illuminating science

In a pretty cool move, the State leaders of Australia have agreed to set up a sort of “carbon economy”. Basically, what it means is that the states will impose limits on the amount of carbon dioxide industry can produce (carbon dioxide is a major contributer to global warming). Then, businesses (mainly industrial ones, like energy production) will be able to trade their carbon allowances with each other - so you can either be efficient and sell of your excess carbon allowance, or you can be a polluter and pay for it. Of course, it’s not that simple - being efficient usually means being more expensive, at least in the short term. But hopefully it will encourage long term reductions in our emissions.

What’s really cool is that the states have “rebelled” against the federal government. Australia, like the U.S. refused to ratify the Kyoto protocol. I’m not certain how I feel about this - originally, I was very disappointed, but recently I’ve been talking to other people who think the Kyoto protocol was flawed. But it would have at least been a step in the right direction. For the States to take a stand like this means that there’s hope even when the government won’t play ball. This follows calls by NSW to cut emissions by 60% in the next 50 years. Of course, all the details are still to be worked out, but hopefully things won’t falter - it sounds pretty set.

Another of my boring-but-necessary posts, I’m afraid. Spam is getting ridiculous here (though not as bad as for some, I’m sure!) so I’ve had to take measures to reduce it. I’ve just installed Spam Karma which will hopefully reduce it - but there’s always the risk of some false positivies. So if you post a comment and it doesn’t turn up drop me a line on [gilmore at physics dt uq dt edu dt au] where “dt” stands for dot! I’ll have a look and reinstate the comment Sorry for the inconvenience, but hopefully this will cut down the time it takes to delete spam.

Friend (and guest blogger last week) Brett has an interesting post on his blog about the difference between maths and the other sciences in the public eye. He’s got an interesting point - even though maths and physics are both considered “too hard” by most of the general public, at least physicists can talk about black holes, play with liquid nitrogen and generally explain how we’re working to understand the underlying laws of the universe.

Interestingly, I was also talking to some biologists just recently who were complaining about how easy it was for physicists to put on displays and give talks, compared to biology anyway. I’d never really thought about this before, but it’s true - on the demo front, physicists are going to win hands down. It’s pretty hard to make any sort of interactive demo from biology, whereas physicsists can lie on beds of nails, break wood using air, and all sorts of other cool things.

It’s probably different for talks - there’s lots of cool things biologists can talk about: cloning, genetic engineering and slime moulds to name a few. For visual aids, there are those fantastic glowing green mice (that have been (harmlessly) genetically engineered) and movies of little e coli bacteria being eaten by giant macrophages. Physicists again have a wealth of options, but I’m not really convinced that there’s “easier stuff” to do talks with in physics compared to biology (of course, both are going to depend on the quality of your speaker - and a good speaker should be able to make anything interesting, entertaining and understandable!)

This raises an intriguing question: are physics talks intrinsically more interesting? It really seems like there are many more public talks on physics than there are on biology. People genuinely seem interested in physics, and the school students and even the general public I speak to usually have lots of questions (everything from “Why is the sky blue?” to “How can neutronium be compressed to become a black hole?”!) In many ways, as Brett pointed out, physics is the science of everyday life - anytime we wonder about why something is the way it is we’re usually asking about physics. I have a bias, of course, but I can’t see school students asking as many questions about biology as physics.

So then why do sooo many students go into biology, and so few into physics, to the point where they actively dislike it? If people are intrinsically interested, and we can do better demos and give just as good talks - where do we go wrong? Is it we don’t do enough? Are we marketing it wrong? On the one hand, we don’t want everyone going into physics! But it would be nice if more people were interested and open to it, rather than dismissing it as being boring or too hard. Perhaps understanding the answer to this question is an important step towards salvaging the physicsists’ image.

