Because in this post-Kayne West world—where a rapper can’t get by on image and artistic aspirations alone, no matter how phony or stupidly ambitious—hip-hop has become the most, for lack of a better word, existential genre of music out there. Rappers’ core themes are embodied almost strictly by their streamlined experiences—desiring fame, reaching fame, reacting to fame, having no fucking clue what to do with so much money—and their songs then reinforce their image. It used to be about how hard of a rapper you were, how many girls you could get or how stupid ridiculous you could sound when you threw money around. Now it’s about all those things folded into one and flipped upside-down; it’s about being famous for rapping and rapping about being famous.

It’s a strange loop and it’s one no other genre can touch. But what is clear is that Drake does it with the most sincerity, the most talent, and the most transparent mask of all, making it hard to discount that the 25-year-old actually loses sleep over questioning how he got here and what it means to his past and his future. “What have I learned since getting rich,” he asks himself on “HYFR,” his second of three Lil Wayne-assisted tracks. “I’ve been working with the negatives to make for better pictures,” is the witty, double entendre answer we’ve come to expect, yet never get tired of hearing.

The opening track, “Over My Dead Body,” is somewhere between an anthem and a more traditional R&B song, opening with a female lead hook and a bare bones piano part that Drake raps over consistently. He seems to crack a few smiles, admitting that you win some and lose some now that his taxes have hit six figures and jabbing at people “discussing his career again, asking if he’ll go platinum in a year again.” The track is trademark Drake in a lyrical sense, but with a balanced display of styles that anticipates the more focused 16 tracks that follow.

Take Care moves on to flip-flop, almost every other song, between two loose styles, which are easy to identify when the light opening song flows into the melancholic “Shot for Me” and then right into the forceful radio classic “Headlines.” The fierce and upbeat lyrical attacks wrapped up in pulsing keyboard beats mark Drake’s confident, near-untouchable state. Meanwhile, the slow, R&B infused songs show us his now-trademark emotional, introspective side concerned with past loves and genuine self-evaluation.

It’s those songs, the already radio-heavy “Marvin’s Room” and some surprisingly well-composed tracks like his Stevie Wonder collaboration “Doing it Wrong” that lead many rappers and genre fans alike to spit hate, but it undeniably gives him a dynamic R&B edge that completes the image—an Usher revivalist with Eminem’s bite and a perfected Lil Wayne flow.

A third style flutters here and there, in “Take Care” featuring Rihanna and the album closer “The Motto,” and is marked by a sort of chopped-and-screwed take on modern club music. It’s the least impressive of Drake’s styles, making those tracks mostly forgettable if you overlook the fact that he rather boldly raps about his past relationship with Rihanna in the very song she contributes to.

Halfway through Take Care, “Underground Kings” descends with a mesmerizing 4-note lead before Drake bursts out of the gate hand-in-hand with the bass. His complex cynicism—that mix of emotional reflection and negativity despite soaking in all the perks of his fame and wealth—is in full force. “Rapping bitches, rapping bitches, bitches and rapping, rapping and bitches until all of it switches,” he says of the flurry and blur of his lifestyle, one he still might think of as absurd no matter how much he may enjoy it at times.

“It’s been two years since someone asked me who I was / I’m the greatest man / I said that before I knew I was,” he admits right after, illustrating that no matter how much time he spends staring at himself in the mirror, Drake is still capable of being confidently sure of who he is and what he wants. Given that a number of the strongest tracks have been playing non-stop for months, the fact that “Underground Kings” remained unheard until Take Care’s release makes it the defining soul of the album when paired with the vulnerability of “Marvin’s Room.”

Even on the surface, Take Care is a massive success, with tastes of every hyper-stylized rapper from Rick Ross to Nicki Minaj and a remarkably large percentage of the album’s sprawling 17-track list enjoyable and repeatable. But it’s Drake’s boldness, the emotional risk-taking bounced off his blisteringly witty self-congratulations, that solidify why he’s so rich and famous, and why none of it really matters unless you can analyze it on his level.

Under the guidance of Nancy Squires, the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Operational Excellence Steering Committee, shared support service centers are a way in which multiple departments, often those with similar focuses and geographical proximity, can balance out inequalities in staffing and attempt to alleviate the pressure from the inability to fill empty positions by joining together.

The process was done with the help of consulting firm Bain & Company, who left in June after performing data collection and analysis and making recommendations based upon their findings. The hope is that department identities will remain completely intact while workloads will be evened out amid the University’s hiring freeze and continued budget strain. Currently, one shared support service center incorporating Theatre and Art has been implemented with a future goal of including the music department. Two separate centers for the Humanities building are in the planning phases.

“Operational Excellence and the Bain consultants were brought in to deal with the level of budget cut we’ve already have. I believe the figure is $82 million over the last four years,” says Squires. “We have had a great attrition of staff and faculty with no prospects that our budget was going to improve. We had to learn live within our means. That is what it was about.”

With a decrease in budget and departments having already suffered losses in the form of staff retirement and resignation, the goal is to bring expenses down to an equal level. “We’re learning to do things differently so we can delver good services with fewer people,” Squires adds.

This idea and all of its many components has generated a swarm of rumors and misinformation among involved staffs and students—that layoffs, despite Squires’ insistence, are on the horizon, department downsizing and potential elimination are real and growing possibilities and that students and staff alike will be forced under dramatic changes with potential negative consequences.

