PhysMath Central Blog
Tonight's Horizon, for UK-based readers of this blog, will be presented by PMC Physics A board member, Brian Cox. Brian is looking at gravity and why we still can't quite figure out what it is or what causes it.
Horizon: What On Earth Is Wrong With Gravity? BBC2 21:00
UPDATE (30 Jan): There is an article on the show's content, written by Brian Cox on the BBC website. UK-based readers can watch the whole programme again until next Tuesday on BBC's iPlayer.
Posted by Chris Leonard at 15:11 Comments (2)
A trip to the ATLAS detector at the LHC lead to an fascinating discussion between Peter Murray-Rust and Jim Downing about 'big science' and how that contrasted to lab-based science:
I felt like Arthur Dent watching the planet-building in the The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It is enormous. And the detectors at the edges have a resolution of microns. I would have no idea how to go about building it. So many thanks to Salavtore and colleagues. And it gives me a feeling of ownership. I shall be looking for my own sponsored hadron (I’ve never seen one). So this is “Big Science” - big in mass, big in spending, big in organisation, with a bounded community. A recipe for success.
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But where do sciences such as chemistry, materials, nanotech, condensed matter, cell biology, biochemistry, neuroscience, etc. etc. fit? They aren’t “big science”. They often have no coherent communal voice. The publications are often closed. There is a shortage of data.
But there are a LOT of them. I don’t know how many chemists there are in the world who read the literature but it’s vastly more than the 22,000 HEP scientists. How do we give a name to this activity. “Small science” is not complementary; “lab science” describes much of it it but is too fixed to buildings.
Jim Downing came up with the idea of “Long Tail Science”. The Long Tail is the observation that in the modern web the tail of the distribution is often more important than the few large players. Large numbers of small units is an important concept. And it’s complimentary and complementary.
Posted by Chris Leonard at 12:53 Comments (0)
Rolf Heuer goes APE for open access
There has been surprisingly little written on the web about Rolf Heuer's keynote speech at the Academic Publishing in Europe (APE 2008) conference in Berlin last week. Thankfully though, Peter Murray-Rust and the SCOAP3 initiative have come to our rescue. In fact, Peter reports that there was no wireless and no electricity at the meeting venue, so that explains the paucity of live blogging reports!
Heuer, who is an editorial board member of PMC Physics A and will takeover from Robert Aymar as Director General of CERN in January 2009, delivered his presentation entitled: "Innovation in Scholarly Communication: Vision and Projects from High Energy Physics" (pdf link, 7MB)
The presentation is particularly interesting as it looks not only at the SCOAP3 project and its plan to turn an entire field open access, but also it outlines what they plan to do with this new corpus of OA material. This includes commenting, tagging, text and data-mining, new bibliometrics to measure impact, aggregation of related material and the preservation and re-use of experimental data.
If anyone thinks that Open Acess is just reading a pdf for free on the web, then this presentation shows the world of possibilities that opens up when the entire dataset is interoperable, free of copyright and re-use retrictions and available to all.
Posted by Chris Leonard at 12:12 Comments (2)