So - seamlessly, relatively painlessly - the upgrade is complete, and Illuminating Science is back to normal. That said, I’m contemplating some renovations - the new Wordpress 1.5 has some neat new features, including the ability to create static pages (e.g., a list of my favourite posts, a description of what the blog is all about, etc.) and it would good to find a natural way to include all that. The new edition makes it really easy to change styles, and there are some new ones I quite like, but I think for now I’ll stick with our current setup. We’ll see! Any feedback or suggestions are of course most welcome.

Interesting article from Slashdot about a new type of solar cell that is made from titanium rather than silicon. This is good, because silicon is in pretty high demand at the moment, and mass produced solar cells are necessarily expensive. However, I’m not sure if this is really a solution - for a start, their product page seems more focussed on “high power” applications, like space and so forth. It’s also not clear whether these cells would be significantly cheaper in the long run or not - better (they say), but what you really want is a dirt cheap solar cell that we can cover roofs with etc. At the end of the day, there’s only a limited amount of titanium too, and the manafacturing costs are still significant.

I think the answer is far more likely to lie with the “soft solids” approach - using flexible polymers (plastic) and biological inspiration to make cheap and efficient cells. This is what we’re working on at UQ, as well as a number of other groups - such as making solar cells out of spinach! The holy grail would have to be a sort of “grow it yourself” solar cell - but I’m not really convinced that that’s going to happen.

Today (and probably tomorrow!) I’m going to be upgrading to the latest edition of Wordpress. This might mean a little instability, and it will almost certainly mean that all my lovely styling will vanish in small nuclear explosion at least for a little while. Hopefully, though, everything will go according to plan - but just bear with me if it doesn’t

We’ll be back to your regularly scheduled program asap.

Gosh! I completely forgot that I was going to post about this. At the Science in the Pub event recently, Jenny and I were responsible for the half time entertainment. Because of all the stuff we do with the Demo Troupe, we decided that we would do some demos. So, we bought ourselves an Airzooka - a brilliant little toy that shoots a “vortex” of air across the room which has enough force to mess up hair, knock over Coke cans, etc. It works on the same principle as blowing a smoke ring (not that I smoke!!!) and is also related to tornados and the like. I ran around shooting people during the break, then we explained the physics of it when we got back together.

To further show off the powerr of air, we also bought ourselves a Windbag. Using simple physics, you can blow up a large bag using a single breath of air - you make the rest of the atmosphere help you literally push air into the bag, rather than blowing it in yourself. It was a real hoot - and of course lots of “full of hot air” jokes followed.

Everyone seemed really pleased by the demos (phew!) and I met some really interesting people from the Australian Science Communicators which I’m really looking forward to doing more with in the future. One possibility is training students interested in science communication on how to do demos and to perform them entertainingly. I’ve seen brilliant demos ruined by a lack luster performance - but I’ve also seen some rather “boring” demos become the centrepiece of our shows through a great performance. I really do think that the most important thing is the presentation - if you get that right, then everything else will follow. And of course this applies to more than just physics!

Guest blogger Ben Powell is a lecturer at UQ in theoretical physics, his research interests include quantum many-body physics, biophysics and unconventional superconductivity. According to Joel he likes English beer, football (soccer) and English beer (Joel can be very perceptive sometimes).

Recently I had a rather interest discussion with Andrew White. Actually this is not true. I don’t think anyone has ever had a discussion with Andrew, it was definitely an argument.

The discussion/argument/whatever started out about the physics curriculum at UQ but quickly moved on to a discussion about what where the truly original contributions to physics in the twentieth century. Andrew claimed that there where only two. The theory of quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity. For the record I should say that many (perhaps most) other physicists would agree with Andrew. I don’t. I think that the existence of emergent phenomena is equally fundamental and probably more important than either quantum mechanics or relativity.

Let me illustrate emergence with a very old example - time’s arrow. The so-called fundamental laws of physics (i.e. quantum mechanics and relativity) do not care about which way you run time. That is if you think of the world as a movie then, if I played the movie backwards everything should, according to these ‘fundamental’ laws, be the same. Clearly your everyday experience contradicts this prediction (you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs - but you certainly can’t make an egg by ‘un-breaking’ an omelet). So - if science is to be based of empirical evidence shouldn’t we reject these ‘fundamental’ laws.

