Monthly Archives: September 2009

Clusters

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I’m sitting on the sofa watching what has so far been a really excellent episode of The Universe on the History Channel. It is entitled “Cosmic Clusters” and it has been a lovely journey (15 minutes show time gone by so far) on an imaginary spaceship ride through the galaxy looking at formations of star clusters, and discussing the process of star formation in those clusters, their birth and the conditions involved, how those conditions change as things progress, the different kinds of stars that can result, the curious case of globular clusters (M13 is pictured below, by Yuugi Kitahara) and so forth. I think it is going to go on to discuss clusters of galaxies, and clusters of those…

m13_kitahara

I’ve learned quite a bit so far from watching it, actually. It is a really lovely discussion with excellent contributions from my friend and colleague Amy Mainzer, Alex […] Click to continue reading this post →

More Book Fun!

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bookfair_homeMark your calendar for Sunday! The West Hollywood Book Fair is on from 10 am to 6:00 pm that day, and there’s so much to see and do with readings, panels, discussions, authors, special celebrity guests, food, exhibitions, writing workshops, discount book offers, signings, swag (no doubt), and so forth. I’ve not been before, but as you know from reading here I’m a big fan of cities going gaga over books for a while, being a regular visitor to the LA Times Book Festival when it comes in the Spring. The calendar of events and much more about the event can be found at the website here.

Here’s another thing. Despite the fact there was no mention of a spankingly splendid […] Click to continue reading this post →

Forward Looking

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optometerySo, do you like it? My new glasses. Think it’s a good look for me? Sort of gadgeteer-scientist extreme. With this I get all the different optical instrumentation combinations I need in one nifty device. Long distance viewing for seeing whether my bus is coming from a long way away, lenses for extreme closeup work in the workshop, night vision, the works…Neat, no?

Ok, I’m being silly. I went to the optometrist today after a bit of a long period between tests, and I always find it an interesting experience. I’m not sure why, but it […] Click to continue reading this post →

Ahmad Jamal

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ahmad_jamal_concert_3Yesterday at some point I decided I was in the mood to see some good live Jazz, and checked out the program at the Catalina and considered John Patitucci and his trio. There was still no Jazz Bakery schedule to check as there is as yet no news as to whether they will be really coming back at some venue somewhere… I thought I’d scan a few more places and noticed that a venue I’d not been to before had… Ahmad Jamal! Gosh, how did I never notice Jazz at the Nate Holden Performing Arts Center before? It is right in mid-city on Washington between Crenshaw and La Brea, near where in days past, there were several Jazz clubs such as The Parisian Room, The It Club and The Hillcrest Club. (All now gone, sadly, leaving a relative vacuum in terms of support for regular live Jazz in the heart of the city.) While the Nate Holden does not look to be set to become a regular Jazz venue featuring great music every night, there were encouraging things said in the announcements before Ahmad Jamal came on to play. Things that voiced an awareness that people miss those places, and the […] Click to continue reading this post →

Speed Demons

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karpov-vs-kasparovHave you heard about the rematch between Kasparov and Karpov, in commemoration of the classic matches of the 1980s? (I was always a Kasparov fan, myself). What is different about this time is that they are playing speed chess. (Collective sharp intake of breath… distant tinkling sound of dropped gins-and-tonic all over the web…) There’s a nice story by Giles Tremlett in the Guardian with some background on the earlier matches, their rivalry, and some discussion of the 80s era for those of you who suspect that period was only in black and white. There are some nice pictures (old and new) here. I cheekily borrowed the one above right (credited Kai Foersterling/EPA) for this post.

Look, the K vs K speed chess thing was bound to happen, given our increasingly limited collective attention span. Everybody is apparently too busy to take time to focus on anything for much of a length of time, so adjustments are happening to… […] Click to continue reading this post →

Moonriver

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moon Well, I’ve been somewhat neglectful of lots of space and astronomy type noticing (here on the blog) in the last couple of months or more, but it is not unusual for me to re-balance my foci a bit as my interests and available time permits. However, I’ve been meaning to point to the quite astonishing results that are being discussed in recent days… The confirmation of what appears to be a remarkable amount of water on the moon. It is an indirect set of measurements, using spectroscopy, (using results from three separate spacecraft) and is quite an interesting story. Happily, Phil over at Bad Astronomy has just put up a rather splendid summary of the story and I’m simply going to recommend that you pop over there and have a read. (There’s also a Space.com story by Andrea Thompson that is nice too.) Very interesting in the whole thing is the discussion of how the water got there, and why it is rather more mobile than you might expect (clue: the sun might be involved).

