Darkness and Light

This is not a light blog entry. Life is not always happy.

I will start with the light. It is unnerving how well our experiment is going this season. We have finished all major maintenance jobs, and are already back to observing clusters. Though the foreground contamination for CMB fields is much larger when the sun is up, we can still get useful data by looking at specific galaxy clusters that we already know are there. It is especially useful to get data with out 90 GHz detectors, because these were not operational during our first full season (2008) and there are numerous clusters that do not have good 90 GHz data. We observe in three frequency bands: 90, 150, and 220 GHz. The reason for this is that the SZ effect (see older posts for explanation) acts differently at these different frequencies. The Thermal SZ (tSZ) has a null at 220 GHz, meaning that there is no effect there. By using a linear combination of the data at 150 and 220 GHz, we are the first group ever to successfully separated out the tSz power specturm. By using 90 GHz, we expect to be able to also separate out the Kinetic SZ (kSZ) power spectrum. Briefly, the tSZ is caused by Compton scattering of CMB photons by hot plasma gravitationally bound to massive, collapsed objects such as galaxy clusters. The kSZ is caused by a Doppler Shift when ionized matter is moving with respect to the rest frame of the CMB.

Also exciting in the realm of science is I just read a paper forwarded by a friend about phenomenological quantum gravity and possibilities of experimental tests. Quantum gravity is probably the one thing that gets me the most excited in all of physics, and the number one problem with figuring out how it works is the current lack of experimental evidence. Apparently, if the theory of quantum gravity violates Parity or Charge-Parity or time reversal symmetry, there could be observable consequences in the CMB spectrum, specifically in correlations in the Temperature and parity odd polarization modes, or B-modes. BICEP2 and Keck, which I worked on up to this past September are specifically designed to look for B-modes. This could be very exciting!

Yesterday was Saturday, and after working all afternoon the evening was fun. There was a film festival of films made by people here at the Pole. Some were artsy, which didn't suit the drunken crowd. But there were two thoroughly entertaining ones. The first was "I'm at the Pole," a music video that was a parody on a rap song that I believe is called "I'm on the boat." Don't know who the original is by, but those who knew it said that the pole video was darn close to the original. It was hilarious! The last film was also quite good. It followed 2 convicts coming to the South Pole, which in the film had been turned from a science base into a prison. They meet a sympathetic prisoner and try to escape, to no avail. It was quite good.

And sure enough, Saturday night meant there was a dance party to do to thrown by Ice Cube, the neutrino detector project. The theme was trashy euro club music, and some of the music took me straight back to a disco club in Grenoble, France. I love dancing.

However, Saturday was not all happy. I woke up late, at 11:40am in time to go straight to lunch. The 4 of us on SPT were sitting in the lunch room eating when Phil from BICEP came in and sat down next to us. "Have you heard about Andrew Lange? He committed suicide this morning." I am still shocked. Andrew Lange was the Principle Investigator on the BICEP and Keck-Array projects and the chair of the physics and astronomy department at Caltech. He was a close colleague of almost all of us, and Justus' graduate adviser. I have met him on several occasions during my trips to Caltech. Lunch was very quiet for the BICEP - SPT group.

I will never know the reasons behind Dr Lange's action. It has caused me some serious reflection for the past two days. Dr Lange was a career role-model for many of us. He has had a wildly successful academic career. So what went wrong? How can we learn from this? The first thought I have is about the necessity of a balanced life. Work is great. There is no substitute for hard work. But life is about balance. Being able to balance your work and your play. The world of academics does poorly at emphasizing the need for this balance. It always pushes for you to work harder, longer, more efficiently, better. I strive for the ever-illusive and undefined goal of perfection, and hence I thrive in this atmosphere where I can push myself to always improve. However, there is a limit that academia does not respect. There is a necessity for other things in life beyond the ivory tower of knowledge. There is a need for spiritual qualities - love, joy, peace. A need for personal time alone with your thoughts. In my current thinking, this is one thing that recreation and things outside of work, outside of science achieve.

Another thing that I have been thinking about is how much our lives are inter-twined with those of other people. Dr Lange's death has caused ripples to flow through our community here at the South Pole, and I am sure that I am seeing only the tip of the iceberg as to what effect this tragedy will have on the people that intersected with Andrew's life. I don't know what will happen to the BICEP and Keck-Array grants, thought presumably the other scientists on the project will take this over. Justus will have to get another adviser. Caltech loses a valuable faculty member. And this is all professional - I don't know anything about Dr Lange's family and personal relations.

This loss is such a waste. In the rest of Dr. Lange's life, what other good might he have brought about, how many students could he have inspired, what knowledge might he have unearthed for humanity? The Dalai Lama says that life is about helping other people, and the best way to do this consistently is to develop a global consciousness, and awareness of how your actions affect everyone and everything around you. By removing yourself from this life, you can no longer benefit others. So what do I take away related to this? I need to strive always harder to be aware of how my actions affect others, and modify those actions to benefit others rather than only serving my own self-interest. I don't mean to sound callous, I'm just thinking aloud.

How should we deal with tragedy like this? The response of the people here at Pole was to go back to work. In one sense this is just ignoring the situation, a form of denial. One of us lamented how working too hard may have been the cause of problems that lead to Dr. Lange's actions, yet when this happened we all just went back to work. Alternately, I similarly just went back to work, which for me was the best way to deal with it. This is because life moves on. I think that it is necessary to learn from what happened, but you must get up and keep on trudging. One thing in particular I have been thinking about is when/if I become a professor, how can I effectively advise those under me to take care of themselves and keep from backing themselves into a corner that they feel they have no escape from? I will always stress the importance of hard work, but I also want to impress upon those around me and myself the need to maintain balance, and the need to take care of oneself both physically and mentally.

Life is sacred. We tend to forget how fragile our grip on this experience is until that grip is broken in an instant. Please take care of yourselves, and do what you can to take care of those around you. May peace be with you.