‘There is no timeline. There’s no plan. This is part of the problem. Nobody really knows what’s going on,” says Fred Walter, head of the University Senate and a member of the Operational Excellence Steering Committee.

But Squires persists that she has no timeline because the needs of specific departments are different, and no plan to implement a center can be done without a successful operation in place. She is also adamant on letting departments staffs draft their own alternative plan in implementing a shared support service center, as she did with Theatre and Art over the summer and plans to do with every potential department involved with the initiative.

Despite a lack of timeline or current deadline for the shared support service centers underway, Squires foresees the Social and Behavior Sciences building is a potential next focus, but that it’s geographical complexities given the number of departments it houses involves an entirely different approach.

“It’s either going to get better, or not at all,” says Squires, who is convinced that no plan would be put forth without assurance that it would in no way diminish support for either staff or students.

Flash-forward two years and the members of Real Estate are now New Jersey’s indie kings of surf pop and “jangly guitars,” a term music reviewers can’t resist from using. On October 17, they drop their second delivery in the form of Days. But this follow-up LP is significantly more powerful, so much more emotionally driven that you’d be hard pressed to find anything on it that wouldn’t have seemed out of place on their debut. The key is in the aesthetics, and Real Estate has crafted one of the best cold-weather albums ever to fill the October air.

Days is no longer than its predecessor, neither in timestamp nor track number. But that makes the leap for singer/songwriter Martin Courtney and crew that much more apparent.

Right out of the gate, “Easy” shatters your conception of the group’s talents with an unbelievable crispness and energy, as if the song title itself were a reference to how effortless the group was able to raise its game from a minimalist, shoe-gaze rehash to the distinctive, emotion-driven pop bursting from Days. Starting with a head-bobbing, poppy energy, the track swings to an impressively serious tone, as Courtney’s vocals and lead guitarist Matthew Mondanile’s sweeping, chorus-drenched guitar simultaneously swallow and seep through you.

“Green Aisles” is a hazy, floating track that stomps out monotony by encompassing itself with layer upon layer of convalescing guitar. It’s the perfect lead into Days’ first single, “It’s Real,” a track that will floor any fan of the band’s debut with its undeniable improvement. When Courtney’s reverb-doused chorus of woah’s transitions to the song’s bridge, the moment is nearly breath-snatching, leaving you pondering where all this emotion and energy could possibly have come from.

By track five, the sullen “Out of Tune,” you start to realize that all of the songs on the album are, like the debut, roughly the same speed; every track’s drum part is more or less interchangeable. But it’s that structural consistency that makes the diversity of these tracks, a diversity that the debut lacked, that much more astounding, especially when you’re lulled through the instrumental “Kinder Blumen” and transported two decades back with “Wonder Years.”

As the closing track, “All the Same,” eases into its instrumental break around the three-minute mark, all you hear for a levitating thirty seconds is a near-perfect guitar part laying brick and mortar all around itself. Mondanile’s equally satisfying complimentary guitar snakes inside, joined by the vibrant notes of Alex Bleeker’s bass moments later. The whole song feels as if it’s about to peak, but then it just stays…for four minutes, until it winds itself down in a calculated tempo spiral.

When Days wraps up with that seven-minute track, that’s when the supposed repetition, lack of variety—everything you think of as a potential shortcoming of the album—becomes part of one near-perfect idea; possibly a photograph, be it the sunlit Jersey turnpike Courtney drives down on “Out of Tune” or the green expanses of his Garden state childhood in the chorus of “Easy,” with 10 different angles and exposures. Whatever current is channeling underneath Days, it’s clear that Real Estate have mastered, in a way no indie band today can, the mantra of less is more.

The six-month-long search for Stony Brook’s provost is over 

President Samuel Stanley announced on August 3 that Dr. Dennis Assanis would be appointed Stony Brook University’s Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs, as well as the Vice President for Brookhaven Affairs.

Assanis, who will be leaving his position as a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan, will be filling the shoes of former Provost Eric Kaler, who resigned in July to become president of the University of Minnesota. Assanis’ appointment is effective October 1.

“I look forward to the opportunity to filling the more than 250 new faculty positions over the next five years, thanks to the passage of the 2020 legislation,” said Assanis. “This will have a catalytic effect that will really benefit all our students, as it will improve our student to faculty ratio from 28 to one to 22 to one, and Stony Brook’s four-year graduation rate.”

Assanis, who shares a background in engineering with his predecessor Kaler, has a long list of awards and accomplishments to his name, including three graduate degrees in different engineering focuses from MIT and one in management from the Boston school’s renowned Sloan School of Business. Assanis is also the founding director of the US-China Clean Energy Research Center for Clean Vehicles and director of the Walter E. Lay Automotive Laboratory.

Stony Brook’s David Ferguson, distinguished service professor and chair of technology and society, and Nancy Tomes, professor of history, co-chaired the search committee with assistance from search firm Russell Reynolds Associates. Assanis was picked, according to Tomes in the university’s official press release, because of his vision, which is easy to see when Assanis talks of the university.

“My initial sense of opportunities where the University can enhance its reputation and move to the next level are making the pursuit of academic excellence the pervasive culture across the campus…” he said. He went on to say that a significant increase in research funding and a stronger partnership with Brookhaven National Lab, alongside better financial models and strategic planning, would also establish a healthier future for the school.

When further discussing the passage of SUNY 2020, Assanis said that it does not change the painful cuts that Stony Brook, as well as other SUNY institutions, will have to keep addressing. But, “It does offer a reason to be very optimistic about Stony Brook’s future and helps us chart a better course for the future of Long Island,” he added.

