Category: Scicomm

PSA about Business Today

If you get your space news from the website businesstoday.in, this post is for you. Business Today has published several articles over the last few weeks about the Starliner saga with misleading headlines and claims blown far out of proportion. I’d been putting off writing about them but this morning, I spotted the following piece:

Business Today has produced all these misleading articles in this format, resembling Instagram reels. This is more troubling because we know tidbits like this are more consumable as well as are likely to go viral by virtue of their uncomplicated content and simplistic message. Business Today has also been focusing its articles on the saga on Sunita Williams alone, as if the other astronauts don’t exist. This choice is obviously of a piece with Williams’s Indian heritage and Business Today’s intention to maximise traffic to its pages by publishing sensational claims about her experience in space. As I wrote before:

… in the eyes of those penning articles and headlines, “Indian-American” she is. They’re using this language to get people interested in these articles, and if they succeed, they’re effectively selling the idea that it’s not possible for Indians to care about the accomplishments of non-Indians, that only Indians’, and by extension India’s, accomplishments matter. … Calling Williams “Indian-American” is to retrench her patriarchal identity as being part of her primary identity — just as referring to her as “Indian origin” is to evoke her genetic identity…

But something more important than the cynical India connection is at work here: in these pieces, Business Today has been toasting it. This my term for a shady media practice reminiscent of a scene in an episode of the TV show Mad Men, where Don Draper suggests Lucky Strike should advertise its cigarettes as being “toasted”. When someone objects that all cigarettes are toasted, Draper says they may well be, but by saying publicly that its cigarettes are toasted, Lucky Strike will set itself out without doing anything new, without lying, without breaking any rules. It’s just a bit of psychological manipulation.

Similarly, Business Today has been writing about Williams as if she’s the only astronaut facing an extended stay in space (and suggesting in more subtle ways that this fate hasn’t befallen anyone before — whereas it has dozens of times), that NASA statements concern only her health and not the health of the other astronauts she’s with, and that what we’re learning about her difficulties in space constitute new information.

None of this is false but it’s not true either. It’s toasted. Consider the first claim: “NASA has revealed that Williams is facing a critical health issue”:

* “NASA has revealed” — there’s nothing to reveal here. We already know microgravity affects various biochemical processes in the body, including the accelerated destruction of red blood cells.

* “Williams is facing” — No. Everyone in microgravity faces this. That’s why astronauts need to be very fit people, so their bodies can weather unanticipated changes for longer without suffering critical damage.

* “critical health issue” — Err, no. See above. Also, perhaps in a bid to emphasise this (faux) criticality, Business Today’s headline begins “3 million per second” and ends calling the number “disturbing”. You read it, this alarmingly big number is in your face, and you’re asking to believe it’s “disturbing”. But it’s not really a big number in context and certainly not worth any disturbance.

For another example, consider: “Given Williams’ extended mission duration, this accelerated red blood cell destruction poses a heightened risk, potentially leading to severe health issues”. Notice how Business Today doesn’t include three important details: how much of an extension amounts to a ‘bad’ level of extension, what the odds are of Williams (or her fellow Starliner test pilot Barry Wilmore) developing “health issues”, and whether these consequences are reversible. Including these details would deflate Business Today’s ‘story’, of course.

If Business Today is your, a friend’s and/or a relative’s source of space news, please ask them to switch to any of the following instead for space news coverage and commentary that’s interesting without insulting your intelligence:

* SpaceNews

* Jeff Foust

* Marcia Smith

* Aviation Week

* Victoria Samson

* Jatan Mehta

* The Hindu Science

A spaceflight narrative unstuck

“First, a clarification: Unlike in Gravity, the 2013 film about two astronauts left adrift after space debris damages their shuttle, Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore are not stuck in space.”

This is the first line of an Indian Express editorial today, and frankly, it’s enough said. The idea that Williams and Wilmore are “stuck” or “stranded” in space just won’t die down because reports in the media — from The Guardian to New Scientist, from Mint to Business Today — repeatedly prop it up.

Why are they not “stuck”?

First: because “stuck” implies Boeing/NASA are denying them an opportunity to return as well as that the astronauts wish to return, yet neither of which is true. What was to be a shorter visit has become a longer sojourn.

This leads to the second answer: Williams and Wilmore are spaceflight veterans who were picked specifically to deal with unexpected outcomes, like what’s going on right now. If amateurs or space tourists had been picked for the flight and their stay at the ISS had been extended in an unplanned way, then the question of their wanting to return would arise. But even then we’d have to check if they’re okay with their longer stay instead of jumping to conclusions. If we didn’t, we’d be trivialising their intention and willingness to brave their conditions as a form of public service to their country and its needs. We should think about extending the same courtesy to Williams and Wilmore.

