I use.

So this is how I live: All packaged up in products from Amazon (this is what happens when you travel too much to go to the mall. I’ve included links to all the products I live by, and if you decide to live by them too, can you use the links here? They are tied to an Amazon Associates account and all proceeds will help pay for this blogs webhosting and the occasional latte in an airport.

Safe Travels

Standard Disclaimer: I bought all of these purchasers after doing my own research. I’ve used them and no one has asked me for this review. I’m simply trying to save you the problem solving I’ve faced. The links above are Amazon links, and all proceeds for anything you buy will be used to offset the cost of airport food.

Earlier this evening I got an IM from a friend alerting me that this afternoon there had been a shooting at the University of Alabama Huntsville. Details are sketchy, but it looks like a faculty member who was recently denied tenure went into the biology faculty meeting and shot 6 people, killing 3 of the 6.

On twitter I’ve seen people express mystification at how this could happen.

Like I said a few years ago, about another school shooting, what really surprises me is how rarely it happens.

Academia as a system is deeply flawed in a lot of ways. One of the ways it is flawed is how the tenure system gets employed. For those of you who don’t know what it means to have tenure, it means you are a God. You can never again be fired without really significant cause (felony criminal charges, embezzling from a grant, cheating on your wife with an undergrad who gets pregnant, etc). Faculty with tenure often abuse their power, assigning junior faculty the largest classes, the worst committee tasks, and the hardest/most time consuming service assignments (like running outreach events). These young faculty, under the weight of these assignments, are required to spend 3 to 6 years demonstrating they are excellent researchers, excellent teachers, and solid community members. People do crack. But rather than take the time off to take care of themselves, they push on, because if only they can get tenure, they will never have to worry about finding a job ever again.

And we are all taught early on that we are failures if we don’t get tenure.

I don’t have tenure. (But then, I haven’t really looked for it)

A few years ago I was attending a meeting of the American Association of Physics Teachers. I was giving workshops on doing real science in the classroom, and giving talks on other research I’d done. I was trying to liveblog what I could in the midst of all this. All the presentations went well, the blogging went well, but I spent each night of the conference in my room in tears. Over and over the same thing happened – I’d give a great talk/workshop/etc and then some gray haired males (and it was always gray haired males) would come up to me to talk about my work, and then ask “So, when did you get tenure?” I’d explain I’m just an assistant prof. They’d say, “Oh, I’m sure you’ll do fine when you go up for tenure!” But I’m not tenure track. And when they heard this, they always asked – what did you do wrong? who did you piss off? – or some version of that same question.

It was always assumed that there is something wrong with me that I didn’t have tenure. I’d only had my PhD 5 years at that point. I’d only applied once for a tenure-track position and I didn’t get that one position. But because I wasn’t inline to join them as Gods in the top of the Ivory Tower, I was (and I guess I still am) a failure. It is this type of “What is wrong with you?” attitude, that breaks people. I simply went back to my room and cried myself out at the end of every day. I can see where someone less emotionally stable would on day 2 or 3 of the meeting start punching people or worse.

I wish this was a one off attitude problem, but as someone without tenure I know it’s not.

The people I know who’ve been denied tenure have generally had to completely start over or mostly start over at a new university. This means facing a second 3 to 6 years of being hazed, of working too hard and never sleeping. It means facing a second 3 to 6 years of postponing children and telling your spouse, “I’m sorry,” over and over and over again as you crawl into bed too late because of the grant deadlines, and then again as you accidently wake them as you get out of bed at 5am to grade, because 5am is the only hour left empty in the day. It means another 3-6 years of knowing you can have everything taken away at any moment yet again.

I’m not sure this means anything to someone outside of academia. People loose jobs all the time and it is no big deal. But academics are essentially self-employed. We design our own research. We raise our own money through grants and donations to do that research. But all that money goes through the university. We are like small business owners who can get kicked out of our own business at any moment. If someone is denied tenure they loose all their equipment they raised money to purchase. They loose all their computers, software, money for staff, and everything else. They may not even get to keep the grants they’ve been awarded that still extend years into the future. It’s terrifying.

Academia is a field that eats its young. It is too often the regurgitated, half digested mass of a human that is left when it is over that gets tenure.

We need to revise the system. “Well, I survived” can no longer be the phrase of the day. There are too many brilliant people crying when they should be working to make our world better.