As to whether Stony Brook’s obvious science and research focus severely hinders its ability to offer adequate arts and humanities programs in the face of budget constraints, Assanis said that that is also a goal for the future, especially for the Association of American Universities (AAU), to which both Stony Brook and his alma mater belong.

“I can also tell you that the College of Arts and Sciences is as comprehensive as what we offer at University of Michigan, where budgets are also strained,” he said. “Having said this, there is an active effort among many of the AAU’s to redefine the role of arts and humanities in the modern research University, and I would like to see Stony Brook play a pioneering role in this effort.”

The Student Activities Board (SAB), the event-coordinating wing of the Undergraduate Student Government (USG), has received an additional $130,887, a 32.4 percent increase over last year, while the club budgets have been cut by $208,062, an 18.3 percent decrease from last year’s final budget. Nearly 70 percent of all clubs saw a cut in their budgets and SAB now has $534,887 to spend on campus events.

USG officers saw immense promise in SAB throughout the last two semesters, which was the organization’s first year after the controversial 2010 Establishment of Student Life Act that restructured SAB and put former USG Treasurer Moiz Khan in charge of event planning.

“They successfully put on big programs clearly demonstrated by Aziz [Ansari], Best Coast and obviously Bruno Mars,” said current USG Treasurer Thomas Kirnbauer, who drafted the budget alongside last year’s treasurer Jackie Mark and a six-person budget committee. “We want to keep the status quo because we feel that SAB has done a pretty good job,” he added.

“If you give them $1,000, that doesn’t help them. This money will help them go,” Kirnbauer said.  The additional money SAB has received is aimed at supporting a Fall event as large as Bruno Mars, but on the Staller steps.

USG’s 2011/12 Original Budget, released on sbusg.org on June 1, is provisional and will be change after budget revisions this Fall, which any club can apply for.

This process, called Fall revisions, takes rollover money from the previous year’s club budget that wasn’t spent and appropriates it to clubs that apply for additional money. With the Clubs and Organizations’ Original 2010/11 Budget at $929,053, many clubs will be awaiting the chance to apply for a budget revision and Kirnbauer estimates that that figure will rise back up to seven figures, where it was last year in both the final and original budgets of 2010/11.

“We are pretty confident that our Fall revisions will mend any wounds that occurred,” Kirnbauer said. While USG officers are stressing that one must compare original budgets to get a better sense of the change, the Clubs and Organizations’ budget still decreased by $175, 771, or 16.2 percent, from last year’s original budget and eventually received only an additional $32,290 to their roughly $1.1 million budget, a 2.9 percent increase, after Fall revisions.

It must also be noted that a percentage of the decrease in club budgets is due to the removal of the individual Residence Halls from the overall Clubs and Organizations budget, which accounted for $38,000 of both the original and final budgets of last year. Those line items were merged into one budget that can be found under USG Agencies, Services, and Organizations under the Residence Hall Association. The revised decrease in the new budget for Clubs and Organizations, with the removal of the Residence Halls budgets, would be 15.5 percent if comparing to the Final 2010/11 budget and 13 percent if comparing to the Original 2010/11 budget.

 This year’s budget contains another point of interest concerning SAB. The spreadsheet indicates that SAB’s Original 2010/11 budget was $270,000 and that it received an increase of $134,000 when the budget was finalized in the Fall. That would equate to a 98 percent increase in its budget if one compared only original budgets from 2010/11 to 2011/12.

Kirnbauer says that those numbers represent a lapse in the spreadsheet and that the new, restructured SAB was never put through the budget process in the Spring of 2010; rather it was given the full $404,000 in the Fall using leftover money in USG’s budget. “It’s probably just how much they allocated to the old SAB,” he explained. “When I was in the Senate, there was an appropriations bill for $404,000. The previous treasurer who did that spreadsheet just might have put it that way.” Former Treasurer Jackie Mark could not be reached for comment on the topic of SAB’s line structure in the budget.

USG President Mark Maloof has yet to replace Moiz Khan, this past year’s Student Programming Agency director who runs SAB alongside the VP of Student Life. With no SPA director, the organization is in the hands of Deron Hill, USG’s current VP of Student Life, with Kirnbauer acting as SAB’s treasurer and VP of Communications and Public Relations Farjad Fazli as secretary. Not only does that put SAB’s leadership in question, but it clouds the future of the now half-million dollar organization’s efficiency, considering that it went over budget last year.

“The reason why SAB goes over budget is the end of the year concert,” Kirnbauer explained. “I’ve had a lot of discussions with Administration with what we can do better in the future and I think the big problem was that we really had one person in SAB kind of running the show,” he added, referencing Khan’s assumption of responsibilities as SPA Director. Kirnbauer said that Maloof is looking for an SPA Director who is fiscally responsible, “…but we really need to stick to a process,” he added.

Kirnabuer will be releasing SAB’s full 2010/11 spending history on sbusg.org later this month, thereby making the activities of one of Stony Brook’s fastest growing, and controversial, pillars of campus life fully transparent.

“We don’t yet have any new info on how or if the final budget deal will affect us,” said Media & Communications Manager Pete Genzer, but he stressed the words of BNL’s Deputy Director for Science and Technology Doon Gibbs, who said in a statement provided by Genzer, “…We deeply appreciate Senator Schumer’s, Senator Gillibrand’s, and Congressman Bishop’s support for science and their willingness to protect the Lab and its programs.”