And this brings us to the third answer: The history of spaceflight — human or robotic — is the history of people trying to expect the unexpected and to survive the unexpectable. That’s why we have test flights and then we have redundancies. For example, after the Columbia disaster in 2003, part of NASA’s response was a new protocol: that astronauts flying in faulty space capsules could dock at the ISS until the capsule was repaired or a space agency could launch a new capsule to bring them back. So Williams and Wilmore aren’t “stuck” there: they’re practically following protocol.

For its upcoming Gaganyaan mission, ISRO has planned multiple test flights leading up the human version. It’s possible this flight or subsequent ones could throw up a problem, causing the astronauts within to take shelter at the ISS. Would we accuse ISRO of keeping them “stuck” there or would we laud the astronauts’ commitment to the mission and support ISRO’s efforts to retrieve them safely?

Fourth: “stuck” or “stranded” implies a crisis, an outcome that no party involved in the mission planned for. It creates the impression human spaceflight (in this particular mission) is riskier than it is actually and produces false signals about the competencies of the people who planned the mission. It also erects unreasonable expectations about the sort of outcomes test flights can and can’t have.

In fact, the very reason the world has the ISS and NASA (and other agencies capable of human spaceflight) has its protocol means this particular outcome — of the crew capsule malfunctioning during a flight — needn’t be a crisis. Let’s respect that.

Finally: “Stuck” is an innocuous term, you say, something that doesn’t have to mean all that you’re making it out to be. Everyone knows the astronauts are going to return. Let it go.

Spaceflight is an exercise in control — about achieving it to the extent possible without also getting in the way of a mission and in the way of the people executing it. I don’t see why this control has to slip in the language around spaceflight.

Did we see the conspiracies coming?

Tweets like this seem on point…

… but I’ve started to wonder if we’re missing something in the course of expressing opinions about what we thought climate deniers would say and what they’re actually saying. That is, we expected to be right about what we thought they’d say but we’ve found ourselves wrong. Should we lampoon ourselves as well? Or, to reword the cartoon:

How we imagined we could react when ‘what we imagined deniers would say when the climate catastrophes came’ came true: “I was so right! And now everyone must pay for their greed and lies! May god have mercy on their soul!”

Followed by:

How we expect we’ll react when we find out ‘what they actually are saying’: “I was so wrong! And now everyone must pay for my myopia and echo chambers! May god have mercy on my soul!”

And finally:

How we actually are reacting: “We’re just using these disasters as an excuse to talk about climate change! Like we did with COVID! And 9/11! And the real moon landings! Screw you and your federal rescue money! You need to take your electric vegan soy beans now!”

People (myself included) in general aren’t entirely effective at changing others’ attitudes so it may not seem fair to say there’s a mistake in us not having anticipated how the deniers would react, that we erred by stopping short of understanding really why climate denialism exists and addressing its root cause. But surely the latter sounds reasonable in hindsight? ‘Us versus them’ narratives like the one in the cartoon describe apparent facts very well but they also reveal a tendency, either on the part of ‘us’ or of ‘them’ but often of both, to sustain this divide instead of narrowing it.

I’m not ignorant of the refusal of some people to change their mind under any circumstances. But even if we couldn’t have prevented their cynical attitudes on social issues — and consensus on climate change is one — maybe we can do better to anticipate them.

Agalloch

Agalloch is a synonym of agarwood. In parallel, Aquilaria agallocha and Agalochum malaccense are synonyms of Aquilaria malaccensis, the accepted scientific name of a tree that produces much of the world’s stock of this wood. When the heartwood (or duramen) of an Aquilaria tree is in the grip of an infection of Phaeoacremonium parasitica, the tree secretes a resin to beat the fungus off. The resin is very fragrant; depending on the duration of secretion, the heartwood can become saturated with it, at which point it becomes the very odoriferous agarwood. For centuries people have extracted this agarwood for use in perfumes and incense. We have also found the oils extracted from the wood, especially using steam distillation of late, are chemically very complex, including more than 70 terpenoids and more than 150 compounds overall.

This is a fascinating tale for the origin of something beautiful in nature, prompted by a tree’s desperate bid to fight off the advance of a fungal menace. Of course the human beholds this beauty, not the tree and certainly not the fungus — and Aquilaria malaccensis‘s wondrous resin hasn’t been able to keep humans at bay. The tree is listed as being ‘critically endangered’ on the IUCN Red List thanks to habitat loss and improper management of the global demand for the resinous agalloch.

‘Animals use physics’

What came first: physics or the world? It’s obviously the world, whereas physics (as a branch of science) offered ways to acquire information about the world and organise it. To not understand something in this paradigm, then, is to not understand the world in terms of physics. While this is straightforward, some narratives lead to confusion.

For example, consider the statement “animals use physics” (these animals exclude humans). Do they? Fundamentally, animals can’t use physics because their brains aren’t equipped to. They also don’t use physics because they’re only navigating the world, they’re not navigating physics and its impositions on the human perception of the world.

