The poem 'Die Lorelei' by Heinrich Heine

By Frank Linde

Having often spent days, weeks and even months on board of huge ocean liners as a sailor’s son, I never imagined myself signing up for a cruise on the Rhine. To make matters worse: I already get seasick on the 30 minutes ferry ride from Den Helder to Texel. Nevertheless, Thursday April 12 I boarded the ms Amacello opposite the Amsterdam central railway station for a Rhine cruise. I had an excellent excuse: I was asked to entertain the passengers with a lecture series covering: The quantum world; past & present at CERN; Why particle physics matters!; and Astroparticle physics. And the real clincher: I could take my lovely wife along as well!

The service onboard can be summarized in one word: excellent. I now even fancy pasta. Not to mention foie gras. And did you know you really can have smoked salmon with champagne for breakfast? It will probably cost me and my wife at least a month to get back to our regular weight. Culturally, our fabulous cruise master showed us, in his words, numerous ABCs, i.e. “Another Bloody Church”. Some of them and notably the ones in Cologne and Strasbourg were indeed very nice. Certainly much nicer than the modern art museum in Strasbourg which I now rank as the worst museum I ever visited (admittedly, I did miss a Kandinsky). For this I cannot blame the cruise master because we toured Strasbourg on our own on bikes provided by the ms Amacello crew. We had to sign a disclaimer (apparently an earlier passenger is still suing after a touring bus just about failed to knock him/her of his/her bike …). After signing, the receptionist almost fainted when we informed her we did not want the bike helmets. Only after we had explicitly added in handwriting on the disclaimer that we declined to use the offered helmets, we were allowed to take the bikes … Strasbourg by bike is really marvelous, in particular the “Petit France” quarter. Another Rhine valley gemstone turned out to be the town of Colmar. Certainly a place we plan to visit again and I even like (some, Gewürztraminer) German white wine now.

Now the real surprise of this cruise: the passengers. Being Dutch (or perhaps just stupid), I always thought Rhine cruises were targeted at not exactly my favorite public (to state it mildly). How wrong can one be, at least with this American-dominated group! I think I have  rarely given a public lecture for a more science-interested audience than on the ms Amacello. These people not only listened almost daily to my 1½ hour lecture, but as well to lectures on: antiquities (Egyptians, Greeks and Romans); the inner workings of our Sun; and biology even my daughter, a bio-medical student, could learn from. And if that is not sufficient, some even took part in the parallel running so called MacMania lecture series on iPad, iCloud, iPhone, photography and other interesting IT topics! (Not to mention of course the trips to e.g. the Max Planck institute for astrophysics in Heidelberg …).

For instance, I learned interesting things about Hannibal crossing the Alps and I learned things I really disliked entirely (it made me very queasy) on how the Egyptian “doctors” improved the eye sight of those suffering from cataract. During lunch and dinner we not only enjoyed the great food, but even more the excellent discussions on many diverse topics: volcanoes, the early days of computers, Feynman, dinosaur digs, nuclear energy policy, digital photo editing- and archive software, politics, etc. In summary: this turned out to be one of the most entertaining workshops I ever went to! As a result I might even track Hannibal on bike across the alps and/or go to a dinosaur dig in the Rocky Mountains. And I guess I will avoid Yellowstone Park as long as that huge volcano remains looming underneath it.

Also nice things come to an end: Thursday April 19th at 10:30 sharp (Swiss timing) our taxi picked us up to drop us at the Basel SBB railway station to start our eight hour return trip to Almere. One thing in common between our house and our cabin: they both are below the waterline …

P.S. I
And indeed me and my wife also participated in a sixties dance session (with some Elvis Presley look-a-likes) and we did rather well.
P.S II
And of course I do hope that those passengers who went on to CERN, enjoyed an unforgettable experience at, in my opinion, the world’s nicest research facility!

By Sander Mooij

Now that I am in my fourth year as a PhD student, I thought it would be interesting to work in another institute for some time. And see: after collecting some money at Nikhef and sending a couple of emails back and forth (and surviving a lengthy conversation with US customs), here I am at the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics!