It shouldn’t take a broken woman shooting people to recognize the problems.

sorrow

Mars Rover (NASA)

If you’re like me, you’ve been following NASA’s desperate attempt to free Spirit, and the ongoing roving of the rugged little Opportunity. These two rovers, with Captain Jack like habits of not dying, are in part the creation of Steven Squyres. Next week, on Wednesday night, Squyres will be giving a talk here at SIUE. Come give him a listen?

Here are the details:

Steven Squyres
“Roving Mars: Spirit, Opportunity and the Exploration of the Red Planet”
Wednesday, February 17, 7:30 p.m.
Meridian Ballroom, Morris University Center
Sponsored by the Shaw Memorial Fund

Steve Squyres is the man responsible for taking us to the Red Planet and igniting a new firestorm of interest in space exploration. “Spirit and Opportunity” have always been prominent in the life of Squyres, best known as the face and voice of NASA’s spectacular mission to Mars using two high-tech robotic rovers. Spearheading a team of 3,000 and a budget of $800 million, the acclaimed scientist and principal investigator of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program will detail how he turned what seemed like an improbable dream into a reality. With a compelling voice and never before seen photos he will discuss the risks taken, the mistakes made and how the project’s goals were ultimately achieved.

Mars Rover (credit: NASA)

Particle Tracks as from a cloud chamber

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been busy teaching particle physics to two very different populations. First I work with working with little kids through the Davidson Institute, going over the ins and outs of making atoms. Then I took on particles again with my physics for poets class at SIUE. Between the two, its forced me to do a lot of thinking, and has reminded me how annoying gravity can be.

Here’s the problem: Einstein taught us that gravity is a manifestation of the geometry of space and particle physics says gravity comes from the exchange of bosons called gravitons that communicate the force of gravity, which is related to mass which is mediated by the hitherto undiscovered Higgs.

These particles couple particles force us to stare at two rather different ways of understanding and visualizing one of the most fundamental things in our universe: gravity. To get to this problem though, I want to give a bit of history, so this is going to be in two parts: Particles and Einstein’s gravity.

Let’s start with particle physics 101.

The idea that our universe is made of several very fundamental particles isn’t very novel. During ancient history, the idea that everything was made of either 4 elements (Earth, Air, Fire, Water) or 5 elements (where they added void) cropped up in Greek, Buddhist, Hindi, Japanese, Tibetan, and Chinese history. The varying attributes of everything we interact with were attributed to the almost infinite variety of ways these 4 (or 5) elements could be mixed.

This idea that fundamental elements was rebranded under the concept of atoms (atomos in Greek): or indivisible. The idea was simple: at a certain point, you can’t break something apart any longer, and that smallest bit of stuff you get is the atom. (While this idea is often blamed on dead white greeks, it first appeared in ancient India and was related to Jainism.

Alchemists, philosophers, and all manner of other forms of pre-scientist thinkers and experimenters worked to find definitive ways to classify and categorize materials by these elements, but the more they burnt, mixed and evaporated, the more they realized that there were rather more than 4 or 5 elementary pieces of stuff.

Making a long story rather short, this all came to a head in 1869 when Dmitri Mendeleev (and the ever forgotten Julius Lothar Meyer) published their periodic tables. In both cases, they arranged the elements in rows ordered by increasing mass, with columns of elements sharing similar chemical properties. This arranging of elements was the organization needed to set all of modern physical chemistry and quantum mechanics on a path to understanding how atoms are made of something even more fundamental.

As early as 1815, Wiliam Prout hypothesized that all atoms were made from Hydrogen. One of the problems with this idea was the weights of atoms aren’t nice, consecutive multiples of Hydrogen. If you look at just the most common versions of the first few atoms, you have atomic masses (in multiples of Hydrogen’s mass) of 1, 4, 7, 9, 11, 12. This seemingly random pattern of particle particulars led to a long period of confusion.

It wasn’t until 1919 that Rutherford sorted out that when rather bad things are done to innocent atoms, you can force out protons (he didn’t know that word, he simply noted the expulsion of particles that were identical to hydrogen nuclei when Nitrogen gas was bombarded with alpha particles). But atomic masses still didn’t make a lot of sense.

But at least it gave us a world consisting of protons and electrons. (Electrons had come somewhat easier, and somewhat earlier, since they’re at the heart of electricity. Here’s that story. You can read about it here.)

