Did you see that bump?

Standard Model wins again.

Magic number five.

Congratulations everyone!!!!

Update: The excellent radio show The World is asking its listeners to come up their own Higgs haikus. Submit yours here.

1. The Ultraviolet Catastrophe

2. The Strangelets (60s-style girl group)

3. Enrico Fermi and the Chicago Piles

4. Los Alamos Ranch School (songs to wear sweaters to)

5. Charm and Strange (acoustic duo, lots of whistling)

6. Spectral Lines (electronica)

7. I Am Become Death (metal)

8. SUSY and the Banshees (80s cover band)

9. Cosmic Ray (lounge singer)

10. Higgsino and the WIMPs

Leave your suggestions for hit singles in the comments. For more on the music physicists make, check out this article in symmetry.

One of NASA’s many amazing pictures of the 2012 transit of Venus.

The next pair of transits happened in 1761 and 1769, and this time there were many more people watching the sky. Earlier in the century, Edmund “The Comet” Halley laid out a method to use data about the transit of Venus to calculate the distance between the Earth and the sun and, from there, the size of the solar system. (Here’s the best non-technical explanation I’ve found of how this worked.) His method depended on the transit being observed at different points around the world, so a bunch of European explorers set off for the ends of the earth with astronomers in tow in anticipation of the event.

The ends of the earth were more accessible to Europeans in the 1760s than they had ever been before, since many of them had been or were in the process of being colonized. Politics and science collide in a particularly unfortunate way in the story of Guillame Le Gentil, whom University of Colorado astronomer Doug Duncan called “the most unfortunate astronomer in history” on The Madeleine Brand Show. Le Gentil sailed to the French colony of Pondicherry in India to observe the 1761 transit of Venus, but by the time he arrived war had broken out between France and England and the English were occupying Pondicherry. Turned away from his intended destination, Le Gentil missed the event. (In fact, most attempts to observe 1761 transit were failures.)

Rather than sail home to wait for the next one, he decided to stick around the Indian Ocean for the next eight years, spending time in Madagascar and the Philipines before returning to Pondicherry, which was once again under French control by 1769. But when the big day finally arrived, the sky over Pondicherry was too cloudy for him to see anything. Despondent, Le Gentil sailed for home—and was promptly shipwrecked on Ile Bourbon, a small island east of Madagascar. By the time he finally made it back to France, no one had seen or heard from him for 11 years and he had been legally declared dead. The French king eventually commanded that all of his possessions be returned to him, though his former wife was allowed to remain with the man she had married during his absence. (For even more twists and turns of the Le Gentil story, check out Cocktail Party Physics.)

Fortunately, other astronomers had better luck observing the 1769 transit. So many, in fact, that author Mark Anderson dubbed their efforts “the world’s first big science project” and wrote a book about it. Data from the various expeditions was collected and used to calculate a distance between the earth and the sun of 95 million miles—only 2 million miles off from the actual distance of 93 million. Today, we have much more precise ways of measuring astronomical distances and most people watch the transit of Venus just for fun, though some astronomers are hoping to use the event to refine the search for exoplanets. One of the best times to detect planets outside of our solar system is when they are transiting their own stars, so by precisely measuring the amount of solar energy Venus blocks during its transit as well as studying what happens to sunlight filtered through its atmosphere, scientists can better understand how to look for far away planets and determine which of them are most likely to support life.

I watched yesterday’s transit of Venus from my friend Jef’s beautiful backyard garden in Claremont. We set up a telescope (complete with solar filter, of course) in time to catch the ingress, which in southern California happened just after 3 p.m.

Celestron and its solar filter helped me watch the transit of Venus yesterday.

We checked on the planet’s progress periodically over the next few hours, each time realizing anew how difficult it is to find even an object as big as the sun in a telescope. When the roof of the house eclipsed the sun around 6:30, we took the solar filter off Celestron and used it to watch the transit with our own eyes for a bit longer. As far as astronomical events go, it wasn’t as dramatic as a solar eclipse or a meteor shower, but it was still a haunting reminder of the scale and beauty of celestial mechanics and a small way, in the words of Doug Duncan, to “feel like [we're] a part of the universe we live in.”

