Have the “troubles” caused by string theory begun to run so deep so as to affect our high schools? Heavens yes! Well, at least one high school in Oregon anyway. Hurrah!
This from the Siemens Foundation press release about the winners of their annual high school science and technology competition:
Dmitry Vaintrob, a senior at South Eugene High School in Eugene, Oregon, won the $100,000 Grand Prize scholarship in the individual category for exciting research in an abstract new area of math called string topology.
I don’t really know what “string topology” is (as opposed to just topology applied to string theory), so I went to their site to read the synopsis of this prize winner, and I Continue reading ‘Winning Combinations’
Just caught a Futurama episode on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim. All I can say is: Go and find the episode called “Time Keeps on Slipping”. It is hilarious. It is a brilliant mixture of physics and basketball jokes. Time is slipping uncontrollably due to an interplanetary basketball game…. Earth has been challenged by the planet Globetrotter, for … “No reason - absolutely no stakes beyond the shame of defeat”. (Found a random site here with some information that may or may not be helpful.)
Two random very funny (in context) lines I sort of remember (not accurate):
Continue reading ‘Timely Futurama’
I meant to tell you about this on Thursday or Friday, but I had to focus on the Southern California String Seminar, and so did not get to it sooner. So you might not get to listen to it as part of a Sunday afternoon relaxation.
The Royal Society gave an award to Stephen Hawking on Thursday, and the BBC took the opportunity to make a special effort to cover some very good science discussion, as a sort of away mission for the Radio 4 Today program. You can go to the Royal Society’s site with all of the interviews (with Martin Rees, Stephen Hawking, Lewis Wolpert, and John Krebs among others) on various subjects. The last two interviews have comments about ethical implications of scientific research, and about whether the public can trust the information they are given by scientists, respectively. I’ve not listened to those yet, but I bet they’ll be interesting.
You can listen to the whole thing in one continuous block by going to Radio 4’s listen again archive for Radio 4’s Today programme, clicking on the Thursday link (before it gets over-written by the next Thursday programme).
Radio 4’s In Our Time last week also had some interesting material. It was all about the speed of light. This is particularly timely in view of the [sometimes morbidly fascinating] discussion going on about varying the speed of light on another thread. The programme features John Barrow (Cambridge), Iwan Morus (Universirt of Wales, Aberystwyth), and Jocelyn Bell Burns (Oxford). Programme here. (Although you might have to go to the archive page here after Thursday to find this episode.)
Enjoy.
-cvj
(*Thanks Ed Copeland!)
[Update: Andrew Jaffe also talks about these programmes.]
Well, in the fine and tedious tradition of various huge Hollywood movies (perhaps most recently Batman Begins), in showing the following picture I probably should have used the blog post title “I gotta get me one of those”, or some slight variant:
… but I’ll spare you the cliché. This car is part of a fantasy that I (and some others) Continue reading ‘Coiled’
Well, it is midnight and I am only on page 12 of the notes I am writing to present as a talk in the Southern California String Seminar tomorrow at 9:15am. Don’t try this at home - prepare talks early, ok?
Where is the seminar being held? UCLA! What University am I from? USC! What event happens tomorrow besides my (hopefully not too terrible) talk? The big USC vs UCLA head to head in College Football. If USC wins, they go to the championship game, apparently. Yay.
So the usual articles about the cross town rivalry between the two institutions have shown up this week in print and on National radio and TV. There are two amusing (and interesting) ones that I looked at - one in LA Weekly (about academic performance, faculty recruitment, student acheivement, and much more - illustration above from it, by Deanna Staffo), and one in the LA Times (mostly about nightlife). Have a look. There are dozens of others -just type USC into the LA Times search engine for example. You learn things about both universities as well from those two, so it is not without some point. For example, our young ones clearly go to cooler bars, for a start, as you can see from the pictures in the LA Times article.
(Strange that the articles do not mention the cooperation and general fun had when their high energy physics groups get together to discuss topics in string theory and other physics. Very odd omission indeed.)
I would say a lot more about the articles, but time is not on my side, so I will instead leave you with a blog post I wrote (“Drag the Bear”) on December 2nd last year, upon encountering something strange on campus:
Continue reading ‘Grin and Bear It’
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