The answer is that when we many particles acting together the begin to behave in new ways that we could never expect from studying a single particle. Such new behaviours are called emergent behaviours. In this case the emergent property is called entropy. Entropy is a measure of disorder - the more disordered a system is the higher its entropy. Something given the rather pompous name of ‘ the second law of thermodynamics‘ says that the entropy of the universe can never decrease. That is the universe as a whole is always getting more disorder. This is easy to misunderstand. Small parts of the universe can decrease their entropy, but then the entropy of the rest of the universe has to increase, so that the total entropy of the universe does not decrease. Actually as you’re sitting here reading this your body is busy decreasing its entropy, however all the body heat that is following out of you is disordering the rest of the universe and
increasing the entropy of the rest of the universe.

However, it is important to realise that when physicists first discovered entropy they did not derive it from a ‘fundamental’ theory, instead they found that, in they’re theories on many particles they had to include entropy to make the theory agree with nature. This century we found that when classical (or Newtonian) mechanics was replaced by quantum mechanics we still need to worry about the role entropy plays in large systems. In fact we can go further than that. We do not know how to derive the second law of thermodynamics from any ‘fundamental’ theory. And yet we believe it to be true. Einstein went so far as to say that “it is the only physical theory of universal content which I am convinced, that within the framework of applicability of its basic concepts will never be overthrown.” So what made him so sure of this?

The important thing to understand is the second law of thermodynamics is true regardless of the details of the ‘fundamental’ theory - be that classical physics, quantum physics or some future theory that we do not know about yet. Therefore Bob Laughlin (who won the 1998 physics Noble prize) and David Pines have called principles such as the second law of thermodynamics ‘higher organising principles’.

The second law of thermodynamics is just the best know of these ‘higher organising principles’, we know know that many physical phenomena can only be described in terms of such ‘higher organising principles’. Examples include superconductivity, Bose-Einstein condensation, the quantum Hall effect, protein folding, most of chemistry, all of biology and life to name a few.

Finally we come to my last point. There is a general acceptance in science, which I must point out is not shared by many philosophers, of a reductionist world view. That is to say the view that we can materials physics in terms of particle physics, chemistry in terms of materials physics, biology in terms of chemistry, psychology in terms of biology and the humanities in terms of psychology. It seems to have become increasingly clear, over the course of the twentieth century that, if this is true then these ‘explanations’ can only be made in terms of higher organising principles because all of the things begin explained are emergent phenomena.

Remember more is different.

There was a careers fair here at UQ the other day, and one of the employers hunting for graduates was the Defense Signals Directorate, which is an Australian civillian organisation specialising in foreign intelligence and information security within Australia. They had a clever gimmick where they put a puzzle on their info sheets, saying that if you could solve it you might be the candidate they were looking for. It was:

If
CHAD = 3
FIJI = 4
FRANCE = 8
KYRGYZSTAN = 9
MYANMAR = 10
NIGERIA = 12
Which country has the value of 5?

I spent probably half an hour looking at this, analysing, thinking, assigning numerical values to letters, etc. I then passed it to my friend’s mum, who looked at it for about 30 seconds, and said “I’ve got it.” And she did, too!

I won’t reveal the solution here (though you can find it on the net, if you want) but it wasn’t anything like as complicated as the schemes I was trying to come up with. In my defense, I’d tried to look for something along the lines of the solution, but just hadn’t seen it, and moved on to other things. Just shows that sometimes a fresh perspective can help - which I guess supports all the interdisciplinary science going on at the moment!

It really gets my goat when I read articles like this one from Wired News about using natural gas trapped under the oceans as a source of energy. With fossil fuels on the way out sooner or later, energy is a big issue. But I don’t think that this is the solution.

For starters, I find it hard to believe that mining it could be an environmentally friendly project. But even more than that is the attitude implied by comments like “[it] could power the world for decades to come”. It speaks of a short sighted view of our future and our energy requirements. Maybe it gives us power for another 50 years, but then what? We’re back to square one, and we still haven’t developed a renewable power source, and we’ve used up yet another natural resource.