My transit companions Eric and Jef. Jef didn’t let a broken leg stand in the way of participating in this once-in-a-lifetime event.

On the road with Robert Oppenheimer, left, and Ernest Lawrence in 1932. Photo courtesy of the American Institute of Physics.

1. Ernest Lawrence goes West, 1928. After finishing his Ph.D. at Yale and spending a few years there as an assistant professor, Ernest Lawrence hopped in a Reo Flying Cloud and headed west to a new job at UC Berkeley. Once there, he invented the world’s first particle accelerator, founded the country’s first National Laboratory, planted the seeds for American Big Science, and put the U.S.’s experimental physics program on the scientific map. (His theoretical counterpart Robert Oppenheimer arrived at Berkeley one year later in a gray Chrysler.)

2. Glenn Seaborg gets on a train with most of the world’s plutonium, 1943. Seaborg’s team isolated the first tiny sample of plutonium on August 20, 1942 at the Met Lab in Chicago. About a year later, he shipped a 200-milligram sample of element 94 to Los Alamos, where it was used in an experiment that proved it could sustain a chain reaction. Seaborg soon followed his precious sample to New Mexico to spend his well deserved summer vacation lurking around Santa Fe with his wife and most definitely NOT visiting the secret Manhattan Project laboratory up on the mesa. Headed back to Chicago at the end of July, he offered to take the speck of plutonium he had loaned to the war effort with him. Robert Wilson made the hand off before dawn in a Santa Fe restaurant, arriving, according to Richard Rhodes, “in a pickup armed Western-style with his personal Winchester .32 deer-hunting rifle to guard a highly valuable but barely visible treasure.” The less flamboyant and decidedly unarmed Seaborg simply put the sample in his suitcase and caught the train home. Soon, much larger quantities of plutonium and enriched uranium would begin arriving at Los Alamos from the production facilities in Hanford, Washington, and Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

3. Richard Fenyman ditches Freeman Dyson to chase a girl, 1948. After World War II ended, many physicists who had devoted themselves to the technical challenges of building an atomic bomb finally had a chance to tackle some of their science’s lingering theoretical problems. One of these was an inconsistency in quantum electrodynamics, the quantum field theory that described photons and electrons. Richard Fenyman published a solution to the problem in 1947, but his explanation was seemingly at odds with the work of two other scientists, Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, and no one was quite sure how to move forward. In the summer of 1948, Fenyman and his friend Freeman Dyson took a road trip from New York to Albuquerque (what can I say, physicists <3 New Mexico), picking up hitchhikers, getting speeding tickets, and staying in at least one brothel along the way. (Ian Sample assures us “they sought only shelter.”) When they arrived in Albuquerque, Fenyman took off in search of a girl, leaving Dyson to aimlessly travel the Southwest on a series of Greyhound buses. He eventually boarded one that would take him back to New York and, somewhere in the middle of Nebraska, suddenly saw that the three competing theories about quantum electrodynamics were actually one and the same. Quantum field theory was saved.

4. Gerry Guralnik and Dick Hagen drive to Germany to be insulted by Werner Heisenberg, 1965. In the early 1960s, the question of how particles acquired mass was just beginning to be discussed. A handful of physicists scattered across the U.S. and Europe more or less independently worked their way toward a preliminary answer, describing a field that permeates space and gives mass to some particles but not others. Gerry Guralnik, Dick Hagen, and Tom Kibble were working on this problem at Imperial College in London, publishing their first paper a bit behind the other teams in 1964. Guralnik and Hagen planned to give talks on their work the next summer at a conference hosted by Werner Heisenberg in a town outside Munich. Since they were both Americans and wanted to see more of Europe, they decided to make a vacation of it and picked up a cheap car in France. After encountering artichokes for the first time in Paris, they made their way to Bavaria, where, much to their chagrin, their work was met with “almost uniform disbelief,” according to Guralnik. Heisenberg himself called their theory “junk,” causing Guralnik to doubt his future as a physicist. If scientists at the LHC find the Higgs boson, Guralnik and Hagen will finally be proved right.

Sources: The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes and Massive by Ian Sample.