Despite the drastic reduction in cuts, the political intricacies of the decision make it difficult to claim the potential passing of FY11 a victory for science. As the economic situation fails to meet the nation’s spending standards, all sectors, not just science, are taking big hits. But proponents of scientific research, including scientists and politicians alike, have ignited a fight to prove the worth of institutions like BNL in their contributions to not just scientific development, but all areas of the U.S.’s future growth.

Dr. John H. Marburger III, currently vice president of research at Stony Brook University, the university’s former president and a former Science Advisor to President George W. Bush, fought back voraciously when the original budget cuts, which came packaged in the House of Representatives’ HR 1 plan, hit the public limelight back in February.

In a April 7 Huffington Post op-ed titled, “House’s Science Cuts Threaten Our Future,” Marburger made a stand for science research, writing, “In the negotiations now underway to determine what share of needed budget cuts must fall to the tiny and already beleaguered domestic discretionary budget, the role of scientific research must be acknowledged for what it is: the key to our nation’s future.” He also cited an estimate from economists that “approximately half of post-WWII economic growth is directly attributable to R&D-fueled technological progress.”

Now that FY11 has replaced the draconian HR 1, Marburger can reflect on his appeal to such future progress being placed in the hands of research. “What I intended to convey…was that science is all-pervasive in the general cultures and economies of modern nations, and especially the U.S.,” he said in an email message. “Science, however it’s construed, is a small-time player in a budget game that is now of world-historical dimensions.  My op-ed was a plea to keep it from being trampled by the elephants,” he added.

But Marburger, with his rich political background, understands the complications involved with FY11 and asserts that the resolution did more forestalling than it did solving by way of gearing itself more towards non-controversial cuts than those to big science. “It is hard to consider the FY11 budget a ‘victory for science.’  I would say it is more like a confirmation that the parties regarded big cuts in science as too controversial to push any farther at this time.  That is good news, but it gives few signals about forthcoming budgets,” he said.

Rep. Tim Bishop (D-Southampton) was another major player in the backlash campaign against HR 1 throughout the last few months. He organized a large body of bipartisan support and even set up a website, www.wesupportbnl.org, according to Spokesman Oliver Longwell.

Despite Bishop being in full support of federal spending cuts, which he expressed through the voting support of a $38 billion federal year-to-year spending cut, he, like Marburger, also saw HR 1 as a threat to future development. “I recognize that we cannot get our budget under control without painful cuts and without compromise. The litmus test I will apply is whether cuts are painful as opposed to destructive and whether they will cause real damage to Long Island’s economy,” he said in a statement provided by Spokesman Longwell. “I will continue to advocate against cuts to scientific research and education that will hurt our ability to compete in the 21st century global economy and hamstring future growth,” he added.

Longwell himself expresses extreme concern over such spending cuts and what they mean for the future. “Frankly, I am dumbfounded that the Republican majority in the House of Representatives voted to gut federal investment in science, which would cede the leadership of the next generation of scientific innovation to China, India, and other nations who are massively ramping up their own investments in research,” he said. “Fortunately for Brookhaven Lab, Long Island, and our nation, wiser judgments were able to prevail in this case,” he added.

Brookhaven National Lab, the central focus of these cuts here on Long Island, is home to more than just expensive research projects like particle accelerators, and the proponents of scientific research as a key to our future development make that very clear.

One such example is BNL’s participation in the Department of Energy program, America’s Next Top Energy Innovator. The program helps increase the number of startup companies by reducing the cost of options to license available patents to $1,000, which is a fraction of the regular cost according to the BNL press release dated May 2. The ‘option’ refers to the ability for a company to obtain a 6-month time window to apply for a patent license for a particular technology, but only if they submit an intensive business plan outlining their strategy to market the technology.

The program, although only a pilot that will remain in effect until December 15, 2011, is aimed at building a better future in corporate science. “We believe the program will increase the number of successful companies and create new jobs that our nation needs — particularly clean energy jobs,” said Walter Copan, manager of Brookhaven Lab’s Office of Technology Commercialization and Partnerships, in BNL’s official press release.

Dr. Marburger, one of the most politically and scientifically astute proponents of this idea that science is a principle foundation of our future, is not too optimistic about federal spending on research down the line. “All ‘big science’ is at risk in the coming years, mainly because it is big and Congress is under extreme pressure to save money,” he said.

But he steadfastly stands by all forms of science, even the enormously costly projects like the RHIC particle accelerator. “These projects are not just ‘probing around for answers.’  They are part of a deep-seated passion that humanity has to understand the world it lives in…today we have extraordinary tools that are revealing astonishing aspects of our world,” he said. “This is serious stuff – as serious as the art and religion and literature that many people think are what make life worth living.”

Marburger even makes the claim that esoteric science is still supported by the public, despite them not understanding it. “Einstein is the world’s most popular scientist, and Feynman is a popular legend. People love the idea of black holes, dinosaurs, expanding universes, extra dimensions and space exploration,” he said.

What it comes down to for Marburger, and in a sense the entire scientific and political community that is pushing so hard to keep science aloft, is the universal benefits that the hundreds of thousands of projects all around the world are providing to everyone, not just the scientists doing the experiment.

“The public deserves to know why their most talented and productive members care so passionately about these things.  The public wants to share that passion, and it’s up to scientists to help.  The SSC scientists explained their search for the Higgs boson in a way that made it seem as if we were just looking for some more particles, like the ones we already found but smaller,” he said.