The usual argument is that technology will come to our rescue, and that scientists will come up with a solution to the energy crisis - we just need to buy them time. A lot of conservationists dismiss that idea, and think that we’re risking the future of our planet if we rely on it. I have to confess that I do belive, up to a point - technology will continue to advance and with the appropriate support science can produce solutions, provided we act quick enough. The problem is that instead of developing new solar cells, we just spent US$23 million on researching the possibility of mining our oceans. And I can’t help but be afraid that by the time politicians decide global warming is a real issue, it will be too late for science to change anything.

What we need is an attitude change now. It doesn’t have to mean switching to solar cells overnight, but it does mean governments should be investing big time in renewable energy rather than stop gap solutions. It means educating people and encourage solar hot water heaters and fuel efficient cars. Governments should be seriously considering how to cut green house emissions, and everyone tries to do their bit. Don’t get me wrong - I’m not a fanatic (hey, I don’t belong to Greenpeace because I don’t agree with a lot of their ideas or how they implement them) but I am a concerned scientist and citizen, who thinks we need to act sooner rather than later.

I really love reading Isaac Asimov, especially his robot novels and stories. It’s just so amazing how many things he predicts, and how appropriate so many of his stories are even now. He was even the first person to introduce the term “robotics”! In his stories, by about the year 2000 robots with positronic brains would be common place, at least amongst off-world mining jobs, etc. It’s interesting to note that in most of his books (despite what the “I, Robot” movie that came out recently had to say) never included robots in use for the general public, or anywhere on Earth outside of the factory - they were always feared and mistrusted by people, despite the Three Laws.

Of course, this hasn’t come to pass, and positronic brains are complete fantasy, but robots are slowly making their presence felt. The most famous of them would be ASIMO, which seems to be the first reasonably functional humanoid robot. There’s some pretty amazing videos of him - including him climbing stairs and, my favourite, showing off all his abilities including playing soccer - sort of! Although ASIMO doesn’t yet have any real applications beyond being a tour guide at science centres and very big Japanese businesses, it does show some potential. Note the use of “it” - the FAQ says

I may be a humanoid robot, but I’m still a robot. Therefore, it is most appropriate to refer to me as “it”, or you can simply call me “ASIMO”

It’s an interesting tack they’re taking - rather than trying to make you feel comfortable with a “him” or a “her”, they want you to think of “it” as nothing more than a machine, a walking computer. This again is in line with most of Asimov’s stories, where robots are treated as nothing more than advanced computers, that are perfectly deterministic in their functioning, and deserve no more “respect” than a computer does. But completely disagreeing with that are stories like “The Bicentennial Man” and robots such as R. Daneel Olivaw, in many ways the hero of Asimov’s robot stories and one of my favourite characters. These robots had personality, intelligence and, it seemed, free will. It is hard to believe those robots didn’t posses true “intelligence”, or what we these days would call “artificial intelligence”.

The application of Asimov’s Three Laws to real robots is still the subject of much debate - after all, Asimov’s stories showed that there’s almost always a work around. Most likely, we’ll never get to the point where robots are making complex enough decisions to decide to turn on their “masters”. All the same, it’s a little disconcerting the way the presenters treat ASIMO in those movies, as if he’s a clever dog with a personality that , while at the same time assuming he’s nothing more than a walking pocket calculator…

Guest blogger Brett Witty is a PhD student in computational algebra at ANU.

Imagine a group of scientists came to you, exclaiming, “We think we’ve punctured the very fabric of space!” (as you do) “We’re not entirely sure, though. Can you find out for us?” They throw you in the lab where the accident may have occurred and ask you to detect any holes. Can you do it?