Understanding atomic mass required playing with radiation and discovering neutrons. This is one of those moments in science that to me always falls into the category of “How did the even think to try that??” It was realized that if one has the radioactive material Polonium-210 (most famous for killing writers), it will emit alpha particles while it undergoes radioactive decay (alpha particles are really just Helium nuclei with 2 neutrons, but saying alpha particles is just cooler). If these alpha particles are then directed at Beryllium, the Beryllium will then give off a stream of neutral particles. So far, so good. It is very odd that someone tried this, but pretty cool. The next part is fabulous though.

Marie Curie’s daughter and son-in-law were both active scientists and they started working with these strange neutral particles (assumed to be gamma rays actually). For reasons that lead to a great discovery, they placed paraffin wax in front of the neutral particles. They noted that this caused protons to be ejected from the paraffin.

They were, in all reality, playing pool with protons. Since the neutron has essentially the same mass as the proton, when a neutron hits one of the very many hydrogen atoms in the paraffin wax it is wacked out of the way and sent flying. Just as pool balls bounce so nicely since they are all the same-ish mass, so too do protons bounce nicely when hit with neutrons.

With neutrons understood, particle math became a possibility! Suddenly, atomic masses were made up of combinations of protons and neutrons, with variations in individual particles coming from the variations in the numbers of neutrons.

Finding all these particles was all just a start. It was quickly (on the scale of human history) realized that particles come in a vast assortment of unstable versions as well as all the stable versions. As quantum mechanics and particle physics were born, scientists started building rule sets that allowed what boiled down to particle math to be done.

And few other things…

Trying to balance all these qualities led to speculation that other types of particle had to exist. Particularly problematic was the decay of neutrons.
n → p + e + ?
In this situation, we have for charge 0 = +1 – 1 (good), but the momentums and particle types are not conserved.

Particles are in general divided into sets of families. Protons and Neutrons are classified as Baryons. Electrons and the unstable Muon and Tau particles are all Leptons. In the above equation, the electrons leptoness is not cancelled out, and some sort of an anti-lepton is required. To fill that need for cancellation, the neutrino was first postulated by Wolfgang Pauli in 1930. Its mass was finally detected in 1998 (and it still isn’t accurately measured).

But then came the question of how exactly does a neutron become a proton? This in turn also led to the idea (eventually, in 1964 by Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig) that Baryons are actually made of even more fundamental particles.

Today, after filing in all the blanks, we have a particle zoo of
Baryons: protons, neutrons, and a bunch of unstable stuff
Leptons: electrons, electron neutrinos, muons, muon neutrinos, and tau particles with their matching tau neutrinos
Quarks: Up and Down make stable things, and charm, strange, top and bottom contribute to making the world unstable at times.

But this chart leaves off all the little worker particles. The photons, with their ability to make the electromagnetic force happen has been left off. The gluons that ever so strongly glue together all the little baryons are messing. And then there are the W and Z, and their determination to decay nuclei, that are also not on the list.

Together, these force ferrying particles have been named Bosons, and have been given their own list.

The Basis of Everything

This something is a particle for conveying gravity. (And, if you’re in to thinking of mass as a directionless – scaler – not-quite-a-force, then we’re missing a particle for that too).

And this is where particle physics breaks me. In this particle physics zoo, my too much mass comes from the ability of my bodies atoms to ever so ably interact via the Higgs Boson with some scaler field that permeates all of space, giving me a quality that does require vector hat in math equations. It also means, that rather than seeing gravity as the side effect of things rolling down a hill through space and time toward high mass objects, we instead have little force carrying particles – gravitons – running back and forth at (we think) the speed of light, communicating “I’ve come from a mass, attract yourself this way now.”

Suddenly, all of space is being organized by so many particles that are zipping around dictating where the forces are forcing (or not).

Can’t you see it now, little yellow photons dressed as the universes traffic copes, forcing charged particles this way and that through all of space? Perhaps not, but this is still a very different way to imagine our universe than the gravity as geometry that that we were all spoon fed by Einstein.

And this is where I’m in an emotional bind: I liked relativity as geometry. I know how to work within that model. But the particle physics idea is harder for me, and there is a non-logical part of my brain going: Um, haven’t found the Higgs, haven’t found the graviton, haven’t really proven they are required. But that part of my brain (along with the rest of me) took only 1 semester of graduate quantum mechanics, and I have to admit, I haven’t ever tried to solve out for the hole in the math that requires the particles be made up. And as a scientist, I have to know, if evidence is presented, I have to believe it.