Marburger is referring to the theoretical Higgs boson particle that the largest particle accelerator on the planet, Switzerland’s LHC, is currently searching for. It is, as the Standard Model of particle physics suggests, the source of all particles’ mass.

“The idea of ‘explaining mass’ seems an odd thing to drive such passion, and in fact that’s not really what it’s all about.  What is at stake is a vision of the nature of all reality.  Try explaining that to your congressman.”

The cause is attributed to an unknown form of energy, and this energy makes up for nearly three fourths of the entire universe’s mass. Its name in scientific circles is dark energy, yet that is simply a placeholder until the truth is discovered. At Brookhaven National Lab, cosmologists study dark energy, as well as its companion dark matter, and conduct experiments in the hope of breaking new ground on the origins and current nature of our expanding universe.

By the end of the decade, these scientists hope that a new tool, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, will allow them to plunge even deeper into the depths of the sky. The telescope will allow them to collect enormous amounts of data with the hope that in these troves of information lays the key to understanding what exactly dark energy and dark matter are.

“All we know about them is empirical. We don’t really have any theoretical understanding of it,” says Erin Sheldon, a Brookhaven astrophysicist and cosmologist who works with the Dark Energy Survey, an internationally collaborative study that will begin collecting and analyzing data related to the mystery this fall. They will be using a four-meter mirror telescope with the ability to survey an expansive amount of space.

Dark energy and dark matter are two terms now commonly thrown around in academic circles, and even used by amateur physics and astronomy buffs, because of the alluring mystery they provide and the large amount of research being invested in the field of cosmology, or the study of the creation of the universe. But to the untrained mind, the two terms are easy to mix up. 

Dark energy makes up for between 72 and 74 percent of the universe’s mass-energy density, according to a number of reports from NASA and other organizations that are funded through the National Science Foundation. Its current and generalized definition is the unknown cause for the acceleration of the expansion of the universe.

Dark matter, on the other hand, constitutes for between 21 and 23 percent of the universe’s mass-energy density and is known as an invisible form of matter that is causing a noticeable discrepancy between what is actually present in faraway objects, like galaxies in distant clusters, and what we’re seeing using our current methods. “The problem is that dark matter doesn’t emit light, so we can only see its effect through gravity,” explains Sheldon.

Dark energy is by a wide margin the more complicated of the two. “Frankly, its vague to everybody, even us. There’s lots of other kinds of theories, but none of them are even appealing,” says Sheldon, explaining that the universe is thought to have expanded after the Big Bang, and then pulled inward due to gravity.

“But instead of slowing down, it looks like the universe started to speed up a few billion years ago,” he says. “This is a shock, and no one really has an explanation for it.”

Unlike dark matter, which was discovered in an elementary form in 1934, dark energy arose from the very recent discovery in 1998 of the expansion of the universe. The study of Type 1a (one- A) supernovae by the High-z Supernova Search Team posited this shocking rev- elation, which was then confirmed by Supernova Cosmology Project in 1999 and then numerous other studies that used various techniques in the years that followed. The core of the discovery by the High-z team lies in the fact that the light emitted by supernovas was red shifted, which means that those celestial objects are moving away from us if you analyze a spectrograph that translates light into wavelengths, but at an accelerating rate.

“We know there is something that accelerates the universe. We have the simplest theory, and you put in by hand and it explains the data,” says Anže Slosar, a cosmologist and astrophysicist who works alongside Sheldon at BNL, but in a separate project titled BOSS, or the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey.

Slosar is referring to the fact that dark energy is explainable, and only barely so, through the use of a sloppy mathematical constant thought up by Einstein decades ago. It is a term that, once inserted, helps coincide gravity with the obvious discrepancies in the mass-energy density of the universe that comes from its unexplainable acceleration and our lack of knowledge.

“In the late 1990s, people worked out that we need to put in the term in order to make everything work,” says Slosar. “You take your Einstein equation, and it turns out you can put the term in there and you can describe everything.”

“It works mathematically, but it’s not nice. We are hoping the real theory works more beautifully,” he adds. So basically, the scientists can make everything make sense on paper, but very much in the way a lazy physics student could ace a lab by working backward from the right answers and tweaking all the math. The scientists know what’s happening with dark energy, but not why or even where to look to find out.

The LSST telescope is projected to begin scanning the skies in 2019 after serious delays throughout the latter half of the last decade. Sheldon and Slosar will be some of the first scientists to analyze the data through their affiliation with BNL.

“Maybe with data, this breakthrough will happen,” says Slosar. But he also entertains the idea that this is an unreachable goal, that unification, a theory of everything and dark energy are just fleeting utopias in a scientist’s dreams. “It’s also possible that we will never reach this,” he says. “Then we are sort of screwed. If you don’t have more than one clue, then you can’t distinguish between the various ideas.”

“The idea is to get more data. Get more detail about the universe to see how fast it was moving over time and see how it started to speed it up,” says Sheldon.

“From our point of view, since we are experimenters, we’re just going to go and look and measure the best we can and shed some light on it, get some kind of clue.”

Employees stand for multiple hours in suffocating, greasy air with sweat pouring down their faces, all while obese assholes stuff their triple turkey burger with bacon order slips down their throats and Asians repeatedly forget to mention what they want on their Philly cheese steaks. It doesn’t look too easy-going, so I can understand why that one guy with thin moustache forcibly stuffs cardboard burger boxes with buns while wearing the most profound scowl imaginable, or why every employee seems to get immense joy out of not taking people’s orders for as long as possible.