We’re going to assume that if it exists, the hole stays in the lab (so it’s localized), and that space (being well-behaved) remains continuous, so you won’t see an obvious big black spot in the middle of the room. It turns out that if you live in a two-dimensional world, then you can indeed detect the hole! Enlisting the help of your trusty trained stunt fly, you instruct him to do circles around the room. If he can fly around in circles of arbitrary size, then all is safe and there are no holes in the room. If there is an area where he just can’t seem to fly a smaller circle, then there’s your hole (or bunch of holes). You can see this by drawing a picture of a room and drawing a sizable hole in the middle. The room will now look like a squarish ring. Paths going around the ring can’t be any shorter than the diameter of this hole. But if all paths can be made smaller and smaller, then there are no holes.

For higher dimensions, say four or more, then this kind of strategy seems to work. But to prove it works is rather difficult. Surprisingly, the trickiest case to work on seems to be the three-dimensional version! In fact, this whole problem of detecting holes in surfaces is the idea behind the famous Poincare Conjecture. Yes, one of those holy million-dollar millenium problems! The general idea is to classify spheres in various dimensions, and whether looking “like” a sphere actually means you’re a sphere. The Poincare Conjecture is just the three-dimension case as all other cases have been solved. This problem has seen a lot of excitement lately with the Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman offering preprints of a proof of a more general conjecture that includes the three-dimensional Poincare Conjecture. If his work is correct (and many experts believe that he is), then he will be the first to take down one of the famous Millenium problems, and this hundred-year-old conjecture will finally be put to rest. Even if his approach doesn’t work out, the mathematics community are very interested in the machinery he used, so not all is lost.

Rumour has it that Perelman isn’t so interested in the million-dollar prize, but due to public pressure, may end up receiving it anyway! Even if he doesn’t want it himself, it may go towards supporting more mathematics jobs, which means mathematics wins every which way.

So, in the coming weeks, we’re going to be having some guest bloggers from other areas of UQ and beyond. We’re going to hear from a mathematician in Canberra, a biophysicist from Brisbane, and more! I’m certainly looking forward to reading them - and I hope you’ll agree that this will make Illuminating Science even more interesting and enjoyable to read! It’s also a great opportunity to ask questions of a wide range of researchers, and I’m sure everyone who posts will be more than happy to engage in discussion through the comments. Everyone is welcome to respond!

Well, I just gave blood today - donation number 9 for me. In Australia, blood donation is voluntary only, and you can’t be paid for it. I really don’t like needles (and there should probably be italics there…) but I make myself do it partially to relieve my fear of needles, and partially because it’s pretty awesome to be able to say that I’ve saved up to 27 lives.

Plus, there’s some neat physics involved. First, they measure the amount of hemoglobin, basically iron, in my blood - today, I had about 145 grams per litre. The minimum donation amount is 130, so I’m well within the normal range (goes up to about 180). I’m not absolutely certain how they measure it - I think it’s using the method Wikipedia describes as “a machine-read result from a chemical reaction on a testing strip”. I can’t find any more info on it though! Another method is to use a centrifuge - spin the blood around until the heavy red blood cells move to the outside, but I presume that requires more space and is a lot noisier! (More fun too, though!)

I was also trying to work out stuff about what rate, pressure, etc my blood was flowing out at (at the same time I was studiously ignoring the fact that my blood was flowing out…) I gave about 500mL in 10 minutes, or 50mL per minute, or just under 1mL a second. My blood pressure was 120/70 - and what this actually means is that when the heart is pushing hardest the pressure is equivalent to 120 millimetres of mercury (mmHg) and when the heart is resting the pressure is only 70mmHg. I don’t think I’ve got enough information to work out at what rate the blood is flowing through my veins. Perhaps it’s best not to think about it. It really is kind of freaky when you see the blood rush down the tube at high speed…

On a personal note, this was possibly one of my more painful times giving blood - sometimes the nurse puts the needle in and out without me feeling anything but the pressure of their fingers. Other times, like today, it stings like heck on the way out, and was pretty darn painful on the way in. Ah well - my noble sacrifice makes for a good story!

