I mean the good type of Hummers: Hummingbirds! (Some types of which are already visiting the garden even though the flowers they like are most not ready yet. One of my Budlea plants died - from the frosts I think - and another is ill. I expect to get three more of them from the market this week. The hummingbirds like them (butterflies love them), although they prefer the Mexican Sage plants which are right Continue reading ‘Hummers’
Well, it’s Friday, and the end of the week of standard work days, although not of course the end of the working week. I’m sure I do not speak only for myself when I say that this job does not really get switched off at a specific time every day (as you’ve seen), and it certainly is not contained to any specific days of the week. But I do scale things back quite a bit on Saturdays and Sundays and try to focus more on other things in my life (there are exceptional circumstances, of course). So this will be the last in this short series of “day in the life” posts describing my work day. (The last one was here. You can find all the others listed at the bottom.)
8:30am Finally I managed to get a lie-in! Unfortunately this is probably due to poor sleeping due to the fact that I accidentally fell asleep with the radio on (with no sleep function set) and so my entire night was full of the BBC and NPR. Getting ready this morning I realize that every story on NPR is familiar because I probably heard it at 4:00am already. I have poor reception in my bedroom, and so I listen to the radio over the web on a computer. It did not go to sleep, since the radio streaming keeps it active. If I want to fall asleep listening to something, I usually overcome this shortcoming by listening to a podcast, but this time I did not get to starting it before I dozed off. Anyway, tea, cornmeal porridge, coffee. No shirt ironing as I don’t need to be terribly professorial-looking today, much (see below).
I’ll be in semi-stealth mode again today (like Wednesday), in order to focus on research matters, but only semi. Again, I’ve avoided scheduling any meetings today (except one - see below). Although I do not leave for work, I settle down to dealing with various administrative matters. This starts with emails about next week’s colloquium, a future colloquium, and things of that nature. Also check blog, and add entries and begin to clean up the post about yesterday for later appearance.
Continuing the week, here’s Thursday:
I really only get the LA Times on Thursdays, with any regularity. Mostly because I like the Weekend section, which has listings of events coming up, and some interesting feature article or two about some LA thing or person or other. They’ve been interesting to me more often than not, on balance. Not always hugely interesting, but enough for a good 25 minutes read on the bus. The Home section can be good too. So I get it just in case there’s something good. Indeed, it pays off, and there are some good things. I’ll point two of them out in some later blog posts, I hope.
Continuing, here’s a short notebook on Wednesday.
Soon time to sign up to help judge the California State Science Fair. I hope I can make it. Just to reassure you that not every entry is another trebuchet (just the physics, mechanics, etc., section and you’ll know what I mean), here’s a story about two schoolgirls from New Zealand, Jenny Suo and Anna Devathasan, who decided to test the claims of GlaxoSmithKline that their product - cartoned ready-to-drink Ribena - has high Vitamin C content. They set out to show that cheaper drinks were less healthy than Ribena, and found to their surprise that there were only trace amounts of Vitamin C at best.
I’m a bit shocked by this since I love Ribena, and grew up with it for years. I seem to remember that some of the largest writing on the packaging is about the huge amount of Vitamin C that you’re going to get. Admittedly, it’s not the vitamin C aspect that attracted me to it, of course -I just love the taste! But all the same, it’s a bit disappointing….
From an article by Mike Steere*:
Continue reading ‘A Fair Cop’
Continuing, this was the Tuesday:
Well, it starts out:
When physicists marry physicists, the beginning may be a ‘big bang,’ but issues of life, love, and family gravitate toward the universal.
Ok. Stop there. That’s way too many physics puns and double entendre in one sentence. It’s a nice article by Mike Perricone in Symmetry magazine about physics couples. Physicists who marry physicists.
Physics, families, careers, children… it’s all in there. Have a read.
Best of all, perhaps, there’s this wedding cake to the left, which is just - Wow! (Click for larger view. More in the article itself.) I wonder what my mum will think of this? She makes cakes - wonderful ones, and can decorate them with flowers and leaves made of sugar. But I’m pretty sure that she has not tried equations of any sort.
-cvj
(Thanks Sara T!)
The other day (some weeks ago now) I started a sort of “day in the life” post, to give you more of an idea of what a typical day was like at work (and maybe also a bit at play). Somehow I never finished it, and then I looked at it a while later and could not remember the rest of the day, and so just deleted it.