But listen, the grilled cheese is literally dumb-proof…I made it as a ten-year-old and it came out fine, so it really doesn’t make much sense that nine out of ten times, they absolutely fuck up my and many others’ sandwiches.

Let me paint you the picture of a typical grilled cheese-ordering scenario at the SAC. You get in line with maybe 40 minutes until your class, which should be more than enough time to get something relatively small from the grill, eat it and be on your way.  Well, guess again. First, you wait until they decide to stop ignoring you while they fill those 10,000 turkey burger boxes that nobody will take because they get cold after 10 minutes of sitting on the pre-made shelf.

Once they actually look at your order, they do get it rolling relatively quickly. They spray the sandwich presser down, lay the bread and put on the cheese and then they are done. That’s it…that’s all the work it requires. Except for the fact that they just don’t give a shit and forget the sandwich is there almost every single time.

So you get to sit there and watch while they fill about three to four other orders and your grilled cheese starts to visibly bubble. You start to contemplate saying something to them like “Hey…I think that’s ready,” or “Please stop fucking up my day with your negligence.” But you don’t want to be too rude because well, let’s face it, if you’re ordering a grilled cheese you’re probably a meek person.

Then comes the climax of the exchange where one of the employees actually decides to look at their surroundings instead of mechanically cutting buns or emptying french fry baskets, and sees that they are on the verge of a kitchen fire. So they stroll over, open the tray and very clearly mutter some expletive as they gaze at the now mostly black slab of a sandwich. So what do they do? Instead of make a new one, which wouldn’t take more than another 5 minutes if they don’t forget about it again, they just take it off the press and hand it to you with no apology or anything.

Now your day sucks. You’re sitting in the SAC, now almost late to your class, and peeling off pieces of burnt cheese off quite possibly the worst grilled cheese ever brought into existence. Please, Charcoals workers, just stop being lazy and forgetful and destroying everything I love about the best sandwich on the planet.

By Nick Statt 

Following their performances at the SXSW festival in mid-March and a slew of other shows all throughout last week, Brooklyn-based indie four-piece Beach Fossils took the time to come out to Stony Brook on Thursday for part of the on-going Stony Brooklyn series. Despite an absolutely horrendous crowd and a number of apparent sound problems that University Cafe employees didn’t seem to address quickly enough, Beach Fossils played with an astounding intensity that displayed how able they are to morph their sound to their liking when it comes to live sets.

Opening for front man Dustin Payseur and his crew of reverb-loving musicians was a rather interesting band called Robbers that almost no one in the crowd had heard of. Headed by the lanky, mustached Andrew Accardi, who donned an impressive afro and equally impressive sea-foam green guitar, Robbers treaded the line between an early 2000s jam band and the explosive, swirling sounds of experimental rock.

It was an odd mix, but they pulled it off well. Their set was made even better by Accardi’s hilarious stage presence, which involved absolutely absurd facial expressions and admirable body wiggling while he thrashed on with the rhythm guitar parts. Interesting side note, Accardi is the brother of guitarist Vince Accardi of fellow LI band Brand New that I guess some people have probably heard of.

Beach Fossils hit the stage shortly after ten, which was refreshing considering how much bullshit waiting people had to do for Das Racist’s 30 minute set at the last Stony Brooklyn. Immediately, Payseur noticed some problems with the sound, and after opening with the namesake song from their new EP, What A Pleasure, he called for every instrument to be turned up and the reverb to be dialed all the way up.

Throughout the next few tracks, core members Payseur and bassist John Pena, who are listed as the only members of the band while drummer and guitarist Zachary Cole Smith and Tom Gardner are simply touring members, complained further about the lack of reverb and volume. At one point, a crowd member jokingly told them to ask for reverb on the reverb, and Payseur repeated that into the mic with a smile. So it seemed that they weren’t necessarily having a bad time for the first half of the show; they were just a little pissed off about the sound quality.

After they got everything in order more or less, the show really picked up. They got to the standout track of the new EP, “Cayler,” and guitarist Smith and Payseur began literally dancing up and down the stage at each guitar break while Pena and Gardner threw everything into the bass and drums. The track is normally played relatively slowly as heard on the EP, but Beach Fossils sped it up for the live version and Gardner’s drumming was far more explosive and upbeat, adding to the overall intensity of the performance.

The strangest thing to happen throughout the night was the fact that people actually started leaving during Beach Fossils’ set. For a band that just played SXSW and is set up to play SUNY Purchase’s Culture Shock on April 15, it made no sense. My best guess is that people simple didn’t care, and those who really wanted to see the guys play had to deal with cigarette-smoking assholes who kept coming in and out the front door in their hopeless attempts to turn the concert exclusively into a social scene.

Despite the shortcomings, Beach Fossils rounded out their roughly hour-long performance with some hits from their debut full length, like “Daydream” and “Golden Age,” and only got more and more into the performance as the night went on. Finally, by the last three our four songs the crowd was moving along with them. So it’s great that we got a band that is just now exploding in popularity, but it sucks we had to greet them with a shitty crowd that couldn’t have cared less and sub-par sound guys who didn’t like to listen.

