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Full Blast

Posted in Science Politics, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , on April 9, 2009 by telescoper

Yesterday, Paolo Calisse and I were paid a visit by a reporter (Martin Shipton) and a photographer from Welsh newspaper The Western Mail who wanted to cover the sad story of Clover.

Paolo is heavily involved with Clover, but I was a bit hesitant about doing this because I’m not really part of the Clover team. Paolo suggested it might be an advantage that I wasn’t so directly involved as I might be able to give a more balanced view of the importance of the experiment than him. Anyway, the story came out today in the newspaper and is available online too.

DrThis is the picture they took of me and Paolo in the Clover lab, fiddling with the cryostat. I’ve already had my leg pulled enough about pretending to be an instrumentalist for the photograph so no jokes please…

 

 

 

 

In the same issue of the paper there is another feature about Cardiff’s astronomy research, concerning BLAST (Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimetre Telescope). This is a much happier story, as it marks the release of results from a highly successful science run from 2006. In the print version of the Western Mail the two stories were run on the same page, one above the other, making very effectively the point that cutting the funding of the Astronomy Instrumentation Group jeopardizes a great deal of world-leading research besides Clover itself. And when I say “world-leading” I mean it, whatever the RAE panel might have thought.

A deluge of articles about BLAST appeared on the arXiv today, one of which is now published in Nature. I thought I’d put up the abstracts here in order to draw attention to these results. The author lists contain many Cardiff authors and, as you’ll see, the results are both fascinating and wide-ranging. I’ve put links to the arXiv after each abstract:

Title: BLAST: Correlations in the Cosmic Far-Infrared Background at 250, 350, and 500 microns Reveal Clustering of Star-Forming Galaxies

Authors: Marco P. Viero, Peter A. R. Ade, James J. Bock, Edward L. Chapin, Mark J. Devlin, Matthew Griffin, Joshua O. Gundersen, Mark Halpern, Peter C. Hargrave, David H. Hughes, Jeff Klein, Carrie J. MacTavish, Gaelen Marsden, Peter G. Martin, Philip Mauskopf, Lorenzo Moncelsi, Mattia Negrello, Calvin B. Netterfield, Luca Olmi, Enzo Pascale, Guillaume Patanchon, Marie Rex, Douglas Scott, Christopher Semisch, Nicholas Thomas, Matthew D. P. Truch, Carole Tucker, Gregory S. Tucker, Donald V. Wiebe

We detect correlations in the cosmic far-infrared background due to the clustering of star-forming galaxies, in observations made with the Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope (BLAST), at 250, 350, and 500 microns. Since the star-forming galaxies which make up the far-infrared background are expected to trace the underlying dark matter in a biased way, measuring clustering in the far infrared background provides a way to relate star formation directly to structure formation. We test the plausibility of the result by fitting a simple halo model to the data. We derive an effective bias b_eff = 2.2 +/- 0.2, effective mass log(M_eff/M_sun) = 13.2 (+0.3/-0.8), and minimum mass log(M_min/M_sun) = 9.9 (+1.5/-1.7). This is the first robust clustering measurement at submillimeter wavelengths.

http://arxiv.org/abs/0904.1200

Title: Over half of the far-infrared background light comes from galaxies at z >= 1.2

Authors: Mark J. Devlin, Peter A. R. Ade, Itziar Aretxaga, James J. Bock, Edward L. Chapin, Matthew Griffin, Joshua O. Gundersen, Mark Halpern, Peter C. Hargrave, David H. Hughes, Jeff Klein, Gaelen Marsden, Peter G. Martin, Philip Mauskopf, Lorenzo Moncelsi, Calvin B. Netterfield, Henry Ngo, Luca Olmi, Enzo Pascale, Guillaume Patanchon, Marie Rex, Douglas Scott, Christopher Semisch, Nicholas Thomas, Matthew D. P. Truch, Carole Tucker, Gregory S. Tucker, Marco P. Viero, Donald V. Wiebe

Journal-ref: Nature, vol. 458, 737-739 (2009) DOI: 10.1038/nature07918

Submillimetre surveys during the past decade have discovered a population of luminous, high-redshift, dusty starburst galaxies. In the redshift range 1 <= z <= 4, these massive submillimetre galaxies go through a phase characterized by optically obscured star formation at rates several hundred times that in the local Universe. Half of the starlight from this highly energetic process is absorbed and thermally re-radiated by clouds of dust at temperatures near 30 K with spectral energy distributions peaking at 100 microns in the rest frame. At 1 <= z <= 4, the peak is redshifted to wavelengths between 200 and 500 microns. The cumulative effect of these galaxies is to yield extragalactic optical and far-infrared backgrounds with approximately equal energy densities. Since the initial detection of the far-infrared background (FIRB), higher-resolution experiments have sought to decompose this integrated radiation into the contributions from individual galaxies. Here we report the results of an extragalactic survey at 250, 350 and 500 microns. Combining our results at 500 microns with those at 24 microns, we determine that all of the FIRB comes from individual galaxies, with galaxies at z >= 1.2 accounting for 70 per cent of it. As expected, at the longest wavelengths the signal is dominated by ultraluminous galaxies at z > 1.

http://arxiv.org/abs/0904.1201

Title: The Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope (BLAST) 2006:
Calibration and Flight Performance

Authors: Matthew D. P. Truch, Peter A. R. Ade, James J. Bock, Edward L. Chapin, Mark J. Devlin, Simon R. Dicker, Matthew Griffin, Joshua O. Gundersen, Mark Halpern, Peter C. Hargrave, David H. Hughes, Jeff Klein, Gaelen Marsden, Peter G. Martin, Philip Mauskopf, Lorenzo Moncelsi, Calvin B. Netterfield, Luca Olmi, Enzo Pascale, Guillaume Patanchon, Marie Rex, Douglas Scott, Christopher Semisch, Nicholas E. Thomas, Carole Tucker, Gregory S. Tucker, Marco P. Viero, Donald V. Wiebe

The Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope (BLAST) operated successfully during a 250-hour flight over Antarctica in December 2006 (BLAST06). As part of the calibration and pointing procedures, the red hypergiant star VY CMa was observed and used as the primary calibrator. Details of the overall BLAST06 calibration procedure are discussed. The 1-sigma absolute calibration is accurate to 10, 12, and 13% at the 250, 350, and 500 micron bands, respectively. The errors are highly correlated between bands
resulting in much lower error for the derived shape of the 250-500 micron continuum. The overall pointing error is <5″ rms for the 36, 42, and 60″ beams. The performance of the optics and pointing systems is discussed.