First I have to write something about the Stanford campus. Being used to Science Park dimensions, I am extremely impressed. I did expect many institutes, libraries and student housings, but not such an entire organism. Why can’t there be a Nikhef Football Stadium? Or a Science Park golf course? Or a nursery and an elementary school? Well, probably because we lack some millionaires donating to Nikhef to have their name on a building (“see you at William Gates”). Besides I guess it’s also the Stanford brand (there is a dedicated clothing store here) that generates substantial income. And, oh yes, we don’t ask 26000 dollars per semester from our students. Anyway: this is enormous. The eternal blue sky above all of this doesn’t hurt either. (By the way: I should mention that my colleague-PhD students are most proud of the fact that the Stanford campus needs TWO zip codes.)

In the institute I mainly work with Russian Andrei Linde, who – just before my birth – was one of the founders of the paradigm of cosmological inflation, which is exactly what my PhD is about. About three times a week we have lengthy discussions in which one is mainly talking and the other is mainly taking notes. Needless to say that I profit a lot. Most often Andrei’s wife, supergravity expert Renata Kallosh, joins the conversation as well. All offices have blackboards reaching up to the ceiling. Being two meters tall this gives me a whole private space to write.

I share a visitor’s office with Taiwanese professor Kim W. Ng. The Stanford PhDs work either in some large mixed space, or in a small office with three or four, or – for those who are finishing – in an extremely small private space. No, that could never beat my good old H321b at Nikhef! Especially because the hierarchy here is such that only postdocs and staff (and visitors) have windows in their offices.

The atmosphere in the institute is quite OK. People are pretty accessible – also the big shots. I know that this sounds like a brochure but it is exactly what I would call “an inspiring and interacting work atmosphere”. Many talks and seminars are organized (last week we had Gerard ‘t Hooft). Lenny Susskind, the head of the group, sits in front and explains, when discussions take too long, in one phrase what the confusion is all about, and that the speaker should continue.

And then at 7 I take my beautiful race bike (169 dollars at the Walmart supermarket) and leave the “Stanford Bubble”. I live about seven kilometres away, with an Indian guy and another Dutch physicist, Joris van Heijningen, who has just finished a one-year internship at our R&D group. It is a small world!

By: Frank Linde, director Nikhef

A guaranteed question after all (ok, almost all) of my public lectures is: “What is the societal impact of …?” In Tuesday night’s Dutch talkshow “Pauw & Witteman” Jolande Sap (member of Dutch parliament) asked Robbert Dijkgraaf (chairman of the KNAW, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences) exactly this question. I already saw it on Jolande’s face while Robbert was giving his excellent explanation (and that for a theorist who, as far as I know, never dealt with the practicalities of experimental (particle) physics) on the impact of the events which took place earlier that day at CERN: the joint announcement of the ATLAS and CMS collaborations that first hints of the Higgs particle had been observed.

What Higgs? – What can we do with the Higgs?

How to answer this question properly? My first reaction is often: “What is the use of (classical) music, art, making love, theatre, etc.?” I.e. many things in life we simply do for relaxation, pleasure and fun. Personally, I think that is exactly what differentiates mankind from animals. And incidentally: it is probably also why we evolved over history to what we are today: a highly sophisticated society.

I fear, for many this is not sufficient and certainly not in today’s economic climate. So let me try better.

Somewhere around 1881 James Clerk Maxwell published an integrated theory of electricity and magnetism. This was the culmination of more than a century of experimental and theoretical research by numerous people. Maxwell’s new theoretical framework predicted the existence of “electro-magnetic waves”: an oscillatory phenomenon traveling at the speed of light, even in vacuum. Maxwell’s prediction’s societal impact was instant throughout the decades after: radio, television, microwaves, radar, mobile phones, optical communications, etc. Incidentally: ordinary light is also an electro-magnetic wave.

Who can imagine our society without all this?
Maxwell initiated a concept we particle physicists now call unification: a desire to incorporate the fundamental forces of Nature into a single unified theory i.e. formula.

Another example: in 1905 Albert Einstein published his theory of relativity. This time the societal impact took much longer. But thanks to Einstein: our GPS works properly; we have sufficient electrical power (albeit, since Fukushima I cease to be an advocate of nuclear power …); we have a plethora of nuclear-based healthcare machinery and treatment; etc. I cannot resist also mentioning the impact of the initially purely theoretical concept of antimatter (Paul Dirac, 1928): the so-called PET (positron emission tomography) which makes use of the anti-electron, coined positron, to visualize transport inside the human body. I can add: most (all?) non-invasive tools in medicine go back to nuclear physics (roentgen, NMRI, CT, SPECT, PET, …).
And last but not least: the World Wide Web, the biggest economic boom (and bust), in mankind was launched at CERN in 1989. And there is more.