It was the February of 1985, and Robert Crease sat across the table from the Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman in his Caltech office. The subject was unification–the idea that there lies in wait a universal theory of everything. It was Einstein’s dream, and in 2011 is still an unachieved goal.

“So we aren’t any closer to unification than we were in Einstein’s time?” Crease asked. He and Feynman had been discussing the Standard Model, a cornerstone of modern particle physics that is considered to be almost a theory of everything, but still not quite there because it leaves out principle subjects like general relativity.

“It’s a crazy question!” Feynman said in anger. “We’re certainly closer. We know more. And if there’s a finite amount to be known, we obviously must be closer to having the knowledge, okay? I don’t know how to make this into a sensible question…it’s all so stupid. All these interviews are so damned useless.”

It was at that point that Feynman got up from his desk and cut the inter- view off. Crease heard Feynman yell from the corridor, “The history of these things is nonsense! You’re trying to make something difficult and complicated out of something that’s simple and beautiful.”

It was Crease’s line of questioning, and his mindset, that made Feynman so mad, despite Crease not being a physicist. He is in fact a science journalist, but more importantly, Crease is a philosopher.

***

Robert Crease received his B.A. in philosophy from Amherst College in 1976. But science wouldn’t begin to play a large role in his life until he attended graduate school in the 1980s at Columbia University, where he would later receive his Ph.D in 1987.

It was during those grad school years that Crease found his love of science journalism, and it was then that the foundations of his knowledge as a science historian and later Brookhaven National Lab’s historian were born.

“I was really into philosophy, but also I avoided science courses. I think if I had a really good science teacher, I would have become a scientist,” Crease explains. “I didn’t. I had a really good philosophy teacher so I wound up as a philosopher.”

Even at the age of 57, Crease has a remarkably youthful face marked by cleanly cropped facial hair and a shaved head, with a pair of expensive frames resting on the brim of his nose. His short stature is absolutely dwarfed by the encyclopedic knowledge that has made him both an expert in subjects like philosophical performance theory and able to discuss and understand heavy-ion physics with particle accelerator researchers.

It was with his old Amherst roommate Charles Mann that the science journalism path ignited while Crease was still in grad school.

“This friend of ours had some kind of publishing company, where she would take Italian references books and she would publish them in English,” ex- plains Mann, who is now an accomplished writer of non-fiction, such as the New York Times bestseller 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. “She came up with the scheme to make an illustrated science dictionary. She hired a bunch of free- lancers and Bob and myself were two of them.”

At one point, Crease and Mann needed to write up something on a particle accelerator and happened to know that Brookhaven National Lab housed their very own in the depths of the Upton, N.Y. facility.

“We were really intrigued, and then they told us that this huge particle accelerator, called ISABELLE, was in deep trouble,” Mann says. ISABELLE was Brookhaven’s proton-proton colliding beam accelerator, partially built by the government before the project was can- celled in 1983. “We looked in the New York Times, which hadn’t covered it. So we wrote to the New York Times Magazine and said you guys are missing out on a huge story, the most important physics story in the country.” Crease and Mann were given the green light to write it up.

The article got some attention, but most importantly was a springboard for both Crease and Mann into the realm of science journalism. “On Bob’s part, I think, it was really just because he was interested in the subject. It wasn’t with the idea that he was going to be a science journalist,” Mann says.

“It was just something on the outside, something that was fun to do,” Crease says. “I would do science journalism to basically support myself as a grad student.”

Since then, Crease has continuously expanded into the published field of philosophy and science. He has authored or co-authored twelve books, and is working on his thirteenth, titled World in the Balance: The Historic Quest for an Absolute System of Measurement, due out this October.

The interview with Richard Feynman in which Crease was kicked out of his office was for his first book, The Second Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics, which he co-wrote with Mann in 1986. It was left out from The Second Creation, but was included in James Gleick’s Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman after the author found the conversation in Feyman’s correspondence files and got Crease’s permission to use it (Feynman died four years before Genius was published in 1992).

Crease has written a monthly column, called “Critical Point,” in the international physics magazine Physics World since May of 2000, but has written for a multitude of science publications throughout his academic and journalistic career, including The Scientist, Smithsonian and Atlantic Monthly.

After receiving his degree from Columbia in 1987, Crease joined Stony Brook University’s philosophy department and is now chairman. In 1989, he joined Brookhaven as a part-time historian. He now has an ID card, an office and can interview anyone he likes.

“The proximity to Brookhaven made me realize that it was a much more interesting place than I had even thought about,” he says. “So I began to work more seriously on the history of Brookhaven and looked into its research.”

“He has an intimate knowledge of Brookhaven Lab, having developed relationships with many of the influential individuals through the years, both on the science side and in management,” says Mona Rowe, the communications manager at BNL who has worked with Crease for many years.

“The laboratory has had a colorful history, and sometimes I think Bob is even gleeful that he is lucky to have such interesting subject matter,” she says. “Yet the story is in the telling. He’s a gifted storyteller.”

Crease’s storytelling expertise is showcased in Making Science: A Biography of Brookhaven National Laboratory, as well as seven published articles on the laboratory. He co-founded the Laboratory History conferences, which have been held bi-annually since 1999, and in 2007 he was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society in the United States, and the Institute of Physics in England.

***

Understanding science journalism means understanding the unique relationship between the public, who know almost nothing about any given field, and the scientific community. Crease has come to know this relationship very well and has aimed to be what he calls an “articulate spokesman for science.”