On July 10, Knowable published an article describing just such a scenario. The article actually uses both narratives — of humans using physics and animals using physics — and they’re often hard to pry apart, but sometimes the latter makes its presence felt. Example:

“Evolution has provided animals with movement skills adapted to the existing environment without any need for an instruction manual. But altering the environment to an animal’s benefit requires more sophisticated physics savvy. From ants and wasps to badgers and beavers, various animals have learned how to construct nests, shelters and other structures for protection from environmental threats.”

An illustration follows of a prairie dog burrow that accelerates the flow of wind and enhance ventilation; its caption reads: “Prairie dogs dig burrows with multiple entrances at different elevations, an architecture that relies on the laws of physics to create airflow through the chamber and provide proper ventilation.”

Their architecture doesn’t rely on the laws of physics. It’s that we’ve physics-fied the prairie dogs’ empirical senses and lessons they learnt in their communities to see physics in the world when in fact it’s not there. Instead, what’s there is evidence of the prairie dogs ability to build these tunnels and exploit certain facts of nature, knowledge of which they’re acquired with experience.

The rest of the article is actually pretty good, exploring animal behaviour that “depends in some way on the restrictions imposed, and opportunities permitted, by physics”. Also, what’s the harm, you ask, in saying “animals use physics”? I’ve no idea. But rather than as they could be, I think it should matter to describe things as they are.

Clocks on the cusp of a nuclear age

You need three things to build a clock: an energy source, a resonator, and a counter. In an analog wrist watch, for example, a small battery is the energy source that sends a small electric signal to a quartz crystal, which, in response, oscillates at a specific frequency (piezoelectric effect). If the amount of energy in each signal is enough to cause the crystal to oscillate at its resonant frequency, the crystal becomes the resonator. The counter tracks the crystal’s oscillation and converts it to seconds using predetermined rules.

Notice how the clock’s proper function depends on the relationship between the battery and the quartz crystal and the crystal’s response. The signals from the battery have to have the right amount of energy to excite the crystal to its resonant frequency and the crystal’s oscillation in response has to happen at a fixed frequency as long as it receives those signals. To make better clocks, physicists have been able to fine-tune these two parameters to an extreme degree.

Today, as a result, we have clocks that don’t lose more than one second of time every 30 billion years. These are the optical atomic clocks: the energy source is a laser, the resonator is an atom, and the counter is a particle detector.

An atomic clock’s identity depends on its resonator. For example, many of the world’s countries use caesium atomic clocks to define their respective national “frequency standards”. (One such clock at the National Physical Laboratory in New Delhi maintains Indian Standard Time.) A laser imparts a precise amount of energy to excite a caesium-133 atom to a particular higher energy state. The atom soon after drops from this state to its lower ground state by emitting light of frequency exactly 9,192,631,770 Hz. When a particle detector receives this light and counts out 9,192,631,770 waves, it will report one second has passed.

Caesium atomic clocks are highly stable, losing no more than a second in 20 million years. In fact, scientists used to define a second in terms of the time Earth took to orbit the Sun once; they switched to the caesium atomic clock because “it was more stable than Earth’s orbit” (source).

But there is also room for improvement. The higher the frequency of the emitted radiation, the more stable an atomic clock will be. The emission of a caesium atomic clock has a frequency of 9.19 GHz whereas that in a strontium clock is 429.22 THz and in a ytterbium-ion clock is 642.12 THz — in both cases five orders of magnitude higher. (9.19 GHz is in the microwave frequency range whereas the other two are in the optical range, thus the name “optical” atomic clock.)

Optical atomic clocks also have a narrower linewidth, which is the range of frequencies that can prompt the atom to jump to the higher energy level: the narrower the linewidth, the more precisely the jump can be orchestrated. So physicists today are trying to build and perfect the next generation of atomic clocks with these resonators. Some researchers have said they could replace the caesium frequency standard later this decade.

But yet other physicists have also already developed an idea to build the subsequent generation of clocks, which are expected to be at least 10-times more accurate than optical atomic clocks. Enter: the nuclear clock.

When an atom, like that of caesium, jumps between two energy states, the particles gaining and losing the energy are the atom’s electrons. These electrons are arranged in energy shells surrounding the nucleus and interact with the external environment. For a September 2020 article in The Wire Science, IISER Pune associate professor and a member of a team building India’s first strontium atomic clock Umakant Rapol said the resonator needs to be “immune to stray magnetic fields, electric fields, the temperature of the background, etc.” Optical atomic clocks achieve this by, say, isolating the resonator atoms within oscillating electric fields. A nuclear clock offers to get rid of this problem by using an atom’s nucleus as the resonator instead.

Unlike electrons, the nucleus of an atom is safely ensconced further in, where it is also quite small, making up only around 0.01% of the atom’s volume. The trick here is to find an atomic nucleus that’s stable and whose resonant frequency is accessible with a laser.