In reality, Dragon’s mission is not a libertarian adventure. Rather, it is the result of a deeply collaborative effort between SpaceX and NASA that could change the way we go to space, just like past public-private partnerships that gave us railroads and commercial air travel.

Dragon makes its way toward the International Space Station. It successfully docked this morning. Photo courtesy of SpaceX.

Not only does SpaceX need NASA to lend it some of its hard-won legitimacy, it also needs the agency’s money to get its still risky business off the ground (pun intended). And NASA needs SpaceX, too. If the space agency is really going to send people to Mars and beyond in the next few decades, it needs to start outsourcing routine trips to low Earth orbit and dedicate its increasingly limited resources toward exploratory missions ASAP.

Finally, a fun/sad fact I learned while reporting this story: it will take the astronauts on the space station TWENTY-FIVE HOURS to unpack the cargo Dragon is delivering. Truly every kid’s dream job!

For many of those obsessed, the only way to satiate their hunger for these machines is to build their own. There are no guidebooks or instruction manuals, and if you bought the raw materials off the shelf, it would cost around $125,000. On average, amateur cyclotrons take two to three years to build.

“It didn’t take long to become obsessed….Where I would be without the cyclotron project I cannot even begin to imagine.” —Tim Ponter. Photo by Tim Koeth, via symmetry.

The amateur cyclotron builders mentioned range from high school students to college professors to Fermilab scientists. To bring down the cost of their hobby they scavenge old equipment, a technique familiar to the first cyclotron builders. Columbia’s cyclotron, for example, was built partly from salvaged parts in the 1930s. It ended its life as scrap metal.

The cyclotron’s heyday as a cutting-edge research tool is mostly over, though they are still widely used in medicine. The largest one ever built is 60 feet in diameter and is still running at the Canadian physics lab TRIUMF. The smallest involves a single electron trapped in a magnetic field and is perhaps more appropriately called an artificial atom.

Pineapple pulque at Las Duelistas in downtown Mexico City. Photo by Beto Adame for The Daily.

Pulque is not a drink for the faint of heart. Once used by the Aztecs as a ceremonial beverage, it is made from the fermented sap of the maguey cactus and has a thick, silky texture reminiscent of an alcoholic lassi and a raw flavor that epitomizes the phrase “acquired taste.” Often blended with sugar and various kinds of fruits or vegetables to make flavored “curados,” pulque combines the probiotic kick of kombucha with an intoxicating effect that can feel mildly hallucinogenic. One friend described his first sip as “unsettling.” Another lost the feeling in his fingertips after downing a mug-full.

Read the full story here.

Biology is perhaps the science I am least familiar with; years spent running around physics labs can sadly sort of make you forget about the life sciences. High energy physics, particularly, operates simultaneously at two scales that seem pretty removed from life on Earth: the very small (quarks, neutrinos) and the very large (black holes, the origins of the universe). I was delighted and a bit surprised to see a similar conflation of disparate scales in the Biology Institute labs I visited. By studying the genetics of specific animal populations, my tour guides Noemi Matías Ferrer, a graduate student in biological sciences working on her Ph.D., and Patricia Rosas Escobar, a staff biologist originally from Baja California, are able to learn about entire ecosystems, humans’ effect on the environment, and life on our planet more generally.

Some of the chemical buffers Paty and Noemi use to extract DNA from their samples. Paty is in the background.

Paty is studying the genetics of guacamaya roja (otherwise know as the scarlet macaw) populations as part of a project to reintroduce the bird to protected areas of the Yucatán. Illegal trade of these dramatically plumed parrots has dramatically reduced their populations, and all surviving guacamayas now live in some form of captivity. Paty studies the DNA of guacamayas to ensure that only birds from populations that originated in Mexico are being reintroduced to the peninsula. This type of environmental intervention, in which intense human management is required to merely get an ecosystem back to “normal,” flies in the face of the assumption that the best thing we can do for the environment is to just leave it alone. (I saw something similar at work at Fermilab’s prairie preserve back in 2005.)