And with the Large Hadron Collider coming, I may be facing the discovering to the nemesis of my comfortable geometric way of thinking of the universe.

But, this is what makes me a scientist: Even if I don’t like a discovery because it forces me to change my world view (and in the case of Dark Energy, all my cosmological calculations), I still have to accept the theories I don’t like. The truth isn’t required to be likable.

Next stop – Gravity.

Galileo Painted on Ceiling of "Aula Magna of Palazzo Bo"

Sometimes it takes a bit longer than planned to get around to writing than expected. The second day of the IYA Closing ceremonies was filled with talks on history & vision – Who was Galileo and what was the real relationship between him and the Chrutch? How do we move forward to celebrate astronomy in years that aren’t 400 year anniversaries? How do we build on what we’ve done so that great new projects aren’t lost? And where does science go tomorrow?- Presented talks included talks from politicians, historians, and scientists.

Want to see what we saw? Full video coverage is available here.

In the past 400 years since Galileo turned a telescope toward the sky and reported what he was seeing, the technology has come a long ways. From hand ground lenses smaller than a palm that couldn’t quite resolve Saturns rings to 10 meter mirrors that allow us to see galaxies forming at the edge of the visible universe, we have not only grown our understanding, but we have also grown the universe.

Prior to Galileo and Kepler moving the Sun definitively to the center of solar system, the Earth-centered universe had been a tiny place, with all the stars hanging out where today we place the Kuiper-Belt. If we pretend they accurately knew distances back then (and they didn’t) the entire universe would have been ~ 0.0005 light years in diameter! Today we know the visible parts of the universe (which are probably less than 5% the size of the total universe!) are 93 billion light years in radius! That means the size of universe people learn in books (or on tablets), thanks to the telescope, has grown by a factor of a hundred-thousand billion! It’s not quite billions and billions, but still…

Along with growing the known size of the universe, the telescope has also populated the universe with objects that have forever been more fantastic than anything imagined in science fiction. From the discovery of galaxies, to black holes, to gamma ray bursts, at every turn and with every new technology the universe becomes more fantastic.

In someways, to me the most reusable legacy of the IYA is one simple phrase, “The Universe: Yours to discover.”

It is a true statement, and it is challenge. In the past couple years, thanks to citizen science, the world has seen comets discovered leaving their mark on Jupiter, new stars emerging from their home nebulae, and even entirely new classes of galaxies. Even today, in our world of giant telescopes and supercomputing, you – working from your sofa or your drive way – are capable of making tomorrow’s great new discovery.

The 2009 International Year of Astronomy is over. Long last the Beyond the International Year of Astronomy.

Galileo's House (credit: Travlr)

It is January 10, 2010, and IYA is coming to a close.

I’m am currently sitting in the Palazzo Bo in Padau (Padova), Italy. I am here for the IYA2009 closing ceremony. It has been a long journey getting here. The idea of the IYA2009 originated form Franco Pacini in 2002, and in 2003, at the Sydney General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union (IAU), a resolution was adopted to make 2009 our year to share astronomy with the world. It was to be fit within the UN Millennium goals, and we were to help educate the world in science. In 2005, our UNESCO endorsed our cause, and at the 2006 Prague General Assembly meeting of the IAU, in between sessions stripping Pluto of its Planethood, a group of determined individuals set about defining what the IYA2009 would look like. By March of 2007, a set of international goals – cornerstone projects and needed task groups – had been defined, and in December of that 2007, the United Nations endorsed an Italian lead resolution to for IYA2009, with Japan seconding the resolution.

My own involvement beginning in March 2007, when I was asked to chair the US New Media working group – a team that eventually grew into the international New Media Task Group. Scattered throughout this room are the chairs of cornerstone projects, the single points of contact (SPOCs) for many nations, and other project and task group leaders like myself. We’ve traveled from around the world to sit here, in this town Galileo lived in, so that we can celebrate what we’ve accomplished (and to perhaps sigh in relief that the hard parts are now behind us).