In 1976, physicists studying the decay of uranium-233 nuclei reported some properties of the thorium-229 nucleus, including estimating that the lowest higher-energy level to which it could jump required less than 100 eV of energy. Another study in 1990 estimated the requirement to be under 10 eV. In 1994, two physicists estimated it to be around 3.5 eV. The higher energy state of a nucleus is called its isomer and is denoted with the suffix ‘m’. For example, the isomer of the thorium-229 nucleus is denoted thorium-229m.

After a 2005 study further refined the energy requirement to 5.5 eV, a 2007 study provided a major breakthrough. With help from state-of-the-art instruments at NASA, researchers in the US worked out the thorium-229 to thorium-229m jump required 7.6 eV. This was significant. Energy is related to frequency by the Planck equation: E = hf, where h is Planck’s constant. To deliver 3.5 eV of energy, then, a laser would have to operate in the optical or near-ultraviolet range. But if the demand was 7.6 eV, the laser would have to operate in the vacuum ultraviolet range.

Further refinement by more researchers followed but they were limited by one issue: since they still didn’t have a sufficiently precise value of the isomeric energy, they couldn’t use lasers to excite the thorium-229 nucleus and find out. Instead, they examined thorium-229m nuclei formed by the decay of other elements. So when on April 29 this year a team of researchers from Germany and Austria finally reported using a laser to excite thorium-229 nuclei to the thorium-229m state, their findings sent frissons of excitement through the community of clock-makers.

The researchers’ setup had two parts. In the first, they drew inspiration from an idea a different group had proposed in 2010: to study thorium-229 by placing these atoms inside a larger crystal. The European group grew two calcium fluoride (CaF2) crystals in the lab doped heavily with thorium-229 atoms, with different doping concentrations. In a study published a year earlier, different researchers had reported observing for the first time thorium-229m decaying back to its ground state while within calcium fluoride and magnesium fluoride (MgF2) crystals. Ahead of the test, the European team cooled the crystals to under -93º C in a vacuum.

In the second part, the researchers built a laser with output in the vacuum ultraviolet range, corresponding to a wavelength of around 148 nm, for which off-the-shelf options don’t exist at the moment. They achieved the output instead by remixing the outputs of multiple lasers.

The researchers conducted 20 experiments: in each one, they increased the laser’s wavelength from 148.2 nm to 150.3 nm in 50 equally spaced steps. They also maintained a control crystal doped with thorium-232 atoms. Based on these attempts, they reported their laser elicited a distinct emission from the two test crystals when the laser’s wavelength was 148.3821 nm. The same wavelength when aimed at the CaF2 crystal doped with thorium-232 didn’t elicit an emission. This in turn implied an isomeric transition energy requirement of 8.35574 eV. The researchers also worked out based on these details that a thorium-229m nucleus would have a half-life of around 29 minutes in vacuum — meaning it is quite stable.

Physicists finally had their long-sought prize: the information required to build a nuclear clock by taking advantage of the thorium-229m isomer. In this setup, then, the energy source could be a laser of wavelength 148.3821 nm; the resonator could be thorium-229 atoms; and the counter could look out for emissions of frequency 2,020 THz (plugging 8.355 eV into the Planck equation).

Other researchers have already started building on this work as part of the necessary refinement process and have generated useful insights as well. For example, on July 2, University of California, Los Angeles, researchers reported the results of a similar experiment using lithium strontium hexafluoroaluminate (LiSrAlF6) crystals, including a more precise estimate of the isomeric energy gap: 8.355733 eV.

About a week earlier, on June 26, a team from Austria, Germany, and the US reported using a frequency comb to link the frequency of emissions from thorium-229 nuclei to that from a strontium resonator in an optical atomic clock at the University of Colorado. A frequency comb is a laser whose output is in multiple, evenly spaced frequencies. It works like a gear that translates the higher frequency output of a laser to a lower frequency, just like the lasers in a nuclear and an optical atomic clock. Linking the clocks up in this way allows physicists to understand properties of the thorium clock in terms of the better-understood properties of the strontium clock.

Atomic clocks moving into the era of nuclear resonators isn’t just one more step up on the Himalayan mountain of precision timekeeping. Because nuclear clocks depend on how well we’re able to exploit the properties of atomic nuclei, they also create a powerful incentive and valuable opportunities to probe nuclear properties.

In a 2006 paper, a physicist named VV Flambaum suggested that if the values of the fine structure constant and/or the strong interaction parameter change even a little, their effects on the thorium-229 isomeric transition would be very pronounced. The fine structure constant is a fundamental constant that specifies the strength of the electromagnetic force between charged particles. The strong interaction parameter specifies this vis-à-vis the strong nuclear force, the strongest force in nature and the thing that holds protons and neutrons together in a nucleus.

