Yellow
I don’t know what they are called, but they’re lovely. There’s a succulent plant that is very common around here (Los Angeles), often growing wild by roadsides, or in no […] Click to continue reading this post
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Monthly Archives: May 2010
CDF Says No
Recall the excitement last week about the D0 result? I wrote a post called “An Exciting Asymmetry?”. Well, there’s a rule that says if you write a title as a yes/no question, the answer is often (usually?) “No”.
Sure enough. over at Resonances, Jester reports that the CDF experiment, also at the Tevatron, has looked for a confirmation of the CP violating result that D0 claimed to see, and did not find anything abnormal where it should have. Find further details (on the technical side for the experts) and links at that post, which, as is usual with material from that blog, is well-written and interesting.
This is one reason why we (the particle physics community) build multiple detector/experiments on the same accelerator machine, and this is a prime example […] Click to continue reading this post
Alternative Synopses
Will is annoyed by the Karate Kid (2010 version, not the 1984 version), not the least because with Jackie Chan involved, you’d be expecting… Kung Fu right? Weren’t we supposed to have stopped confusing the forms back in the 70s or so? People are up in arms about this all over the web it seems. I’ll lay off the whole thing since I’m not an expert in the etymology of the terms anyway, but more to the point I’m just tired of having my childhood memories cynically smacked around by pointless remakes, if the truth be told.
Anyway, to help himself vent, Will wrote some amusing synopses for other remakes Hollywood might do where the details are… modified. Here are a couple I liked: […] Click to continue reading this post
The Runaway Black Hole
In recent years there was all the nonsense about how scientists were going to accidentally make a black hole with the Large Hadron Collider that would runaway out of control…. we would not be able to stop it. We scientists would have tampered with the murky depths of Nature and awoken a monster we could not control. Naughty scientists that we are. The LHC has been colliding away at unprecedented energies, and last time I checked (you can too – click here) we’re ok.
I just realized something. Now we do have a runaway black hole! But it was created by naughty engineers, tampering with the murky depths of Nature and awakening a monster they cannot control. That gushing well 5000 feet below in the gulf of Mexico is a black hole […] Click to continue reading this post
Nostalgia
AOL is 25 years old today! Twenty Five! To help you understand that, those of you who where alive then click here for the list of number one songs in the charts at the time… Yes, Wham!, Tears for Fears, Huey Lewis and the News, Phil Collins, Jan Hammer, etc… Do you remember America Online? Dialing up to connect? (Perhaps some of you still dial up, to read this blog?) Ah yes, memories. I was never an AOL subscriber. I was, after all, not in America until the 90s, and only started connecting from home in that decade. By then several companies offered dialup service. Then I was of course, just like everyone else, familiar with the reassuring dialup noises to the point where by ear you could tell if the connection was going to work or not (huh, I just realized that sound is sort of from the same swatch of sounds as the TARDIS noise), and recall the sitting and waiting for files of just a few hundred kilobytes to download, and so on and so forth. (Amazingly, and wonderfully, we are now at the point where people are streaming movies and tv shows directly to their homes on their web connections.) The speed difference became a way of measuring the difference between work and home, in a way. At work, you had tons of storage space and perpetual connectivity, and once got home that went away. So waiting for data to squeeze through the telephone line using dialup was extra frustrating.
Truth be told, there’s a piece of me that does not mind that difference, at times. Being connected all the time at home – fast and conveniently – can bring down the […] Click to continue reading this post
Another Hole in Pandora’s Box?
No doubt you’ve heard it all over the news. Craig Venter and his teams have created another press storm, this time about “synthetic life”, although I wonder a bit about the meaning of the term. I’ve no particularly insightful things to say about it all, other than to do like everyone else and watch and wonder where it’s all going to lead (probably not exactly where people currently think… is one thing we can say for sure). There’s coverage everywhere so I don’t need to point, but for future reference, here’s a Guardian link to a video of the man himself talking about it in some detail, and a link to a story by Ian Sample in the same paper. There you can find links to the research paper too. (Image at right is of a pithos, the kind of vessel Pandora opened in the Greek myth. The image is from the online component of the Michael C. Carlos museum at Emory university. Click image to jump there.)
Truly fascinating stuff to say the least.
An Exciting Asymmetry?
A big mystery in physics is why there is more matter than anti-matter. (Of course, which we call the matter and which we call the “anti-matter” is a… matter of convention. Take your pick.) It is hoped that there is some mechanism in the laws of physics (at a very basic level concerning particle interactions) that will become apparent that explains it. It’s also hoped that the mechanism itself might have some understandable origin too. The mechanism would operate in the first tiny fractions of a second of the universe’s life when the primordial soup of particles and antiparticles (created from, roughly speaking, the energy of the big bang) began to cool down as the universe expanded. Rather than them annihilating all back into energy again, the mechanism would create an imbalance between the two, giving rise to a matter-filled universe, from which we emerged. So what could be the mechanism, can we isolate it in our theories and in our experiments? Build a good model of it? Explain it?
This is all very first and foremost in people’s minds when there’s a new experiment switched on that is probing the unknown – the Large Hadron Collider. Well, actually, it has been recently announced that a suitable mechanism (or, more precisely, its […] Click to continue reading this post
Greetings!
Greetings of the birthday sort to my younger nephew.
I made a card for him out of these lovely passion flowers (click for larger view) from my garden, and I posted it, but apparently there are postal delays due to volcano ash and so forth, so it might not get there in time.
