Brian York's Life

Next Week

Written on June 19, 2008

So, the research project

There hasn’t been much progress in actually finding something to do for the project, but there has been some progress in goals and methods. In particular, I now have a couple of guiding principles.

Focus on the Science

This, I think, is an important principle. Instead of looking for things I can do with the data I have, I should really be looking for scientific questions that I want to answer. Sure, it’s important that I be able to answer them quickly enough to finish them up during the next couple of years, but it might well be easier to read up on what’s being done, find the holes, and figure out how to use the data I have to fill them, than to look at what I have and then look for how I can use it to answer a question no one has asked/answered before.

That said, it’s not likely to be an easy job, just a possible job. And I’m sure there will be plenty of setbacks along the way, because that’s how it seems to work. I know, in any of my non-science university experience (e.g. choosing topics for a final paper) I’ve always passed through a certain amount of panic at the thought that I wouldn’t be able to find anything to write about. Same thing here I suppose. Of course, there’s also another guiding principle that could help me narrow things down.

Focus on the Story

By this I mean focus on the fact that my thesis, when all is said and done, should be telling a unified story. At the moment, I’ll have a chapter or two on the Diffuse Interstellar Bands (both in “standard” DLAs and in Ca II-selected systems), and then a chapter or two on 21-cm observations, and then a chapter or two on something else. Now, that doesn’t sound very unified. In fact, it isn’t very unified. But, to make up a good thesis, it should be unified. So what’s the connection?

One possibility is the idea of physical conditions in DLA absorbers. After all, when I started the whole DIBs in DLAs work, the thought was that DIBs might serve as a proxy for the conditions in the DLA. In the Milky Way, for example, there’s a nice tight correlation between the strength of the 5780 angstrom DIB and the H I (neutral hydrogen) column density along the same line of sight. If that had held in the DLAs, not only would DIBs have been easy to find, it would also have allowed us to estimate the N(H I) for absorption systems where the Lyman-α transition is in the UV (i.e. systems with a redshift less than 1.8 or so, which are really important systems because the path between z=0 and z=1.8 encompasses 2/3 of the age of the universe). Of course, a UV telescope could also do that, but UV telescopes have to be space telescopes, and all of Hubble’s UV spectrographs are dead (although the next servicing mission will add one and might fix another), and the new James Webb Space Telescope won’t have any UV capability. Of course, this relationship didn’t end up holding up. Nor did a nice simple version of it (say scaled for metallicity), so that’s a dead end in practice (although it can still go in the thesis, because nothing requires your theories to always be right, as long as they’re plausible, and you actually tested them to find out).

Another way in which DIBs might have traced physical conditions in the absorbers is their relative strengths. Of course, to use that we’d need to have detected a lot of DIBs. More than 3 (all in the same DLA) anyway. But, again, it can serve as a connecting thread, because 21-cm absorption also tells us about the physical conditions in the absorber.

What else could I do with physical conditions? Well, there’s always molecular hydrogen, although I’m not sure that’s a sufficiently original idea (or even necessarily possible with the systems I have). There might be the idea of looking for molecules (CO for example). I’m not quite sure, but there are bound to be possibilities.

So, anyone have any other ideas for how I can connect everything together? For each different story I can tell, there’s a different type of science question that I can be asking myself. And having as many questions as possible seems like a good idea.

Elsewhere, work-related

Well, after a few recent events, I’m being pushed into doing something I probably should have done some time ago — actually going through a formal process of testing for Asperger’s. It’s going to be time-consuming, expensive, and probably annoying, but my supervisory committee has strongly recommended it, and knowing exactly what my strengths and weaknesses are there will help them to figure out ways to help me get through the program. In particular, the part about establishing a leading role in my research. There have also been memory issues which I need ways to deal with.

Elsewhere, non-work-related

After all, I have to do something for fun. At the moment, I’m working on a few comments about a recently-released study funded by the US government. A study which hasn’t been much publicized, and which, for some reason, was released without a press release (or any attempt to draw attention to it). A study describing the (lack of) effectiveness of four different abstinence-based sex education programs. I expect my responses will be a bit, well, sarcastic, but I hope people might be interested in reading my commentary (complete with figures and tables taken from the report). Short version, it doesn’t work. For the longer version, you’ll have to read my post (hopefully in the next week or so).

So that’s about it for me, for now. So far at least, I’m managing to post (sort-of) once a week or so, which is good. Let’s see if I can keep it up.

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Entry last updated May 9, 2007