Probing the ‘stability’ of these numbers in this way opens the door to new kinds of experiments to answer open questions in particle physics — helped along by physicists’ pursuit of a new nuclear frequency standard.

Featured image: A view of an ytterbium atomic clock at the US NIST, October 16, 2014. Credit: N. Phillips/NIST.

Buildings affect winds

A 2022 trip to Dubai made me wonder how much research there was on the effects cities, especially those that are rapidly urbanising as well as are building taller, wider structures more closely packed together, had on the winds that passed through them. I found only a few studies then. One said the world’s average wind speed had been increasing since 2010, but its analysis was concerned with the output of wind turbines, not the consequences within urban settlements. Another had considered reducing wind speed within cities as a result of the Venturi effect by planting more trees. I also found a The New York Times article from 1983 about taller skyscrapers directing high winds downwards, to the streets. That was largely it. Maybe I didn’t look hard enough.

On June 11, researchers in China published a paper in the Journal of Advances in Modelling Earth Systems in which they reported findings based on a wind speed model they’d built for Shanghai city. According to the paper, Shanghai’s built-up area could slow wind speed by as much as 50%. However, they added, the urban heat-island effect could enhance “the turbulent exchange in the vertical direction of the urban area, and the upper atmospheric momentum is transported down to the surface, increasing the urban surface wind speed”. If the heat-island effect was sufficiently pronounced, then, the wind may not slow at all. I imagine the finding will be useful for people considering the ability of winds to transport pollutants to and disperse them in different areas. I’m also interested in what the model shows for Delhi (which can be hotter), Mumbai (wetter), and Chennai (fewer tall buildings). The relationship between heat-islands and the wind energy is also curious because city parts that are windier are also less warm.

But overall, even if the population density within skyscrapers may be lower than in non-skycraping buildings and tenements, allowing them to built closer together, as is normal in cities like Dubai, where these buildings are almost all located in a “business district” or a “financial district”, could also make it harder for the wind to ventilate these spaces.

You’re allowed to be interested in particle physics

This page appeared in The Hindu’s e-paper today.

I wrote the lead article, about why scientists are so interested in an elementary particle called the top quark. Long story short: the top quark is the heaviest elementary particle, and because all elementary particles get their masses by interacting with Higgs bosons, the top quark’s interaction is the strongest. This has piqued physicists’ interest because the Higgs boson’s own mass is peculiar: it’s more than expected and at the same time poised on the brink of a threshold beyond which our universe as we know it wouldn’t exist. To explain this brinkmanship, physicists are intently studying the top quark, including measuring its mass with more and more precision.

It’s all so fascinating. But I’m well aware that not many people are interested in this stuff. I wish they were and my reasons follow.

There exists a sufficiently healthy journalism of particle physics today. Most of it happens in Europe and the US, (i) where famous particle physics experiments are located, (ii) where there already exists an industry of good-quality science journalism, and (iii) where there are countries and/or governments that actually have the human resources, funds, and political will to fund the experiments (in many other places, including India, these resources don’t exist, rendering the matter of people contending with these experiments moot).

In this post, I’m using particle physics as itself as well as as a surrogate for other reputedly esoteric fields of study.

This journalism can be divided into three broad types: those with people, those concerned with spin-offs, and those without people. ‘Those with people’ refers to narratives about the theoretical and experimental physicists, engineers, allied staff, and administrators who support work on particle physics, their needs, challenges, and aspirations.

The meaning of ‘those concerned with spin-offs’ is obvious: these articles attempt to justify the money governments spend on particle physics projects by appealing to the technologies scientists develop in the course of particle-physics work. I’ve always found these to be apologist narratives erecting a bad expectation: that we shouldn’t undertake these projects if they don’t also produce valuable spin-off technologies. I suspect most particle physics experiments don’t because they are much smaller than the behemoth Large Hadron Collider and its ilk, which require more innovation across diverse fields.

‘Those without people’ are the rarest of the lot — narratives that focus on some finding or discussion in the particle physics community that is relatively unconcerned with the human experience of the natural universe (setting aside the philosophical point that the non-human details are being recounted by human narrators). These stories are about the material constituents of reality as we know it.

When I say I wish more people were interested in particle physics today, I wish they were interested in all these narratives, yet more so in narratives that aren’t centred on people.

Now, why should they be concerned? This is a difficult question to answer.

I’m concerned because I’m fascinated with the things around us we don’t fully understand but are trying to. It’s a way of exploring the unknown, of going on an adventure. There are many, many things in this world that people can be curious about. It’s possible there are more such things than there are people (again, setting aside the philosophical bases of these claims). But particle physics and some other areas — united by the extent to which they are written off as being esoteric — suffer from more than not having their fair share of patrons in the general (non-academic) population. Many people actively shun them, lose focus when reading about them, and at the same time do little to muster focus back. It has even become okay for them to say they understood nothing of some (well-articulated) article and not expect to have their statement judged adversely.