But is this enough to guarantee future societal impact of ingenuity-driven research like CERN’s hunt for the Higgs particle?

Future will tell. Meanwhile, our universities and institutes like Nikhef train numerous, and often incredibly smart, youngsters to become original, independent researchers. Many of them opted for physics because of the challenges and progress in the quest for the fundamental building blocks of our Universe and their interactions! About 50% of Nikhef’s PhD students eventually pursue a career in private industries like Philips, ASML, Shell, finance and consulting companies to directly boost the Dutch economic activity. If that is still insufficient, the income tax paid by Nikhef graduates working in private industry alone corresponds more-or-less to Nikhef’s gross annual budget!

Finally: Are endeavors like CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project expensive? Surely with an investment tag in the multibillion Euro range, the LHC machine isn’t cheap. But is it expensive? The LHC design started in the eighties of the last century. It was built between 1994-2008 (re-using the old LEP underground tunnel!). First turned on in September 2008 with a major incident soon after. As of November 2009 the LHC is operating smoothly at ½ of its design energy. In 2014 the LHC is expected to reach its design specifications. At present “standard” LHC operations are expected to continue until 2030. Around that time one of the options is to double the LHC energy and to run it for at least another decade. Hence we are talking about an one-of-a-kind worldwide 50-year project. Can one do research more efficiently than that? I do not think so. LHC investment costs amount to about 20 k€ per physicist per year, similar to the instrumentation expenses of many other experimenters. Of course there is a price to pay: particle physicists have to collaborate, to work incredibly hard to secure funding even in harsh economic times, to have the endurance to patiently work towards that fabulous moment that the facility is switched on and hopefully starts to deliver the physics it was built for. And in my opinion it is more than worth it: the first Z-events (1989) and WW-events (1994) at LEP or the first hints of the Higgs at the LHC (2011). And for you?

Finally: Robbert’s answer in response to Jolande’s question also boldly referred to nuclear power (a reality these days, even for those, like me, who dislike it).

[ A translation into English of a blog I posted summer 2011 on a dutch site ]

A friend of mine sent me this link a while back.  You might remember the discussion this summer about the coming of a “Little Ice Age”; the link above concerns sunspots, how there is less sunspot activity now than in the past, and how sunspots might disappear completely in the future.  Would that cause the earth to become colder?

For most of my friends, I am the only scientist they know, I get this kind of question from time to time.  I don’t mind answering them at all, I am always happy if something I say helps reduce confusion and uncertainty.  Use your talents to good purpose, my parents used to always say.

Anyway, I read the link, and then took a look at the discussion in the replies to the link (there was a section for “comments” below the story).  Somebody asked in a comment, how important sunspots were to the climate, in comparison to all the greenhouse gases humans are dumping into the atmosphere.  Somebody replied to that comment:

Does this guy know that volcanic ativity since the Earth has been around is responsible for the gases that make up the atmosphere not humans. One medium grade volcanic expolsion is more distruptive to all human contributions times 4.

Said another way, he wants to know (in the first sentence) if we realize that volcanoes have been dumping gases into the atmosphere for a long time, and compared to that, what human activity contributes is peanuts. The second sentence, about the relative importance of a volcanic eruption versus human activity, is easy to address.  This is information you can just look up.  I did so.  On the one hand, indeed, a volcanic explosion releases a lot of pretty nasty gases into the atmosphere.  Count them all up over a year, including for example the daily eruptions in Hawaii.  How much carbon dioxide in total is released.  The answer : around 200 billion kilograms.  Sounds like an awful lot, and it is, but the amount released yearly by “us” is one hundred times greater. So that second sentence is just nonsense.

