Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. I had my own little Thanksgiving meal this year after noticing this mini turkey loaf at the grocery store the day before:
What a year it's been, eh? I'm certainly thankful that all my relatives that caught COVID-19 (including my parents and maternal grandparents) are still alive, and that I haven't gotten it myself that I know of. I'm thankful that Melbourne today recorded a full 28 days since the last COVID-19 diagnosis (I think the last active case was declared cleared a day or two ago). Certainly, even with the fact that Victoria was hardest-hit by far among Australia's states and territories, we're truly blessed here considering basically all of the rest of the world.
While adjusting to working from home (or “living at work,” as one of my grad student friends put it) was an upheaval (similar in scope and stress to moving house, I found to my surprise—I guess it's the sudden breaking of most routines), I've adjusted to it pretty happily now. I do not miss the roughly hour-long commute to and from Swinburne amidst crowds of people on public transport. I can tailor my daily exercise to the state of the weather, instead of having to tramp back and forth to the train station at a specific time, often in pouring rain or burning Sun in the heat of the afternoon. The latest news from Swinburne is not to expect to be back on campus until February, and while I would still have potentially three more months to finish up my PhD at that point I think it'd be easier (and I'd prefer) to just continue working from home for the remaining time rather than re-adjusting to a different schedule.
Speaking of, the PhD remains a constant struggle, but at least we had some encouraging news last week: my advisor finally performed the last few steps on my results to get constraints on variation in the fine-structure constant, \(\alpha\), and even with just a subset of about 15% of the most Sun-like stars in our sample the error came out to be just 10 parts-per-billion (ppb). (The full preliminary result was \(\Delta\alpha/\alpha=11\pm10\) ppb.) We'd previously estimated a final error of 10–100 ppb, so having it come out directly at the low end of our estimation was a pleasant surprise. That also means that the constraints we'll be getting from my PhD work will be a full 100 times better than the current best constraints from astronomical tests, which are at the 1000 ppb (1 part-per-million) level. Even a factor of 10 improvement would be quite impressive—PhDs are awarded for less—but a full hundred-fold improvement is really quite remarkable, and really speaks to the amount of information available from high-resolution stellar spectroscopy (though extracting that information to that level of precision has taken the preceding three years—almost 10%!—of my life).
There's still a number of sources of systematic error to investigate, and we may refine exactly how we calculate that number, so it may change in the final result, but likely not by much—certainly not by a factor of 10, probably more like a factor of 2. With that level of precision we'll be going for a short paper in Science, though probably not until next year when it can coincide with my already-in-progress papers on the process of making such measurements.
With that in mind, I've finally signed up for my own ORCID ID number. If you haven't heard of ORCID, it's a not-for-profit organization which curates ID numbers for researcher, allowing them to have one unique identifier that can be used to unambiguously identify people's contributions to research. Admittedly, in my case there are exactly zero other Daniel Berkes publishing in astronomy—I checked—but it's useful for people who might share names with other researchers, and it just makes it simpler for people to look you up without having to search by name by offering a simple URI which can hyperlinked, encoded in a QR code, etc.. It also offers one convenient place to tie in all the information about your career such as education, employment, papers, and so forth, and you can check mine out right here:
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7181-3020Anyway, that's all for tonight! A hui hou!
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