I’ve decided to do something different. There really is no typical day. So I will try to do a series of days instead. Of course, I’m not going to have tine to sit and do a long, detailed entry about these days, and so instead I’ll just do a sort of sketchy notebook, with some time stamps. From time to time during the day I’ll stop in and add to it, and then post the whole thing at the end of the day before going to sleep. I won’t include all details (I’ll spare you bathroom breaks, personal grooming, and things of that nature, you’ll be pleased to know), but will try to give you some impressions of how the day goes. If people are interested (and people did ask for such a “day in the life post” before), I might try to do them more frequently. But for now, I’ll try and do one for each day of this week. Average over them to get the typical day.
So here goes.
Well, this work week really started on Sunday night.
Oh my. I’m a sucker for cute bears*. I admit it. My head almost explodes with Continue reading ‘Almost Can’t Bear It’
I went for a nice hazy-then-sunny hike this morning in Griffith Park, and decided to try a way up that I have not used in a while. I’d forgotten how wonderful it is to approach the Griffith Observatory using the trails directly below it.
It’s such a majestic building! - A lovely backdrop to some of the hike up to the peak Continue reading ‘View from the Trail’
No, not the name of a new Jazz singer as far as I know. Instead, it is the single most powerful source of a sweet scent in the garden. What has been happening is that the Jasmine has steadily crept up one of the palm trees, and is engulfing it in hundreds of tiny flowers. (Click for larger view.)
The scent from this is huge. For better or worse, the web does not allow communication of scents, and so I can do no more than offer this rather odd picture (the tree is quite tall, and so it is an odd one to take, and hard to get the right sense of the situation while letting you still see the plant), and leave the rest to your imagination.
The only downside to this wonderful scent is the fact that it is close to the group of Continue reading ‘Jasmine Tower’
Sometimes the journalists and editors get it right. In fact, they get it right a lot of the time, but you hear more about the complaints (sometimes from me, sometimes elsewhere) about them getting it wrong, when it comes to things like science coverage especially. What am I talking about? I’m talking about the set of questions and answers that are in a new article on MSNBC that a number of people pointed out to me yesterday and today. It starts out as an article about Brian Greene’s science outreach efforts (books, and tv and movie appearances, including a new one), with some discussion of how this is regarded by his colleagues, the value it has had in raising public awareness of physics (and fundamental science in general, I would argue), and so forth. All that is interesting, but not nearly as interesting to me right now as the later parts of the article which is simply a question and answer session. (Picture above right is from a fun joke I carried out last year that you can read here - be sure to read the comments too.)
Alan Boyle, the science editor, asks Brian a series of very thoughtful questions, and Brian gives some very thoughtful answers. The topics include research in string theory (of course), hopes and possibilities for experimental and observational results (such as from the LHC and Planck) that can inform and ultimately test the ideas coming from string theory and open up new vistas in fundamental physics, research on issues such as the landscape, the idea of multiple universes, research on better developing our understanding of string theory (to the point where we can, it is hoped, extract firm predictions from it), and many other things. (I wrote an introduction to aspects of the landscape issue here - see also the comments - and talked a bit about a Tom Siegfried article on the discussion amongst researchers here.)
It is nice to see an honest, non-inflammatory and non-hyped conversation about the issues, and read Brian’s personal take on some of these matters. The bottom line is, Continue reading ‘Questions and Answers about Theories of Everything’
So on Wednesday night while cooking dinner I was listening with half an ear to Talk of the Nation, on NPR, and at some point found that I was listening to a discussion about robots. They were talking to Lee Gutkind about his new book about robots, and about the future, and robots as tools, and interfacing with robots and so forth. All very interesting, all 
made somewhat more engaging by the very deliberate way the interviewee spoke, taking great care with every sentence he uttered. This feat rather kept my attention more than the material, which I’ll hasten to add was not uninteresting -and certainly a topic I spent a lot of my youth dreaming about especially given all the Asimov books I used to devour- but my focus was elsewhere I suppose. You can listen to the program here, and it is all certainly worth thinking about, it is a very serious and important topic, and robots (although mostly not in the form we see in our dramas on tv and in the cinema) may well dominate our society the way computers have become so central to us right now… so go right ahead and listen to what he has to say.