http://arxiv.org/abs/0904.1202

Title: A Bright Submillimeter Source in the Bullet Cluster (1E0657–56) Field Detected with BLAST

Authors: Marie Rex, Peter A. R. Ade, Itziar Aretxaga, James J. Bock, Edward L. Chapin, Mark J. Devlin, Simon R. Dicker, Matthew Griffin, Joshua O. Gundersen, Mark Halpern, Peter C. Hargrave, David H. Hughes, Jeff Klein, Gaelen Marsden, Peter G. Martin, Philip Mauskopf, Calvin B. Netterfield, Luca Olmi, Enzo Pascale, Guillaume Patanchon, Douglas Scott, Christopher Semisch, Nicholas Thomas, Matthew D. P. Truch, Carole Tucker, Gregory S. Tucker, Marco P. Viero, Donald V. Wiebe

We present the 250, 350, and 500 micron detection of bright submillimeter emission in the direction of the Bullet Cluster measured by the Balloon-borne Large-Aperture Submillimeter Telescope (BLAST). The 500 micron centroid is coincident with an AzTEC 1.1 millimeter detection at a position close to the peak lensing magnification produced by the cluster. However, the 250 micron and 350 micron emission is resolved and elongated, with centroid positions shifted toward the south of the AzTEC source and a differential shift between bands that cannot be explained by pointing uncertainties. We therefore conclude that the BLAST detection is contaminated by emission from foreground galaxies associated with the Bullet Cluster. The submillimeter redshift estimate based on 250-1100 micron photometry at the position of the AzTEC source is z_phot = 2.9 (+0.6/-0.3), consistent with the infrared color redshift estimation of the most likely Spitzer IRAC counterpart. These flux densities indicate an apparent far-infrared luminosity of L_FIR = 2E13 L_sun. When the amplification due to the gravitational lensing of the cluster is removed, the intrinsic far-infrared luminosity of the source is found to be L_FIR <= 1E12 L_sun, consistent with typical luminous infrared galaxies.

http://arxiv.org/abs/0904.1203

Title: Radio and mid-infrared identification of BLAST source counterparts in the Chandra Deep Field South

Authors: Simon Dye, Peter A. R. Ade, James J. Bock, Edward L. Chapin, Mark J. Devlin, James S. Dunlop, Stephen A. Eales, Matthew Griffin, Joshua O. Gundersen, Mark Halpern, Peter C. Hargrave, David H. Hughes, Jeff Klein, Gaelen Marsden, Philip Mauskopf, Lorenzo Moncelsi, Calvin B. Netterfield, Luca Olmi, Enzo Pascale, Guillaume Patanchon, Marie Rex, Douglas Scott, Christopher Semisch, Nicholas Thomas, Matthew D. P. Truch, Carole Tucker, Gregory S. Tucker, Marco P. Viero, Donald V. Wiebe

We have identified radio and/or mid-infrared counterparts to 198 out of 351 sources detected at >= 5 sigma over ~ 9 sq. degrees centered on the Chandra Deep Field South (CDFS) by the Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope (BLAST) at 250, 350, and 500 microns. We have matched 92 of these counterparts to optical sources with previously derived photometric redshifts and fitted SEDs to the BLAST fluxes and fluxes at 70 and 160 microns acquired with the Spitzer Space Telescope. In this way, we have constrained dust temperatures, total far-infrared/submillimeter luminosities and star formation rates for each source. Our findings show that the BLAST sources lie at significantly lower redshifts and have significantly lower rest-frame dust temperatures compared to submm sources detected in surveys conducted at 850 microns. We demonstrate that an apparent increase in dust temperature with redshift in our sample arises as a result of selection effects. This paper
constitutes the public release of the multi-wavelength catalog of >= 5 sigma BLAST sources contained within the full ~ 9 sq. degree survey area.

http://arxiv.org/abs/0904.1204

Title: BLAST: Resolving the Cosmic Submillimeter Background

Authors: Gaelen Marsden, Peter A. R. Ade, James J. Bock, Edward L. Chapin, Mark J. Devlin, Simon R. Dicker, Matthew Griffin, Joshua O. Gundersen, Mark Halpern, Peter C. Hargrave, David H. Hughes, Jeff Klein, Philip Mauskopf, Benjamin Magnelli, Lorenzo Moncelsi, Calvin B. Netterfield, Henry Ngo, Luca Olmi, Enzo Pascale, Guillaume Patanchon, Marie Rex, Douglas Scott, Christopher Semisch, Nicholas Thomas, Matthew D. P. Truch, Carole Tucker, Gregory S. Tucker, Marco P. Viero, Donald V. Wiebe

The Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope (BLAST) has made one square-degree, deep, confusion-limited maps at three different bands, centered on the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey South field. By calculating the covariance of these maps with catalogs of 24 micron sources from the Far-Infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey (FIDEL), we have determined that the total submillimeter intensities are 8.60 +/- 0.59, 4.93 +/- 0.34, and 2.27 +/- 0.20 nW m^-2 sr^-1 at 250, 350, and 500 microns, respectively. These numbers are more precise than previous estimates of the cosmic infrared background (CIB) and are consistent with 24 micron-selected galaxies generating the full intensity of the CIB. We find that more than half of the CIB originates from sources at z >= 1.2. At all BLAST wavelengths, the relative intensity of high-z sources is higher for 24 micron-faint sources than it is for 24 micron-bright sources. Galaxies identified very broadly as AGN by their Spitzer Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) colors contribute 32-48% of the CIB, although X-ray-selected AGN contribute only 7%. BzK-selected galaxies are found to be brighter than typical 24 micron-selected galaxies in the BLAST bands, and contribute 32-42% of the CIB. These data provide high-precision constraints for models of the evolution of the number density and intensity of star-forming galaxies at high redshift.