The timing of IYA – 2009 – was tied to the 400th anniversary of Galileo using the telescope to make astronomical observations. This town was Galileo’s home, and his house is still here waiting to be explored. I found it quite by accident this morning as I wandered a bit lost through the winding allies of the Padau city center. While trying to figure out where I was, I paused in an intersection of too many narrow roads and started reading signs in a language I don’t understand, hoping some set of words would match something somewhere on my map. While I wasn’t able to figure out where I was, I did find a lone sign reading “Casa Galileo Galilei” with an arrow. With a few hours to spare and no better indication of what direction to head in, I took off down the side street. Galileo’s house bares a rather unimpressive white facade and no street level plaque or other markings. I would have missed it entirely had a second little sign not pointed randomly at the side of this otherwise bland building. I guess in a country that seen so many millennia of history, one scientist’s house isn’t all that important to memorialize.

A bit more walking later I was able to find myself and find the opening ceremony, and now I am in the room where Galileo gave his lectures at Padau University for 8 years. The room is packed, and yet I can feel the electric heater still struggling to work to warm this high ceilinged space against the chill of this January day. It is hard to imagine what it must have been like 400 years ago. Smoke from candles and/or oil lamps would have filled the room and students would have sat bundled against the cold with no electric heaters to warm them. Like us, the students may have found themselves on wooden benches, looking up to a speaker at the podium. There is no chalk board. There are no little tables for taking notes. It would have been just the speaker’s voice communicating ideas to students who would have absorbed concepts attentively.

Today we are not too different a crowd. As near as I can see, my little netbook is the only laptop out, and only a few notes are being scribbled on note pads on knees. We are today’s attentive students, trying to absorb the moment we worked so hard to reach. In the first afternoon session, we are listening to a chain of speakers: the rector of the University, the Mayor of the city, the UNESCO Assistant Director General, and IAU and INAF Presidents. It is a long stream of welcomes and thankyous and acknowledgements often (but thankfully not always) issued in two or more languages and all leading toward the first major presentation: an overview of the IYA 2009 by Catherine Cesarsky.

A few key points came from these first speakers: UNESCO speaker Walter Erdelen made the important point that UNESCO is going to be funding an Astronomy in Developing Nations program that will help spread space science. They invite us to collaborate with them and bring space science to the world. For some reason, I had never realized until now that the world is filled with nations where astronomy isn’t even taught at the university level. There are no minor in astronomy, no classes in aeronautical engineering; there is no option to educationally chance a dream of going to the stars. Now, UNESCO seeks to change that, getting astronomy all the way down in to the children’s schools. They are specifically looking for ways to promote teacher training, and to work on building alliances between universities in developing nations and in industrialized nations. The IYA2009 was a start of achieving this work, and many nations adopted programs like “Universe Awareness” (UNAWE) for kids, an ongoing project to get the youngest school children interacting with space science concepts. The power the IYA2009 had to change nations in positive ways is a constant them, and the INAF president, Tommaso Maccacaro wants to see our work continue. In his talk, he called for the beginning of an International Century of Astronomy and this caused a collective murmur that bordered on a groan. His idea, a century spanning 2010-2110 that would than lead to a millennia of astronomy where at the end we will have “Given up on having closing ceremonies.”

(Side note: It is amusing to watch speakers try and cope with a computer that responds with menus in Italian when you click on things)

According to Catherine Cesarsky, the IYA2009 Vision was to help the citizens of the world rediscover their place in the Universe. With the year behind us, we may not have reached the entire world, but we have come close. 148 nations have participated, each them in their own ways participating in cornerstone and major projects and creating projects of their own.

It is amazing to hear from the SPOCs of developing nations, and realizing how much some nations were able to do with so little. Claudio Moises Paulo, SPOC of Mozambique, detailed how they had held major events in the southern most proveniences of their southern African country, and then used TV and radio to share their ideas nationally. With just 1000euro in seed money they were able to get UNAWE in place, participate in the Moon for Mankind photo project, hold a star party for Galilean nights, and to locally put together a 50 student project called “The Night with the Planets” that got kids looking up and learning. The also have a traveling project that uses meteorites to promote astronomy and are setting up a major astronomy club – the first of its kind in their country. They’ve had some outside help – Brazil sent them a “From the Earth to the Universe” exhibit, and two of their teachers will be going to Portugal to receive “Galileo Teacher Training” – but for the most part this has been a small cadre of dedicated individuals changing a nation. They are now working toward getting astronomy into their universities, and they have a simple dream of getting a planetarium for their nation.