What finally grabbed me, this time, was not the serious “issue” material. It was this: Continue reading ‘RoboCup’
The next Categorically Not! is Sunday 25th March. The Categorically Not! series of events that are held at the Santa Monica Art Studios, (with occasional exceptions). It’s a series - started and run by science writer K. C. Cole - of fun and informative conversations deliberately ignoring the traditional boundaries between art, science, humanities, and other subjects. I strongly encourage you to come to them if you’re in the area. There’s a new website showing past and upcoming events here. You can also have a look at some of the descriptions I did of some events in some earlier posts (such as here and here), and the description of some of the recent special ones on Point of View and Uncertainty that I organized with K. C. as USC campus events (here, here (with video) and here).
Here is a description from the poster for the upcoming programme:
Continue reading ‘Categorically Not! - Vulgarization’
No, not another flower from my garden. This is a two dimensional projection (originally hand drawn in the 1960s by Peter McMullen, of a polytope that lives in eight dimensions, known as the Gossett polytope 421. Click here to be taken over to the American Institute for Mathematics (AIM) site for more information about it. (This image was computer generated by John Stembridge, and you can get higher resolution there for use on your T-shirts and so forth.)
What does this all pertain to? A new result from a team of mathematicians. They’ve done what some are calling the mathematician’s equivalent of mapping the genome of a Lie group, the one called E8. Groups pertain to symmetries. Symmetries are Continue reading ‘E8′
The flowers from one of the earliest of the bulb varieties I planted late last year have started to emerge. Here’s gladiolus tristis:
Lovely aren’t they? There are many stems of these, with more and more opening every Continue reading ‘Light Yellow’
The other day I was making one of my (half-) joking “kids today” mini-speeches to one of my (very patient) graduate students, Tameem, as part of an IM chat we were having about graduate teaching matters. He then said that he remembered something he wanted to share with me, and IM-ed me this*:
…which I’ll readily admit is both funny and very familiar!
-cvj
(*You can click to make it a bit larger)
Rather than just sit around and wring our hands about the severe underrepresentation of women and minorities in science and engineering, it’s worth getting out there and trying to do things to help make a change. Here at Asymptotia, I describe things of that nature from time to time. At other times, I like to just shut up and listen, since (for example) it is also important to hear about the opinions and experiences of a range of different people who are trying to make their way in some aspect of these fields.
Today we have a guest post from Asymptotia regular commenter Candace Partridge (clickable image on right). Candace is doing an undergraduate degree in Physics at the University of London (Birkbeck College), having come to study the subject at this level rather later than is traditional, and having studied other subjects, and worked professionally in another career. This gives her an unusual perspective, and one that is of considerable value. Candace attended the Women in Physics conference that was held at USC in January, and of which I spoke earlier. She tells us a bit about it below, along with some thoughts about her own path in Physics. There is some overlap with an article she wrote for Inkling, but Candace has expanded on several aspects for her post here.
-cvj
___________________________________________________________________________________
Ahhh…what’s better than a trip to LA? How about a travel grant to get to LA to attend the 2nd annual Undergraduate Women in Physics conference held at USC? Most students view MLK Day as a sort of bonus extension the to holidays, a way to ease back into the usual routine. However, for 50-odd physics students, this long weekend was a chance to make the journey to USC to meet other female (and a few male) physics students.
Of course, where I’m now from (London), we don’t get MLK day off. In fact, I was only on native soil because I had cleverly timed a three-week trip to visit my parents in Mississippi to coincide with this conference. After all, once I’ve flown 5000 miles, what’s a couple of thousand more? No problem! I landed in LAX to bright and sunny weather but with a cold wind blowing out of the north, heralding the arrival of that cold wave that destroyed the citrus crops and brought snow flurries to Malibu. It was far colder in LA than in London that weekend.
This was my first trip to a physics-related conference, and I was a wee bit out of the target demographic. See, I am still a lowly undergrad — I say ’still’ because here I am a woman pushing thirty who is barely halfway through her BSc as opposed to the young striplings a full decade younger than myself. Also, I was the only attendee from overseas…kind of. But I am happy to mix with people of all sorts, especially other women like me who are studying physics because, let’s face it, some of us are still feeling a little alone over here.
So I’m a female mature student, which in undergrad physics makes me a bit of an Continue reading ‘Candace Partridge: Women in Physics at USC’
Here’s some remarkable news from the garden. You may remember that last April I noticed a tiny tomato plant growing out of a crack in some steps, and that I promised to keep an eye on it? (Picture, left.)
Then later in July I reported that not only had it survived, but it produced tomatoes? (Picture, right).