But that’s just a faulty claim not backed up by data; that’s not the flawed logic that gives this post its title.  The logic error is in the first sentence, about all those volcanic eruptions during the entire history of the earth, they being responsible for the gases that make up our atmosphere.  Volcanoes are indeed an important contribution.  But there are also trees, for example, that “eat” carbon dioxide, oceans that absorb it, etc etc.  It is just not the case that after a volcanic eruption, the gases released remain in the atmosphere for millions of years. The real question is the balance between the rate at which carbon dioxide (and other gases) are released into the atmosphere (due to volcanoes, human activity, whatever) and the rate at which the same gases leave the atmosphere (for example absorption by plants).  Human activity has caused a large increase in the release rate of greenhouse gases in the past hundreds of years.  What effect does that have?  Can the absorption rate keep up?  And if not, what effect will that have on climate? Those are the real questions.

The logic error is easy to make — I almost made it myself — because we’re talking about things outside our daily experience.  Let me attempt to make the same error in a more familiar situation.

Someone claims on a forum that water can be poisonous.  Drink too much too fast, and you’ll die.  (Four liters in one hour and you could already be in trouble, it’s true … look it up!)   Somebody else replies

are you crazy?  Think about all the water you’ve ever drank in your life, that is way more than four liters.  Those four liters are peanuts!

Do you see it now?  Has this guy never sweated or used the toilet?

[ This is an English translation of a blog post I made on a dutch site a few years ago ]

The April 27, 2008 issue of the newspaper Kennemerland op Zondag contains an article about the May Festival in the town Wijk Aan Zee.  One of the sentences is “De zestiende editie van het Meifestival staat komende week voor de deur.“  (next week is the 16th edition of the May Festival).  A little further on in the article one of the organizers is quoted as saying “We zijn het festival zestien jaar geleden begonnen.” (we started the festival 16 years ago).

Huh?

Think about it.  Suppose that last year, I organized a festival for the first time.  And this year I will organize the same festival again.  So “we started the Jeff Festival one year ago”, and “next week is the second edition of the Jeff Festival”.  Shouldn’t the paper have said that this is the 17th edition of the May Festival?

In computer science, this sort of error happens so frequently that it has a special name: “off-by-one error”.  Look at this list of programming tips (see number 17) from the famous Brian Kernhigan, one of the people who created the Unix computer operating system, which is now (35 years later) still used on our Grid systems and also behind the scenes on the popular Macintosh computers.

Or maybe they just skipped the May Festival one year

For my first Nikhef blog post, I’d like to talk about something I read a couple of weeks ago, something I really liked. It had to do with what I will call “hard data on a social phenomenon”.  Let me explain what I mean.

When studying any effects, scientists need to do experiments and gather data with which to test their hypotheses and theories.  Social sciences are no different … except for people are harder to study than particles.  Because of this, those scientists often rely on questionnaires that they give to the people being studied, or sometimes they devise very clever experiments. [ As an aside, check out the great book "59 seconds" for some good examples of those clever experiments and questionnaires! ] However, sometimes something happens, a big thing, which connects together enough people that you can actually MEASURE something in the way that other scientists do. You don’t have to rely on being clever (which is something I also really like) nor do you have to rely on people telling the truth when you ask them a question.

So first a personal example, then the real story that I said I would tell you about. The final episode of the TV series “MASH” was broadcast while I was a student in college, living in student housing. Lots of people were all talking about how they were going to watch this last episode, it was a VERY popular program at the time. This is of course people just talking about it. Who knows, maybe many would change their mind, or maybe many did not want to admit that they thought it was a stupid program and just SAID they were going to watch it.

In any case, I certainly watched it, and at the end of the show, I went to do some private waste management as I had had a few beers while watching.  After finishing, I attempted to flush the toilet : nothing. I found out later this was a campus-wide thing: in all student housing, there was at that moment zero water pressure.  Because MANY people were watching, and they all were saving their toilet breaks and evening showers until after the show was over, not wanting to miss anything. Real, hard social data, proof that you could observe, that many people were actually watching that program. Great!

At this point you might be wondering what this has to do with Nikhef.  My work at Nikhef is in large-scale distributed computing. Somebody once said, a great thing about computers is they enable you to make mistakes at incredible speed.  One way I help myself avoid making large-scale mistakes with all those computers is to read stories about large-scale mistakes others have made. This gives me ideas about what things to be careful with, what kind of tests we should make on our systems before turning them over to our users.

