“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” – Margaret Mead

The future of Science in the UK is under threat. What follows is a letter I’ve sent to my MP, Harriet Harman, asking her to support the Science is Vital campaign to try to persuade the government back from enacting cuts that would undermine not only our standing in the world, but out ability to make a strong, sustainable economic recovery.

If you care about science and you live in the UK, I urge you to do the same, and get involved in and to support the to do the same campaign. Feel free to plagiarise or adapt my letter below.

Dear Rt Hon. Ms Harman

I am writing to express my grave concern about the impending cuts to UK science funding the Government has signalled will be part of its comprehensive spending review. At a time when the USA, Germany, France, Japan, India and China are increasing their investments in scientific research, cutting our own investment threatens to turn the UK into an intellectual and economic backwater. As one of your constituents, I was hoping to call on your support in opposing this ill-advised and short-sighted course of action.

Specifically, I urge you to consider:

• Challenging the Chancellor of the Exchequer to explain where he expects future economic growth to come from, if not from advances in science and technology.
• Signing the Early Day Motion, EDM 767 (Science is Vital – http://bit.ly/edm767).
• Signing the Science is Vital petition at http://scienceisvital.org.uk/sign-the-petition
• And attending a lobby in Parliament on 12th October, 15.30, Committee Room 10.

As a physicist by training, I know first hand the rapid and long-lasting detrimental impact that cuts of this size have on a country’s intellectual infrastructure. I and many of my colleagues left Australia in the late 1990s, as a direct result of the Government’s decision to drastically reduce its funding of science. Few have since returned. In these challenging times, the UK can ill afford to drive away its best and brightest.

Vince Cable’s claim that it is just a matter of “doing more with less”, by focusing on projects that have obvious economic benefit, suggests a poor appreciation of the nature of scientific enquiry and how it seeds technological progress. No-one could have anticipated that investment in high-energy particle physics research would have led to the invention of the world wide web. Certainly, few if any of the momentous technological advances of the century, from the laser to the silicon chip, could have been conceived without discoveries made in the course of curiosity-driven research.

The Science is Vital coalition, along with the Campaign for Science and Engineering, are calling upon the Government to increase, or at least maintain, UK investment in science as a central plank of its plans for economic recovery. Without such commitment, we risk our international reputation, our share of the global high-tech industrial market, and our ability to respond to the many challenges we face as a nation.

I know that you are very busy, but I hope that you will be able to spare the time to meet me to discuss this issue in person on the 12th October. Either way, I hope that I can count on your support. I look forward to hearing from you.

Yours sincerely,

Dr Edmund Gerstner
Senior Editor, Nature Physics

I’ve been thinking a lot about community journalism recently. Mostly inspired by Jay Rosen and Dave Winer’s Rebooting the News podcast. I’ve never previously paid much attention to local media. When I lived in Cambridge (until just over a year ago) the free weekly never made it as far as the coffee table before ending up in the recycling. The only time it really entered my consciousness was when I started dating a journalist from The Cambridge Evening News.

Then I moved to South London (where I’d lived 6 years before) and I began to miss it. Don’t know why. Clearly I had never needed it before. Maybe for a sense of community that I’d taken for granted and couldn’t anymore. More likely its connected to the fact that I never felt so acute a sense of identity with Cambridge as I do South London. I guess then it makes sense that I should want to be more embedded here and engaged with the people around me.

But I’m not particularly inspired by any of the local rags. When I read about my local area, it’s more likely to be in The New York Times.

So I was intrigued to hear what local news pundits had to say about the matter at tonight’s “What now for local and regional media in the UK?” event at The Frontline Club.

It turns out, surprise surprise, that none of them seem to have any idea.

Probably not their fault. Many of the panelists either conducted or (quasi-successfully) tendered for the Labour government’s Independently Funded News Consortia (IFNC) initiative — a scheme to try to find ways to fund regional and local news not focused on London. Most seemed to think it was a promising way forward, an opportunity to test a new model. This morning, the new Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport, Jeremy Hunt, killed it.

Which turned the first half of the evening into an impromptu wake.

Yet there was constructive discussion to be had once they threw it open to the floor. Not that anyone in the audience had any better notion of where they’d be in five, or even two, year’s time. But some interesting ideas.

The most apposite (about 55 minutes into the video stream), was from a journalist from Brighton’s West Hill Whistler. Sweetly, she admitted no one read it, but that she quite enjoyed writing for it, nonetheless. She then echoed exactly my own feelings about local press in Cambridge: When it comes to buying a local paper, or a national paper, if you’re being asked to part with any money, most people will choose the national.