http://arxiv.org/abs/0904.1205

Title: BLAST: A Far-Infrared Measurement of the History of Star Formation

Authors: Enzo Pascale, Peter A. R. Ade, James J. Bock, Edward L. Chapin, Mark J. Devlin, Simon Dye, Steve A. Eales, Matthew Griffin, Joshua O. Gundersen, Mark Halpern, Peter C. Hargrave, David H. Hughes, Jeff Klein, Gaelen Marsden, Philip Mauskopf, Lorenzo Moncelsi, Calvin B. Netterfield, Luca Olmi, Guillaume Patanchon, Marie Rex, Douglas Scott, Christopher Semisch, Nicholas Thomas, Matthew D. P. Truch, Carole Tucker, Gregory S. Tucker, Marco P. Viero, Donald V. Wiebe

We use measurements from the Balloon-borne Large Aperture Sub-millimeter Telescope (BLAST) at wavelengths spanning 250 to 500 microns, combined with data from the Spitzer Infrared telescope and ground-based optical surveys in GOODS-S, to determine the average star formation rate of the galaxies that comprise the cosmic infrared background (CIB) radiation from 70 to 500 microns, at redshifts 0 < z < 3. We find that different redshifts are preferentially probed at different wavelengths within this range, with most of the 70 micron background generated at z < ~1 and the 500 micron background generated at z >~1. The spectral coverage of BLAST and Spitzer in the region of the peak of the background at ~200 microns allows us to directly estimate the mean physical properties (temperature, bolometric luminosity and mass) of the dust in the galaxies responsible for contributing more than 80% of the CIB. By utilizing available redshift information we directly measure the evolution of the far infrared luminosity density and therefore the optically obscured star formation history up to redshift z ~3.

http://arxiv.org/abs/0904.1206

Title: BLAST: The Mass Function, Lifetimes, and Properties of Intermediate Mass Cores from a 50 Square Degree Submillimeter Galactic Survey in Vela (l = ~265)

Authors: Calvin. B. Netterfield, Peter A. R. Ade, James J. Bock, Edward L. Chapin, Mark J. Devlin, Matthew Griffin, Joshua O. Gundersen, Mark Halpern, Peter C. Hargrave, David H. Hughes, Jeff Klein, Gaelen Marsden, Peter G. Martin, Phillip Mauskopf, Luca Olmi, Enzo Pascale, Guillaume Patanchon, Marie Rex, Arabindo Roy, Douglas Scott, Christopher Semisch, Nicholas Thomas, Matthew D. P. Truch, Carole Tucker, Gregory S. Tucker, Marco P. Viero, Donald V. Wiebe

We present first results from an unbiased, 50 square degree submillimeter Galactic survey at 250, 350, and 500 microns from the 2006 flight of the Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope (BLAST). The map has resolution ranging from 36″ to 60″ in the three submillimeter bands spanning the thermal emission peak of cold starless cores. We determine the temperature, luminosity, and mass of more than a thousand compact sources in a range of evolutionary stages and an unbiased statistical characterization of the population. From comparison with C^18 O data, we find the dust opacity per gas mass, kappa/R = 0.16 cm^2/g at 250 microns, for cold clumps. We find that 2% of the mass of the molecular gas over this diverse region is in cores colder than 14 K, and that the mass function for these cold cores is consistent with a power law with index alpha = -3.22 +/- 0.14 over the mass range 14 M_sun < M < 80 M_sun, steeper than the Salpeter alpha = -2.35 initial massfunction for stars. Additionally, we infer a mass dependent cold core lifetime of tau(M) = 4E6 (M/20 M_sun)^-0.9 years — longer than what has been found in previous surveys of either low or high mass cores, and significantly longer than free fall or turbulent decay time scales. This implies some form of non-thermal support for cold cores during this early stage of star formation.

http://arxiv.org/abs/0904.1207

You can find a lot more detailed information on the dedicated BLAST website.

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Statistics Matters, Science Matters

Posted in Science Politics with tags , , on April 7, 2009 by telescoper

I thought I’d say something about why I think statistics and statistical reasoning are so important. Of course they are important in science. In fact, I think they lie at the very core of the scientific method, although I am still surprised how few practising scientists are comfortable even with statistical language. A more important problem is the popular impression that science is about facts and absolute truths. It isn’t. It’s a process. In order to advance it has to question itself.

Statistical reasoning also applies to many facets of everyday life, including business, commerce, transport, the media, and politics. Probability even plays a role in personal relationships, though mostly at a subconscious level. It is a feature of everyday life that science and technology are deeply embedded in every aspect of what we do each day. Science has given us greater levels of comfort, better health care, and a plethora of labour-saving devices. It has also given us unprecedented ability to destroy the environment and each other, whether through accident or design.

Civilized societies face rigorous challenges in this century. We must confront the threat of climate change and forthcoming energy crises. We must find better ways of resolving conflicts peacefully lest nuclear or conventional weapons lead us to global catastrophe. We must stop large-scale pollution or systematic destruction of the biosphere that nurtures us. And we must do all of these things without abandoning the many positive things that science has brought us. Abandoning science and rationality by retreating into religious or political fundamentalism would be a catastrophe for humanity.

Unfortunately, recent decades have seen a wholesale breakdown of trust between scientists and the public at large. This is due partly to the deliberate abuse of science for immoral purposes, and partly to the sheer carelessness with which various agencies have exploited scientific discoveries without proper evaluation of the risks involved. The abuse of statistical arguments have undoubtedly contributed to the suspicion with which many individuals view science.

There is an increasing alienation between scientists and the general public. Many fewer students enrol for courses in physics and chemistry than a a few decades ago. Fewer graduates mean fewer qualified science teachers in schools. This is a vicious cycle that threatens our future. It must be broken.

The danger is that the decreasing level of understanding of science in society means that knowledge (as well as its consequent power) becomes concentrated in the minds of a few individuals. This could have dire consequences for the future of our democracy. Even as things stand now, very few Members of Parliament are scientifically literate. How can we expect to control the application of science when the necessary understanding rests with an unelected “priesthood” that is hardly understood by, or represented in, our democratic institutions?

Very few journalists or television producers know enough about science to report sensibly on the latest discoveries or controversies. As a result, important matters that the public needs to know about do not appear at all in the media, or if they do it is in such a garbled fashion that they do more harm than good.