So Sunday was the delightful Science in the Pub activity - a trip down to the local pub to debate the question: Should Einstein have been named Person of the 20th Century, or was he overrated? It ended up being a really interesting debate. The panelists were all excellent, and had some really interesting arguments.

Perhaps the only odd thing that most of the panel was eithre neutral or against Einstein! I guess they assumed that most people would already be pro-Einstein, and their job would be to create an interesting counter argument. For instance, one panelist, Matt, wasn’t a physicist - instead he’s a top class debater. His argument (against Einstein) was that Einstein’s theories weren’t quite as amazing as everyone claimed. Einstein “stood on the shoulders of giants” (that is, he’d used the research of a lot of great people before him) to develop his theories, and anyway, if he hadn’t done it then someone else would have. It was an interesting argument, but as a physicist I have to disagree. As Andrew White, another panelist pointed out, Einstein’s theories really were revolutionary. Sure, someone else would eventually explained the photoelectric effect, etc. But his theory of general relativity, that whole idea of space and time being the same, was pure genius - and he shouldn’t be slighted for that.

It seems that the physicists assumed that everyone would know how great Einstein’s discoveries were, and so set out to discuss his attributes as a person, while Matt, as a non-physicist, may not have really appreciated how much Einstein changed modern physics (no offense to Matt here - it was an interesting argument that made for great discussion, and that’s what debating is all about!) But the panel swung around to defend Einstein when he needed it, so the discussion was still lively.
One interesting question was whether Einstein was a good role model, and hence appropriate for “Person of the Century”. He was a disrespectful student, he didn’t treat his first wife well, and he (supposedly) didn’t reference other people’s works. On the other hand, he campaigned for peace and nuclear disarmament, was involved in humanitarian efforts, and helped Marie Curie get a job when no-one else would employ a woman. Personally, I think that Einstein was human, and no human is perfect. If anything, it’s their flaws that make them interesting.
A related question Einstein’s popularity is a good thing for physics or not. He’s old, he’s got the crazy hair, and is always portrayed as being a brilliant but slightly absent minded old man - all together, forming pretty much the standard stereotype of a physicist. Is that really what we want young people thinking physics is all about? I guess not, but Einstein’s more than that - he shows that a physicist can become a household name and be more famous that anyone. He was brilliant but also funny, an academic but also involved with the rest of the world. And really, anything we can do which promotes physics and makes it accessible to students has got to be good.
So, at the end of it all, the audience voted and found Einstein to be worthy of his Person of the Century title, by a 2 to 1 majority. Seems like Einstein gets to keep his place as everyone’s hero. I certainly voted for him!

Nature magazine is running a neat physics detective story, called “Mousetrap: the physics detective“. It’s about a famous (ficitonal!) physicist, Rufus Jaeger, who is killed while performing a quantum experiment to an adoring crowd. At first is seems like an accident - but was it?! Glass with a negative refractive index, holograms and the elusive Schroedinger’s cat all play a part in this epic tale - I certainly don’t know who dunnit! Not yet anyway - 3 parts to go!

Each chapter seems to be written by a different famous scientist or mathematician, starting with Ian Stewart, and it’s quite good fun to read. I think it will particularly appeal to physicists, but it also gives a little insight into a physicists world for the layperson as well, albeit in a romanticised way. I’m also not sure yet what part physics really plays in his death - but it’s certainly a part of the story. It’s well worth a read - and if you can guess who dunnit, then let me know.

What do you get for the person who has everything? How about naming a frog after them?
Friend Ben Powell has been using his time wisely to discover BIOPAT, a German conservation group, who will name a newly discovered frog, orchid or possibly other creatures after you or the name of your choice - all for a small donation of 2,600 euro.

Take note! There are estimated to be only 18 million undiscovered species left - order yours now before they all become extinct! You think I’m joking, right? Countless species are being lost forever each before they can be found. Even if you don’t care about the loss of a particularly ugly frog or yet another fern, it’s possible that they could have had valuable medicinal applications which evolution perfected over millions of years. Who knows, it could have been your life that would have been saved.

