The ADELE campaign is over, with some great results on lightning that I’ll tell you about before this year is completely over; new balloons are floating over Antarctica, because that season has come around again since my earlier posts at the start of this year; but none of that is very important this week, because one week ago, Sarah accepted my proposal of marriage. So it has been an “astronomical” year for me in another way, after all.

In commemoration, here is a poem by Robert Browning, for Sarah, and for everyone who fell in love in this Year of Astronomy:

My Star (from Men and Women,1855)

All that I know
Of a certain star,
Is, it can throw
(Like the angled spar)
Now a dart of red,
Now a dart of blue,
Till my friends have said
They would fain see, too,
My star that dartles the red and the blue!
Then it stops like a bird,—like a flower, hangs furled,
They must solace themselves with the Saturn above it.
What matter to me if their star is a world?
Mine has opened its soul to me; therefore I love it.

Greetings from Melbourne, Florida! ADELE is here for her science flights in the beautiful Gulfstream GV:

The beautiful Gulfstream GV

We tarried all afternoon on the ramp, bewitched by the tropical storm in the Gulf of Mexico but unable to go there (too many cirrus clouds blocking our view of the thunderstorm clouds themselves). Eventually we settled on a smaller but intense storm on the Western coast of Florida, and flew back and forth across it.

Looking over the data late at night afterwards, we think we saw something! Very exciting; now I have something to talk about at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union, where I have been invited to speak by a small committee that includes me and another of the ADELE collaborators (hmm….). What we saw was not our holy grail — the incredibly intense, 1-millisecond long Terrestrial Gamma-ray Flashes — but something we call a “surge”. Surges last longer than TGFs (seconds or minutes) but are much, much weaker. The gamma rays are similar in energy to those in TGFs, though, and both TGFs and surges probably result from the acceleration of electrons to nearly the speed of light by the electric fields in thunderstorms. We made up term “surges” but our group has never seen one before. Other groups have: from the ground, from high-altitude balloons, and in one case from an airplane. But we look forward to figuring out what we can learn from our very own surge.

ADELE will fly tomorrow for the first time. Although it is considered “just a test flight”, there have been thunderstorms all week and they have promised to get us above some if they can. We could get the first of the great data we’ve been waiting for tomorrow if everything goes well. I am tired and scared; we’re still fixing the last bugs in the software, and today’s work on the instrument ended with a sudden power outage — that shouldn’t have hurt us, but we won’t know until tomorrow.

The thunderstorms the last couple of nights have been an unexpected inspiration. Where I live, in coastal Northern California, has the absolute lowest rate of lightning in North America. Where I grew up, in Connecticut, there were sometimes summer thunderstorms but the landscape is made up of small, tightly packed hills that never let you see much of the sky. In the great high plain of the Denver area, the huge sky lights up with all kinds of lightning in all directions — I can’t remember experiencing anything quite like it before.

I promised pictures last time. These were taken by Bryna, one of the newly-minted postdocs. The first is the ADELE instrument. The second shows the side of the airplane with a small radioactive gamma-ray source taped onto it. ADELE is inside. We are seeing how many of the gamma-rays get through the skin of the plane and into our instrument, so that we will know how to interpret what we see when we are flying through a storm. For example, if we see that the airplane soaks up 2/3 of the gamma-rays from our source, then if we count 1000 gamma rays during a thunderstorm, we will know that there were really 3000 of them coming into the airplane toward our detector. Actually that number is probably suitable for the lowest-energy gamma-rays we will see (more like the energy band that is called x-rays). The really high-energy gammas will have no trouble at all penetrating the airplane. That’s why it’s OK that our detectors sit inside an aluminum box inside an airplane.

ADELE her very self

High-tech calibration activity

We might actually have seen our very first signal today, but we will never know. There was lightning outside, and we saw a spike in our data, but we had only one detector turned on, and Forest the excellent engineer was working on another part of the instrument at the time. So it could have been him banging around, or electrical noise — or it could have been our first gamma rays from lightning! We will have more confidence in the data when all the detectors are running and we are not working on the instrument at the same time.

About 5 minutes after that, we had the violent blackout — probably another lightning strike near the power station.