I understand why narratives with people in them are easier to understand, to connect with, but none of the implicated psychological, biological, and anthropological mechanisms also encourage us to reject narratives and experiences without people. In other words, there may have been evolutionary advantages to finding out about other people but there have been no disadvantages attached to engaging with stories that aren’t about other people.

Next, I have met more than my fair share of people that flinched away from the suggestion of mathematics or physics, even when someone offered to guide them through understanding these topics. I’m also aware researchers have documented this tendency and are attempting to distil insights that could help improve the teaching and the communication of these subjects. Personally I don’t know how to deal with these people because I don’t know the shape of the barrier in their minds I need to surmount. I may be trying to vault over a high wall by simplifying a concept to its barest features when in fact the barrier is a low-walled labyrinth.

Third and last, let me do unto this post what I’m asking of people everywhere, and look past the people: why should we be interested in particle physics? It has nothing to offer for our day-to-day experiences. Its findings can seem totally self-absorbed, supporting researchers and their careers, helping them win famous but otherwise generally unattainable awards, and sustaining discoveries into which political leaders and government officials occasionally dip their beaks to claim labels like “scientific superpower”. But the mistake here is not the existence of particle physics itself so much as the people-centric lens through which we insist it must be seen. It’s not that we should be interested in particle physics; it’s that we can.

Particle physics exists because some people are interested in it. If you are unhappy that our government spends too much on it, let’s talk about our national R&D expenditure priorities and what the practice, and practitioners, of particle physics can do to support other research pursuits and give back to various constituencies. The pursuit of one’s interests can’t be the problem (within reasonable limits, of course).

More importantly, being interested in particle physics and in fact many other branches of science shouldn’t have to be justified at every turn for three reasons: reality isn’t restricted to people, people are shaped by their realities, and our destiny as humans. On the first two counts: when we choose to restrict ourselves to our lives and our welfare, we also choose to never learn about what, say, gravitational waves, dark matter, and nucleosynthesis are (unless these terms turn up in an exam we need to pass). Yet all these things played a part in bringing about the existence of Earth and its suitability for particular forms of life, and among people particular ways of life.

The rocks and metals that gave rise to waves of human civilisation were created in the bellies of stars. We needed to know our own star as well as we do — which still isn’t much — to help build machines that can use its energy to supply electric power. Countries and cultures that support the education and employment of people who made it a point to learn the underlying science thus come out on top. Knowing different things is a way to future-proof ourselves.

Further, climate change is evidence humans are a planetary species, and soon it will be interplanetary. Our own migrations will force us to understand, eventually intuitively, the peculiarities of gravity, the vagaries of space, and (what is today called) mathematical physics. But even before such compulsions arise, it remains what we know is what we needn’t be afraid of, or at least know how to be afraid of. 😀

Just as well, learning, knowing, and understanding the physical universe is the foundation we need to imagine (or reimagine) futures better than the ones ordained for us by our myopic leaders. In this context, I recommend Shreya Dasgupta’s ‘Imagined Tomorrow’ podcast series, where she considers hypothetical future Indias in which medicines are tailor-made for individuals, where antibiotics don’t exist because they’re not required, where clean air is only available to breathe inside city-sized domes, and where courtrooms use AI — and the paths we can take to get there.

Similarly, with particle physics in mind, we could also consider cheap access to quantum computers, lasers that remove infections from flesh and tumours from tissue in a jiffy, and communications satellites that reduce bandwidth costs so much that we can take virtual education, telemedicine, and remote surgeries for granted. I’m not talking about these technologies as spin-offs, to be clear; I mean technologies born of our knowledge of particle (and other) physics.

At the biggest scale, of course, understanding the way nature works is how we can understand the ways in which the universe’s physical reality can or can’t affect us, in turn leading the way to understanding ourselves better and helping us shape more meaningful aspirations for our species. The more well-informed any decision is, the more rational it will be. Granted, the rationality of most of our decisions is currently only tenuously informed by particle physics, but consider if the inverse could be true: what decisions are we not making as well as we could if we cast our epistemic nets wider, including physics, biology, mathematics, etc.?

Consider, even beyond all this, the awe astronauts who have gone to Earth orbit and beyond have reported experiencing when they first saw our planet from space, and the immeasurable loneliness surrounding it. There are problems with pronouncements that we should be united in all our efforts on Earth because, from space, we are all we have (especially when the country to which most of these astronauts belong condones a genocide). Fortunately, that awe is not the preserve of spacefaring astronauts. The moment we understood the laws of physics and the elementary constituents of our universe, we (at least the atheists among us) may have realised there is no centre of the universe. In fact, there is everything except a centre. How grateful I am for that. For added measure, awe is also good for the mind.

