Posts Tagged Radio NZ

A few noteworthy happenings Shaun Hendy Mar 04

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The Crown Research Institute (CRI) Taskforce report was released this morning – it is available here.  Reading the recommendations, I think that the Taskforce has nailed it.  If its recommendations are implemented, I think CRIs will finally gain the ability to work strategically for the interests of New Zealand.  Not everyone will be pleased; I have no doubt that fully contestable funding has been good for the universities, but I would argue that it has forced the CRIs to become more like universities, while neglecting their role as agents of technology transfer.

Tonight I am back on Bryan Crump’s show (‘Nights’) on Radio New Zealand at 8.40pm.  I am planning that this will be the first in a series of chats about nanotechnology.

And get in quick to get your tickets to see talks by Martin Lord Rees this month.  Tickets are free (but disappearing fast) from the Royal Society’s website.  He is giving a talk in Wellington and a talk in Christchurch:

Martin Lord Rees is a successor of Sir Isaac Newton and Ernest Lord Rutherford as President of the Royal Society of London, the world’s oldest and most prestigious scientific institution.  He is also UK’s Astronomer Royal and Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.  He comes to New Zealand as the Rutherford Memorial Lecturer in the 350th year since the founding the Royal Society of London.

The World in 2050

7.00pm, Tuesday, 23 March 2010
Wellington Town Hall, Wakefield Street, Wellington

As a cosmologist, Lord Rees studies the universe and tries to understand its evolution on grand timescales of billions of years.  But he is also concerned with the much smaller time scale of a human life.  In his book Our Final Century, he gave our civilization a 50/50 chance of surviving the 21st century.  He is not a prophet or a doomsayer, but a scientist and ‘a worried member of the human race’.  What does he think now, five years on from the publishing of his book and what is his view of how things will stand in 2050?

The next 20 years in astronomy:  Probing the Big Bang, Galaxies and Planets

7.30pm, Monday, 22 March
Limes Room, Christchurch Town Hall, Christchurch

We can trace cosmic history from the mysterious ‘beginning’  of the universe nearly 14 billion years ago to our current home and the complex biosphere of which we are part.  But with advancing technology  in the coming decades, we can expect further breakthroughs in our knowledge of the spread of life in our cosmos.  Is physical reality even more extensive than the domain that our telescopes can probe?  What can we expect in the next 20 years in astronomy?

I will certainly be going to his Wellington talk.

Finally, congratulations to one of my PhD students, Dmitri Schebarchov, who submitted his thesis today.  He has done some fantastic work on the growth of carbon nanotubes, something that is still poorly understood, despite almost two decades of intense research.

Who hid the Higgs? Shaun Hendy Jan 29

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I had a lot of fun being interviewed by Bryan Crump on Radio NZ on Monday evening about why particle physicists have had such trouble finding the Higgs boson.  If you missed it and are interested, you can listen to the audio here.

It was a good opportunity to highlight some of the wonderful stuff going on at CERN, even if the catalyst for the interview verged on the frivolous.  As you’ll hear if you listen to the interview, Holger Nielsen and Masao Ninomiya proposed in a recent paper that production of the Higgs might be suppressed by some exotic non-local physics.  This was colourfully described in the New York Times as sabotage from the future. 

In the interview, I characterised their speculations as mathematical philosophy, although perhaps it is a bit more subtle than that:  their prediction that production of the Higgs specifically might be suppressed is actually falsifiable.  We’ve built the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), and in three to four years, most particle physicists believe that we’ll either have found it, or else have sufficient data to conclude that it doesn’t exist.  Either outcome will falsify their prediction.

As pointed out by Sean Carroll though, there doesn’t seem to be any reason why it should be the Higgs in particular that is suppressed in this way, even if it is a mathematical possibility.  If we find the Higgs, then perhaps it’s the neutralino (the hypothetical supersymmetric partner of the neutrino) that’s being suppressed, and so on.  In this way, the theory underlying Nielsen and Ninomiya’s prediction is not itself falsifiable. 

If physics had a propensity for this type of non-locality though, I think we’d have a lot more missing pieces in our description of the Universe.  I’m also not impressed by the card game suggested to test this (pick a card from a million card deck, where just one says “Don’t build the LHC”).  There are plenty of ways to not find the Higgs other than falling victim to a spot of bad luck in a card game.  Perhaps the Universe should have avoided evolving physicists in the first place? 

Anyway, I’ve been invited to appear every 5-6 weeks on Nights on Radio NZ in the Thursday science slot at 8.45pm.  I will be trying my best to mix fun and fact, and I am happy to consider any suggestions readers might have for topics to discuss with Bryan. 

I will leave the last word to a Radio NZ listener who sent in a text during the interview: “If the Swiss can build a 27km long tunnel for $8bn, how come we can’t build a tunnel under the harbour for $3bn?”.