Years ago I used to listen to radio interviews with scientists on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4. I even did such an interview once. It is a deeply frustrating experience. The scientist usually starts by explaining what the discovery is about in the way a scientist should, with careful statements of what is assumed, how the data is interpreted, and what other possible interpretations might be and the likely sources of error. The interviewer then loses patience and asks for a yes or no answer. The scientist tries to continue, but is badgered. Either the interview ends as a row, or the scientist ends up stating a grossly oversimplified version of the story.

Some scientists offer the oversimplified version at the outset, of course, and these are the ones that contribute to the image of scientists as priests. Such individuals often believe in their theories in exactly the same way that some people believe religiously. Not with the conditional and possibly temporary belief that characterizes the scientific method, but with the unquestioning fervour of an unthinking zealot. This approach may pay off for the individual in the short term, in popular esteem and media recognition – but when it goes wrong it is science as a whole that suffers. When a result that has been proclaimed certain is later shown to be false, the result is widespread disillusionment.

The worst example of this tendency that I can think of is the constant use of the phrase “Mind of God” by theoretical physicists to describe fundamental theories. This is not only meaningless but also damaging. As scientists we should know better than to use it. Our theories do not represent absolute truths: they are just the best we can do with the available data and the limited powers of the human mind. We believe in our theories, but only to the extent that we need to accept working hypotheses in order to make progress. Our approach is pragmatic rather than idealistic. We should be humble and avoid making extravagant claims that can’t be justified either theoretically or experimentally.

The more that people get used to the image of “scientist as priest” the more dissatisfied they are with real science. Most of the questions asked of scientists simply can’t be answered with “yes” or “no”. This leaves many with the impression that science is very vague and subjective. The public also tend to lose faith in science when it is unable to come up with quick answers. Science is a process, a way of looking at problems not a list of ready-made answers to impossible problems. Of course it is sometimes vague, but I think it is vague in a rational way and that’s what makes it worthwhile. It is also the reason why science has led to so many objectively measurable advances in our understanding of the World.

I don’t have any easy answers to the question of how to cure this malaise, but do have a few suggestions. It would be easy for a scientist such as myself to blame everything on the media and the education system, but in fact I think the responsibility lies mainly with ourselves. We are usually so obsessed with our own research, and the need to publish specialist papers by the lorry-load in order to advance our own careers that we usually spend very little time explaining what we do to the public or why.

I think every working scientist in the country should be required to spend at least 10% of their time working in schools or with the general media on “outreach”, including writing blogs like this. People in my field – astronomers and cosmologists – do this quite a lot, but these are areas where the public has some empathy with what we do. If only biologists, chemists, nuclear physicists and the rest were viewed in such a friendly light. Doing this sort of thing is not easy, especially when it comes to saying something on the radio that the interviewer does not want to hear. Media training for scientists has been a welcome recent innovation for some branches of science, but most of my colleagues have never had any help at all in this direction.

The second thing that must be done is to improve the dire state of science education in schools. Over the last two decades the national curriculum for British schools has been dumbed down to the point of absurdity. Pupils that leave school at 18 having taken “Advanced Level” physics do so with no useful knowledge of physics at all, even if they have obtained the highest grade. I do not at all blame the students for this; they can only do what they are asked to do. It’s all the fault of the educationalists, who have done the best they can for a long time to convince our young people that science is too hard for them. Science can be difficult, of course, and not everyone will be able to make a career out of it. But that doesn’t mean that it should not be taught properly to those that can take it in. If some students find it is not for them, then so be it. I always wanted to be a musician, but never had the talent for it.

I realise I must sound very gloomy about this, but I do think there are good prospects that the gap between science and society may gradually be healed. The fact that the public distrust scientists leads many of them to question us, which is a very good thing. They should question us and we should be prepared to answer them. If they ask us why, we should be prepared to give reasons. If enough scientists engage in this process then what will emerge is and understanding of the enduring value of science. I don’t just mean through the DVD players and computer games science has given us, but through its cultural impact. It is part of human nature to question our place in the Universe, so science is part of what we are. It gives us purpose. But it also shows us a way of living our lives. Except for a few individuals, the scientific community is tolerant, open, internationally-minded, and imbued with a philosophy of cooperation. It values reason and looks to the future rather than the past. Like anyone else, scientists will always make mistakes, but we can always learn from them. The logic of science may not be infallible, but it’s probably the best logic there is in a world so filled with uncertainty.

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Post Mortem

Posted in Science Politics with tags , , , , on April 6, 2009 by telescoper

Finally the full details of the Physics panel’s deliberations during the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise have been published in the form of sub-profiles, showing the breakdown of the overall scores into various components, including the rating attached to “outputs” (i.e. papers), “environment” and “esteem”; for the jargon see the RAE guidelines for submissions.

 I’ve blogged about the RAE results before: here, there, elsewhere, et cetera and passim. Andy Lawrence (e-astronomer) has now written a blog post about the latest publications from HEFCE  (commenting on the Cardiff situation with a generosity that contrasts with the offensive attitude displayed by one of my former colleagues).  Andy has also produced a graph which makes for very interesting reading:

rae_21

I’ve used my meagre graphical skills to indicate the location of Cardiff on the figure between the thick solid lines. Note the enormous gap between the panel’s assessment of our outputs (2.22) compared to the score for esteem (2.74).

I’ve mentioned before that apparently not a single one of the papers submitted by Cardiff’s excellent Astronomy Instrumentation Group was graded as 4* (world leading). Among the papers submitted by this group were several highly cited ones relating to an important Cosmic Microwave Background experiment called BOOMERANG. The panel probably judged that Cardiff hadn’t played a sufficiently prominent role in this collaboration to merit a 4*, which seems to be a completely perverse conclusion. The experiment wouldn’t have been possible at all without the Cardiff group.

Notwithstanding my disgruntlement at the particularly and peculiarly harsh assessment of Cardiff’s physics submission, there is also an indication of a more general problem. Notice how at the top right, a large number of departments has an output score seriously lagging their other score (by about 0.4 or more).

The counterexample to this trend is Loughborough, which has a very small but clearly good research activity in physics, and which scored 2.66 on its outputs but only 1.1 on environment. They are easily identified on the graph as an extreme outlier below the general trend.

Although there is no reason to expect a perfect correlation between the different elements of the overall assessment, it looks to me like the Physics panel decided to let the output score for the strong departments saturate at a level of about 2.8 whereas other panels were much more generous.

