This morning I received an email from someone called “Grrrl Einstein” today which read:
I am creating a Physics Calendar for the Holiday season, and I am including twelve entities. So far I have:
- Newton’s Laws
- The Dirac equation/Schrodinger equation
- The Clifford Algebra defining the Dirac gamma matrices
-
E=mc2/Einstein’s equations/postulates and/or some solution of them, such as the Schwarzschild solution
- The principle of least action
- Maxwell’s equations
- E=hv
- The Yang-Mills Lagrangian
- The Schwinger-Dyson equations or something else related to functional methods
- Stokes’ Theorem
- Entropy
What would be a good String Theory equation to round it out? Any things I should include/exclude?
She also says:
Continue reading ‘Twelve Days of Physics’
Well, you’re sitting there at the desk, so might as well put on the radio to keep yourself company. Do in on the web, and I suggest that you listen to:
Radio Lab episode #205
This one was about Space. It has a lot of good stuff in it: excellent speakers, very good clips, and playful (rather successfully, surprisingly often) presenters. My favourite bit? Neil DeGrasse Tyson being interviewed about our place in the universe. If you’re not an expert on the anatomy of the idea, please have a listen, since this is one of the best (and quite funny) layperson’s quick descriptions I’ve heard on the subject.
Tim Ferris (on the unlikelihood or likelihood of travelling vast distances for expeditions in space) and Brian Greene (on the geometry of our universe - another good layperson’s level chat) are also in this segment, just before. Direct mp3 file link to that particular piece here. Main link here for all the other really good segments.
-cvj
So I must apologize. I went to the preview of the Griffith Observatory so long ago now and did promise to blog about it with more than just one nice picture, but it did not happen. Partly because I had to go back across the Atlantic to do some work, and then got ill over the weekend I was planning to do it, and then...
Anyway, here are some of my thoughts. First note that my two week delay means that this is no longer a scoop, since even the LA Times had a spread on the whole thing on Thursday. A rather nice one as well. I urge you to consult it for a lovely pull-out graphic of the whole site. There is also a special website with picture tours, nifty 360 degree interactive shots of the spaces, and other information. The Griffith opened yesterday.
What they’ve done over the last four or five years is simply shut down the entire building and rethink and redo a great deal of it. How to preserve the lovely 70 year old landmark, while making it even better? Simple question - simple answer: Get $93 million for your project (I find this number, the earth-sun distance in miles, suspicious), and then go underneath the existing building and hollow out about the same amount of space that is has, but underground. Fill it with lots of goodies. And I mean lots and lots. What goodies? We’ll see.
Continue reading ‘Some Observations at Griffith Observatory’
Spotted in the windows of a Department store (Hermes?) in Dublin (click for larger):
They are trying to invoke a car that has been taken apart and draped with splendid Continue reading ‘Fashionably Deconstructed’
It’s a pleasantly foggy morning here on the USC campus. It is 7:00am now (at least at start of writing), and it will all burn off in a few hours, I imagine, to reveal the sunny sky waiting for us. But right now it reminds me of the Cambridge morning of a couple of weeks ago. A foggy Saturday morning in fact. I took that photo of the spider web I used on Halloween with that mist in the background.
That Saturday of celebration of Andrew’s work (The Andrew Chamblin Memorial Conference) at Cambridge was a remarkable experience. (See here for my first post on Andrew, with tributes.) I was exhausted through a good deal of it, since I had eight hour jetlag, but I’m so glad I went, and that I could contribute a talk. I met many old friends and colleagues, drawn mostly from the UK and European side of Andrew’s collection of friends, collaborators, and admirers in the field.
There were talks by former collaborators of Andrew’s: Gary Gibbons, myself, Roberto Emparan, Robert Caldwell, Raphael Bousso, and Stephen Hawking (who also guided some of Andrew’s thesis work). Gary, in “Discrete Symmetries and Gravity”, talked about Andrew’s early Oxford and Cambridge work on various discrete symmetries in physics, particularly those of a geometrical origin. He’d played with various ideas in this context, including some applications to problems in cosmology and other areas of physics. Gary described some of this Continue reading ‘Memories, Physics, and Celebration’
Due to travel, work, and illness, I’m very behind in a number of posts I was hoping to have brought to you by now. I’m planning a big session of playing catch-up tomorrow, and so please accept my apologies for the lateness of some things I promised.
Until then, I’ll leave you with another lovely Peter Goin “Narrative Photogramâ€, part of the series that I showed you before at the Metro/7th Subway stop on the Red Line.
They’ve put a lot of effort into those subway stations. Not nearly enough people use them or even know about them, even though they live and work in the city. Consider Continue reading ‘Promises, Promises’
“According to So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish, God’s Final Message To His Creation is written in fire in letters thirty feet high on the far side of the Quentulus Quazgar Mountains in the land of Sevorbeupstry on the planet of Preliumtarn, which orbits the star Zarss, which is located in the Grey Binding Fiefdoms of Saxaquine. The long path to the message is lined with souvenir stands at spaced-out intervals.
When Marvin reads the message, it says, “We apologise for the inconvenience.” However, Fenchurch’s reaction suggests that the message she saw was the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything (and that presumably, therefore, the Message is personalized to each viewer).”
–Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Or perhaps this* is God’s Final Message:
Continue reading ‘God’s Final Message?’
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
“So are you the Talent?”
“Uh… Yes… Maybe.”
“You’re the Physicist?”
“Yes.”
“You’re a real Physicist? Not just playing one?”
“I’m… real.”
Snippet of conversation between myself and a woman from the art department at the studio, while we stood waiting for our green tea to brew. The floor is full of tables all around, mostly occupied with various people sitting at them fiddling with Macs. (Macs everywhere, as I’ve come to expect from the people in the Industry.) There’s a serious-looking table with more senior looking people discussing something in earnest, and another serious-looking table with people editing video on more Macs. All the tables are serious, of course, but overall there is a fun atmosphere. There’s also a big situation board that is consulted regularly by groups of people. It is covered in bright yellow stick-notes covered in writing that are being moved around. There are people coming in and out with a sense of purpose, and some of the crew I am with 
are milling around with bits of equipment. All very exciting-looking. It is all made a bit comical by this totally out of place and thoroughly splendid trio of bright red chandeliers that are hanging down from the ceiling over what looks like the head table for the senior folk. Strange but well-appreciated quirk of decoration, for what is otherwise a high-ceilinged warehouse-type space.
***
The situation? Shooting some fun things about physics for a TV show. It will air on a station near you (in the USA) next year some time. Details then. We converted a corner of one of our teaching labs at USC into a mini-studio:
Joe Vandiver, the director of our teaching labs, got to bring out some nice little demos Continue reading ‘Tales From The Industry, VIII’
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