So this blog post is to serve as a card and wish him Happy Birthday.
Happy Birthday!
Venus at Midday!
[Update: That really hurt. Hard on the neck. And could not even find the moon… I think there’s left over moisture haze high up. 🙁 ]
I just learned from Phil’s Bad Astronomy blog that apparently there’s a great opportunity to see Venus right in the middle of the day, and today is rather optimum for it. I’m going to try and see if it works. At about 1:00pm (sorry those of you for whom the sun has already gone way past that), look for the sun and then the thin crescent moon will be about three fist-widths to the left of that (if in the Northern hemisphere – right otherwise). Venus will be visible just to the right of that crescent. Phil has a diagram up on his site, here. This is all supposed to be possible with the naked eye, and I imagine you can help things a lot by holding your palm up against the sun to stop the brightness from that direction, and then waiting a bit for your eyes to relax into the viewing of the area of the sky I mentioned. Phil also mentioned binoculars. I’d seriously suggest trying without them, if you can, since accidentally looking at the sun with them is something I want to strongly urge you to avoid. (If you must use them, put something like a building or a large tree trunk in front of the sun and don’t change your footing…)
Good luck! I’m going to try in a couple of hours. Let me know how it works out for you, if you like!
New Beginnings
It has been a wonderful Spring for me so far, I must say. On many fronts. For example, work is trundling along steadily, with small but regular landmarks in my project being set and met, and the garden is planted with lots of new vegetable plants that carry promise for tasty treats in the months to come. In the mornings the garden has a cacophony of sounds from all sorts of birds, all determinedly busy with whatever it is they think needs to get done that morning. It is good to start that day hearing all that activity. 
(Fully half of that sound comes from a remarkably energetic Northern Mockingbird that manages to run through several distinct birdsong choruses at high volume while flying from tree to tree in the neighbourhood. It is almost as though it is trying to create the illusion that there are several mockingbirds in residence…) In the photo you can see a pair of mourning doves (the same pair I think I spoke about earlier), surveying the activity in the air and on the ground below.
There’s a feeling of promise, hope, and growth all around at this time of year. It’s everywhere. A nice surprise waited for me early last week. I was filling the kettle at the sink for my first cup of tea of the day one morning and noticed something green […] Click to continue reading this post
But is it Real? (Part One)
After my colloquium at UC Riverside some weeks back, I was asked an important question I’ve been asked before, and no doubt will be asked again. The same question may have occurred to you given things I’ve written here about the subject of my research concerning applications of string theory (particularly, ideas from quantum gravity) to understanding (relatively) recent experimentally measured phenomena. (The technique of “gauge/gravity dualities”: See also the special Physics Today May issue with articles on all of this. I wrote about that here. It tells you some of what we can and can’t do with the computational technology, and prospects for improvement, etc.)
So the question is “Is it real?”. This is particularly referring to the black hole in the discussion. Recall, one computes properties of new novel liquid phases of matter (that seem to be closely related to what shows up in the lab) by using a toolbox that involves the equations of gravity, in a higher dimensional spacetime, and much of the thermal nature of the system is controlled by a black hole solution of those equations. So people want to know if that black hole is real. A version of the conversation is like this: (Imagine I’ve already introduced the technique, the higher dimensional spacetime, and the black hole…)
Happy Mother’s Day!
It is Mother’s Day in the USA. The UK version was earlier, in March, but since my mother is there, she usually gets two greetings from me, one for each version of the holiday.
Mother’s Day for me means flowers, at least in part. I often (although not this year) make and send her a card featuring a flower from my garden. Roses are usually the ones that make it to the card (my mum loves them) but as I stood in the garden this morning and looked around, the Oleander caught my eye. The bushes are covered in pink flowers (click the image on the right for a larger view), with many more to come, and I was suddenly put in mind of the years I lived in the Caribbean. Oleander plants were very common, and I recall many of them (in a selection of colours, I think) in the grounds of St. Augustine’s where my family went to […] Click to continue reading this post
Cloudy with a Chance of Spaceballs
This cloud’s shape is rather incredible, at least in the context of a certain small green character from Star Wars. See it? Have a read of Phil’s post (where I spotted this) and be sure to have a laugh at several of the hilarious comments from readers!
QED Treatment?
This sign (spotted in a shop window – presumably placed there for olde-world nostalgia) makes me giggle for a number of reasons. One of them is because in my field, QED stands for Quantum Electrodynamics, the fundamental theory of electromagnetism and its quantum interactions. So it’s […] Click to continue reading this post
Summer Fun…
Ah, now that Springtime is firmly settled in (been several weeks now), it is time for the next major season. What is that? Summer Blockbuster season! It’s already been underway, the highlight so far (in my opinion) being the clever and tongue-in-cheek “Kick-Ass”, which I suspect will be the best of the bunch of the (dismayingly rapidly growing) superhero movie genre for this year.
One of my favourite movie theatres, the Vista (a classic old movie palace that has not been chopped up into bits, like so many criminally have, but instead kept in excellent condition with great seats, huge screen, and wonderful sound) always has a treat when showing the superhero-type movies: The manager dresses up in a (sometimes charmingly saggy) costume to match the title character. Here he is (on the right – click for larger view) as the character Kick-Ass, where the (forgive me) lameness of the costume is this time actually appropriate (you have to watch the movie to understand fully why). See an earlier one here.
Enjoy!
