Got a Little Story for Ya, Ags

Posted on November 26, 2013 by Shana Hutchins

As a writer, I do so love a good story and those who wield both the appropriate subject matter and the flair for its proper delivery.

One of the best absolute naturals in all above respects is Texas A&M astronomer Nick Suntzeff, who I describe to people as a marketer’s dream for good reason. Beyond his ease with media representatives, administrators and officials, and external visitors and general audiences, he’s also a master at breaking down the subject at hand and explaining why it matters. And in going the extra mile.

I offer a recent example — a follow-up email to Battalion reporter John Rangel, thanking him for a recent story:

John,

I would like to congratulate you on the article in The Batt on the most distant galaxy. You nailed the science and gave a feeling for the excitement of the discovery. Great job!

By the way, there are some points to this discovery that you, as an engineering student, may enjoy. It is difficult to define what is distance in astronomy because the universe is expanding, and the grid by which we measure distances is also stretching at the same time. So for me the best way to understand distance is just what you did — give it in units of how much time it took for light to get here compared to the age of the universe. However, you will see some articles refer to the distance to this object as 30 billion light years or so. This is the way astronomers would measure it, but this distance is not intuitive. Imagine we are in our galaxy in the early universe and we are looking at this distant galaxy. It would be very close to us because the universe is so small. Imagine putting a 3-D grid on this early universe and put our galaxy at one corner and the distant galaxy at another corner. Now run the universe forward to today. The universe has stretched a lot (expanded, if you will). Our galaxy and the other one are still at those corners, but the grid has expanded by a factor of 9 now. That short distant that separated us and that galaxy has now stretched into about 30 billion light years — the co-moving distance we call it. So you will also hear astronomers quote distances that are greater than the age of the universe.

How can something be farther away than the age of the universe (in today’s time) and we can still see it? Well, the weird thing is that we will never see that galaxy when it is today age — 13.8 billion years old. We can only see it now, but as the universe evolves, the galaxy will actually disappear from our universe or perhaps more to the point — will disappear from our vision.

The other point is that although galaxies appear to be moving away from us and this appears as a Doppler shift, it is actually not a Doppler shift. It is space stretching. Nothing is actually moving. The motion looks like a velocity and a Doppler shift, but there is no kinetic energy involved. If there were, galaxies near the edge of the universe would have a ridiculous amount of energy because they are moving close to the speed of light.

Edwin Hubble, who discovered the expansion of the universe, was careful never to call this apparent expansion a velocity — he called it a cosmological redshift which is what astronomers should also call it, and if they don’t, well I will go kick their butts.

Anyway, sorry for the long email about your great article.

cheers, nick

I don’t know about John Rangel, but for this writer, the initial interview is typically a formative experience. I remember well my first trip to Dr. Suntzeff’s Texas A&M campus office — a veritable time capsule spanning the high points of astronomical history as well as his career, which includes 25 years at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. I was interviewing him for a piece on Albert Einstein’s cosmological constant — Einstein’s self-described “biggest blunder” which he predicted in 1917 as the proverbial glue holding together the theory of a never-changing universe that Edwin Hubble’s 1929 discovery of the universe’s expansion later debunked. (Incidentally, in a Kevin Bacon-esque six-degrees-of-separation constant, Hubble served as mentor to Allan Sandage, who in turn is the one who encouraged Dr. Suntzeff to focus on Type Ia supernovas — specifically their brightness — to measure precise distances, which is how Dr. Suntzeff came to help discover dark energy and roughly 75 percent of the universe. But that’s a whole ‘nother story!)

After posing a basic equation-type question to gauge my level of astrophysical knowledge (essentially negative infinity), Dr. Suntzeff took great pains to explain not only the equation and the basic physics behind it, but also each and every piece in his collection, in addition to the actual research I was there to discuss. And so began an educational relationship across subsequent visits and stories, typically supplemented with emailed anecdotes and other means of follow-up insight about astrophysics and oh, so much more that has always served to enlighten or entertain. (Ask him sometime about saving Alan Alda’s life while down in Chile or about being school mates with Robin Williams — yes, that Robin Williams — or about the time he made international headlines for discovering nothing! Yeah, I have hundreds of these, as does he.)