The ADELE instrument to detect gamma-rays from lightning has to be delivered to Colorado on Monday to begin integration with the airplane that will fly it near and over thunderstorms. Right now, however, it consists of a number of pieces scattered all over the lab. They have mostly been tested on their own, but never together. We are going to have a very busy next few days getting everything together, and we will be working nights and weekends in Colorado doing testing and software changes that we should have done here at home long ago.

Part of the problem was that we unexpectedly had 3 weeks chopped off our schedule. But another part of the problem is that we had a naive project manager who was distracted by too many other projects over the past couple of years (that would be me). The five other people working on the project — the ones doing the actual work — are all superb, they just needed better guidance and management. Hopefully we will pull this off, and hopefully I’ll learn some kind of lesson for next time. But I participated in a number of projects of roughly this scale when I was a grad student, and they all ended the same way — in a desperate struggle to finish the instrument, building and coding at the field site, with insufficient time to test everything. So I thought the lesson had already been learned — I guess it’s one thing to recognize the problem and another to figure out a way to solve it. As has often been said, “Experience is the ability to recognize a mistake when you make it again.”

So how do I try to contribute at this late time? Bear in mind that I just came back from a 2.5-week vacation with Sarah (delightful), so I’m kind of out of the loop, and intensive work has been going on while I was away. Fortunately for my reputation with my team, the Principal Investigator is not usually expected to do much in the lab, anyway, and I spent time every day while I was gone keeping in touch with the team and doing the on-line purchasing necessary to keep them supplied with aircraft-qualified screws, electronic parts, and wire.

This week, the team has been doing the sophisticated parts of the construction work during the day, while I have been at my computer doing other useful things like trying to get us more money from the National Science Foundation. In the evenings, we have all been sitting down together and making cables — stripping wires, clamping or soldering the wires to connectors, printing labels, etc. There seem to be an endless number of wires involved, which all looked so easy when they were little lines on the drawings. Picture three PhDs (one middle-aged, two brand new) and a skilled engineer, sitting around a table going snip, snip, snip and cursing when something breaks and has to be done over again.

This has been the third evening of it, and I really should be going home to sleep instead of blogging. Have to be back here again in 10 hours. So goodnight, all, and next time I promise you pictures of ADELE — and maybe one or two from our vacation.

I had the exceptional honor of sitting in the “dunk tank” at a fundraising event given by the engineering students at my university for their student organizations. If you don’t know what this is, it is a game where the victim sits in a chair over a small tank of water, and people pay for the privilege of knocking him in by hitting a target with a thrown ball. If they hit it, the machine drops the chair out from under the victim and he falls in the tank:

It really was an honor, I suppose. All the other victims were faculty and staff in the engineering department. But a lot of the engineering students had taken their first physics class from me, and either they liked me or hated me enough to make me an honorary engineer.

I was the first victim of the day, and they were slow setting things up and getting started, so in the end only three students tried to dunk me, and they were all organizers of the event. Two of them threw three balls each and missed each time. All the time I was shouting appropriate “trash talk” related to physics: “What angle should you throw at to get the greatest range? What if you consider wind resistance? Where will the energy come from that makes the splash?” (see answers at end). The last fellow missed twice. On his last ball, I shouted, “You gonna let me go home dry?” and then…

Splash!

It wasn’t as cold as I thought it was going to be, and it seemed like the water jumped up instead of me falling down. Then I had to go quickly, dry off, and go attend a dissertation defense.

Speaking of which… the latest great news is that former fantastic graduate students Brian and Bryna are now perfect postdocs. Both of them successfully defended their dissertations since you last heard from me. Now I will pay them both as postdocs for the rest of the summer, until they go off to their new jobs. It was wonderful putting on their doctoral hoods on a beautiful sunny afternoon in June. I will miss them. Bryna is going to the University of Washington to do cosmology by observing radio waves, and Brian is going to Caltech to work on the NuSTAR satellite.

But before I can miss them we all will go through a crazy, hectic summer finishing the ADELE lightning instrument and flying it. We are running out of both time and money, but everyone working on the project has done amazing work so far, so I am trusting we will come out all right in the end.

Today is my sweetie’s birthday. She’ll read this sometime soon, but I’ve been such a bad blogger she might not check today… If you do, Sarah this one’s for you…

I only just realized that she was born on Earth Day.