It turns out, that another member of the audience (of barely a dozen or so) was not only familiar with The Whistler, but sang its praises. For him, the news from most of the areas that Brighton’s main regional newspaper, The Argus, covers is as relevant to him as local news from Tehran.

And that’s surely the point.

Moreover, you don’t need to sell subscriptions to turn a profit. One of the panelists, Mark Reeves, editor of The Business Desk seemed to be having no problem generating revenue from advertising. Yes, its catchment is bigger than the West Hill area of Brighton. But with only a few thousand (admittedly sought after) readers, it can’t be that far from the potential readership of The Whistler.

But, I digress. I don’t care about business models any more than the journalist from The Whistler.

What I do care about is connecting with my community. But which community? It seems shortsighted to think that my community is just where I live.

When it comes to my day job, my community is geographically global but topically hyperlocal… in the sense that the number of people interested in the esoteric cutting edge of physics is probably dwarfed by the number of people who live in Southwark. And then there are the community of pinko politicos, or London science journalists, I follow on twitter. And on and on.

Is it meaningful to distinguish the community that lives around me from the many other communities that I call my own? Is hyperlocal a significant category or just another category?

I really don’t know. But I’m keen to find out!

As always, I’ve learnt a lot, drank a lot, and pressed the flesh of a lot of authors, referees and journalists. Was introduced to at least one potentially revolutionary idea (which I’m not going to tell any of you about until I’ve asked someone else about whether it’s madness or genius). And lots of less-than-revolutionary, but still awesome, ideas.

In 7 years of attending March meetings Portland was one of the nicest APS cities I’ve been to. But still, looking forward to being back in London.

Until next time, I think this says it all…

Every APS March meeting I try to get my head around something new. Last year in Pittsburgh it was supersolids. Now that I’m on the return trek home from this year’s meeting in Portland, I’m trying to work out how far I have managed to get with this year’s challenge, topological insulators.

By all accounts, topological insulators are set to be the next big thing in physics. Though theymade a splash like graphene at the 2006 meeting in Baltimore, but if the increase in submissions to Nature and Nature Physics in this area are anything to go by, it may soon come close. Even graphene took a few years to become stratospheric. And a colleague of mine suggested that ‘topological’ is the new ‘nano’ as the favorite buzzword that authors are adding to their papers to try to make them sound more sexy.

There are good reasons for the excitement. They could enable low-loss spin currents to be harnessed for high-speed, low-power electronics. There is much talk about their use in high-efficiency thermoelectric systems for power generation and heat management. But most exciting is their potential to generate exotic quantum states — from Majorama fermions, which behave analogously to dark matter candidate particles known as axions, to braiding states, which could finally enable us to build quantum computers that don’t fall down the minute anyone thinks about sneezing.

But enough of the hype. What about the nuts and bolts?

I’m not going to pretend that I have anything close to a coherent understanding of what topological insulators are or how they work. The site in the press room after the APS press conference on the subject was one of a half-dozen journalists on the table trying to find a way to parse what the hell they were about to their readers. Of all so far, I think my colleague Geoff Brumfiel from Nature came the closest to getting the balance right.

First, the easy bit. A topologically insulator in fact isn’t really much of an insulator at all. By definition, its surface is conducting. And although an ideal topological insulator has a bulk that is insulating, in practice many materials that people are working on aren’t bulk insulators at all, but semiconductors or semimetals. Thankfully, this needn’t be a problem. That’s because you can modify the bulk with doping (or similar) without affecting the all important surface states, because these states are robust — one of the unique selling points of a topological insulator… actually, arguably the unique selling point.

Yulin Chen, from Stanford showed some pretty compelling angle resolved photoelectron spectra that show that when you dope bismuth telluride (Bi₂Te₃) — one of the materials that several groups are working on — with tin, you can switch it from an n-type semiconductor to an insulator while leaving the impotant topological surface states unchanged. This occurs at a doping concentration of 0.67% — which is freakin’ huge! It’s remarkable that the surface states are not utterly destroyed at such a level — to compare, parts per million doping turns silicon into garbage.

Anyway, I (and all my colleagues) have been throwing the word ‘topological’ around with gay abandon. Do we know what this means? Probably not. I certainly don’t — not in a deep way. anyway. But I might have an idea.

HEALTH WARNING: The explanation that follows (and what precedes, as well) is subject to change without warning. At best, it’s likely tangential to anything that resembles reality. Really, it’s just an exercise in me thinking out loud.

I’ve heard many explanations but none really resonate. It is often said that topological insulators are materials whose surface states are ‘topologically protected’. Okay, well that’s helpful, like, not at all!

