A senior scientist at the Computing Division, Cooper has sailed competitively for 25 years and finished his thirteenth "Mac" race. He sailed aboard Tenacity, a 34-foot Olson racer-cruiser, with co-owners Bill Hood and Dick O'Connell, and finished 80th out of 137 small sailboats. Because not all sailboats are created equal, Cooper believes it was a decent finish. "We understood perfectly well that we'd end up near the middle," Cooper explained.

Sailing Tenacity or any sailboat, Cooper says, is a lot like running an experiment. "You have a plan, but as they say, 'no military plan survives engagement,' and no sailing plan survives the wind and the water," he said. "You have to take what nature gives you and deal with it."

Cooper joked that Tenacity's crew never has to buy parts because they have everything imaginable. "During this race we carried nine or 10 sails and used all but three," Cooper recalled. But on 22,300 square miles of unpredictable surface water, those parts come in handy. "Most of the time you're sailing the boat, but some of the time it's sailing you," Cooper said. "Evil stuff can happen." As for the mid-race storm, the sea-worthy scientist said it didn't trouble him at all. "I slept right through it," Cooper said. "It's a line of thunderstorms that gets my attention."
--Dave Mosher

*From left, front row: Dick O'Connell, Sean Mattingly, Larry Zabrowski and Peter Cooper. Back row: Brian Devries, Tim Streiff and Mike Walczak.

Alain Connes's noncommutative geometry offers an alternative to string theory. In fact, being directly testable, it may be better than string theory

If there is a mathematician eagerly waiting for the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva to start up next year, it is Alain Connes of the Collège de France in Paris. Like many physicists, Connes hopes that the Higgs particle will show up in detectors. The Higgs is the still missing crowning piece of the so-called Standard Model--the theoretical framework that describes subatomic particles and their interactions. For Connes, the discovery of the Higgs, which supposedly endows the other particles with mass, is crucial: its existence, and even its mass, emerges from the arcane equations of a new form of mathematics called noncommutative geometry, of which he is the chief inventor.

Connes's idea was to extend the relation between geometric space and its commutative algebra of Cartesian coordinates, such as latitude and longitude, to a geometry based on noncommutative algebras. In commutative algebra, the product is independent of the order of the factors: 3 x 5 = 5 x 3. But some operations are noncommutative.
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