Mars Rover Curiosity Successfully Landed, and My Name Too

The Mars rover Curiosity, also known as the Mars Science Laboratory, was launched on November 26, 2011, and successfully landed on Gale Crater of the Red Planet on August 6, 2012. I was almost forgetting but participated in NASA's program of "Send Your Name to Mars." The image above shows the certificate of this participation issued on June 4, 2010 by NASA. On NASA's page of this program, it is written that our names were being prepared for etching on a microchip for the Curiosity rover to carry it on its "back" (its "deck"). So, my name must also have landed on Mars on August 6, 2012.

The Web site of Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA, includes the "World Participation Map" page of the above program. On this page, we find that the number of worldwide names sent is 1246445. Countries that have the largest number of participants are as follows: United States 529386 (42.5%), United Kingdom 77329 (6.2%) and India 59041 (4.7%). Japan comes at the 46th with the number 2865 (0.002%).

My Number is 2.2% of Einstein's!

I have learned that Google Inc. now provides a service called "My Citations" as part of "Google Scholar." This service automatically makes, preserves and updates a list of publications by a researcher (papers, books, etc., including those with coauthors) together with the number of citations and the lists of sources of citations. It seems to have started last summer. There is a Web page that introduces the service, telling that you can see an example of Einstein's citations (the above image). The total number of citations of his publications is currently 56,985.

As for me, the total number is 1277 (as of today; see here for a possible update) and is 2.2% of Einstein's. I certainly know this: The relative importance of the scientific contributions by Einstein to that of mine is much more than this ratio shows because of the following reason. The results obtained by Einstein soon became well known. Therefore, those are often used without citing the original paper every time. Contrary to this, it is always necessary to mention the original publication in order to use such results as are not widely known like ours.

There is another reason for the fact that the number of citations of Einstein's publications are less than expected. Compilation of citation data from earlier journals are probably not yet complete, because publication was not digitized those days (my number may also suffer this delay to some extent). This can be inferred from the graph in the above image; i.e., the number of citations per year shows a trend of decline as the year goes back in the period before 2004.

I will soon write another blog post to describe advantages and disadvantages of "My citation" service at the present stage.

"Group Therapy for Particle Physics"

Peter Woit at Columbia University is known for his criticisms of string theory in his book Not Even Wrong [1] and writes essays at the blog site of the same name. One of his latest blog post was entitled "An Introduction to Group Therapy for Particle Physics" [2]. The title comes from the subtitle of one of the books reviewed in the latest CERN Courier [3]. He writes, "Group Therapy for Particle Physics (at least for particle theorists) seems like an excellent idea."

I have not read the book Not Even Wrong but read the following passage in the book description on an Amazon Web page:

"Not Even Wrong" shows that what many physicists call superstring “theory” is not a theory at all. It makes no predictions, not even wrong ones, and this very lack of falsifiability is what has allowed the subject to survive and flourish.

This view can certainly lead to the thought that string theorists need "therapy." So, Woit is surely joking here. In fact, "Group Therapy" in the subtitle of the book is a typo, which should read "Group Theory." At the end of his blog post, Woit added three other examples of the same typo in publications related to group theory.

I also saw the same typo on the occasion of "Third International Workshop on Electron and Photon Transport Theory" held in Indianapolis in 1999. On the name tag of participants, the title of the workshop was printed as "Third International Workshop on Electron and Photon Transport Therapy" [4].

References

1. P. Woit, Not Even Wrong (Basic Books, 2006; paperbound 2007).
2. P. Woit, "An Introduction to Group Therapy for Particle Physics," Blog site Not Even Wrong (January 24, 2012).
3. Bookshelf, CERN Courier (January 25, 2012).
4. T. Tabata, "Stolen Joke," Web page Surely I'm Joking!: A Physicist's Personal Essays (August 18, 1999).

My Face Flew with Discovery

I participated in "Face in Space" of NASA. It is the project to launch the images and (or) names of the participants into orbit to make them a part of history. My participation was for Shuttle Discovery's Mission STS-133. Its flight was delayed a few times from the originally planned return date of September 25, 2010, to March 7, 2011. Thus, I got my commemorative flight certificate signed by the Mission Commander (the above image) yesterday. The words on the certificate read as follows:

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Face in Space

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Congratulations!
This certifies that the face of Tatsuo Tabata has flown in space aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery on mission STS-133 from February - March 9, 2011. The face was flown on Discovery's mission to the International Space Station at an altitude of 220 miles above the Earth. It flew at a speed of more than 17,400 miles per hour as it orbited our planet. On behalf of my crew and all of NASA, we thank you for sharing the excitement of our mission and welcome your interest in space exploration. We were glad to have you aboard.

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STS-133 Commander Steven W. Lindsey

The next mission STS-134 is currently scheduled to launch April 19, 2011, and you can still take part in the project.

Note added later: The mission STS-133 was the last one the Discovery performed. Read the related stories "A Bittersweet Finale for the Discovery" in New York Times (March 9, 2011) and "Space shuttle Discovery lands in Florida, capping its 39th and final mission" in Scientific American (Mar 9, 2011).