The group in charge of the guacamaya reintroduction effort in the Yucatán sends Paty these blood samples from the birds, from which she extracts their DNA. The paper is specially designed to preserve the genetic information in the blood without refrigeration, making it an ideal tool for rural fieldwork. In this (slightly blurry; sorry!) picture, you can see the small holes where Paty has removed part of the sample on the right in order to analyze it.

Noemi, on the other hand, studies two species of tree frog in southern Veracruz. Unlike Paty, who analyzes samples that are sent to her, Noemi spends a lot of time in the field collecting specimens and observing the frogs’ behavior. When she first went to Veracruz to do fieldwork in 2009, there was a drought and the frogs were extremely hard to find—a worrying discovery. But thanks to increased rain in 2010 and 2011 (she usually goes during September and October, the height of the rainy season), the populations seemed to bounce back.

But that doesn’t mean that the frogs Noemi studies are out of the woods (so to speak). One of the reason that Noemi is interested in studying tree frogs is because, as she said in Spanish, “amphibians reflect [environmental changes] in a more immediate manner than mammals do” and are, therefore, considered bioindicators. Noemi’s frogs have lost much of their habitat over the years, and she is studying their genetics and morphology to determine how that stress is affecting them. Studying their DNA reveals which individuals in a population are reproducing, while weighing and measuring the frogs helps Noemi pick out physical changes and asymmetries that can be responses to environmental stress.

Noemi studies the physical traits of these tree frogs under a microscope. Afterward, she removes their hearts and livers for further study. If you look closely at the frogs lying on their backs, you can see the incisions she makes on their abdomens.

All of Noemi’s specimens are males, partly because her research does require killing the frogs she studies and she prefers to leave the egg-laying females alone to minimize her effect on their populations. But the male tree frogs are also much easier to find, as they spend their nights singing to attract mates. In addition to the challenge of finding the frogs, Noemi is increasingly confronting issues related to declining security in Veracruz. Her fieldwork often involves wandering around private property at night, which is the first thing you learn NOT to do if you visit rural Mexico.

The heart (below) and liver of a tree frog. Noemi leaves their other organs intact so that other scientists can use them for future studies.

Back at the lab, Noemi will often spend seven or eight hours measuring and dissecting frogs under a microscope, but she says that after about four hours she starts to burn out. The fine motor skills and intense concentration required for her hands-on work reminded me of the arts and crafts sensibility of Steph’s chemistry lab.

Perhaps the most time consuming part of both Noemi and Paty’s research is extracting DNA from their samples and preparing it for analysis.

Noemi and Paty use these micropipettes to measure out extremely small quantities of the buffers in the first picture as part of the process of DNA extraction.

Once the sample has been treated with the buffers, it goes into this centrifuge to separate out the DNA and force it to clump together.

Tubes containing extracted frog DNA.

Once they have extracted the DNA, Noemi and Paty must isolate the fragments of genetic information they are most interested in. To make those fragments easier to study, they amplify them using what they charmingly referred to as “a copy machine.”

The "copy machine" that Noemi and Paty use to amplify the fragments of DNA they want to study.

When the extraction and amplification is complete—which can take hours—Paty and Noemi look at the DNA under UV light to make sure they actually have the sample they need. This is the moment of truth, since if nothing shows up they have to repeat the tedious and time consuming process until they get it right.

By looking into the eye piece on the top of this box, Paty and Noemi can view the DNA they have extracted and amplified under UV light.

The result of a successful DNA extraction and amplification as seen under UV light. This picture is of a fragment of pine tree DNA.

All this work is just a prelude to the analysis that Noemi and Paty will ultimately produce.

A page from Noemi's lab book.

Mexico is often described as one of the most beautiful countries in the world, and it certainly contains an impressive variety of ecosystems (my favorite is the huatesca, a truly bizarre combination of desert and rain forest). I asked Noemi and Paty what they thought about the recent push to increase ecotourism in Mexico in hopes of protecting some of these areas, and their answers were some of the most thoughtful I’ve ever heard on the subject. Paty pointed out that ecotourism often favors certain species over others; she recalled seeing whale watchers in Baja California trample plants and litter during their excursion. Noemi, for her part, wondered if ecotourism can be sustainable without economically benefiting the local populations of humans, who are often more generously rewarded for exploiting the environment around them than for protecting it—think of how lucrative selling a captured guacamaya on the black market could be, especially for a person without many other options.

