Farewell to 2020

With less than four hours to go to 2021 as I type this, I wanted to cap off a turbulent year with one final post.

Where to begin? I have so much to be thankful for over the past 366 days. Just under a year ago, in early January, I flew through Shanghai airport on my way back from visiting family in California, just a few days after hearing about a new disease called “COVID-19” which was showing up in China. Thankfully I avoided catching it, either then or since. And while multiple members of my family caught it back in the U.S., they all survived more-or-less unscathed, a fortune not shared by millions of grieving people around the globe this year.

My PhD research has also thankfully been mostly unscathed by the tumult of transitioning to working from home from early March. Indeed, it's hard to imagine a more upset-resistant project than mine: my data is all archival (so I don't have to worry about observing runs being disrupted), I already had it all downloaded on a hard drive I can bring with me, and all my research happens on my university-provided laptop (so no worrying about the Swinburne supercomputer being down or having a faulty internet connection like many of my fellow students). I've continued to make slow but steady progress over the past ~9 months, and haven't had unavoidable delays like students in other fields who were doing lab work have. While the transition to working from home initially produced psychological stresses not unlike a house move (which was interesting to observe), once those wore off after a few weeks I've been quite happy not to be taking lengthy public transportation every day, and am probably going to continue working from home for the remainder of my PhD. (Which should hopefully be finished before the end of March.)

Sure, what I'm calling The Great Melbourne Lockdown was a bit rough. But I made it through with a guaranteed student stipend, the newly-discovered ability to order groceries online from my local grocery store, and the natural propensity of an introvert (or maybe just a hermit) to be at home when given the option. The winter was miserably cold, since keeping my room warm all the time in Melbourne's "What's insulation?" housing would've been prohibitively expensive with a space heater, but when, outside of the tropics, aren't winters miserable? (I'm channeling it towards motivation to find a job in the tropics again.) And on the plus side I didn't have to tramp a kilometer to and from the train station every day no matter the weather—on near-freezing rainy days I could time my daily walk with a break in the clouds, or even skip it altogether.

So on the whole, I really do have many things to be grateful for this past year. But what's on the horizon for 2021? 

Well, as mentioned, I hope to be finishing up my PhD and submitting my thesis by the end of March. Along the way I plan to submit two papers, containing the results of my three and a half years' of work. (I'm also contemplating a series of posts covering my research aimed at a layman audience now that the results are nearly done.) This is the time of year for astronomy jobs to be posted, so I'll be kicking the job hunt into high gear next week. It's no secret that I miss Hawaii and will be checking for jobs there, but who knows where things will go from here? I'll be looking for astronomy jobs first, but the skills I've learned from my PhD are quite broadly applicable; this year's put a lot of things into perspective for me, and I wouldn't mind potentially putting my skills to work in a medical field for a few years.

In the meantime, the prospect of summer is looming in the near future…probably. While we had some extremely hot days in late November presaging the approaching estival season, the weather here in Melbourne took a dip back to cooler temperatures for most of December. I've been wearing warm clothes and occasionally running the heater the past two weeks (including on Christmas) due to the antarctic cold fronts blowing up from the south lately. Now, as much as I dislike being cold, I can at least mitigate it with clothing and heating; cooling down from Melbourne's intensely hot summers (with nights that sometimes barely cool down) is a bit trickier, as the AC unit we got installed last year is out in the living room and doesn't really reach back to my bedroom. Supposedly we're in for a cooler and wetter summer due to a La Niña year in the Pacific, and I will happily take that over the more typical Melbournian summers I've endured the past few years. (I've also got a new gadget that might help out a bit with that, but I'll save a full discussion and review for a post early next year…)

As we approach anno Domini 2021, I'm feeling fairly upbeat. Yes, there are the multiple promising vaccines that will hopefully bring an end to the worst pandemic in a century; but I'm also really looking forward to finishing this PhD into which I've poured a tenth of my life and moving on to something different. Exactly what, I don't know yet, but that's the exciting part. I've been reading two books lately: Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, by David Epstein, and Late Bloomers: The Power of Patience in a World Obsessed with Early Achievement, by Rich Karlgaard. Range is a study about how many of the greatest breakthroughs and innovations throughout history have come from people who, contrary to the prevailing wisdom of specializing ever more deeply in a single subject, were broadly acquainted with many, allowing them to see and make connections their more specialized peers weren't equipped to. And Late Bloomers complements that by documenting many people who, despite society's push for us to be high-achievers by our 20's, bloomed and discovered new talents much later in life.

Range argues that instead of knowing exactly what we want to do for the rest of our lives before college, we are actually very ill-equipped to make that decision and should instead spend time during and after college trying various different jobs and experiences out for short periods of time, both to become more well-rounded and experienced and to have a better chance of discovering what exactly we want to do. Late Bloomers similarly advocates for patience in figuring out our path, due to full brain development demonstrably happening later in people these days (with a median age around 25, but even into late 20s or early 30s), and being open to the possibility of change and discovering new talents and interests throughout life.