In addition to Claudio Moises Paulo, we also heard from the Egyptian, Honduran, Vietnamese, Ukrainian, and Indian SPOCs. What struck me most as I listened to them talk was how much of an impact UNAWE has had. This program is almost non-existent in the US where people are perhaps too concerned with teaching to national standards and national exams and have forgotten how to teach to inspire. UNAWE inspires. We’ve also heard over and over of projects to get telescopes into the hands of children. In some nations, where Galileoscope’s $15 was still too much, they came up with their own $2 plans and had kids building little spyglasses to explore the universe. And beyond educating, the IYA2009 has also brought the world stamps and even coins. The Ukraine produced an amazing coin that I think I’m just going to have to google a source for.

It has been a long few years, but I feel safe in saying that while we did not give everyone in the world an experience in astronomy, we did reach more people than have ever been reached before. I suspect, based on random Fermi calculations, that we may have provided in the past year more kids a chance to build a telescope that can used to look at the stars than have been given that opportunity ever before.

We have been busy, and Catherine acknowledges we are all exhausted and that it is with a mix of sadness and relief that we realize it is now over and now we can rest.

But first we have one more day of pomp and circumstance. Tonight, following a cocktail hour there is a celebratory concert, where I’m amused to note both Holst’s Jupiter and John Williams Star Wars Saga are set to be played. It all then starts over at 9am. And I will be here to share what I see.

July 8, 2009 Image of Charlie Bolden (credit: Bill Ingalls/NASA)

Charlie Bolden is giving the NASA Policy talk today. The last several of these that I’ve heard (excepting when Alan Stern spoke) have left me angry or discouraged. Griffin was not an astronomers’ NASA director. But it’s a new day and a new administration, and just 30 seconds into Charlie’s talk I can tell I’m going to leave with faith in his ability to communicate to my community and to support our dreams.

[Note: Bad Astronomer Phil Plait as coverage as well. Check it out?]

NASA Director Charlie Bolden is a grandfather (he talks about his grand kids all the time), an astronaut, a communicator who brings laughter, and a person willing to admit with humility that he’s not the smartest person in the room, and to admit with pride that he likes working with all the smart  -icists in the room.

As he speaks, he is looking forward to a great year of new launches and new science. He remembers the 1990’s discussions of how Hubble would change our understanding of the world we live in as it brings us understanding of the Big Bang and so much more (which it did). We live another new era of discovery.

• Kepler is finding planets (5 announced yesterday).
• Last month WISE was launched and it will bring a deeper, higher resolution survey of the sky in the Infrared. The mission is launched, the cover is off, and tomorrow we get to see the first images and see if it is in focus (Charlie points out each mission has three hurdles: Does it launch? Does it get first light? Is it in focus? Remember why we worry about that third one?)
• There is also SOFIA, which was resurrected from the desert and is now flying, door open, on the verge of having the telescope installed
• Fermi has revealed whole new classes of pulsars
• Spitzer found the largest ring around Saturn, and
• A combination of images from many of the great observatories has found the  the most distant clusters.

And then there was Hubble. Director Bolden was part of the Hubble in its first days, and as he brought up this most recent mission he teared up. He is telling us stories of his own work, and telling us of their struggles getting Hubble out of the cargo bay. These are stories I’ve never heard. The arm struggled with its weight and they had to read numbers off this that and the other things as they exceeding limits in unexpected ways. And it got worse. As Hubble was deployed, one of the Solar Panels got stuck and didn’t deploy. To protect the Hubble, hanging as it was on the robotic arm, they stopped stabilizing the shuttle (that would have put torque on the whole system as it got yanked around). Left to their own dynamics, the Shuttle and Hubble tumbled together as they orbited around the planet, with the whole team working to find a solution (It was found – there was a piece of software designed to make sure the solar panels didn’t get torqued too much. They disabled it and the Solar Panel deployed right away. It worked. It all worked. And he was part of that magical moment when Hubble floated away to take on the universe.

Transitioning  form his emotionally spoken story – his voice cracking more than once – back to policy, he declared the importance of partnering internationally, treating our partners as equals and with respect, and of building strong international collaborations.