In her work with amphibians, Noemi also runs up against the issue of how to convince people to protect an animal that isn’t, to be blunt, cuddly or conventionally beautiful. A lot of people think frogs are pretty gross and don’t want to go out of their way to help them out. (For more on this issue, check out Robert Krulwich’s story about efforts to reintroduce the world’s largest stick insect to its natural habitat.) What’s more, the habitat her tree frogs need to reproduce—deep pools of standing water surrounded by vegetation—is also conducive to dengue-carrying mosquitos, making it a target for well-meaning and necessary public health efforts as well as simple deforestation.

Our relationship to the environment is never a simple issue, and the first step toward improving it is figuring out just what is going on out there anyway. A big thank you Noemi and Paty for taking time away from their work to show me what they do.

¡Gracias, Noemi!

And of course a big thank you to aluminum foil, without which no science would ever be done.

Michael Faraday, experimentalist extraordinaire. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

Michael Faraday, the experimental physicist who did pioneering work on electromagnetism in the early nineteenth century, walked the fine line between insider and outsider in a way that is nearly impossible to do today. Faraday grew up poor and began his scientific career as a bottle washer in a laboratory in London’s Royal Institution. Like Carter, he had no university education and puzzled through the mysteries of the universe largely on his own. Unlike Carter, he was eventually regarded as a genius and recognized as one of the greatest experimental scientists of all time. In fact, it was Faraday who first developed field theory after sprinkling iron filings near a magnet and observing the predictable patterns they formed. “Ironically,” Wertheim writes of Carter, “the one major figure in the history of physics whose life story in some respects paralleled his own had been the source of an idea he could not stomach.”

Faraday lived at a time when the boundaries between amateur experimentalist and professional scientist weren’t quite as rigid as they are today, but he, too, felt the sting of being ignored by the academy. It wasn’t until the more respected physicist James Clerk Maxwell turned the results of Faraday’s experiments into differential equations that the physics community embraced field theory, setting the stage for the industrial revolution, the telecommunications industry, home electricity, and quantum mechanics. Ironically, Faraday’s lack of a formal education meant that he couldn’t understand Maxwell’s equations; Wertheim tells us that he “died a hero, but an alien in the world he had helped create,” and it’s easy to imagine him sympathizing with Carter and the other outsider physicists who still feel left out of that world today.

Click here for more information about Physics on the Fringe. Margaret Wertheim also runs the very cool Institute for Figuring here in Los Angeles.

I got my start writing about physics as a Fermilab intern, so when it was time for the Tevatron to be laid to rest last fall, I felt like I had to be there to say goodbye. What follows is my account of attending the Tevatron’s funeral on Septemeber 30, 2011.

An aerial view of the Tevatron. The Main Injector can also be seen in the background. Image courtesy Fermilab/DOE.

Approximately seven hours after the Tevatron shutdown, I squeezed out of Fermilab’s Users’ Center bar to head to an Irish wake for what was, until just a few months ago, the most powerful particle accelerator in the world. This being the CDF party, The Drug Sniffing Dogs, the collaboration’s official rock band, had been going strong for three and half hours and showed no sign of stopping. The set list had devolved from what the lead singer called “crying in your beer songs” like “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” to dance party favorites like “Super Freak.” I had signed two commemorative T-shirts, one on someone’s body, while sipping Two Brothers’ Atom Smasher beer and munching on homemade cookies frosted with the CDF logo. The whole affair was tinged with the melancholy elation of the night after high school graduation, with everyone desperately savoring the last moments of an already bygone era before truly letting themselves move on to what they hoped would be bigger and better things.

For many physicists, those bigger and better things await them at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, which is already colliding particles at over three times the energy of the Tevatron and only operating at half power. Others will be staying at Fermilab to work on the lab’s new intensity frontier program, which involves building state-of-the-art superconducting accelerators to study muons and those potentially faster-than-light neutrinos you’ve heard so much about. Still others are moving on to careers in industry or medicine, while some are retiring along with the Tevatron. But on Friday, all eyes were on the machine that had, for the last 28 years, led the way in the study of the fundamental building blocks of our universe and made the Illinois prairie the best place in the world to be a high energy physicist.