From a story by Ian Sample in the Guardian (which also discusses and speculates […] Click to continue reading this post →

Doomsday Fun and Games

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the_universeI’ve been wondering why over the last day or two I’ve been getting email about various apocalyptic scenarios. I’ve now figured out why, I think. On Tuesday, several scientists, myself included, played with the idea of how to destroy the earth! Well, it was on the History Channel in an episode of the show the Universe, (it was recorded back in June and July) entitled “Ten Ways to Destroy the Earth”. Of course, these are not scenarios we envision happening any time soon, but rather an excuse to talk about various kinds of science (from spontaneous symmetry breaking and the early universe, through planetary science, solar physics, and of course black holes and more). We list various favourite ways that were chosen to be discussed, and each physicist (although they called me an astrophysicist) picks a favourite. Fun stuff.

I chose putting a huge amount of antimatter at the core of the earth and letting it […] Click to continue reading this post →

Len Adleman: Quantum Mechanics and Mathematical Logic

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Today I’m pleased to announce that we have a guest post from a very distinguished colleague of mine, Len Adleman. Len is best known as the “A” in RSA and the inventor of DNA-computing. He is a Turing Award laureate. However, he considers himself “a rank amateur” (his words!) as a physicist. len_adleman He’s one of my colleagues on whom I can always rely for a fun and interesting conversation, even if it is just for a fleeting moment during a chance encounter in an elevator. The other day he told me he’d been thinking a lot about quantum mechanics, and it seemed like it would be fun to share his thoughts with others here on the blog. So join in using the comment form if you’ve some thoughts of your own in response.

Here’s Len.

-cvj

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For a long time, physicists have struggled with perplexing “meta-questions” (my phrase): Does God play dice with the universe? Does a theory of everything exist? Do parallel universes exist? As the physics community is acutely aware, these are extremely difficult questions and one may despair of ever finding meaningful answers. The mathematical community has had its own meta-questions that are no less daunting: What is “truth”? Do infinitesimals exist? Is there a single set of axioms from which all of mathematics can be derived? In what many consider to be on the short list of great intellectual achievements, Frege, Russell, Tarski, Turing, Godel, and other logicians were able to clear away the fog and sort these questions out. The framework they created, mathematical logic, has put a foundation under mathematics, provided great insights and profound results. After many years of consideration, I have come to believe that mathematical logic, suitably extended and modified (perhaps to include complexity theoretic ideas), has the potential to provide the same benefits to physics. In the following remarks, I will explore this possibility.

But, be warned: I am not a physicist and these ideas are embryonic. At best they indicate a possible direction; a fully functional theoretical framework, if possible at all, would be the work of lifetimes.

For most of my academic life, my primary topic of research (and affection) has been […] Click to continue reading this post →

Armstrong on God

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karen-armstrongSo what is the origin of the whole God idea anyway? Is God very old, or a relatively new invention? From where emerged that omnipotent being , that so many subscribe to, which apparently lives outside of the rules of Nature? Where did the severe rifts between science and God first come about? Were some of our greatest scientists, such as Newton, responsible for creating the modern God? What is the role of God now, and where does it/he/she sit in the landscape of our current society? (Image credit: Gerry Penny/AFP/Getty Images.)

Questions such as the above are fascinating to ponder and by now you must have gathered that I don’t subscribe to the Atheist-fundamentalist view that the matter is treated well by simply declaring that people who believe in God are stupid or otherwise broken in some way. And yelling it in their face. It’s much more interesting than that.

Karen Armstrong writes very well about the issues I mentioned above, and recently was on NPR’s Fresh Air talking about her new book, “The Case for God”. She examines a great deal of history of the idea of God, and (among other things) reminds us that the common, often over-simplistic, personal God created in our own image (the one that probably creates the most religion problems in the world), is one […] Click to continue reading this post →

Collections!

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Well that was fun! I’m sitting on the bus on the way home [editorial note: I wrote most of this on Thursday afternoon], with the memory of the College Commons event that I just went to still fresh in my mind. (That and the tasty food at the end of the event.)

ivory-billed-etc

This event (“Discovering the World: Collections, Curiosity and Evolution”) was all about collecting and collections, from the institutional collections we have in our society today such as museums and libraries, through the “cabinets of curiosity” of earlier centuries, to the sort of obsessive collections of random stuff that sort of becomes a disease (I mentally glance over at the shelves, piles, and boxes of old New Yorkers in my house; I’ve not been able to throw away a single one since I started subscribing in the early 90s. Yes, I know, I know… I know.)

So many of these types of collections (and the resulting books and compendia which they themselves become the objects of collections and subjects of books and so on and so forth) formed the foundations of the culture, the raw material for scientific study, the inspiration for more collections and for more study, and so on…. So the event used that as a basis and dug out some wonderful articles for us to look and marvel at. The digging was done at USC’s own splendid Doheny library (original Audubon volumes, Cook’s journals, etc) the Huntington library (several illustrated tomes of natural history and an actual plate used long ago for printing Audubon illustrations which were then later hand-coloured by artists) and the Los Angeles Natural History Museum across the street. A number of my colleagues who are scholars in areas that these objects pertain to gave short, informative and […] Click to continue reading this post →

Snooky

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tribute-to-snooky

Still from the closing piece of the short concert in tribute to trumpeter Snooky Young on the occasion of being awarded the first LA Jazz Treasure award. This was on Friday 11th September, at LACMA. (Don’t you long for a time when everybody had nicknames like this as a matter of course? Well, it is more of a matter of place and culture than a time, in some ways, but anyhow… What would you choose yours to be, if you had the choice?) There are some trumpet players of note on the stage at this point (Arturo Sandoval is one, I cannot identify the others by eye), and Snooky himself is there too. He’s the one looking endearingly like a Mathematics professor (which, now I think about it, sort of fits for a trumpet player).

While it was a pleasant enough event, and I am glad it took place, I can’t help but think that it would have been greatly improved by not having quite so many official […] Click to continue reading this post →

Happy Birthday Murray Gell-Mann!

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Murray Gell-Mann at TEDIt is Murray Gell-Mann’s 80th birthday today! Congratulations! Gell-Mann is best known as the person who came up with the idea of quarks, the particles that make up (for example) protons and neutrons, the building blocks of atomic nuclei. (He’s known for a lot more than that, of course, and you can read about it online.)

There’s an interview with Tom Siegfried in Science Now in honour of his 80th birthday*. Have a look. (See also an excellent article by Siegfried on Gell-Mann from August, focusing on the quark discovery, and the progress of new scientific ideas.)

[…] Click to continue reading this post →

Laser

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Well, here it is! The second of the fun (I hope) short films I made illustrating some science ideas. Recall that last month I released “Shine a Light” for your viewing and sharing pleasure, and I promised a second and this is it. (The trailer was out some days ago.) Please read my post of last month for more on what this is all about. Here is some of what I said:

For this [National Science Foundation-supported film] to be a success, your help is needed. It needs to be seen. Tell your family and friends, colleagues and students, local teachers, etc., about it. Forward it on to people you know. Blog it, tweet it, facebook share it, etc. Crucially, remember that it is designed to be not just for people who already know they have an interest in science, but others too, so make no assumptions about who might like it… just please send it. Thanks.

Ok, let’s dim the lights! Run the Projector! Be sure to look out for the Monty Python moment…! (Tip: It is a high video quality, so pause it and let it buffer for a while before watching if you’ve only a moderately fast connection. Also, try the high definition (HD) option if you like, and/or view it in full screen and with the volume turned up. The embed here is small, so you can see it at a more glorious size at the YouTube site by clicking here.

laser_still

-cvj

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