The closest I think I’ve come to getting a feel for what it means for a state to be topologically protected comes from some things that Laurens Mollenkamp (University of Würzburg) said in a press conference on Monday. Mollenkamp was the first to demonstrate the existence of topologically protected surface states experimentally, in mercury telluride. In the press conference, he began by saying that in normal insulators, the geometry (or did he say topology?) of the conduction band states are s-like (like a Bohr atom), and of the valence band states are p-like (like the states of the electrons in the outer shell of a carbon atom).

Now, the electronic behaviour of an insulator or semiconductor is sensitively dependant on the distance in energy between the bottom of the conduction band, which always curves up in density of states of a material, and the top of the valence band, which always curves down. And any perturbation to the material — such as impurities (deliberate or otherwise), defects, strain, changes in temperature, even magnetic or electric fields — tends to frig with the distance between them.

Sometimes this is useful. Most times it’s a pain in the ass. And for things like quantum computing, this sort of thing is a deal-killer. So what do to topological insulators bring to the table?

According to Mollenkamp, in certain materials made from heavy elements, the geometry (s-like and p-like) of the conduction and valence bands flip. And at the surface of some materials, they cross. And this is the key, I think.

If you move the uncrossed conduction and valence bands of a conventional material, you change the distance between their nearest points — that is, you change the thing that controls their behaviour.

But if you move the crossed conduction and valence at the surface of a topological insulator, they still remain crossed. The point where they cross might move a bit in k-space (that’s momentum-space — the inverse of normal space, which physicists like to describe electronic materials in, because makes this simpler). But they’re not going to move further apart — they’re crossed!

And it is this crossing, apparently (I think), that not only makes topologically protected states robust, it also makes them wacky, and gives rise to the panoply of exotic behaviour that physicists are excited about.

So there you go. I didn’t promise that’d you’d be able to write a paper on topological insulators after reading all this. I certainly wouldn’t claim that I could. But if I can pick up more bits and pieces at future meetings, perhaps by the time topological insulators are really huge, I might.

(Image credit: Ali Yazdani, Princeton University.)

On the first day of the APS meeting, I sent a shout out… or is it tweet out, for suggestions for the collective nouns of physicists.

First up was @StanCarey with a ‘measure’ of physicists.

Then @Cromacrox with a ‘condensate’ of physicists (my favourite for a time).

Which prompted @JonMButterworth to suggest “surely it’s an ‘interference’?”

Then @PhysicsTeo with a ‘matrix’? Or a ‘vector’, outside Starbucks at the convention center.

Then @CollectiveNouns RT’d and the trickle became a flow, including a ‘fizz’, a ‘collision’, an ‘approximation’, a ‘flux’ and several variants of ‘particles’ and ‘quanta’.

But the best from @DrPeterRodgers was “An ‘ensemble’ for when they are being serious. And a ‘gas’ for when they are not.”

One of the notable things at this year’s APS is the lack of buzz about graphene. Ever since it made it’s APS debut in 2006 at the Baltimore meeting, the activity — and number of parallel sessions — on this material has grown and grown. The graphene audience in Denver 2007 was about twice that in Baltimore. And at New Orleans 2008 twice again. And last year in Pittsburgh bigger again.

That’s a lot of growth. And of course unsustainable. So I figured it had to level out this year. But it’s more than levelled, the buzz seems to be on the wane.

Why? Is it simply a matter of hype’s short life span?

There’s still plenty more to do. There are plenty of new results emerging and much about it’s electronic behaviour that we don’t understand. We haven’t hit any roadblocks in synthesizing or building devices from graphene (unlike nanotubes, whose potential now seems all but dead).

Maybe it’s the theorists?

When graphene hit the headlines, the theorists hit their blackboards. Most had been working on carbon nanotubes, which are essentially just rolled-up graphene sheets, so the theoretical tools they’d developed over nearly two decades were directly transferrable. And by 2006 new ideas in nanotubes were already starting to dry up. And literally hundreds of new graphene papers began rolling off theorists’ computers every week.

Although isolating graphene is as easy as peeling a ribbon of sticky tape from a chunk of graphite, it took a good year or two before significant numbers of experimental papers started coming. But when they did a similar flood emerged. And by New Orleans in 2008, pretty much the entire nanotube community — which was a large community — had moved into graphene. But the production of experimental results was never as ponderous as that of theory.

So has graphene theory finally tapered off? Or have researchers found a new bandwagon? Topological insulators, perhaps?