Fermilab describes this picture as “The CDF detector rolling out of the collision hall after discovering the Top Quark.” Taking a victory lap, I suppose. Image courtesy of Fermilab/DOE.

Shutting down the Tevatron was a multi-step process, all of which I watched from the control room of DZero, Fermilab’s other main detector and CDF’s complement and competitor. CDF stopped taking data first, while its emcee tried not to get too choked up and the DZero operators enjoyed the fact that they had outlasted their rival for a few precious minutes. But soon enough it was DZero’s turn to save its last pieces of data and power down. Then the action switched over to the accelerator’s Main Control Room, where Helen Edwards, who was the lead scientist for the construction of the Tevatron three decades ago, pressed a large red button that killed the beam by steering it into a metal target, followed by an equally large blue button that powered down the magnets. Cheers wafted into the DZero control room from the experiment’s assembly hall, where many members of the collaboration were gathered to watch the proceedings. And then it was over.

One by-product of having an accelerator that runs successfully for 28 years is that your once cutting edge Main Control Room starts to look decidedly retro. Image courtesy of Fermilab/DOE.

As the detectors stopped taking data and the Tevatron terminated its store for the last time, I wasn’t the only one with tears in my eyes. Many of the scientists I spoke with compared shutting down the Tevatron to losing a family member. At the lab-wide party at Fermilab’s high rise, Wilson Hall, after the shutdown procedure, the accelerator physicists and operators wandered the atrium with a shell-shocked look behind their eyes. The CDF and DZero scientists, after all, still have several years of data analysis ahead of them. The accelerator physicists had just killed their baby. At a particle accelerator, losing beam—intentionally or unintentionally—is an everyday occurrence. For accelerator physicists, not trying to get it back is almost unthinkable.

Bob Mau, who was head of the Operations Department for 34 years and came out of retirement to emcee the shutdown ceremonies from the Main Control Room, told me that he was proud of keeping his composure through the official event but fully expected to wake up crying in the middle of the night. “I’ve been here since the beginning,” he said. “I have a lot of emotions tied up in this machine.” When I asked Ron Moore, the head of the Tevatron Department and the man behind the machine’s Twitter feed, how he felt, he said with a kind of frantic laugh, “Well, I didn’t lose it!” He was leaving Fermilab the next day for a job at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he will be operating a cyclotron that makes the radioactive isotopes used in PET scans.

On the day of the shutdown, the DZero Assembly Hall was filled with physicists who had traveled from all over the world to say goodbye. Image courtesy of Fermilab/DOE.

Bittersweet was definitely the word of the day, as collaborators who hadn’t seen one another in years met each other’s children and exchanged plans for the future. Many had already moved on to new experiments and had traveled back to Fermilab just for the celebration. As Brendan Casey, a DZero scientist who is beginning to work on Fermilab’s new muon g-2 experiment, said, “It feels like a reunion, bringing everybody back together and having one last hurrah.” And just as the scientists who worked on and with Fermilab’s most powerful accelerator are moving on to new jobs, new questions, and new frontiers, the Tevatron itself isn’t going to get much rest. After as much of its infrastructure as possible is repurposed into Fermilab’s new experiments, a section of the accelerator, along with the house-sized CDF and DZero detectors, will become an educational exhibit for the public.

In addition to being a high energy physics lab, Fermilab is also a prairie preserve and home to a herd of bison. Image courtesy Fermilab/DOE.

At the Irish wake that closed out the day of celebrations, about 20 of the younger members of the Operations Department gathered around a backyard fire and raised their whiskey glasses to cowboys like Fermilab’s founding director Robert Wilson, whose idiosyncratic leadership powered the laboratory through its early years and set the stage for the construction of what seemed at the time like an impossible machine—a machine that, as current lab director Pier Oddone pointed out earlier in the day, had “exceeded every expectation ever set for it” and ran strong until the very end. As the young operators vowed to live up to the legacy the Tevatron leaves behind, I thought of what Casey had said to me the day before about transitioning from DZero to his new muon work: “We did some great physics. Now let’s do some more.”