Spencer Klein/Courtesy

Right now, UC Berkeley graduate Zigmund Kermish should be preparing to launch a balloon-based telescope from Antarctica. This instrument, which would rise 120,000 feet into the atmosphere, collects data that might provide insight into the physics behind the Big Bang.

He would be on the ice by Nov. 1 if the U.S. government hadn’t shut down.

But without a spending bill to fund government operations, the National Science Foundation ran out of funds for the U.S. Antarctic Program about Monday, forcing a delay on Kermish’s work as well as that of other campus researchers. The shutdown comes at a crucial time for these scientists — the start of Antarctic summer, when many researchers head south to upgrade or begin projects.

Even if the federal government were to reopen tomorrow, Kermish said, researchers would not fully recover from the delay.

The base out of which these balloons are launched opens only for this period of about three months, during which weather further limits the time available for preparation and launch. Kermish, who is working on this project as a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University, said this instrument has been developing since about 2008.

Now, they must wait another year to collect data.

In an Oct. 8 statement, the NSF said it will continue to staff research stations in Antarctica at the minimum level, called “caretaker status,” required to keep people and property safe. What constitutes caretaker status, however, is still unclear to researchers.

“The rule is only essential operations can continue,” said Elizabeth George, a UC Berkeley doctoral student working on another project, the South Pole Telescope. “So in principle, you can say, ‘My equipment’s going to freeze — that is essential,’ but the reality of the situation is those decisions about what’s essential are not really made by scientists.”

The South Pole Telescope detects remaining light from the Big Bang, according to George, which can be used to study the early universe. Regardless of what the NSF decides to do, she said, any delay can wreak logistical havoc on such a large enterprise.

“Anything you do in Antarctica is driven by logistics: You need food, you need fuel, you need transportation,” said Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory senior scientist Spencer Klein, who is involved with the Berkeley IceCube group, which also does work in Antarctica. “Things that are just minor details here are enormous down there.”

George fears that, because of the current delay, the fuel required by these research stations will not arrive in time to start them up for next year. In that case, South Pole Telescope researchers will lose a year of data.

Additionally, contract workers, who agree to work in Antarctica for a set period of time, will be out of a job if a lack of funding prevents their deployment.

Klein faces similar issues in his South Pole project. The IceCube Neutrino Observatory — one cubic kilometer in volume — detects subatomic particles called neutrinos, which possess incredibly high energies. Scientists hope they can see how the particles reached such high energies by tracking their direction.

Klein said the NSF is unlikely to risk damaging equipment, considering the organization has already invested $242 million in IceCube. According to Klein, the observatory needs at least two people at the South Pole to maintain the technology and collect data. If data collection continues but the shutdown prevents researchers from flying down to upgrade the hardware this Antarctic summer, he said, the sacrifice will be survivable but not ideal.

“I just feel pretty helpless about the situation,” Klein said. “Everybody’s kind of making this up as they go.”

Contact Melissa Wen at mwen@dailycal.org.

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On Wednesday, the board will release and then vote on the names of finalists for the position, which was vacated by Leah Wilson, former board president. Wilson resigned on March 31 after taking a position with the Alameda County Superior Court, the first time a school board member has resigned since 1909.

The applicants include two campus professors, the campus director of local government and community relations, and a scientist and former deputy director of the Nuclear Science Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, among others.

The candidates are Ty Alper, Peter Bloomsburgh, Michael Bolgatz, Meleah Hall, Spencer Klein, Dan Lindheim, Satish Rao, Margit Roos-Collins, Julie Sinai and Mark Zoidis.

Because the new board member will serve a partial term — until Nov. 30, 2014 — he or she needs to be able to “hit the ground running” and “immediately be an integral and contributing member of the board,” said board president Karen Hemphill.

In the coming months, the board will be learning to work with a new superintendent, “all while focusing on bridging the opportunity gap that exists along racial lines in our district,” Hemphill said in an email, referencing the city’s 2020 Vision program, which aims to close the city’s achievement gap by the year 2020.

Alper, a professor at the UC Berkeley School of Law, has seen this gap himself, as both he and his wife went through Berkeley public schools as children.

“I know firsthand how important it is for all children in this city to get the educational opportunities that will enable them to thrive,” Alper said, echoing many of the sentiments of his fellow candidates.

Many candidates who come from analytical backgrounds, such as computer science and financial advising, plan to bring their analytical minds to the job to address the numbers of the achievement gap in Berkeley public schools as well as those of the district’s budget.

Other applicants stressed the importance of maintaining solid and open relationships with the community.

“We need to be meeting the needs of our kids and families in relation to a positive education outcome,” Sinai, campus director of local government and community relations, said. “We as a community need to come together to provide coordinated support.”

The board has 60 days from the time Wilson’s resignation was submitted to fill the vacancy, according to the Berkeley city charter. It plans to fill the seat nine days before the deadline at its May 8 board meeting at the latest.

Megan Messerly covers city government. Contact her at mmesserly@dailycal.org and follow her on Twitter @meganmesserly.

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Stuart Jay Freedman, a world-renowned nuclear physicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a UC Berkeley professor, died Nov. 9 while at a scientific conference in New Mexico. He was 68.

Freedman was born in Los Angeles on Jan. 13, 1944. He graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in engineering physics from UC Berkeley in 1965 and eventually returned to the campus to take up a joint position as a professor in the campus physics department and a senior scientist in Berkeley lab’s Nuclear Science Division.

He is known for research he did ruling out the existence of naked quarks — which are single subatomic particles — and faster-than-light particles as well as work he did as a graduate student at UC Berkeley studying quantum mechanics.

Freedman was also at the forefront of nuclear physics study at the national level. He worked for the National Academy of Sciences beginning in 2001 and also advised the U.S. Department of Energy on which industries the nation should focus its resources on.

“He was one of the leaders in the physics community and in the area of very difficult, important experiments where you look for new laws of nature,” said Roberto Peccei, formerly UCLA’s vice chancellor for research and an assistant professor at Stanford University when Freedman was there in the late 1970s. “We’ve lost an enormous ability to do that, and we’ve lost a great man.”

Freedman was known for an interest in unconventional theories.

“He did a lot of experiments that were unorthodox — things that people did not expect,” said Berkeley lab researcher Robert Cahn. “He did a number of experiments that found a lot of surprising results.”

One of Freedman’s experiments showed that heavy neutrinos, subatomic particles, weigh 100,000 times less than previously believed, according to Cahn.

“He was always looking far into the future,” said Spencer Klein, a deputy director of Berkeley lab’s Nuclear Sciences Division and Freedman’s colleague since 1994. “He worked extremely hard. He was able to juggle an impressively large number of projects and keep up with them.”

Besides being a talented scientist, Freedman was known for his encouragement of new researchers and students.

“He liked human company very much, especially the company of young people, and was always willing to take the time to encourage his undergraduate and graduate students,” said James Symons, a colleague of Freedman’s at Berkeley lab. “He was happiest when two or three people had dropped in to discuss quite different things and could learn from each other.”

Outside of the lab, Freedman had a passion for flying, sailing and motor vehicles. He loved the thrill of piloting, skydiving, riding motorcycles and driving sports cars, according to his wife, Joyce Freedman.

“He was a man of great integrity, had a fabulous wit and always a twinkle in his eyes,” she said. “He was devoted to his students, postdocs and any young person coming up through the sciences that he felt needed the support and mentoring.”

Contact Lindsey at llohman@dailycal.org.

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