Sarah is coming down to Santa Cruz this weekend, but I decided there isn’t a restaurant in town worthy of her birthday celebration (sorry, Santa Cruz), so we will wait for another weekend when we are up in Berkeley/Oakland/San Francisco.

Oh, yeah, I guess I should say something astronomical. This is a week of rampant scientific cross-fertilization. Tomorrow, two grad students — one from Stanford University (California, USA) and one from the Technology University of Bergen (Norway) are visiting us at UCSC to exchange ideas about the production of gamma-rays in lightning. Thursday, a research scientist from Berkeley is coming to give my department a colloquium about particle acceleration in solar flares — he’s a friend, so I’ll be putting him up for the night and serving as his host during the day. And Friday, I am going up to Berkeley myself with two fantastic graduate students and an excellent undergraduate to sit all afternoon and talk about accreting black holes and neutron stars with another research scientist at Berkeley. Visiting and exchanging ideas is a wonderful thing, but this may be too much for one week.

And a last bit of good news: fantastic graduate student Brian has been offered two perfect postdoctoral positions, and can make a choice! I’ll tell you about his choice when it is final.

I just came back from visiting Sarah in Stockton for a few days — so now, in quick succession, we have gotten a much better look at each other’s lives, which is nice. Forbes Magazine ranked Stockton as America’s second most miserable city, after Detroit, but apparently Forbes doesn’t place as much emphasis as I do on the presence of a wide variety of good ethnic food, and, even more importantly, on the presence of Sarah. We did some fun cooking together during my visit. I took home some chili as a souvenir.

But the title of this post has nothing to do with that.

One of my fantastic graduate students is currently writing a paper, with me and an optical astronomer (call him X) as co-authors*. The paper involves data taken with an orbiting x-ray observatory. With most of these satellites (and with many ground-based, optical observatories), the person who proposed the observation gets the data all to his/herself for one year, and then the observatory releases the data to the general public. So if you want to be sure that you get to publish the results of your own idea, you must analyze your data and write your paper in less than a year. Normally this isn’t a problem, but if you are encouraging a new graduate student to do the work, and to write the paper, then she has to learn a lot about the observatory, about x-ray astronomy techniques in general, about the scientific question and scientific background, and about how to write a paper for a journal. Even for a fantastic grad student, that’s a lot to do in less than a year, taking classes at the same time.

We have just about made it. The paper is only a few days from being ready to submit to a journal, and we have 3 more weeks until the data become public. But there is still a problem — it takes a couple of months for the paper to be reviewed by an expert referee and accepted by the journal. In that time, someone else (someone who is very practiced and quick at data analysis) could download the data, analyze them, and write a paper of their own. “But,” you say, “they will have to wait for the journal too, and so you will still be first.”

Sound reasoning, but there is another factor: the “arXiv”. The arXiv (pronounced “archive”) is a hugely valuable service provided by Cornell University to the community of astrophysicists and other scientists. When I have a paper accepted by a journal, I also upload a copy of it to the arXiv and it is immediately available for anyone to look at on the Web. But I could also upload a copy of the paper even before the journal accepts it, or without submitting it to a journal at all. So an ambitious person could post a paper on the arXiv while the referee is still reading our paper. That person would end up getting primary credit for the results. The only defense against this is for us to upload our paper to the arXiv at the time we submit it to the journal, instead of at the time the journal accepts it. This is not immoral, but it isn’t desirable. If we have to change the paper significantly because of the referee’s comments, then there will be two versions of it rattling around out there.

I asked collaborator X for his advice, and he reluctantly agreed that we should upload early, even though neither of us has ever done that before. He said,

I have never posted a paper [to arXiv] without formal acceptance, and always felt very reluctant posting papers before having a (mostly) positive review. But I’ve never been in a case like this before. People don’t jump like hungry jackals on optical data the day they go public!

Photo by Megan Bradfield from the South African National Parks website. There's some choice data in that bush.

Before you judge the jackals too harshly, please note a few things. First, the system of 1-year proprietary data is designed to make sure that data get used, which is a good thing, since these observatories are paid for by taxpayers. Sometimes people get lazy, and don’t have a pure, virtuous excuse like I do (training a student) for letting their year elapse. Some people also have very good ideas and are very good at analyzing data but haven’t been able to get observing proposals accepted (sometimes because their country hasn’t contributed to building the satellites).