He carries with him the message that during the White House Star Party, a cold clear night in D.C., President Obama and his wife and daughters spent nearly 45 minutes going from telescope to telescope. They were engaged, absorbing with interest the views through telescopes while hearing about the discoveries of high school astronomers – discovers of rare neutron stars, supernovae, and more, each student having their own science discovery behind their name . The Obama’s have their own interest in astronomy, and they value the importance of space and space education.

The White House Star Party is an example of one of the things we do right: Engaging people intellectually and passionately in astronomy observing and content.

He challenges us to go forth and communicate our work: Educating and sharing our results to increase understanding and passion for astronomy.

There is more coming: More launches of more missions.

And the Decadal Survey reports are forth coming and will be used to shape our future, making sure that NASA addresses with its missions the most compelling science of our time. And to succeed in these missions we need to create an educated work force ready to dream these missions, build these missions, and generate the science from these missions’ data.

To make this future real we need to both educate and do science while always always inspiring.

Closing his talk, Bolden gave us these words: “The future of manned space flight will not be paid for out of the hide of science. … Let’s embrace our future together.” He states that together we and are international partners will work on great things and do science while we educate a future generation. This is a partnership, and we will inspire together.

And now we are into questions… (Paraphrasing as close to quotes as I can)

Q: Will you be teaching anything?
A: I won’t enter the teaching profession on a formal basis, but I’m privledged to travel and communicate to people and through that get communicate in my own small way

Q: Will be have a manned space flieght before 2020
A: Yes. This will not be the president who precedes over the end of manned space flight. … We have incredible partners in terms of technology. [HUGE PARAPHRASE] The Japanese have the incredible HTV. We’re asking if they can work to make it capable of returning things to earth

Quote: I recently had a surgery with robots in my body – It was incredible! But I wouldn’t want to turn those robots loose!

If you had told me we would not be on the surface of the Moon today, I would have told you were smoking dope. We became risk adverse have Challenger. We have got to become willing to take risks.

Quotish: If you’d told me when I was training to be an astronaught that we would not be on the surface of the Moon today, I would have told you , you were smoking dope. Let me say that again: If you’d told me we wouldn’t be back on the moon today I would have told you that you were smoking some bad dope. I thought I was going up on the Shuttle and coming back to train to go to the moon.

We became risk adverse after the Space Shuttle Challenger. That has got to stop. We’re going to drop satellites into the ocean periodically. Human mistakes are going to happen. We don’t want to plan for this. We want to work to avoid this. But we can’t be afraid. We need to take risks to move forward.

…

We’re open to comment and to criticism. We’re not going to do things the way we used to do.

…

Audience Comment: I’m concerned about the emphasis on international collaboration. That seems to imply large missions. What about small missions?

A: (Summary of long response) International Collaboration doesn’t imply large missions. It implies opening doors for other countries by helping them doing things they can’t do on their own. Consider scientists in Nigeria who are working with researchers at the University of Alabama on small research missions. It is our duty to share what we can do.

My Words: I don’t think everyone can educate face to face, but I think all of us have something to give, and that as a community, if we create a culture of collaboration, of partner globally, and of working to find ways to decimate our results and value the communicators as highly as we value our top researchers we can create a new generation of people who understand science and understand how to love science.

I’ll be writing more on this later. Right now, all I know is I’ve seen a great speaker speak from the heart about my dreams and how we can work together to make them real. I’m in love, but, as Phil put it, this really was only a first date.

I want to believe.

Comparison of ground-based and space-based light curves for hot exoplanet HAT P7b (Image credit: NASA Ames Research Center)

This is the morning of Kepler. I’m currently sitting in a the Marriot Ballroom watching the speaker, William J Borucki (NASA/Ames) gear up to announcing planets.

This amazing mission has been imaging the same rich stellar field over and over looking for planetary transits: the slight dimming of light from a star that comes from an orbiting planet passing between us and that distance star.

After 20 minutes of gearing up, he announced 5 new planets with orbital periods between 3.2 and 4.9 days orbiting stars larger than the sun at orbital distances 4.31 to 18.8 times the size of the Earth’s orbit. Because the stars are bigger than the Sun (by an amount not shown in the table), this is hard to quantify – they could be very near the stellar surfaces! – He referred to them as icy giants, but their surfaces are all hotter than 1500 Kelvin, with surfaces in 2 cases hotter than molten lead! These are large hot planets.