So the place where I read this story that I promise you, I really am going to tell you about, was on a great computer “horror story” forum called “comp.risks” which discusses risks associated with using computers in general. This particular story involved “hard data” on a social phenomenon: causes of car accidents.  Police generally ask you, if you are in an accident, “how did it happen?”  In August in New York City, official statistics say that about 2000 of the accidents (11% of all accidents) involved “driver inattention/distraction”.  Of those 2000, 10 specifically mentioned a mobile phone.

So here is the story: this past October, there was a widespread Blackberry service outage in Europe, Africa and the Middle East (unfortunately, not in NYC).  During this outage, traffic accidents dropped by 20% in Dubai and 40% in Abu Dhabi.  Hard data.  On a social phenomenon: traffic accidents caused by drivers using mobile phones.

[ The interested reader can find here the original article in comp.risks. ]

By: Frank Linde, director Nikhef

Every week at least one Nikhef scientist gives a public lecture somewhere in the Netherlands. With 5-10 public lectures annually, I take my fair share. Last week I had my best public lecture experience ever.

It all started last July with (apologies for the Dutch):
“… ik ben lid van de Vereniging Mensa (u wellicht bekend).”
I replied:
“In ieder geval weet ik niet wat Mensa is (afgezien van een goedkoop studenten restaurant).”
Only to realize that I am not that smart as I thought:
“Vereniging Mensa is een (internationale) vereniging van en voor zeer intelligente (hoogbegaafde) mensen.”

Friday evening I went to a resort somewhere smack in the middle of the woods on the Veluwe. At the reception desk my host (a very nice young lady as opposed to what I had imagined from our earlier e-mail conversation) welcomes me and immediately makes it clear that I should not only talk about the agreed-upon topic (Large Hadron Collider) but also about the super-luminous neutrinos recently observed by the OPERA experiment in Italy. I.e. two talks for the price of one. And I can talk as fast as I want (Nobel prize winner Sam Ting and former spokesman of the L3 experiment at LEP always told me before I started my presentation: “I know you: you have to speak S L O W L Y”).

I first gave my neutrino lecture. I could not resist asking the Mensists how fast light (photons) from nuclear fusion in the Sun’s interior travel to Earth. Eight minutes was the enthusiastic and unanimous response… Indeed the correct answer for neutrinos which traverse the Sun unhindered to arrive on Earth. Photons, however, are absorbed, emitted, re-absorbed, etc. numerous times within the Sun’s core before they reach the Sun’s surface to race to Earth. This delays the photons by hundreds of thousands of years… The point was taken. Nevertheless, my lecture generated a very lively discussion and the audience flagged some errors on my slides and asked very deep questions e.g. on causality… And meanwhile I talked faster and faster… and nobody complained!

The neutrino’s warmed them up and they also wanted the Large Hadron Collider lecture. I think I never gave it faster than this time. And again many questions and a serious debate entering into various related topics followed. I do not think I exhausted the audience. At some time I proposed my host to wrap up… I was afraid I was getting tired. After she thanked me for the lectures, I even tried to become a honorary Mensa member. That failed miserably: I simply have to take the test and risk failing it which would completely ruin my self-esteem (I could do it incognito as Mr. Van Buren she suggested …). Anyway, I did get a very nice book with Mensa stories. I already read that one of my favourite authors (Yvonne Kroonenberg from ‘Alle mannnen willen maar een ding’; ‘Zij houdt van hem; hij ook’; ‘Kan ik hem nog ruilen?’, ‘Het zit op de bank en het zapt’) was a Mensist as well as Wubbo Ockels. I guess I should really take the test eventually and risk ruining my self-esteem.

Before I made it to the bar I had to answer many other questions. And nobody complained about the speed of my lectures. I fear they even would have loved to hear my lecture on Dan Brown’s “Angels & Demons”.

Wat fijn dat je er bent! Binnenkort beginnen wij officieel met ons nieuwe blog. Wat willen we ermee bereiken?

* Dat iedereen een kijkje kan nemen in het leven / de belevingswereld van wetenschappers…
* Dat iedereen vriendelijke en levendige discussies aan kan gaan over natuurkunde, en astrodeeltjes- en deeltjesfysica…
* Dat iedereen meer te weten kan komen over de fascinerende natuurkunde die wij bedrijven!

1 huisregel:

* Wij verwelkomen discussies, maar vragen iedereen respect te hebben voor elkaars mening en vriendelijk te blijven!