Why did they do this?

Answers on a postcard (or, better, via the comments box), please.

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Clover Story

Posted in Science Politics, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , on April 2, 2009 by telescoper

Just a quick note for those interested in the story of Clover, Physics World have run a news item on their website.

You may also like to read the article by Alan Heavens over on the e-astronomer.

Note added on Monday 6th April: the Nature slant on the story is now published online, complete with quote from yours truly…

Another update (9th April). Welsh Newspaper The Western Mail has now run a story on the clover cancellation and there was a short item on the BBC Radio Wales News this evening.

Another update (14th April). A statement from Walter Gear, Principal Investigator of the Clover project, about the current status of Clover has been placed on the Cardiff University School of Physics & Astronomy web pages.

Update: 22nd April 2009. Here is the text of a piece I wrote for today’s Research Fortnight:

An undeserved end

Science projects don’t get much purer than CLOVER, an experiment designed to search for evidence of the existence of primordial gravitational waves by making ultra-sensitive measurements of the polarisation of the cosmic microwave background.

From its vantage point in the Atacama Desert in Chile, CLOVER was intended to probe the state of the universe when it was less than a billionth of a billionth of a second old, to test our understanding of the Big Bang theory. Unfortunately, the Science and Technology Facilities Council says it is cancelling funding for the experiment.

Gravitational waves have been studied theoretically and are known to be intimately related to the structure of space-time itself, the understanding of which is arguably the fundamental goal of modern science. The first discovery of the presence of gravitational waves will lead to the emergence of a brand new area of physics. In anticipation of this new science, the CLOVER team—entirely British, with members in the universities of Cardiff, Cambridge, Oxford and Manchester—has established a technical capability in the UK that is second to none. Cancellation will prevent the team from making direct experimental observations of the universe that would not only have been of immense scientific importance, but could also have had deep cultural significance.

So if CLOVER is so good, why is it being cancelled?

The answer lies in an unfortunate combination of circumstances. CLOVER was initially funded in 2004, with
£4.8 million from the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council, one of the forerunners of the STFC. This budget was not sufficient to complete the experiment, for two main reasons. First, the original grant did not include the costs of setting up a site, which was originally to be provided by overseas collaborators in Antarctica. When this option fell through, the cost of the alternative site in Chile (approximately £0.8m) had
to be found. Second, there were delays due to technical challenges, such as the need to develop some of the world’s most sensitive far-infrared superconducting cameras. So, the CLOVER team was unable to complete the project within the original budget, and went back to the STFC to request extra money. This brought a third factor into play.

Since 2007, the research councils, including the STFC, have changed their method of funding university-based research. In the new full-economic-costs regime, costs are substantially higher than at the time of the original award. These elements combined to leave the CLOVER team with a shortfall of about £2.6m, bringing the overall cost to completion to about £7.5m, although the increase in resources required would be only around 20 per cent if calculated on the pre-FEC basis of the initial funding.

Unfortunately, despite receiving strong support from the scientific community and being rated extremely highly in recent prioritisation exercises, the STFC Council has decided that it does not have the funds and has abruptly cancelled the CLOVER experiment.

The background to this decision is one of dire financial circumstances within the research council. Created in 2007, the STFC was set up with insufficient funding to continue all the programmes that it inherited from its predecessors. The deficit (of around £80m) has led to swingeing cuts in research grants over the past year. The pound has also fallen dramatically against the euro, increasing the cost of subscriptions to the European Space Agency, Cern and the European Southern
Observatory. The balance sheet of the STFC is now in total disarray. CLOVER is the first casualty in what may become a large-scale cull of fundamental science projects.

The STFC’s decision on CLOVER means that an important instrument will be lost, and the millions already spent on it wasted. The technology will be difficult to replace. The many gifted scientists who have been working on CLOVER will have to leave the UK to continue in the field, and are unlikely to return. Their fate is unlikely to tempt younger people into a career in science either.

In cancelling CLOVER, the council has effectively closed the door on UK involvement in cosmic microwave background science in general, an area that has already led to two Nobel prizes for physics. The decision also provides worrying evidence that the STFC seems to be turning away from fundamental science towards technology- driven projects. For example the lunar probe Moonlite has recently won funding for initial development studies without ever passing through the rigorous peer review required of CLOVER. If this really is the way the STFC is going, then we may be witnessing the beginning of the end for British astronomy.

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The Waste Land

Posted in Poetry, Science Politics, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , on April 1, 2009 by telescoper

APRIL is the cruellest month, sending
Clover into the dead land, ditching
The great for the dire, erring
Dead heads caused spring pain.
Keith Mason fucked it up, smothering
Good science with tons of shit, ending
Our little dream; we’re the losers.

After The Waste Land, Part I: The Burial of the Dead, by T.S. Eliot.

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Clover and Out

Posted in Science Politics, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , on March 31, 2009 by telescoper

One of the most exciting challenges facing the current generation of cosmologists is to locate in the pattern of fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background evidence for the primordial gravitational waves predicted by models of the Universe that involve inflation.

Looking only at the temperature variation across the sky, it is not possible to distinguish between tensor  (gravitational wave) and scalar (density wave) contributions  (both of which are predicted to be excited during the inflationary epoch).  However, scattering of photons off electrons is expected to leave the radiation slightly polarized (at the level of a few percent). This gives us additional information in the form of the  polarization angle at each point on the sky and this extra clue should, in principle, enable us to disentangle the tensor and scalar components.

The polarization signal can be decomposed into two basic types depending on whether the pattern has  odd or even parity, as shown in the nice diagram (from a paper by James Bartlett)

The top row shows the E-mode (which look the same when reflected in a mirror and can be produced by either scalar or tensor modes) and the bottom shows the B-mode (which have a definite handedness that changes when mirror-reflected and which can’t be generated by scalar modes because they can’t have odd parity).

The B-mode is therefore (in principle)  a clean diagnostic of the presence of gravitational waves in the early Universe. Unfortunately, however, the B-mode is predicted to be very small, about 100 times smaller than the E-mode, and foreground contamination is likely to be a very serious issue for any experiment trying to detect it.

An experiment called Clover (involving the Universities of  Cardiff, Oxford, Cambridge and Manchester) was designed to detect the primordial B-mode signal from its vantage point in Chile. You can read more about the way it works at the dedicated webpages here at Cardiff and at Oxford. I won’t describe it in more detail here, for reasons which will become obvious.