Finally, note also that X and I recently started working on some data on another object that we are interested in — data that just went public a month ago, for which the “owner” never published anything. Sometimes the jackal eats you, and sometimes the jackal is you

That’s Sarah, looking at a photo of me from the late 1980s. Please don’t judge her harshly; you haven’t seen that photo.

It was wonderful to have Sarah visiting me at Santa Cruz for the first time, and apparently my cleanup (see last post) was sufficient for its purpose: to avoid scaring her off.  We did a lot of eating, went to see some music, and spent some time looking at my old photos after walking on the beaches of the California coast at sunset.

Sarah last came to our campus many years ago as a prospective student of Astronomy; she ended up studying Anthropology elsewhere instead. Now she’s back on our beautiful campus, and I figure this is a good time to show it to you, as well. After all, the site says, “Meet the Astronomers…See where they work…”.

The Santa Cruz campus of the University of California is beautiful chiefly for what the University has left untouched rather than for what it has built. The land used to be a ranch, and some of the old ranch buildings have been adapted for the use of the University. But most of the buildings are a mix of modern styles. Some I like, some I don’t, but I don’t *love* any of them (my taste in architecture is barbaric — meaning that I mostly like things that are old).  But between the buildings are huge groves of redwood trees. The trees sprout up out of little canyons that are spanned by footbridges, part of a series of paths connecting the different clusters of buildings. Then there are huge, rolling fields. From the top of the hills in the fields, you can see the Monterey Bay. From the door of my office, I can walk for 10 minutes and be in the middle of a completely wild redwood forest, with almost no sign of humanity nearby. I don’t do it nearly as often as I should.

A footbridge on the UCSC campus (from www.ucsc.edu)

The department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at U. C. Santa Cruz is one of the biggest and best in the US. Maybe even #1, if it is possible to make such rankings meaningfully. I can say this without blushing because I am not part of it. I work in the Department of Physics. I think we’re pretty good too, of course

Sarah will be coming to visit me at my home in Santa Cruz next week for the first time! It is finally time to cope with about a year’s worth of accumulated bacheloresque clutter and grime, in just a few short days. Wish me luck. I am dying to show a particular image here, but it belongs to a company with extremely vigorous views on copyright infringement. Perhaps I can post a link at least, and take it down if I get in trouble.

Today’s main topic is a sensitive one. A decision that most astronomers have to make pretty frequently is how to deal with those people who contact you to persuade you that they have a unique and brilliant theory, and that some major part of current scientific thinking is wrong. We are all educators, even those astronomers who don’t work at schools, and the natural instinct is to try to teach and explain — to give the person enough basic information so that they can see how (and usually how well) the real theory addresses the problem.

As you grow up and keep trying, you find that this doesn’t work very well. The writers don’t want to hear that science is 1) pretty well advanced now, and 2) very difficult. They don’t even seem to want to learn anything about the Universe, for the most part. They just want to be a person with a theory named after them, a genius. Usually they have already named their theory after themselves (note: that’s not how it works).

I’m a little more foolish than most, and even in middle age I still occasionally break down and reply and try to inject a little reality. Maybe I’m just being mean. Maybe I’m just offended by the arrogance of the implication that I and the thousands of other working scientists of the past century are all wrong, and only my correspondent is smart enough to see it. Or maybe I really hope that if this person can get past their delusion, they might actually become someone who really enjoys learning about the Universe, after all. Maybe I wish people would write to me out of nowhere to ask me to explain how some cool phenomenon works, so I could tell them what we know, and what we don’t — and my correspondent is what I get instead.

When I do try to engage, the main thing I point out is this: I doubt that anyone in the history of science has ever made an important contribution without a complete mastery of the state of the art of “mainstream” science in his/her time. This is not to say that you have to have a credential or be part of the club to do science. Einstein was not part of the club in 1905 when he had his “Great Year”. But even though he was working as a patent clerk, he was reading and understanding all the best physics papers of his day at the time. Without knowing all the things that the current theories do explain, and exactly how they explain them, it’s impossible to propose any improvements.