Bottom line, it all goes to prove my long-held theory that most professors first and foremost are born educators and — big surprise — people, too. Their areas of expertise are vitally important, but somehow lost amid all that focused excellence and relentless drive is their intrinsic motivation and passion for knowledge generation, big-picture dreams and doing what they love and want you to love, too. Or at the very least understand in some tangible way.

Trust me, it’s a great story well worth the time it takes to read. Even better if you get the chance to hear it in person.

Nick Suntzeff claims no one believes that he knew Robin Williams in high school and that the two hung out together, but this image from the Redwood High School 1969 Yearbook offers actual proof from the days long before fame for both or the invention of Photoshop! Redwood is located in Larkspur, California.

Derivative Bee

Posted on November 13, 2013 by Jean Marie Linhart

Tuesday night was the Math Department’s second annual Derivative Bee, as well as my first visit to the event as a faculty volunteer.

TAMU Math Derivative Bee 11/12/2013

Students participate in two categories. Category U is for students currently taking differential calculus (Math 131, 151 and 171). Category G is for students who have completed differential calculus (Math 152, 172 or higher).

In the first round, students are issued clickers and have 3-5 minutes to choose the correct multiple choice answer to a differentiation question. There wasn’t a lot for the faculty volunteers to do at this point, so I thought I’d play along. I was confident of my advantage; this isn’t the first time I’ve taught calculus. And I have those three magic little letters (Ph.D.) following my name.

It didn’t take long for me to get a little attitude adjustment. Question 1 was to evaluate

$\dfrac{d}{dx}\left[\dfrac{(x+2)(2x+3)}{x}\right]$

Since I don’t like using the quotient rule, I changed it to a product

$\frac{d}{dx}\left[(x+2)(2x+3)x^{-1}\right]$

and promptly made a distribution mistake in the multiple iterations of the product rule required to evaluate the derivative.

What I should have done in the first place was to FOIL out the product and divide through by the x in the denominator

$\frac{d}{dx}\left[\dfrac{2x^2 + 7x + 6}{x}\right] = \frac{d}{dx} \left[2x + 7 + \frac{6}{x}\right] = 2 - \frac{6}{x^2}$

which is just oodles easier.

Another problem I got schooled on: find the derivative of

$\frac{d}{dx}\sqrt{x\sqrt{x\sqrt{x}}}$

Me? I love the chain rule, and the first thing I did was apply it incorrectly, not realizing that all those embedded square roots were also multiplied together and that the product rule is required, too! Fortunately, I caught my mistake and corrected it — with a not insubstantial amount of sweat. I was all proud of myself until one of the other instructors showed us the easy way to do the problem usingthe rules of exponentials.

$\frac{d}{dx}\sqrt{x\sqrt{x\sqrt{x}}} = \frac{d}{dx}(x(x(x)^{\tiny 1/2})^{\tiny 1/2})^{\tiny1/2} = \frac{d}{dx} (x^{\tiny 1/2}x^{\tiny 1/4}x^{\tiny 1/8}) = \frac{d}{dx} (x^{\tiny7/8}) = \frac{7}{8}x^{\tiny -1/8}$

which is an easy problem to solve!

This old dog learned a few tricks tonight. Including renewed respect for my colleagues and students. We have some smart people here at Texas A&M.

Light Years Ahead and Apart

Posted on November 11, 2013 by Shana Hutchins

Every day is a learning experience when you’re covering Texas A&M Science. In many cases, that experience doesn’t end with the finished story — for us as the writers or for the reporters who choose to pick it up.

It should come as no surprise that our professors are natural educators, in and outside their classrooms. Email and social media, along with news outlets that enable and encourage reader comments, offer extended opportunities for those savvy enough to harness them in the ever-broadening realm of public education and outreach.

Take, for instance, the recent most-distant-galaxy discovery. Astronomers Casey Papovich, Vithal Tilvi and Nick Suntzeff went to great lengths to help us get that story not only out but also accurate, from handling initial interviews to helping with multiple revisions and small tweaks to the article in progress as well as to the supporting images and captions.