The chance to get involved in a high-profile cosmological experiment was one of the reasons I moved to Cardiff a couple of years ago, and I was looking forward to seeing the data arriving for analysis. Although I’m primarily a theorist, I have some experience in advanced statistical methods that might have been useful in analysing the output.  It would have been fun blogging about it too.

Unfortunately, however, none of that is ever going to happen. Because of its budget crisis, and despite the fact that it has spent a large amount (£4.5M) on it already,  STFC has just decided to withdraw the funding needed to complete it (£2.5M)  and cancel the Clover experiment.

Clover wasn’t the only B-mode experiment in the game. Its rivals include QUIET and SPIDER, both based in the States. It wasn’t clear that Clover would have won the race, but now that we know  it’s a non-runner  we can be sure it won’t.

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Hard Cash

Posted in Science Politics, Uncategorized with tags , , on March 19, 2009 by telescoper

The Higher Education Funding Council for Wales (HEFCW) has finally announced its cash allocations for Welsh Universities over the period 2009-10. The settlement of English Universities (produced by HEFCE) has been public for quite a while already.

On the back of a poor showing in the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) by Cardiff University we were all braced for a cut in our recurrent grant, which has indeed turned out to be the case. Our total grant for teaching and research has been cut in cash terms by about 1.3% with most of the hit coming in the QR money that was allocated according to the RAE. This cut amounts to losing about £2M from the University’s budget and, including inflation, is more like a 3% cut in real terms.

That sounds bad enough (even the fact that there is a minus sign is pretty poor), but there are exacerbating factors on top. First, the National Pay Agreement has given University staff large pay rises over the past year or so. Given the large fraction of a University’s budget that goes on salaries, this means that a positive change in the grant would have been required to keep pace with the increased cost of staff wages. I’m ignoring other sources of income, of course, such as external research grants and endowments but the latter are less important to us in Cardiff than they are, for example, in Oxbridge. Moreover, the recent dire performance of the various University pension schemes has led to the proposal – virtually certain to be agreed – that the employers’ contributions should rise by 2%. This also has a big effect on the University’s budget.

The particular implications of all this for the School of Physics & Astronomy are yet to be worked out in detail, but a safe working assumption is an effective cut in our own budget of about 10%. Unless we can drastically increase our external income then some of our planned activity will have to be curtailed. With STFC having a budget crisis of its own, there seems little prospect of increasing our income from that source so it looks like we’re in for a challenging time.

There were winners in Wales, notably Swansea which has enjoyed a cash increase of about 10%, and some even bigger losers than Cardiff such as Lampeter, already a struggling institution, which has to endure a cut of 9% in its HEFCW grant.

The funding allocations for English Universities have been handled a bit differently to Wales, partly by the introduction of transitional relief to assuage the pain of some large Universities who would have suffered large drops in grant. HEFCE also ring-fenced funding for Science Technology and Medicine (STEM) subjects which helped out places like Imperial College, who would otherwise have had a cut; as it is, their allocation is up by 0.1% in cash. There was no attempt by HEFCW to implement this type of damage limitation, although it did put some extra money into STEM subjects from “other resources”.

It’s interesting to note that Cardiff’s share of the QR funds is actually steady at about 50% which is roughly where as a result of the previous exercise. Application of the English formula in 2001 would have given Cardiff 75% of the QR funding in Wales, which was decided to be politically unacceptable so it was capped at 50%. I think HEFCW used the English formula this time because it kept Cardiff at the level HEFCW wanted it at…

Furthermore the settlement for England as a whole is a tad more generous than Wales. The overall cash settlement for Welsh Universities is up by about 1.66% over last year, whereas that for England is up by 4.1%. The origin of the difference is in the QR funds which in England are up by 7.7% in cash terms but rise by a much lower amount in Wales. This isn’t HEFCW’s fault of course: it has to work with the funds allocated to it by the Welsh Assembly.

Among the English Universities to have done well overall are two that I used to work at. The University of Nottingham has a total grant that has increased by about 9.6% and Queen Mary has trumped that with 10.4%. However, another of my previous haunts, the University of Sussex is one of the few English institutions to have a cash cut like Cardiff’s. Their total grant is cut by 1.4%, which is a tough deal for them. I think the ring-fencing of STEM subjects probably hasn’t helped Sussex as much as some other institutions, as its traditional research strengths are in Arts and Humanities. The biggest loser in England is the troubled Thames Valley University, which has a cash cut of 11.7%. Ouch!

I think I’ve made it clear (here, here, here, here and here) that I think the RAE was a bit of a botch generally and that Physics was particularly badly done by. The outcome has certainly hit Cardiff School of Physics & Astronomy hard. I still can’t understand why our research was rated so poorly. Nature papers with over a thousand citations were not graded 4* by the panel, or at least not when submitted from Cardiff.

When I moved here, I had dreams of building up a nice little cosmology group but it looks like there’s not much chance of this happening, unless we find some way of getting some more money into Welsh physics. Welsh University Physics Alliance anyone?

But the cards have now been dealt. At least we know what sort of hand we’ve got. Now we have to get on playing it as best we can.

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A Welsh Affair

Posted in Science Politics with tags , , , , on February 26, 2009 by telescoper

Today I had the “pleasure” of attending a day-long conference called Funding, Risk and Innovation: Wales’s Engagement with Science Policy organized by the Institute of Welsh Affairs and sponsored by, amongst other organizations, the Institute of Physics. I had hoped that this would give me an insight into the landscape of Welsh science politics which might bear fruit in the future. As if.

Unfortunately, but alas predictably, there wasn’t much of interest. I think the first presentation of the day perfectly  illustrated the whole problem. Opening the batting was Ieuan Wyn Jones, Deputy First Minister and Minister for Economic Development, from the Welsh Assembly Government or WAG.  He gave a motherhood-and-apple-pie talk about how important science was to the future of Wales, took a few questions and then left. Those of us scientists who had gone to the meeting hoping for engagement between  politicians and scientists were left to discuss things between ourselves. Hardly the point.