I bring this up now for two reasons. One of these folks has posted his “theory” as a comment to one of my previous posts. I have been postponing deciding what to do about that comment, but I’ve allowed it to appear now so that you can see an example. Don’t be either put off or impressed by all the equations; they don’t matter. The other reason is that another person of this type (perhaps not quite as bad) emailed me and my entire department on Friday. I was having a bad day and decided to engage with him, which I did rather bluntly, and which I regret now. Mostly I resented his having bothered all my colleagues, including all our grad students. If it had just been sent to me, I would have been much more polite. Anyway, we have reached a point in our conversation where he is now asking for real scientific information, and if I have any integrity at all I should now do my best to give it to him. We’ll see how it goes. Thanks and love to Sarah for being tolerant and comforting when I ranted about this to her.

For the cruelest view of this subject, you can look here. I include the link because, while cruel, it is also terribly familiar to those of us who get this often.

If any of my fellow astronomers are reading this post, I would love your comments and stories.

If anyone but my fellow astronomers is reading this post, I would love yours as well.

ADELE is the Airborne Detector for Energetic Lightning Emissions. This is an instrument we are building to send up in an airplane (or perhaps several airplanes over the years) and look for gamma-rays associated with lightning. We have seen these gamma-rays from orbit (see my post from January 6) and from the ground. Many of the ground-based observations have been made by my colleague Joe Dwyer from the Florida Institute of Technology. Joe is the co-investigator for ADELE.

Look at her scarf.

Why go up in an airplane? We want to get as close as possible to the lightning source region to get the closest look. If we see about 100 gamma rays in a flash from 600 km away in Earth orbit, then we should see about 1,000,000 gamma rays if we are only 6 km above the thunderstorm! ADELE has some big detectors so that we can gather as many counts as possible from a small or distant event, but it also has a couple of small detectors in case we hit an event so bright that the big detectors are overloaded. If this sounds a little scary, it is; right now we worry that a TGF may produce so much ionizing radiation that it will be somewhat dangerous for people if they are directly at the point of origin. This is one of the reasons that our first flights, this summer, will keep some distance (about 25 km) away from the thunderstorms. The other reason is that we are flying in an airplane that is not designed for rough weather. It is a
Gulfstream V (a modified business jet) operated by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) for the National Science Foundation (NSF). When it’s finished, ADELE will look like a big computer rack full of electronics. It sits inside the plane, since the gamma-rays can and will penetrate the hull.

One of ADELE's large gamma-ray detectors

What do we want to find out? First and foremost, the “chicken and egg” problem: do gamma-ray flashes happen first and cause the lightning to happen? Or does the lightning happen first and set up the conditions that produce the gamma rays? Second, the “ubiquity” problem: does all lightning come along with a flash of gamma-rays, or just some kinds? There’s a bunch of smaller and more complicated questions, but those are the big ones.

ADELE is being built by three fantastic graduate students, one excellent undergraduate, and a terrific engineer. I mostly run the meetings. As I mentioned in my last post, I don’t really enjoy many aspects of management (arranging the meetings, worrying about the budget and schedule, etc.). But I also want to make clear something that I didn’t say last time: I love working with these people. I just sometimes wish someone else was in charge.

Last summer I was in Corsica at a workshop on atmospheric electricity along with fantastic grad students Bryna and Brian. While we were sitting around drinking beer and talking about the project, we realized that there is another thing we can do with ADELE: instead of just flying her on airplanes — which is expensive and won’t happen very often — we can also stick her in the back of a van and drive around chasing thunderstorms, hoping lightning will strike near us. Joe Dwyer has recorded some great data from his ground-based detectors, but they stay in one place. If we drive around, we can increase our chances of catching good data enormously! It wouldn’t be the craziest thing anyone has ever done for science; inside a closed car you are quite safe from lightning (look up “Faraday cage” on the web).

So this is where I hope to be two summers from now: driving around Florida chasing storms. I hope NSF agrees and funds our proposal.

PS: The ultra-long duration balloon carrying the BARREL prototype instrument was cut down by NASA a few days ago. It was still going strong, but it was headed out over the ocean, and they wanted to cut it down over the continent. Amazingly, our payload kept sending data all the way down on the parachute, and it is still sending data from the ground, just beeping happily away! I guess it won’t shut up until the sun sets in a couple of weeks and its solar panels can’t get any more power. Altogether a very successful test of our instrument, and fantastic grad student Max has even found some scientifically interesting events in the data (electrons crashing into Earth’s atmosphere from the radiation belts — the stuff that BARREL was designed to see).