4 of these planets are all more massive than Jupiter, and one is smaller but still larger than Earth. There is a great table coming in a paper on Astro-PH going up later today (link to come)

In addition to these stars, they have also discovered several neat variable stars: binaries, oscillating stars, pulsating variables, and more. This is one of the great things about this mission: While it was designed to find earth-sized planets orbiting other stars (given more time – they require data over more time than Jupiter-sized planets), it also collects data on variable stars in the field that is of amazing quality. This means that Kepler’s throw away data is somebody else’s science.

Okay he just said something weird I’m going to have to look up. They have found small – Jupiter-ish sized in radius – that are hotter than the star they are orbiting. These look like tiny hot stars orbiting cooler stars BUT the hot object is too big to be a white dwarf and too hot to be anything else. He said there are more than one in the field and no one knows what they are.

The Kepler Press conference is coming up soon, and hopefully we’ll get more info there.

Invited Talks

Press briefings are scheduled for following dates and times. You are invited to attend all events on the Astronomy Cast UStream Press Conference Channel. Please feel free to embed this channel on your own webpage!

• Mon., Jan. 4
  • 10:00 a.m. Battling Black Holes
  • 1:00 p.m. Kepler Early Science
  • 2:30 p.m. Exploding Stars

• Tues. Jan. 5
  • 9:00 a.m. Stellar Mysteries
  • 10:30 a.m. Galaxies Near & (Very) Far *See it in Second Life
  • 2:30 p.m. Pulsars *See it in Second Life

• Wed. Jan. 6
  • 10:00 a.m. Cosmology’s Dark Side
  • 1:00 a.m. Exoplanet Exotica *See it in Second Life
  • 2:30 p.m. TBA

• Thurs. Jan. 7
  • 9:00 a.m. Galaxies Stirred, Not Shaken
  • 10:30 a.m. Spicing up the Solar System

And…

Want to meet us in person? There will be a meet up Wednesday night at 7pm. Location TBA.

*ALL PRESS/AAS MEMBERS WHO WISH TO ATTEND THE EXPERIMENTAL SECOND LIFE SESSIONS, PLEASE EMAIL YOUR REAL LIFE NAME AND SECOND LIFE AVATAR NAME TO ADRIENNE (astronomy2009insl@aas.org) AS SOON AS POSSIBLE AND NO LATER THAN 1 HR BEFORE THE SESSION START. Our press sessions will be CLOSED to the general public and you will need to be on our “entry list” in order to teleport to the ‘Astronomy 2009′ island and attend.

Invited Talks are scheduled for following dates and times (pending confirmation with all speakers!). You are invited to attend all events on the Astronomy Cast Public Events UStream Channel. Please feel free to embed this channel on your own webpage!

• Mon., Jan. 4
  • 8:00 a.m. Van Biesbroeck Prize and Welcoming Address
  • 8:30 p.m. Kepler Planet Detection Mission: Introduction and First Results
  • 11:40 p.m. Russell Lectureship: RR Lyrae Atmospheres: Wrinkles Old and New
  • 3:40 p.m. Pierce Prize: Finding Utility in the Diverse Origins of Gamma-Ray Bursts
  • 4:30 p.m. LeRoy Doggett Prize: History of the Extraterrestrial Life Debate Join us in Second Life [SLURL]
  • 6:30 p.m.  Gemant Prize: Science as Performance Join us in Second Life [SLURL]

• Tues. Jan. 5
  • 12:30 p.m. Policy Talk: Charles Bolden
  • 3:40 p.m. Warner Prize: The Demographics of Exoplanets
  • 4:30 p.m. Galaxy Clusters and Black Holes: Cooling Versus Heating

• Wed. Jan. 6
  • 8:30 a.m. Invited Talk: John Grunsfeld, Shuttle Atlantis Join us in Second Life [SLURL]
  • 11:40 a.m. Heinemann Prize: The High-redshift Galaxy Jigsaw Puzzle
  • 3:40 p.m. Cannon Award: A Holistic View of Catastrophic Cosmic Explosions
  • 4:30 p.m. Rossi Prize: Strong Gravity and the Masses of Stellar Black Holes

• Thurs. Jan. 7
  • 11:40 a.m. Formation of Massive Black Hole Seeds in the First Galaxies
  • 3:40 a.m. Reionization to Near Earth Objects: Scientific Results from the Spitzer Space Telescope