Taken together, they've been very comforting to me. I've been secretly bothered for a long time by the way my brain doesn't really fit with the prevailing societal pressure to “pick something early and specialize in it forever.” My interests shift with the years, and I've held several jobs over the past decade rather than a single one. Range taught me to look upon my breadth of experience as an asset rather than a disadvantage, and Late Bloomers taught me not to fear the changes of time, or to worry about not already having changed the world or become a multi-millionaire. I've learned a lot over the course of my PhD; research methods, for sure, but I've also had time to become much more knowledgeable in Python (which will serve me well for any number of possible jobs) and I've discovered latent talents like painting and music scoring I never knew I had. I've learned that maybe research (or at least academia) isn't for me like I thought when I was younger, and I'm eager to try something new when I'm done with my PhD. Between it all, while I don't know what the future holds, I'm feeling more optimistic about it than I have for the past few years. And with that, here's to a Happy New Year 2021! Hau'oli Makahiki Hou!

Christmas Planets, 2020

Merry Christmas everyone! I've got a Christmas video for you this year. I'd been hoping to see the Great Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn this year, with their closest approach for over 800 years on December 21st, but Melbourne's weather took a turn for the cloudy for more than a week around that date. However, I noticed Christmas evening that the clouds were finally starting to clear out, so on a whim I set up my GoPro to get a timelapse, and caught not just Jupiter and Saturn but Mars and the Moon too. The two gas giants are a bit hard to see in the video, but were clearly visible to the naked eye when I came out to look when it got dark. They're already pulling apart again, but at least I got to see them so soon after closest approach. Hope your Christmases everywhere were as merry as can be this year! A hui hou!

A Typical Melbournian Hailstorm

So if you've followed this blog for a while you may know that I enjoy making videos, and have been doing so for a few years now. And while cell phones are a great portable video-taking device (seeing as all my previous videos were taken using them), some of the kinds of things I really want to do (such as long timelapse videos) aren't really suited for being taken by them (not that that's stopped me before). I've thus been interested in getting a dedicated action camera such as a GoPro for several years now; in fact, I first looked into it back in 2017 right before coming to Australia, but couldn't afford one at the time.

Fast forward to 2020, and with all the money I'm saving on not taking public transport and eating out during the week I could finally convince myself I could afford one. The latest GoPro model, the HERO9 Black, came out in September with some nice improvements (such as for timelapses), and after doing a lot of research into various action cameras out there I picked one up over a sale on Thanksgiving weekend! (GoPro has actual competition now, but its specific features were still the best fit for what I wanted.)

Tada! This was me attempting timelapses of the night sky. They're impressively easy to get, but not quite ready to show off.

I'm still experimenting with it, but today I've got my first video to show off. Last Thursday we were projected to have an afternoon thunderstorm, so I decided I'd put my camera out facing up and try to get a timelapse of the clouds passing overhead. Fortunately, I somehow started recording real-time video instead (still learning!), and it turned out that the thunderstorm dropped some hail as well (as they often do, in Melbourne, we had another hail storm less than a fortnight before that).

I was worried for my new camera, but more worried about myself dashing out into the hail to retrieve it, which worked out for the best as the camera's fine and I got a cool video of being in a hail storm. The storm itself passed in less than 30 minutes, so I sped the whole thing up 10× and made the following video out of it:

Anyway, that's all for now, but look forward to more—and hopefully more innovative and unique—videos from me in the future, as I figure out what kinds of videos I can get with something I wouldn't want to use my phone for. A hui hou!

Happy 250th, Beethoven!

Today (December 17) marks the 250th anniversary of Ludwig van Beethoven's birth in Bonn. I'm pretty sure he needs no introduction from me, and I doubt I can say anything that hasn't already been said about this famous master of classical music, so I'll just note that Beethoven has long been one of my favorite composers, ranked up there next to Handel for music I love. As a teenager some of the first CDs I owned (yes, I'm old enough to have had them) were his nine symphonies, and while I've become acquainted with much more of his work in the past few years, those will always remain etched into my memory.

Beethoven wrote quite a few sets of variations on tunes, both original and from others (he wrote a set on the tune for "God Save the King/My Country ‘Tis of Thee", for instance), and while most of them aren't well known, they showcase to a particular intensity his propensity to experiment with tunes or motifs throughout his music, poking, prodding, stretching, inverting, mirroring, and just generally wringing every last drop of music out of a simple set of notes that he could. It's one of the things that I quite enjoy about his music, and which makes it unique.