Well, it just continued on through the cold spells we had here this Winter, and some weeks ago I noticed that it had tomatoes on it again! This is a shot I took today: Continue reading ‘Staying Power’
… and now, thanks to the Talented Ms Bee (a genius DJ/MC in the making if there ever was one), you can carry around on your ipod an audio pastiche of some of the choicest (sometimes unfortunate!) phrases said during the “storm in a teacup”:
The excellent mp3 file is: Continue reading ‘Teacup Mashup’
Now that’s a phrase to roll around in your head:
Spotted when on my rounds on Friday, walking around various old haunts in New York Continue reading ‘Astronomy Begins Below’
You can catch up on some of the earlier Scenes by looking at the posts listed at the end of this one. Through the course of doing those posts I’ve tried hard to summarize my views on the debate about the views of Smolin and Woit - especially hard to emphasize how the central point of their debate that is worth some actual discussion actually has nothing to do string theory at all. Basically, the whole business of singling out string theory as some sort of great evil is rather silly. If the debate is about anything (and it largely isn’t) it is about the process of doing scientific research (in any field), and the structure of academic careers in general. For the former matter, Smolin and Woit seem to have become frustrated with the standard channels through which detailed scientific debates are carried out and resolved, resorting to writing popular level books that put their rather distorted views on the issues into the public domain in a manner that serves only to muddle. On the latter, there is a constant claim that string theory and its proponents are somehow brainwashing and/or frogmarching young people into working on that area to the exclusion of all else. The authors seem oblivious to some simple facts to the contrary there: (1) that you simply can’t do that to genuinely smart, creative young people; (2) that even students who have string theorists as their Ph.D or postdoc advisors often work on non-string theory research topics (3) that they’re doing an excellent job of either driving young people away from working on some of their favourite alternatives - or from pursuing theoretical physics altogether - by failing to clearly explain their merits and by using the press to help turn this into a distorted spectacle.
I’ve summarized a lot of what I think in the latter part of this post.
There are two major problems with how live debates take place in the public sphere. One is that the average person listening to the debate cannot know whether much of what Smolin and Woit claim as facts are right or wrong (or anyone on the other side of the debate, for that matter). When someone disputes a claim that Smolin makes, he Continue reading ‘More Scenes From the Storm in a Teacup, VII’
I think I ought to explain, as promised, why I am in New York. The first thing to mention is that I wrote the previous post in this miniseries (it was written on a flight to Dublin, and finally posted when I returned) before I knew about any of what I’m about to tell you, so it is rather funny to me…
The week that I returned from Dublin I noticed a phone message from an editor of a magazine asking me to return their call. A couple of days later I learned what it was about. It’s a magazine that largely focuses on buzz about people and projects in the entertainment and fashion industry - Music (R&B, Hip Hop mostly), Movies and TV, etc., as far as I can tell, along with some coverage of parts of the business world. Its readership is mostly younger African American males, I think. As far as I can tell, the intention is not to be about those things in particular, but it is largely reflecting the interests of the readership it is targeted at. It’s a major product, jumping out at you immediately when you are in the magazine store (the striking picture of a woman on the front helps it grab your attention, of course).
Each year, the magazine does a special issue featuring a group of individuals who are doing “major things” in the industries I mentioned above. It is a combination of a focus on new talent that’s about to become more widely known, or just bringing to readers’ attention the existence of some of the people who are making significant impact in what they’re doing.
Somehow - I do not know how - they got my name. It turns out that they spent some time reading some of things I’ve written here at Asymptotia too. Now normally, you’d expect things to stop at that point, but in fact it did not. They decided to broaden things out a bit and include me (if I was willing) in this year’s feature issue.
I thought about it for a day. It is quite an honour to be approached, and I’m also impressed that the magazine’s editors are being creative in this way (it would be easy Continue reading ‘When Worlds Collide, II’
I’m referring to New York, of course. The Empire State building, which I walked by a short while ago, is still pretty lovely (it has to be said that I’m more of a Chrysler building man, myself - must go and have a look for it).
It’s been several years since those days when I used to use New York as my Summer base camp, and it’s been too long. Four or five years, I think. I’d forgotten how much I missed the city, to be honest. It is certainly good to be back and see it all again, including the bitterly cold wind that can be channeled down the grid streets with the bits of snow side by side underfoot.
The city is even greater in my mind now that you can so easily connect to the airport using the subway, train and the AirTrain. (As I’ve discussed in other posts I am sure the same enhancement (but massively more so) will happen to Los Angeles when the new subway/train lines are built). When I was last Continue reading ‘So Good They Named It Twice’
[Written a few hours ago on a plane. Later uploaded for your consumption.]
