Mars Curiosity Tweetup

After hearing such wonderful things from fellow skeptic, Trent Faust, about his Tweetup experience with NASA, I was super-excited to hear that I’d been chosen to attend the Mars Curiosity Tweetup and launch event in November. I debated whether to attend since the tweetup was scheduled for the day before Thanksgiving and the launch the day after. My wife, Sharon, encouraged and supported my attendance and I could not ignore this opportunity. I didn’t debate it for too long – only a few hours after receiving the invitation, I decided to attend.

Once I joined the closed FaceBook group dedicated to the event, information started pouring in like crazy. They wanted us all to vote on designs for patches, pins, teeshirts, etc. Suddenly, I felt like a pawn in a merchandising scheme. Many people in the group seemed to take a sense of pride in being part in what seemed to me a guerrilla marketing project.

I committed to buying three of the pins; but I expressed no interest in hats, teeshirts, patches, etc. I suppose NASA needs the money they get from all of the merchandise, but I felt no urge to participate much in this part of the festivities.  A good number of people attending are from out of state and some from overseas. So I get that they want to get all the souvenirs and memorabilia as they can get their hands on.

Some of us used the group page to arrange car pooling. There is also a special luncheon with an astronaut on Thanksgiving for those guests dining sans family due to participation. Some locals have also opened up their homes for people to sleep and/or dine on Thanksgiving evening. How’s that for Southern hospitality? So there are certainly some good uses for the Facebook group page.

What really interested me, though, is the opportunity to get a VIP tour of the Kennedy Space Center and front row seats to the launch. Yes – sign me up for that! After all, exploration is from where all of the excitement begins. What better way to celebrate Carl Sagan Day (Nov. 12) than with the thought of seeing a Mars Mission launch in the same month.

The Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover is slated to land on Mars in August 2012. Its two-year mission is focused on finding any possible remnant of microbial life starting with the most likely locations near its landing site. This little guy is going to be a hard worker collecting rock and soil samples, pulverizing them, collecting and transmitting the resulting data back home to the JPL. It will also be sporting a number of cameras to help researchers navigate and explore, not to mention snapping more great photos of the red planet for all to see.

You can follow twitter accounts @MarsRovers and @MarsCuriosity or navigate to http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/mission/overview/ to find up to date information.

Future and past NASA Tweetup info can be found at http://www.nasa.gov/connect/tweetup/index.html.

Carl Sagan Day info can be found at http://carlsaganday.com/

There’s been a lot of buzz lately about a recent article, which proposes that the Higgs boson doesn’t want to be detected, and that some superior force is preventing it. Whether the culprit is Nature, causality, paradox, Galactus, or rogue Time Lords from Raxacoricofallapatorius, the authors claim that “unlucky” events seem to be conspiring to prevent detection of the Higgs. The gist is that, despite 45 years of intensive searching, the Higgs has gone undetected. And, even though several experiments have had the potential of detecting it, all have (so far) failed to do so, sometimes in seemingly suspicious ways.

Briefly, the Higgs boson is the last remaining undetected particle in the Standard Model, which unites all non-gravitational interactions in the universe. It would be the particle that explains why other particles have mass, by creating a molasses-like field that gives other particles traveling through it inertia. Now, the mathematics describing the laws of physics work equally well with time moving in either the forward of backwards direction – i.e., you can calculate a baseball’s final position after leaving the pitcher’s hand, or you can determine its starting position by observing it entering the catcher’s mitt. The paper’s authors conclude that, since we never seem to find the Higgs boson in the catcher’s mitt, any historical trajectory that would cause the detection of the Higgs boson is forbidden, and therefor we must always find ourselves in a present where something has conspired to prevent it. Furthermore, the authors suggest an experiment to determine whether the future is determined to prevent detection of the Higgs: Cut a million-card deck, where one card says “Don’t turn on the LHC,” and, if that card comes up, don’t turn on the LHC! (Why perform this experiment at all? Because, if we don’t give the future [or the Time Lords] a “pressure valve” – an easy way to prevent Higgs production – more drastic preventative measures may be required, such as catastrophic failure of the LHC, or production of planet-devouring black holes.)

A lot of the buzz has been backlash and loud outcries, as if the article were crankish; however, the article itself seems to have been submitted in all seriousness – it was produced by extremely well-respected physicists, the proposed mechanisms are well within established physics (or, at least, non-forbidden physics, which, according to Murray Gell-Mann, means that they’re compulsory), and it was published in an acceptable venue and manner (i.e., not a Pons & Fleischmann press conference).

I am not criticizing the authors of the paper or claiming that their article was fallacious. Speculative ideas – even wildly speculative ideas – have a distinguished tradition and a valuable place in the scientific process. Quantum mechanics in particular is notoriously non-intuitive – Niels Bohr once said, when asked if an idea was crazy, “We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.”

The problem with this (admittedly fun) paper is that the data set proposed to speculate interference from the future is incredibly sparse: The cancellation of the Superconducting Supercollider after an expenditure of several billion dollars, the shutdown of the LEP just before possible Higgs detection, and the malfunctioning of the LHC upon startup due to electrical shorts. And this also doesn’t take into account the extreme difficulty of detecting the Higgs, nor the extreme expense and complexity of the machines and projects constructed to do so. The LHC is probably the largest, most complex, most intricate machine ever built by mankind – I hardly think it requires such unlikely speculation to explain why it failed during its first trial run; I’m sure it will have many more technical glitches over its lifespan, some serious and some severe.

Of course, since the LHC has now once again been fully cooled to below the temperature of deep space, and particles have now been injected into the main ring in anticipation of the first collisions in a few weeks, I guess the proof will soon be in the pudding.

Seen in this week’s Science, a definition of hydrogen:

a colorless, odorless gas, which, given enough time, turns into people.

Awesome. From Los Alamos physicist Steen Rasmussen.

It reminds me of Carl Sagan’s quote from Cosmos:

In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.

And that, of course, gives me the excuse to post this: