Thanks for sharing, Chicago

Cosmologically speaking, three days isn't much of a delay (astrophysicists deal in billions of years, after all); but, for me to take three days to post concerning my recent attendance at a physics seminar seems like a long delay.

My being in the good graces of Nickolas Solomey, head of the physics department at Wichita State University, and of Susan Emerson, the department's administrative guru, I receive multiple notices and invitations to attend all things physics that occur at the University. The latest flurry of such missives was to assure my attendance at the past week's physics seminar. The over-sized post card that was sent out as invitation featured a large photo of part of a cosmic ray detector grid plus small blurbs concerning two lectures (one, scientific, the other of interest to a lay audience) to be given by James W Cronin, whose photo accompanied them. The scientific lecture blurb stated:

Observations of the highest energy cosmic rays in Argentina: 2 p.m., Wednesday, October 6, 2010: 128 Jabara Hall

James W. Cronin is a professor of physics at the University of Chicago and a local scientist for the Pierre Auger Observatory, an international project to study the nature and origin of rare, but extremely powerful, high-energy cosmic rays that periodically bombard Earth. The project includes more than 450 scientists from sixteen nations. He shares the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physics with Val Fitch for their discovery of charge conjugation/parity violation, the asymmetry in the behavior of matter and antimatter. [As an aside: in my undergraduate days, pursuing a physics degree, I was taught that parity was preserved. It wasn't much later when brilliant physicists concluded that it was not. CC] He is a member of the National Accademy of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Science, and is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

Well, folks, it isn't every day that I get to chat with a Nobel prize winner or to hear him/her speak. As it happened, Professor Cronin's talk at WSU occurred on the 30th anniversary of his being awarded the Nobel. As you will understand, one of the small items that came up during my chat with Professor Cronin was my "forewarning" him that I might need to stand and/or walk around a bit during his talk (I did stand to the side of the lecture hall after sitting for 45 minutes!)

The Pierre Auger Observatory, mentioned in the above blurb, covers many square miles of ground - sparsely. As I recall, each of the cosmic ray detectors (essentially, a 10-foot-diameter tank of water with some detector equipment and solar-powered instrumentation to transmit data "home") is situated 1.5 kilometers away from its four nearest-neighbor fellow detectors in the square grid. The detectors do not actually detect the cosmic rays themselves but the products of collisions of the rays that produced charged particles that are easily detected.

Professor Cronin is particularly keen on encouraging the people of Kansas to collaborate in his intended installation of an even larger grid of cosmic ray detectors in eastern Colorado and western Kansas. As an article in the Wichita Eagle newspaper (Nobel Laureate Speaks at WSU - Physicist: U.S. needs its scientific moxie back, by Roy Wenzl) notes,

The United States used to lead the scientific world in scientific daring, he said.

But in recent years that daring has tailed off, and the funding entities of U.S. science projects have become more politicized (and more timid) than their scientific counterparts in Europe.

You can see the loss of daring in many of the areas of the U.S., he said; physics and engineering programs around the country can't find nearly enough American high-schoolers wanting to get in; they fill out their rosters with students from India and China and Malaysia, who have plenty of young people wanting to be physicists and engineers. You saw it, he said, when the U.S. under the first President Bush decided to build a supercollider in Texas to study astrophysics; and then decided not to build it when President Clinton was in power. The Europeans decided to build one instead.

And he saw it again a few weeks ago when, he said, the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation refused, at least for now, to consider helping out with the financing of a giant cosmic-ray project he hoped to install in western Kansas and easter Colorado. It would involve installing hundreds of water tanks with sensors over thousands of square miles; the tanks would sense and help study the cosmic rays that rain down on the earth.

Later in the article Wetzl wrote,

He'll keep trying. But politics on most days is harder than astrophysics; he's had to sell his cosmic-ray project for years and years and it will take years more. And maybe the giant project that he hoped would enhance America's reputation in astrophysics "will be built instead in Morocco. Or Kazakhstan."

As the good professor is now age 79, he's having a tough time being patient. Since, even when I was in graduate school in the early 1970s, most of my classmates were from countries other than the USA, and having seen President Obama water down the science and space programs that would receive partial funding from tax dollars, I understand Professor Cronin's impatience. The state of scientific progress in the USA is discouraging.

If you care to see the slides and/or audio of Cronin's presentation, they may be accessed from the WSU physics department's website. That website includes the following listing of seminars yet to come in 2010, below.

13 Oct	Prof. Richard Henry, The University of Oklahoma	Probing the Milky Way's Oxygen Gradient with Planetary Nebulae
27 Oct	Prof. Peter Shull, Oklahoma State University	Super Nova Remnants
3 Nov	Dr. Aaron Dotter, Space Telescope Science Institute	What globular star clusters can tell us about the formation of the Galaxy
10 Nov	Prof. Alexander Konopelko, Pittburg State University	Imaging the Universe in Very-High Energy Gamma Rays
17 Nov	Prof. Bharat Ratra, Kansas State University	Standard Model of Cosmology and Open Questions
1 Dec	Prof. Marco Cavaglia, The University of Mississippi	The Search for Gravitational Waves

For a video presentation by Professor Cronin, go to Astrophysicist defines cosmic rays.

Comments

[Kay Dennison]

Wow!!!!! I envy you this experience.

Thanks for sharing it!!!!

[Cop Car]

Kay--You would have laughed at the input I got on FaceBook. A PhD fluid dynamicist (well, in point of fact, he's a magnetohydrodynamicist - MHD) responded to my posting that I had attended Prof Cronin's presentation (no room on FB for longer explanation) to say that he had been in a class taught by Cronin some years ago, and that he (my friend, who has four degrees and has taught at four or five universities/schools) considered Cronin a poor instructor. Be that as it may, it is no reflection on Cronin. Brilliant people must earn a living while they are thinking their lofty thoughts. To be so brilliant and so productive, I should certainly accept being a sub-par instructor!

So that no one need look up MHD, according to Wikipedia (and I agree), "MHD is related to engineering problems such as plasma confinement, liquid-metal cooling of nuclear reactors, and electromagnetic casting (among others)."

[joared]

Sounds fascinating. Would enjoy getting the insight of Prof. I met here a few years ago. The past few years some retired Cal Poly Pomona Physics Profs. formed a CW music group -- playing to raise money for Physics Dept. scholarships. I used to enjoy talking with one of the group and his wife when we connected thru a jazz group whose blog he was webmastering. He took up drumming for fun on retirement and coincidentally the "Outlaws of Physics" group evolved. They continued performing thru 2010, but I see he didn't update their appearances on their web site. The last I knew the group didn't know if they would continue without their drummer, as he and wife recently relocated to Portland, OR.

These science and math major shortages keep eroding, contributing greatly to our moving further toward third world status. I know a friend's son had a scholarship in mid-eighties to a top school then, and the nation's 2010 number one engineering college, but he chose instead to attend a school in the state university system and focus his efforts in another area.

The supercollider seemed like a good idea to me those years ago, but not enough people in a position to support science investigation would get behind it. Don't recall much outcry from the public whose children and grandchildren will reap the consequences, unless this national attitude toward science turns itself around.

[Cop Car]

What a concept. I'll have to see if our local physicists and mathematicians can whip up a band, Joared! It was recently announced that the WSU physics department would be melded with the math and statistics departments into a "super" department, as none of the three was awarding enough degrees to merit being a stand-alone department. Of course, in our state-school system, there are many more departments known to be shy of awarding the minimum number of degrees, but they obviously had more clout with the decision makers. Everything is political, is it not?