So I’m continuing my thoughts about plans for the Summer. You probably ought to read part I first. This post is also a bit of a ramble. I was thinking a bit more about Spring/Summer travel, you see. There’s a thing I ought to do one of these days which nobody in the field seems to ever do as a Summer travel option:
Why not go back to school?
Students and young postdocs in my field often go to long schools where there are lecture courses in various aspects of a particular topic or selections of topics. Somehow, faculty don’t seem to go to these, and I don’t know why (unless they are lecturing part of the school and sit in on some other lectures, which I’ve done, and it’s always instructive). It is as though there’s some sort of stigma - perhaps we are all supposed to pretend that we know all that stuff and so can’t be seen sitting in a classroom taking notes. But these lecture courses -when done right- are a perfect combination of the basic techniques and the most contemporary results, which can be rare material, and I know of nobody in the field who can honestly claim to be fully in Continue reading ‘Thoughts from Above, II’
[Written a few hours ago on a plane. Later uploaded for your consumption.]
I find myself on a plane to New York (sort of) all of a sudden. I’ll explain later what it’s all about, since I do not yet know to what extent I’m allowed to blog about the details. Let’s just say that it involves dusting off the tuxedo (I can’t recall what we called them in England..dinner suit?) that I bought a couple of years ago. I’ll leave you to guess, if you like, what on earth could involve being thus attired during the daylight hours.
About the tuxedo: I’d decided back then, while preparing to be one of the blushing recipients at an award ceremony, that I’d buy a decent one and get it tailored to fit properly rather than continually rent ones that don’t quite fit right. I decided to gamble that - given the town I live in, where the cold Winter Season is replaced by an Awards Season- it makes sense to own one, especially since my suit measurements have not really changed for the last 20 years or so1.
This blog post is not about anything in particular. It’s really just some random thoughts passing through my head as I fly over the… Oh. well, it was desert last time I looked. But now it’s just cloud, so I’ve no idea what I’m over. A cloud-covered bit of desert, I expect.
Travel Planning
While engaged in this unexpected travel, I’ve realized that it is high time to start planning Spring and Summer travel. Already the spectrum of possibilities is somewhat Continue reading ‘Thoughts from Above, I’
I’m rather shocked by this story, and feel compelled to draw it to your attention. This week’s LA Weekly’s cover story is by Judith Lewis, and it is a very detailed account of what’s been happening to Billy Cottrell since you probably last heard about him. He was convicted for his role in various arson attacks on SUV dealerships in the Pasadena area, and sent to prison. Just to remind you, Billy Cottrell was a graduate student in theoretical physics working with colleagues of mine just up the road at Caltech, and so it has even more resonance as a story than normal, since even though I never knew him, he -or his type- is so familiar to many of us, right down to the youthful fascination with Euler’s eiÏ€ + 1 = 0. (Apparently he left that written at some of the crime scenes…)
I leave a question mark in the title of this post for lots of reasons: Just how “bad” was he in the first place? Had some of the vehicles that were damaged not been from out of state, the crimes would not have been Federal matters, and the full weight of the crimes being labeled acts of terrorism (and all that brings with it in today’s atmosphere) would not have transpired. The judge seems also to have simply added three years to his sentence on a whim. His having Asperger’s syndrome was never allowed to be mentioned in the case at all, and so the jury was never given the opportunity to consider that some particular behavioural characteristics (in the course of the crimes themselves, and in the course of the courtroom defense) might have been exacerbated by it. The list of things goes on.
But since his sentencing, things have got even worse. It’s just dreadful. The terrorist Continue reading ‘When Physicists Go Bad?’
Well, yesterday’s colloquium by Caltech’s Richard Massey was a lot of fun, and really excellent. When faculty, postdocs and students are all chatting about it afterwards, you know it went well. This is what a departmental colloquium is supposed to do, and it happens when subject, level of delivery and speaker all come together in just the right way.
When the news about that lovely dark matter result broke some months ago, I got in Continue reading ‘Through a Lens Darkly’
I just learned of this festival, starting tonight at the New Beverly Cinema. I thought I should tell you about it in case you’re able to go. Also, it’s just fun to remember some of the movies in this genre, or some of the modern movies that celebrate, quote from, or were otherwise influenced by them. The festival should be a lot of fun!
