Today Gail Zasowski (JHU) showed up at MPIA for a week or so. Hans-Walter Rix brought up the possibility that we should consider—for the next generation of SDSS projects—using the BOSS spectrograph in concert with the APOGEE spectrograph to study the detailed chemical abundances of millions of stars. He pointed out that both observationally (Anna Ho's work) and theoretically (Yuan-Sen Ting's work) we believe that we can get many precise chemical abundances out of high signal-to-noise spectra at low (2000-ish) resolution.
Late in the day I worked on text for a large NSF Physics Frontier Center proposal we are putting in at NYU to build new data-science methods for the physical sciences of cosmology, planetary and stellar dynamics, and particle physics. This is being led by Kyle Cranmer (NYU) but includes many other luminaries, including our new hires at (that is, coming to) NYU: Anthony Pullen, Yacine Ali-Haïmoud, and Kat Deck!
US Taxpayers should fork over more money to train the next generation of European and Chinese scientists.
ReplyDeleteThat's the problem with Americans---they are too stupid and lazy to actually do science, but too selfish to spend the money to invest in science.