It might seem like a terrible cliché to quote Oscar Wilde here — “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars” — but it’s a cliché precisely because we have often wanted to be able to dream, to have the simple act of such dreaming contain all the profundity we know we squander when we live petty, uncurious lives. Then again, space is not simply an escape from the traps of human foibles. Explorations of the great unknown that includes the cosmos, the subatomic realm, quantum phenomena, dark energy, and so on are part of our destiny because they are the least like us. They show us what else is out there, and thus what else is possible.

If you’re not interested in particle physics, that’s fine. But remember that you can be.

Featured image: An example of simulated data as might be observed at a particle detector on the Large Hadron Collider. Here, following a collision of two protons, a Higgs boson is produced that decays into two jets of hadrons and two electrons. The lines represent the possible paths of particles produced by the proton-proton collision in the detector while the energy these particles deposit is shown in blue. Caption and credit: Lucas Taylor/CERN, CC BY-SA 3.0.

A new source of cosmic rays?

The International Space Station carries a suite of instruments conducting scientific experiments and measurements in low-Earth orbit. One of them is the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), which studies antimatter particles in cosmic rays to understand how the universe has evolved since its birth.

Cosmic rays are particles or particle clumps flying through the universe at nearly the speed of light. Since the mid-20th century, scientists have found cosmic-ray particles are emitted during supernovae and in the centres of galaxies that host large black holes. Scientists installed the AMS in May 2011, and by April 2021, it had tracked more than 230 billion cosmic-ray particles.

When scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) recently analysed these data — the results of which were published on June 25 — they found something odd. Roughly one in 10,000 of the cosmic ray particles were neutron-proton pairs, a.k.a. deuterons. The universe has a small number of these particles because they were only created in a 10-minute-long period a short time after the universe was born, around 0.002% of all atoms.

Yet cosmic rays streaming past the AMS seemed to have around 5x greater concentration of deuterons. The implication is that something in the universe — some event or some process — is producing high-energy deuterons, according to the MIT team’s paper.

Before coming to this conclusion, the researchers considered and eliminated some alternative explanations. Chief among them is the way scientists know how deuterons become cosmic rays. When primary cosmic rays produced by some process in outer space smash into matter, they produce a shower of energetic particles called secondary cosmic rays. Thus far, scientists have considered deuterons to be secondary cosmic rays, produced when helium-4 ions smash into atoms in the interstellar medium (the space between stars).

This event also produces helium-3 ions. So if the deuteron flux in cosmic rays is high, and if we believe more helium-4 ions are smashing into the interstellar medium than expected, the AMS should have detected more helium-3 cosmic rays than expected as well. It didn’t.

To make sure, the researchers also checked the AMS’s instruments and the shared properties of the cosmic-ray particles. Two in particular are time and rigidity. Time deals with how the flux of deuterons changes with respect to the flux of other cosmic ray particles, especially protons and helium-4 ions. Rigidity measures the likelihood a cosmic-ray particle will reach Earth and not be deflected away by the Sun. (Equally rigid particles behave the same way in a magnetic field.) When denoted in volts, rigidity indicates the extent of deflection the particle will experience.

The researchers analysed deuterons with rigidity from 1.9 billion to 21 billion V and found that “over the entire rigidity range the deuteron flux exhibits nearly identical time variations with the proton, 3-He, and 4-He fluxes.” At rigidity greater than 4.5 billion V, the fluxes of deuterons and helium-4 ions varied together whereas those of helium-3 and helium-4 didn’t. At rigidity beyond 13 billion V, “the rigidity dependence of the D and p fluxes [was] nearly identical”.

Similarly, they found the change in the deuteron flux was greater than the change in the helium-3 flux, both relative to the helium-4 flux. The statistical significance of this conclusion far exceeded the threshold particle physicists use to check whether an anomaly in the data is really real rather than the result of some fluke error. Finally, “independent analyses were performed on the same data sample by four independent study groups,” the paper added. “The results of these analyses are consistent with this Letter.”

The MIT team ultimately couldn’t find a credible alternative explanation, leaving their conclusion: deuterons could be primary cosmic rays, and we don’t (yet) know the process that could be producing them.

Suni Williams and Barry Wilmore are not in danger

NASA said earlier this week it will postpone the return of Boeing’s crew capsule Starliner back to ground from the International Space Station (ISS), thus leaving astronauts Barry Wilmore and Sunita Williams onboard the orbiting platform for (at least) two weeks more.

The glitch is part of Starliner’s first crewed flight test, and clearly it’s not going well. But to make matters worse there seems to be little clarity about the extent to which it’s not going well. There are at least two broad causes. The first is NASA and Boeing themselves. As I set out in The Hindu, Starliner is already severely delayed and has suffered terrible cost overruns since NASA awarded Boeing the contract to build it in 2014. SpaceX has as a result been left to pick up the tab, but while it hasn’t minded the fact remains that Elon Musk’s company currently monopolises yet another corner of the American launch services market.