Breathtakingly beautiful, isn’t it? But as good as it is and we thought we did, it turns out people — general readers and even some astronomers — got a bit confused regarding the distance part of that most distant galaxy find. Enter the chance to educate, as illustrated in the following two examples.

In the first, Papovich expands on the 30 billion light years question in response to a direct email from a science writer in Germany:

Technically, the answer is “yes,” but I tend to use the distance the galaxy appears to be (that’s where we “see” it) That distance is only 13 billion light years distant.

The 30 billion light years comes from the following. If you could stop the universe expanding and run a tape measure, then the distance we would measure would be 30 billion light years. But we don’t see the galaxy there. I tend to quote the “light travel distance” because that’s the distance the galaxy “appears” to be (the light left the galaxy 13 billion years ago and has been chasing after us as we are carried away with the expansion). That distance (the light travel distance) is 13 billion light years.

Now, the galaxy we’re seeing has also been moving in the other direction for 13 billion years, so it has also moved away. That’s why the present-day distance is 30 billion light years (but we can’t see the galaxy at that distance). Because we “see” the galaxy at the light travel distance, I quote that distance (13 billion light years).

Distances are very screwy because the universe is expanding so fast.

Hope that helps, Casey

And here’s the second example, in which Suntzeff responds to a comment on the story featured in the local newspaper, The Bryan-College Station Eagle:

The attentive Eagle readers here have caught an obvious mistake, but let me turn this into a learning moment (hey, give me a break! I am a professor at A&M.) When you measure distances to stuff in the universe, the meaning of distance is ambiguous. It has taken 13 billion years for this light to get to us from this galaxy, and this is one way of measuring distance. Another way, which is often used in astronomy, is asking how much the universe has expanded since that time — sort of how far away is the object in today’s much larger universe. We call this the “scale” distance. That number is more like 30 billion light years for this galaxy. For me, it is easier to think of distance as how long it took the light to get to us, which would be 13 billion years. But the 30 billion year distance is also correct, if not obvious. And yes, this will be on the mid-term.

Any way you slice/write it, I think it’s pretty darned cool we get paid to promote the likes of a discovery of the most distant galaxy known to man (one born only 1 billion years or so after the Big Bang) alongside such great ambassadors for astronomy, Texas A&M University and the state of Texas, and science education as a whole. Welcome to Aggieland!

Why I Ask Why

Posted on November 5, 2013 by Shana Hutchins

I read the other day that the average 4-year-old asks 437 questions a day.

As a mother of three young children (the youngest being a 3-year-old whom I’d consider advanced for his age, if not so much in potty training, then in this department), I can identify. As a journalist who works day in and day out with scientists who poke, probe and ponder for a living, I can also appreciate.

So much value in simple curiosity and in being persistent enough to follow this innate gift to its fruition, whether the outcome ends up being success, failure or something in between. In recognizing and relating to the beauty in the build-up. The end game in the before, during and after insight. The process in and of the pursuit. The long-term possibility, even in the face of setbacks or sidetracks.

In so many ways, scientists and journalists have a lot in common. Both seek to raise awareness and convey information, ideally answers and solutions. In both worlds, accuracy is paramount – or should be. In absence of it, the product/audience is cheated, as is the profession.

Years ago, I got the opportunity to sit in on a PBS interview with 1986 Nobel Prize in Chemistry recipient Dudley Herschbach, who recounted being asked by a fifth grader whether he thought scientists were made or born. Dr. Herschbach’s answer? “I’m sure scientists are born just like everyone else; however, the difference is, they’re not unmade. Every little kid is a natural scientist because they’re naturally curious. They also want to understand things they see, so they ask lots of ‘why?’ questions. That’s what science is.”

Dr. Herschbach went on to describe research as child’s play, equating it to the way a child first learns a language: “A child isn’t worried about getting the words right or wrong, so they just imitate and they play and they experiment and they learn. That’s the way you need to do science.”

Out of the mouths of babes, not to mention a Nobel laureate: The world depends on 4-year-olds asking questions. And on us retaining our inner 4-year-old. Well, maybe minus that back-talking part! I bet even Dr. Herschbach’s mother would agree.