“The problem is not transparency; it’s not like politicians,” Crease says. “The problem is something different. Almost all scientists I’ve talked to are more than happy to talk to reporters.” The problem Crease is talking about lies in understanding and clarity. It’s the largest hurdle a science journalist faces, and the largest barrier between the scientific community and the public.

“The average per- son has an extremely confused idea about how science works. If you look at things like the debate over climate change, on all sides there are extraordinarily mistaken ideas about how science works,” explains Mann, who, after working on his and Crease’s first book and penning a multitude of his own non-fiction pieces, understands the intricacies of communicating science.

Mann explains that in both cases, a distinct lack of understanding of the scientific process clouds the public’s idea of certainty and probability. “If people had a better handle on that, you would see a lot of these public policy disputes that would make people not want to bang their head on the floor,” he adds.

One of the principle examples Crease uses to explain the complexity of communication is the supposed “Doomsday” scenarios posed by critics of particle accelerators. The theory is that particle accelerators, which amass enormous amounts of energy as they whip particles around near the speed of light, could possibly create a black hole by creating a new form of matter that eats all other forms of matter.

“That’s the fiction that RHIC will create a black hole to destroy the universe. It’s absurd,” Crease says, referring to Brookhaven’s RHIC particle accelerator.

“Scientists look into that, and they can’t find any credible way, but they al- ways say that they can rule it out only with a certain amount of error,” Crease says. “Now there’s the problem. Theoretically you can disprove it, but the only people who can understand the argument are nuclear scientists,” he adds.

“Why should the public trust an argument that they can’t understand?”

Crease, being a science journalist, swiftly and concisely sums up the debunking argument, citing the lottery fallacy. “In the lottery there is a winning ticket. So even if it’s a million to one, there’s going to be a winning ticket. But here you don’t know, and there’s no reason to suspect one (a winning ticket). So it’s an interesting philosophical issue.

In this analogy, the lottery ticket is the chance that a particle accelerator will create a black hole, meaning the possibility of a black hole being created is as probable as any other science fiction or fantasy occurrence. Because scientists can rule out the probability only to a certain degree does not mean that the probability exists.

Given these problems of miscommunication and the barriers of under- standing, Crease doesn’t see an easy solution. “In principle, there should be a lot more coverage because the issues that scientists are researching are important, but there isn’t,” Crease says. “It’s because there’s not that much of a readership for it, and there’d be more if there were more articulate spokesman for science, but you can’t blame the newspapers. It’s partly the public, and it’s partly the lack of good writers about science.”

“A good journalist can make any- thing seem interesting.”

***

The connections between philosophy and science run deep, all the way back to the Greeks in fact, and these connections continue to drive the over- lapping of the fields today. From Copernicus and Galileo’s scientific bouts with the Catholic Church to the “doomsday scenarios” of particle accelerators like Brookhaven’s RHIC, philosophical implications can be found everywhere in the umbrella field of science that many people consider to be solely fact-driven.

Another byproduct of these connections is both the creation of and in- creasing need for the insight of thinkers like Crease who have dedicated their lives to understanding this enmeshing of focuses.

“I think anyone interested in philosophy ought to know what science is all about because science is a method of inquiry that has proved hugely successful,” Crease says. “But is it the only method of inquiry? How is it different from ordinary methods of inquiry? What has made it so successful? So questions like that are deep philosophical questions.”

Here at Stony Brook, Crease gets to take this ideology to the front lines of higher education with a class he co- teaches with physicist Alfred Goldhaber, a man as outstandingly encyclopedic in his understanding of highly advanced physics as Crease is with philosophy and science history. It’s titled The Quantum Moment, and it explores the beginnings and later implications of quantum mechanics, in not only a scientific and philosophical sense, but also through a literary and popular culture lens.

“Basically, I get to ask him questions and he gets to ask me questions,” Crease says on the overall structure of the co-taught class. “He starts to explain something, and I don’t get it, so I ask him to explain and other people in the class ask him to explain, and then it’s my turn.”

Goldhaber found that working with a philosopher like Crease didn’t involve a dramatic bridging of gaps. “In the class, almost always we are on the same wavelength,” Goldhaber says. “I think our overall views are sufficiently similar that there has been rather little ‘in- stilling’ of different general perspectives,” he adds.

While Goldhaber and Crease may be able to tune to the same general perspective, it’s the specific perspectives that make their co-teaching such an insightful and valuable tool to students.

Can you grasp both the full philosophical side of an issue while simultaneously understanding the scientific perspective? “Ideally,” Crease says, “but it never works that way because you can’t fit it all into one brain,” he says.

Crease points to a model piranha sitting in the center of his table in the spacious office on the second floor of Harriman Hall. Its teeth glow with a yellow rust and its eyes bulge out like ballooning beach balls.

“You’re looking at it sort of head on and I’m looking at it from the side,” Crease observes, pointing at the lifeless model. “There is no right way to look at it. Because of who you are and where you’re sitting, you have one perspective and I have the other. It is not like one perspective is better than the other and we certainly couldn’t merge the two perspectives into one…It’s just the nature of perception.”

For Crease, understanding unique perspectives is his specialty. It’s what has allowed the philosopher to acrobatically break down complex scientific concepts, and delve as deep as into those fields as any traditional philosopher does into the works of Kant or Nietzsche. When he was kicked out of Richard Feynman’s office back in 1985, Crease was simply upholding a multi- disciplinary mantra that any journalist, philosopher or scientist should strive for – asking the right questions, no matter what the consequences.