Against this backdrop, neither NASA nor Boeing — but NASA especially — have been clear about the reason for Starliner’s extended stay at the ISS. I’m told fluid leaks of the sort Starliner has been experiencing are neither uncommon nor dire, that crewed orbital test flights can present such challenges, and that it’s a matter of time before the astronauts return. However, NASA’s press briefings have featured a different explanation: that Starlier’s stay is being extended on purpose — to test the long-term endurance of its various components and subsystems in orbit ahead of operational flights — echoing something NASA discussed when SpaceX was test-flying its Dragon crew capsule (hat-tip to Jatan Mehta). According to Des Moines Register, the postponement is to “deconflict” with space walks NASA had planned for the astronauts and to give them and their peers already onboard the ISS to further inspect Starliner’s propulsion module.

This sort of suspiciously ex post facto reasoning has also raised concerns NASA knows something about Starliner but doesn’t plan on revealing what until after the capsule has returned — with the added possibility that it’s shielding Boeing to prevent the US government from cancelling the Starliner contract altogether.

The second broad reason is even more embarrassing: media narratives. On June 24, Economic Times reported NASA had “let down” and “disappointed” Wilmore and Williams when it postponed Starliner’s return. Newsweek said the astronauts were “stranded” on the ISS together with a NASA statement further down the article saying they weren’t stranded. The Spectator Index tweeted Newsweek’s report without linking to it but with the prefix “BREAKING”. There are many other smaller news outlets and YouTube channels with worse headlines and claims feeding a general sense of disaster.

However, I’m willing to bet a large sum of money Wilmore and Williams are neither “disappointed” nor feeling “let down” by Starliner’s woes. In fact NASA and Boeing picked these astronauts over greenhorns because they’re veterans of human spaceflight who are aware of and versed with handling uncertainties in humankind’s currently most daunting frontier. Recall also the Progress cargo capsule failure in April 2015, which prompted Russia to postpone a resupply mission scheduled for the next month until it could identify and resolve some problems with the launch vehicle. Roscosmos finally flew the mission in July that year. The delay left astronauts onboard the ISS with dwindling supplies as well as short of a crew of three.

The term “strand” may also have a specific meaning: after the Columbia Space Shuttle disaster in 2003, NASA instituted a protocol in which astronauts onboard faulty crew capsules in space could disembark at the ISS, where they’d be “stranded”, and wait for a separate return mission. By all means, then, if Boeing is ultimately unable to salvage Starliner, the ISS could undock it and NASA could commission SpaceX to fly a rescue mission.

I can’t speak for Wilmore and Williams but I remain deeply sceptical that they’re particularly bummed. Yet Business Today drummed up this gem: “’Nightmare’: Sunita Williams can get lost in space if thrusters of NASA’s Boeing Starliner fail to fire post-ISS undocking”. Let’s be clear: the ISS is in low-Earth orbit. Getting “lost in space” from this particular location is impossible. Starliner won’t undock unless everyone is certain its thrusters will fire, but even if they don’t, atmospheric drag will deorbit the capsule soon after (which is also what happened to the Progress capsule in 2015). And even if it is Business Today’s (wet) “nightmare”, it isn’t Williams’s.

There’s little doubt the world is in the throes of a second space race. The first happened as part of the Cold War and its narratives were the narratives of the contest between the US and the USSR, rife with the imperatives of grandstanding. What are the narratives of the second race? Whatever they are, they matter as much as rogue nations contemplating weapons of mass destruction in Earth orbit matters because narratives are also capable of destruction. They shape the public imagination and consciousness of space missions, the attitudes towards the collaborations that run them, and ultimately what the publics believe they ought to expect from national space programmes and the political and economic value their missions can confer.

Importantly, narratives can cut both ways. For example, for companies like Boeing the public narrative is linked to their reputation, which is linked to the stock market. When BBC says NASA having to use a SpaceX Dragon capsule to return Wilmore and Williams back to Earth “would be hugely embarrassing for Boeing”, the report stands to make millions of dollars disappear from many bank accounts. Of course this isn’t sufficient reason for BBC to withhold its reportage: its claim isn’t sensational and the truth will always be a credible defence against (alleged) defamation. Instead, we should be asking if Boeing and NASA are responding to such pressures if and when they withhold information. It has happened before.

Similarly, opportunist media narratives designed to ‘grab eyeballs’ without considering how they will pollute public debate only vitiate narratives, raise unmerited suspicions of conspiracies and catastrophe, and sow distrust in sober, non-sensational articles whose authors are the ones labouring to present a more faithful picture.

Featured image: Astronauts Sunita Williams and Barry Wilmore onboard the International Space Station in April 2007 and October 2014, respectively. Credit: NASA.