Next was Phil Gummett, Chief Executive of HEFCW who gave the results of the latest Research Assessment Exercise (which I’ve blogged about here, there and everywhere). To my dismay he announced that HEFCW are indeed going to use the 0:1:3:7 weighting formula adopted by HEFCE, but has found a bit more cash which it will add to the pot of money allocated to 4*. However, unlike in the case of English universities, HEFCW is not going to apply any protection to STEM subjects (Science, Technology & Medicine). In the case of my own department at Cardiff University, which got a very low assessment  of 4* research, this is very bad news.

When I got home this evening I read the same news in the Times Higher. I could have found this out without wasting a day sitting  in a ghastly conference room in the soulless Cardiff Novotel. Still, the lunch wasn’t bad.

Phil Gummett struck me as quite a reasonable chap who is trying to do the right thing, but whose hands are tied by the Welsh Assembly which has decided that Higher Education in Wales is not as high a priority as Further Education, with the result that the funds available to HEFCW for research is less than it would be for English universities. University STEM departments in Wales altogether receive about £10M less from HEFCW than they would get from HEFCE if they were in England. For physics, this will probably get worse after the 2008 RAE.

The reason for this pessimism is that, as I’ve noted before, Physics did rather badly in the RAE compared to other discplines, with a significantly lower fraction of work assessed at 4* (world-leading). Since the funding formula is heavily weighted by the 4* element, physics will suffer relative to other disciplines. HEFCW will not attempt to correct this. I think the Chair of the Physics panel, Sir John Pendry, must shoulder at least some of the blame for the gross anomaly that this represents.

It remains to be seen what happens to physics nationally, but I fear the RAE may undo a decade of very effective positive campaigning about the importance of physics. I’ve already heard from various Heads of Physics departments around the country (even those who have done well in the RAE)  who have been asked by their Vice-Chancellors why they have done so much worse than other disciplines.

The final thing he said was that HEFCW would make its allocations as block grants to the Universities concerned and that they should make their own decisions as to how to allocate the funds to the departments. This sort of thing always annoys me. It’s admitting that the formula is probably stupid, so passing the buck to the institutions to sort out the mess themselves.

I spoke to a nice lady from Cardiff University’s planning department in the afternoon who said that they weren’t sure how they were going to allocate funds to Schools after the HEFCW grant was announced, and that the University as a whole was probably going to lose out in research funds, despite having 54% of all the 4* research in Wales.

The big problem is the funding gap caused by the WAG’s policy. Devolution has had a negative effect in science funding in Wales, while in Scotland it has had the opposite effect. The Scottish parliament seems much more interested in science than does the Welsh Assembly. Indeed, per capita, Scottish Universities have a much heavier level of research investment even than those in England, which in turn are much higher than in Wales.

EPSRC‘ recently allocated £82M to UK universities to fund  doctoral training centres. In all, it allocated grants to 45 universities. Wales has 5% of the UK population, but not a single grant went to a Welsh university. Of the 1200 or so students these centres will train, not a single one will be in Wales.  I can’t believe the Scottish assembly would have let such an outcome happen in Scotland.

Further strangulation of research funds is inevitable unless the WAG is persuaded to change its mind about the importance of science. But if the politicians don’t stay to listen to the arguments, how will this happen?

Over lunch I chatted to various physicists from Swansea University. Several of them had come to the meeting, but I was the only representative from Cardiff. There was a strong steer from the RAE panel for physics in terms of closer collaboration so we chatted a bit about possibilities for that. I think the consensus was that we’re probably going to be bounced down the road anyway so the best way forward would be to come up with a plan of our own instead of having someone else’s.

I promise not to mention the RAE again, until the final allocations are published in April!

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The Problem of the Steady State

Posted in Science Politics with tags , , on February 24, 2009 by telescoper

Just as a quick postscript to my recent item about proposed changes to the method of funding PhD students by STFC, let me point out the following simple calculation.

Assume that the number of permanent academic positions in a given field (e.g. astronomy) remains constant over time. If that is the case, each retirement (or other form of departure) from a permanent position will be replaced by one, presumably junior, scientist.

This means that over an academic career, on average, each academic will produce just one PhD who will get a permanent job. This of course doesn’t count students coming in from abroad, or those getting faculty positions abroad but in the case of the UK these are probably relatively small corrections.

Under the present supply of PhD studentships an academic can expect to get a PhD student at least once every three years or so. At a minimum, therefore, over a 30 year career one can expect to have ten PhD students. A great many supervisors have more PhD students than this, but this just makes the odds worse. The expectation is that only one of these will get a permanent job in the UK. The others (nine out of ten, according to my conservative estimate) above must either leave the field or the country to find permanent employment.

The arithmetic of this situation is a simple fact of life, but I’m not sure how many prospective PhD students are aware of it.

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Scientiae Doctores

Posted in Science Politics with tags , , , on February 22, 2009 by telescoper

The season for recruiting new research students is well and truly upon us and at the same the Science & Technology Facilities Council (STFC) is consulting about changing the way that it allocates PhD studentships to departments.

Most postgraduate students studying for PhDs in Astronomy are funded by STFC (although some Universities also fund their own internal studentships). The result of this arrangement is that successful applicants to a PhD course can receive a stipend which amounts to about £13K per annum. It’s not a huge amount of money, but it is a stipend rather than a salary so it’s tax-free. Since a PhD student also remains a student and therefore qualifies for various other fringe benefits (Council Tax, student discounts, etc), it’s not actually a bad deal for the student. Anyway, if it were significantly more then it’s possible PhD students would have to start paying back their student loans, which would make things worse. STFC also pays a tuition fee to the University concerned, but this is done directly and the student doesn’t even see that element of the funding.

Since about 1995, PPARC and then STFC has funded research studentships in areas within its remit by means of peer review. Departments have bid for studentships (every two years) and a panel awards an allocation depending on the quality of the bid. Of course, everyone asks for many more studentships than are available so what you get is a fraction of what you ask for. I wrote the application for the first ever quota studentships for the Astronomy group at the University of Nottingham, and did it again a couple of times after that. Each time, despite going into best bullshit mode to write the case, I was frustrated by the relatively small number of studentships we were awarded. Although we succeeded in building up gradually from zero to 2-3 per year, it was a very slow process.

In recent years, the funding mechanism has evolved slightly so that studentship fees and stipends were devolved to the departments concerned in terms of Doctoral Training Grants (DTGs) rather than being administered centrally by PPARC/STFC. In the old days, students used to get their stipend from PPARC/STFC whereas now they are paid by their department from a cash grant.