UPDATE
My learned colleague Geoff Brumfiel has suggested that my spreading of rumours of graphene’s demise might be premature. He’s probably right. Here’s a photographic representation of how Andre Geim’s “Graphene Update” talk was received.

But I still maintain that nanotubes are looking decided ill. In searching for Geim’s talk, I accidentally ended up in the carbon nanotube session next door. And this is was it looked like.

Most times, physicists are an idealistic bunch. We study physics because of a strange and desperate yearning to know how things work. Not out of any particular desire to exploit this knowledge for fortune or fame. We just want to know. Perhaps because we never grew out of the adolescent/tourettic urge to ask “But why? … But why? … But why?”

And most physicists are just as keen to share what they know with others. Ask a physicist a question about the fundamental nature of the Universe and you will have a terrible time getting her to shut up.

But when it comes to teaching others how to spread the knowledge to which we’ve dedicated our lives, we suck. We *really* suck. Or so it would seem from the conclusions of the National Task Force on Teacher Education in Physics, formed to look at how physics teachers are taught in the US and to develop strategies for doing better.

On the first day of the APS conference, Valerie Otero, painted a dismal picture of the state of physics teacher education in the US. Only a third of the 20,000 US high school physics teachers majored in physics or physics education. This may go some way to explaining why the 2006 Program for International Student Assessment placed American 15-year-olds in the bottom third of OECD nations for the scientific literacy.

And yet, a survey of physics majors who intended to go into high school teaching found they were discouraged from doing so by their professors, often told that they should pursue research rather than waste their talents on teaching.

Among the taskforce’s key findings were:

1. Few physics departments are actively involved in training physics teachers. When approached, most seemed to feel this was somebody else’s problem.
2. Of the few institutions that seemed to be doing a good job at teaching physicists to teach — demonstrated by their producing two or more physics teachers per year (really, that’s all it takes to be considered to be active in teacher education??!?) — *all* were driven by a single ‘champion’ dedicated to the cause. And with few exceptions, these champions get little to no support from their institutions. That is, the production of good teachers is not a factor they can include on promotion applications. And they get few additional resources for the job.
3. Institutions that only award Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees are more likely to have active teacher training programs than those that also offer PhDs.
4. Physics department and Departments of Education within the same institution almost never talk, let alone collaborate.
5. Programs do little to develop the physics-specific pedagogical expertise of teachers.
6. Few programs provide support, resources, intellectual community or professional development for physics teachers.
7. Few institutions offer coherent programs for the professional development of in-service teachers. Again, despite the fact that only a third of physics teachers have majored in physics.

So where do these professors think future physics majors are going to come from?!?

Or to put it more simply, WTF?

It’s a clear morning in Portland. And day one of the American Physical Society March meeting looks likely to be an intriguing and challenging one. The walk from my hotel downtown across the river and to the conventional centre was awfully pleasant. Made all the moreso by being able to saunter past the mile-long line of physicists waiting for the registration system to reboot, into the press room where my pass was waiting.

First up, a depressing session on the state of physics teaching in the US. Then down a gear to the physics of catastrophes and the four physicists of the apocalypse. And finally, what looks set to the the theme of the week, topological insulators.

It’s that time of the year, for the American Physics Society March meeting, when 5000+ physicists from around the world descend on some poor unsuspecting American town (this year, Portland) and, well, talk physics.

Last year’s meeting in Pittsburgh was the first meeting I tried my hand at live-tweeting. And it was a good experience (for me, that is, I think it strained the good nature of my Facebook friends). Unexpectedly it helped me get much more out of the technical sessions — it’s amazing how much more attention you pay to what someone is saying when you’re trying to distill it for someone else. I’ll bet UN interpreters know better what’s going on in the world than any UN diplomat.

The only draw back is that 140 characters isn’t really an ideal format for physics reporting. Although I appreciate the discipline, it atomizes the flow too much to do the subject matter justice.

And so this year, I’m going to try live-blogging instead. The powers that be have not extended the free wifi into the meeting rooms. But I’ve managed to find a 3G and a contract-free broadband package that looks a good two orders of magnitude cheaper than dataroaming on O2. So the only thing stopping me is Maxwell’s equations.

If anyone’s interested I’ll be pegging the sessions on Twitter but most of the content will be presented here.

To follow other tweeters from the meeting, the tag set for the meeting by @APSPhysics is #APSMar10. And Matteo Cavalleri and Dave Flanagan will be live-blogging at MaterialsViews.com.

Fun fun fun!

Reckon I should have done a few more takes with the audio (this was the second take). But happy with what I managed with a camera, a roll of slide film, a tape-recorder and a library card.