There's a concept called frisson (from the French “to shiver”), which is the feeling of euphoria (often accompanied by feelings of chills and goosebumps) some people feel when listening to music. I only came across the term recently, but I've been familiar with the concept for a long time. I primarily enjoy classical music because of the various musical genres I've been exposed to it consistently has the largest fraction of works which induce frisson, and my ongoing quest to expand my horizons in classical music is ultimately all in pursuit of more works that cause it. In that quest, Beethoven is possibly the composer with the largest number of pieces which can provide that feeling of chills (though as mentioned Handel is right up there too), especially his works for strings; partly his many string quartets and piano trios (which have some sublimely frisson-inducing movements), but most especially in his sonatas for violin and piano, all ten of which have at least one movement capable of bringing goosebumps to my skin.

It's a bit difficult to discuss frisson, as it's an intensely personal feeling (and is apparently different for every person); merely discussing it feels like baring a part of my soul to public scrutiny. I read recently (in a study on the topic which pointed to the pleasure coming at least in part from being able to correctly predict remembered patterns) that only about 50% of the population feels it at all, so this post may not make much sense to half my readers; though perhaps even for my readers who can enjoy it, the individual nature of it may make trying to describe the exact notes and cadences that induce it like trying to describe a rainbow to the color-blind. Anyway, if you, like me, were familiar with the sensation but didn't know the name of it, I hope this post has been helpful, and I'd love to hear of any pieces that induce frisson for other people if you feel like sharing. A hui hou!

Measuring the Fine-Structure Constant to the Best Precision Yet

As you might know if you've been following this blog, my PhD research focuses on the fine-structure constant, traditionally denoted by \(\alpha\). Specifically, I'm working on extending an astronomical method for searching for variation in the fine-structure constant's value to main-sequence (specifically Sun-like) stars for the first time. I'm more interested in searching for a change in \(\alpha\) than in that value per se, but I was still interested to see an article in Nature a few days ago reporting the most precise determination of \(\alpha\) yet.

The authors measured the value of \(\alpha\) to be 1/137.035999206(11) (the last two digits are uncertain), with an incredible precision of 81 parts per trillion. Interestingly, this value varies by more than \(5\sigma\) from the previous best measurement. This measurement used rubidium atoms, while the other measurement used caesium atoms, so it's possible it could be some systematic difference between the two different setups. But we don't know at this point, so we'll have to see as the respective teams go about improving their measurements even further. (Incidentally, this measurement helps rule out that the electron could be a compound particle, as such a state would conflict with the measured electron's anomalous magnetic moment at this level of precision.)

You'll notice there are no units on that value. That's because \(\alpha\) is a member of a small group of pure numbers which define the universe known as ‘dimensionless constants,’ whose values are independent of the units used to measure them. For comparison, if you measure the speed of light c in different systems, the numerical value will differ; for instance, approximately 186,000 miles per second or approximately 300,000,000 meters per second. The value of \(\alpha\), on the other hand, is always approximately 1/137, no matter what you measure it in. This lack of dimensionality is really quite remarkable when you think about it, and has fascinated physicists practically since \(\alpha\) was introduced by Arnold Sommerfeld in 1916.

Interestingly, it's looking like my PhD work will be able to put constraints on variation in \(\alpha\) at about the level of 10 parts per billion. That's two orders of magnitude better than the current best constraints from astronomical tests (~1 part per million), and only about another two orders of magnitude larger than the precision with which we can measure \(\alpha\), which is rather amazing to think about. Hopefully before too much longer I'll have my own published articles to share here on the subject. A hui hou!

R.I.P. Arecibo Observatory

I woke up today to the news that the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico, originally constructed in 1963, had collapsed. This wasn't entirely a surprise (though it was a shock), as it had been having some trouble lately. Back in August, one of the cables holding the instrument platform above the dish snapped, followed by a second one in November. After the second cable broke, the NSF decided about a week ago to decommission the telescope after determining it would be too dangerous to repair it. That decision turns out to have been the right call, as today another cable snapped (along with the tops of the towers they were anchored to), sending the many-ton instrument platform plunging to the ground and through the dish in between.

Now, I've never used Arecibo myself, but pretty much every astronomer knows about it; for being the largest single-dish radio telescope in the world until 2015, and for participating in various important scientific work over the years. Plenty of non-astronomers know about it too due to its appearance in movies such as Goldeneye. Its loss will leave a gap in astronomy for quite a while, unfortunately; for instance, it's been used to bounce radar off of near-earth asteroids to give us a better idea of their shapes and orbits, which can help determine their threat levels. All in all, it's a bit of an end of an era for radio astronomy. (This doesn't affect me or my PhD at all, if you were wondering, but it's still a shame it happened.)

Edit (12/6/20): The NSF released a video of the collapse, which was, remarkably, caught by two sources: a security camera trained on the telescope, and a drone which happened to be inspecting one of the cables at the exact moment it snapped. It's pretty heartrending to watch, but also pretty incredible to have it caught on camera like that.