Anyway, for various reasons (chief among them being no doubt to save administrative costs) STFC has decided to consult on changes to the mechanism for allocating the DTGs to the various departments around the country. The most serious proposed change is to follow the practice at the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and dispense with peer review. Instead, the proposal is to award studentships based on a formula involving how successful the department is at obtaining postdoctoral research assistant (PDRA) support from STFC.

Here is the proposed formula:

 Specifically, the studentship award per department should be proportional to the product of volume and average quality per academic within the department, that is to:

 

V * Q

 

The Committee has followed guidance in developing measures of V and Q that are non-subjective, repeatable and transparent.  The volume V is defined as the number of academics (including Fellows) eligible to hold STFC research grants. The  quality Q is measured by the number of STFC-funded PDRAs (P) awarded per academic (i.e. P/V), since this measures the success of the academic staff in securing STFC funding for PDRAs through peer-review.  More precisely we define quality per academic as Q = [1 +(P/V)].

 

Although the Committee felt this definition of quality applied primarily to responsive-mode PDRAs, it agreed that PDRAs on project grants should be included, but with a weighting, relative to responsive-mode, of 0.33.

 

Using these definitions, the Committee recommends that the studentship award per department should be proportional to a simple product of volume and average quality per academic within the department, that is to:

 

N(students) µ V * Q

 

where Q = [1 + (P/V)]

 

And so the departmental quota is proportional to: 

 

V[1+(P/V)] = V+P

 

In addition, recognising that very small departments offer more limited training opportunities on their own, a threshold is proposed, such that no studentships are awarded for V < 3. Instead, these very small departments/groups would be able to collaborate with other larger departments in seeking STFC studentship support.

 

Hence

 

         N(students) µ V+P  for V ³ 3

                             = 0        for V < 3

 

The constant of proportionality is chosen such that the total number of studentships equals the number available for allocation.

 

 

I think this is a fairly reasonable proposal, actually. The one thing I don’t really understand relates to the fact that STFC doesn’t just fund PDRAs on its grants, but under the Full Economic Cost regime (FEC), it also pays for fractions of academic staff effort for people working on its projects. On my recent successful STFC grant, for example, I was awarded 25% of my time (i.e. 0.25 FTE, full-time-equivalent) to do the research as well as a PDRA. Since the proposal above will have to cope with the question of what staff are “eligible” then why not make the quantity V proportional to the total FTEs funded, or at least only count those for whom some FEC time is allocated? And why not include staff FTE in the Q-factor too?

My guess is that such a modification wouldn’t make much difference to astronomy departments, but the original proposal has caused cries of anguish from particle physicists. This is because the number of PDRAs in particle physics is much smaller than in astronomy, so many large groups face a big reduction in their PhD quota. Including FEC numbers in the mix might well smooth the transition for them. For your information, the number of PDRAs per active astronomy researcher  is around 0.5 at present.

Anyway, the deadline for consulting on this has passed (on February 20th) so we now wait to see what STFC actually does. Probably the consultation period is a purely cosmetic exercise anyway and what will emerge is exactly what was proposed.

If you ask me (and nobody did), all this is mere tinkering. I think there are serious problems with graduate funding in the UK and these require much more radical remedies. At the risk of (and indeed with the intention of) being provocative, here is my diagnosis and suggested remedies:

  • There are too many PhDs in astronomy. STFC funded 160 studentships in 2006, compared with 88 in 2000. There are nowhere near enough PDRA positions to accommodate this number of PhDs in academic research. And even those who get their first PDRA position have very limited prospects of getting a permanent job. The result is a generation of disaffected students employed as low-paid assistants for 3-4 years and then thrown aside when they have got their PhD.
  • Of course, applicants for PhD places don’t know what research is really like and some will leave academia of their own volition when they find out that it’s not for them. In my experience, though, most graduate applicants simply don’t realise how heavily the odds are stacked against them. Less than one in ten can possibly stay in research in the long term, and the more PhDs are funded the worse the odds against them become.
  • The short duration of a British PhD disadvantages our students with respect to those from the USA or continental europe, who all do a lengthy Masters course before taking their PhD. These take at least 5 years to complete.  The result is that our home-grown PhDs are seriously disadvantaged in the job market against competitors from abroad. Similar points have been made forcefully by Ian Halliday.
  • My remedy is simple. Reduce the number of studentships but extend each one to five years and require each hosting department to provide a proper graduate school with intensive graduate-level courses to make up for the progressive reduction in content of undergraduate physics courses.
  • Even more unpopularly, I think the UK should scrap 4 years Masters (MPhys) programmes and embrace the structure of the Bologna agreement, i.e. a universal 3+2+3 structure of 3 years Bachelors, 2 years’ Masters and three years PhD.
  • Currently STFC stipends can only be paid to UK nationals and residents. It’s an open secret that most departments would preferentially recruit European physics graduates to their PhD positions if they were allowed to do so, because their undergraduate preparation is much better than that provided in UK universities. I propose that we abandon this protectionism and open up PhD opportunities to European applications, just as we would legally have to do if a PhD were considered to be a job.
  • Finally, I think the UK should consider the introduction of a common graduate entrance examination, perhaps based on the US GRE, to ensure the maintenance of appropriate standards for postgraduate entry and eligibility for STFC funding.

There are of course some advantages to the current British PhD system. For one thing, the PhD is earned very quickly. I was 25 when I got my PhD, and already had several publications. Most of my European collaborators were at least 30 before they got theirs (additional years have to be added for national service in many countries, but we don’t have it in the UK). But I am painfully aware that my technical knowledge outside the immediate area of my PhD is much thinner than most academics in the field. Now, in middle age, I feel like a long-distance runner who had inadequate preparation, went off too fast at the start of the race, and is now struggling along while people overtake him with monotonous regularity.

The nature of research in astronomy and cosmology has changed so much in the 20 years since I got my PhD that the old system has to go. Instead of tinkering with funding formula, driven principally by the need to save adminstrative costs within STFC, we need a radical overhaul of the entire graduate education system in the UK, involving all research councils and their political masters.

Unfortunately, though, for the time being at least the politicians have other more pressing matters to worry about, such the collapse of the economy.

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