I have to say it’s a brilliant way of raising funds. Given the number of species out there, I’m sure people get bored naming them. And if that money can go towards conservation - well, it’s a win-win situation. Now, I think there’d be another potential market - naming ugly bugs after your enemies or least favourite politicians. How about “Sluggius Bushius” or “Wormius Kerryius”? Particularly if you could get a photo of the creature with it - it would make the perfect present!

If nothing else, this is a change from the usual name a star scams, where all the money goes straight into the site’s profits, and the naming careers no “legal” weight at all.

If you’re in Brisbane on April 6th, you should check out a public lecture by Paul Davies on “E=mc²: The equation that changed the world“. Paul Davies is a great speaker and an excellent scientist - I used to read his books with great gusto when I was younger. I’d love to tour around doing lectures like that!

There’s only a limited number of tickets, so get in quick if you’re interested! It’s free - you just need to reserve a place. All are welcome, and no physics knowledge is necessary! Come and celebrate World Year of Physics!

This Friday, for the physics club here at UQ, my partner Jenny and I are running a workshop on the “Physics of Swing Dancing”. We’ve run it once before, and it’s great fun - we get to combine our love of swing dancing with our love of physics! The idea is that we teach a basic routine, and use it to talk about some interesting physics - centre of mass, conservation of angular momentum, projectile motion (!). For instance, we do a couple of different moves and then ask whether it would be possible to do them on ice. It turns out that if you’re on ice, the centre of mass of you as a couple must stay where it is. So you couldn’t move around the room, but you could change places by pulling on each other. Another fun thing is working out how high you can throw your girl and still keep the move in time with the music!

I think it’s a pretty cool activity. It shows that physics really is important to a lot of different things, even if sometimes we don’t realise it! It’s a fun way of communicating physics to people who might not otherwise be interested. I’ve had classes from instructors who are also physicists, and it really does help to explain a move when they talk about “storing up your energy as elastic potential in your arm, then springing your partner away!” See, a physics degree is good for dance instructors too!

If anyone’s around UQ tomorrow (Friday), we’re in the Tea Room in building 7 (Parnell), by the walkway to the Annexe (Bldg 6). Fun starts at 5pm! Or, if you’d just like to learn swing dancing, check out Swing Dance Brisbane, or use Google to find a local school in your area!

This is straight off Slashdot so you can read all the relevant articles there, but basically someone discovered a ridiculously simple hack for Harvard Business School - you could view your acceptance (or otherwise) letter a month in advance for when it was officially released. They posted it on the net, and 119 people went to check out their status. Harvard has since cancelled the enrolments of those 119, saying they don’t want such unethical students (though they don’t say how many would have been accepted and how many were rejected anyway.) Woah! So is this a fair punsihment, or not?

The hack seems to be as simple as changing “viewindex” to “viewletter” in the URL of Harvard’s “Apply Yourself” online enrolment system. The security fault is entirely with the “Apply Yourself” authors (a major company) and a number of other universities who used the same program were similarly affected. One person on Slashdot likened it to putting all the acceptance letters on a desk in an unlocked room with no guard, then advertising it far and wide. Another pointed out that the hack was only available for 9 hours - of the 4000 students, how many read about it? Say, 119? I’m an honest person, but if I could read my acceptance letter in advance, I probably would - guiltily. If nothing else, I’d be curious to see if the hack worked! And does it really hurt anyone for me to find out now, rather than later? Why should they delay so long in sending the letters?!

On the flip side, they did violate the trust with the university, and they are “unethical” in some sense - and business types are hardly famous at the moment for their honesty, so Harvard wants to set an example. But it was Harvard’s mistake, and if it were me (and it wouldn’t jepoardise my career) I’d be going straight to the law courts. And I’d find it hard to believe that given how smart and probably well off those applicants were, at least one of them doesn’t. We’ll see.

What would you do? Should they be punished like this? Can Harvard back down, without losing face? Would you have peeked at your acceptance letter? Where do you draw the line?