It’s a Quentin Tarantino project, and there’s more at the cinema’s website, and an truly excellent post about it at the blog “Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule”, which early on has this excellent paragraph:
The director has responded to the New Beverly’s generosity by lining up a gut-bucket cornucopia of authentic grindhouse trash cinema to celebrate not only his
upcoming movie, but the whole experience of seeing sleazy cinema classics in the only movie house left in L.A. (outside of the Vine on Hollywood Boulevard) that feels physically, spatially and, yes, spiritually related to the downtown second-run trash palaces that fed Tarantino’s (and everyone else’s) desire for this kind of rotgut, low-rent fun to begin with.
…and then goes on to do a wonderful thing by finding as many of the original movie posters (or related artwork) for each movie. It’s great to look at, and there’s a rather Continue reading ‘Grindhouse Marathon’
The Nominations have been announced, I learned from the blog LA Observed. Among them:
Science and Technology nominees:
• Joyce E. Chaplin for “The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius” (Basic Books)
• Ann Gibbons for “The First Human: The Race to Discover Our Earliest Ancestors” (Doubleday)
• Eric R. Kandel for “In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind” (W.W. Norton)
• Daniel J. Levitin for “This is Your Brain on Music: the Science of a Human Obsession” (Dutton)
• Edward O. Wilson for “The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth” (W.W. Norton)
Lots of good material here… so little time. I particularly want to read Chaplin’s and Kandel’s but the others look so good too. More about the complete list in all nine Continue reading ‘LA Times Book Prizes’
You can read more on the Cassini site about this wonderful shot of Saturn from a Continue reading ‘A New Angle on Saturn’
A most striking representative of an item from a completely different world than mine is the magazine Angeleno. It is among the most glossy of the glossy magazines I’ve ever seen. I’ve no really strong idea of who its intended readership is - this has been a mystery to me for so long, but by default it clearly can’t be someone like me (an academic), I decided upon first seeing it. (You can read about the raison d’être of their parent company, Modern Luxury, here.) For some reason it arrives (for free although the cover price is $5.95) in my mailbox every month and I don’t know why. It is almost as though it’s a joke on the part of some prankster deity or other.
It has nevertheless done an excellent job of sneaking past my defenses. I don’t immediately throw it away when I receive it, and I find myself alternately annoyed and fascinated by it. Could this have been part of their plan all along?
It used to be that I was just plain annoyed when it would arrive - as much as 1/2 an inch thick, larger in square footage than most other magazines, highly airbrushed A-list star on the cover, and every page super glossy and shiny - and it would sit there for weeks until I’d find myself glancing inside it … just to confirm that I was justified in my righteous annoyance, you see. Sure enough, it would not disappoint. It has pieces devoted to ways of spending oodles of money on pointless stuff at extraordinary prices. There’s be the hot new treatments (”is Fraxel the new Botox?”). There’d be a gaudy diamond-encrusted PDA for your microscopic toy dog, that you Continue reading ‘When Worlds Collide, I’
Well, the video of the Point of View event of a couple of weeks ago is now available. Click here for streaming media. There’s a problem, however. While my opening off-the-cuff remarks are utterly unimportant, and so it is not a big deal that the audio of that is poor, the big problem is in the third segment. Apparently (according to the A/V person) the Bluetooth microphone that they were using to capture the sound for the video camera must have used up its battery, as all the audio for USC’s Cinematic Continue reading ‘You Can View Point of View’
Don’t forget the total lunar eclipse Saturday! It won’t be visible over here in the West (except toward the end - see Amara’s remark), so unfortunately I won’t get to see all Continue reading ‘Eclipse’
In Physics Today last month, Helen Quinn wrote rather well about the issue of language in science and in common (non-scientific) usage, with a focus on when the two collide. I recommend the article, which you can read here.
There are cases in our own teaching where confusions arise, which mostly get resolved as the students learn the concepts associated to specific words….
A few words in elementary physics— force, work, momentum, and energy—have carefully defined physics meanings. Their much broader everyday usage causes students a great deal of confusion until they learn the precise physics concepts.
…but she’s much more interested in the cases where some words -often powerful ones, commonly invoked- contribute to “considerable public misunderstanding of science”:
belief, hypothesis, theory, and knowledge.
None of these words has a unique physics meaning, but their meanings as we use them among ourselves and as non-scientists hear them are very different. We need to be much more careful how and when we use them in talking to the public.
She goes on to discuss them in turn. I recommend reading it in full. One of the things I like most about the article is that she talks not only about the process of using those Continue reading ‘On Language in Science and Beyond’