Monthly Archives: June 2010

Scenes from School

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unam_astro_math_mexico_2Well, my work at the Quantum Gravity school over (see previous posts here, here and here), I hopped on a plane yesterday, in order to return to Los Angeles. It was an excellent time. I enjoyed being in Mexico again, and seeing a new part of it (see posts to come), and the school was well organized and very enjoyable. The students were very receptive overall, and I spent a huge amount of time chatting with them about physics between sessions, over lunch, and on the bus back and forth between the campus and the city (and on the excursion on Sunday for a while). A number of students seemed very interested in some of the quantum gravity phenomena that are possible to describe using string theory – surprised in most cases (since the background independence issue that keeps being waved about by some as a naive (in my view) and bluntly used principle seems to have served as a block to many) – and it was a pleasure to be able to open them up to new physical ideas. It worked pretty well because I gave them three lectures on the basics of string theory, and so could build on that material in the one to one discussions to explain more detail.

lunch_waiting_unam_mexicoDynamical changes of spacetime dimension is one thing that captured a lot of interest, as well as string theory’s various ways of showing in model examples how spacetime is an emergent, classical approximation to an underlying quantum description that does not have manifest spacetime geometry. The latter is something that all approaches to quantum gravity hope to realize in one way or another (since those sorts of ideas and fantasies about what quantum gravity should be appeared in the mid 20th Century), and exactly how it emerges in string theory is a beautiful story. Who knows, perhaps they will take these hints from string theory about how quantum gravity can work and develop them […] Click to continue reading this post →

Victory!(?)

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In other news…

It’s a long story. You should refer to last year’s start of The Troubles, starting with the Great Tomato Atrocity. This year it began with the lovely tomato on the right…tomato_gift (click for a larger view).

At first I thought it was an early attack by Fluffy (in the 3.x series, presumably – I did battle with series 1 and 2 last Summer – especially since I’d deployed the first level of countermeasures already this season, the shields around the main tomato area of the garden. Had Fluffy found a way past those? Would I have to fortify them? I was very annoyed since I wanted to make a gift of that tomato and had been admiring it every day since it began to ripen, waiting for the moment to pick it. Evidently mine were not the only admiring eyes. And my paws were not the first to get to it. So I decided to launch more level one of the offensive countermeasures, to test the possibility that something other than Fluffy was a work here. Perhaps one of Fluffy’s allies. The Fluffy series with less good PR: Slinky. I might need to be fighting a war on two fronts. […] Click to continue reading this post →

Minority Report

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This is a quick update on the school. I’ve been trying to give the students some of the core concepts they need to help them understand what string theory is, how it works, and what you can do with it. Here’s the really odd thing about all this (and an explanation of the post title): While this is a school on Quantum Gravity, after talking with the students for a while one learns that in most cases the little they’ve heard about string theory is often essentially over 20 years out of date and almost always totally skewed to the negative, to the extent that many of them are under the impression that string theory has nothing to do with quantum gravity at all! It is totally bizarre, and I suspect it is largely a result of things that are said and passed around within their research community.. So there […] Click to continue reading this post →

Arrival

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(Anyone remember Mike Oldfield? I recall a lovely piece of music of his with the same title as this post and it has now been playing distantly in my head as I type…very pleasant.)

Well, I’m sitting at an outside table across from the main square with the cathedral and having a simple lunch. It is hot, and so I have a glass of cold pale beer in front of me, and everyone around me is speaking Spanish. This feels like it could be that I am back in Madrid, but in fact I am in Morelia, Mexico. (I can tell because, among other things, I’ve never been offered a shoe shine quite so many times in the space of 15 minutes…) It is quite a lovely place, as far as I’ve seen so far (I’ve not explored much yet). I’m resting after a very early morning travel schedule which saw a slight panic (er…long story) at LAX to catch my flight which left just before 1:00am. The seats were fixed to the bolt upright position the whole flight and so the two and a half hours I’d planned to snooze were not so […] Click to continue reading this post →

Summer School Prep

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So, it is that time of year.

I’ve got to give three introductory lectures on string theory in a Summer school somewhere in Mexico next week. So I must break away from intense work on The Project (which is going well, so maybe you will hear about it sometime soonish(ish)….) and focus on how to cram all the cream into three comprehensible and useful lectures. I hate overdoing the “it can be shown” line that ends up making the whole thing seem like magic (as is so often done), so this is always a challenge. Here’s how my preparation usually goes (and indeed it went this way this week): […] Click to continue reading this post →

A Treasure Trove!

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As I’ve mentioned before, I listen online to Radio 4, one of the BBC radio stations I love for its variety, breadth and depth of programming. Between it and NPR affiliate KPCC, my day is usually rather full of (spoken-word) radio of a wide variety. I’ve noticed that Radio 4 has been doing a programme called “A History of the World in 100 Objects”. The Director of the British Museum does a 15 minute programme on each of 100 objects and talks about aspects of its historical significance. (If you think you don’t like history (maybe bad experiences in school or something like that) this might be a great way back into the subject for you. Not liking a subject is usually, I find, an issue with how it was presented to you and not with the subject itself.) It’s a lovely way of quickly plugging into aspects of world culture in interesting ways, and rather reminds me of the short series that we here at USC in the College Commons called The Cultural Life of Objects, organized by my colleagues Anne Porter and Ann Marie Yasin. (See also the Collections event, and my post about it.)

The BBC series is about half way now, and it has been quite wonderful. I strongly recommend it to you. Here’s the marvellous thing: The entire series can be podcast […] Click to continue reading this post →

Laserfest Videos

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laser_beamI think I mentioned a while back that as a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Laser, there was a video competition on Physics Central to make a fun video about the Laser. They were put on YouTube (tag is laserfest, I think) and then there was voting at some point (I imagine), and winners were chosen. You can see them here. Congratulations to the winners!

Actually, I think the whole playlist of Laserfest video entries is here, and you can jump through them by clicking the link to the next one in the top right hand area.

Are you aware of Laserfest, by the way? Go and check out the website and join in the celebrations of the Laser!

I should mention that the competition has all meant good news for my work as well. I […] Click to continue reading this post →

Planck Matters

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You can read a bit about the work of my colleague Elena Pierpaoli and her postdocs and students in this article in one of USC’s in-house publications. It focuses on the Planck observatory (image right from NASA/ESA), which we’ve discussed here before. (Recall the launch?) There’s a lot of exciting physics about the very young universe to be discovered as more data from the mission get gathered and analyzed.

Enjoy the article!

-cvj Click to continue reading this post →

He Had Problems…

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vaderYeah, there was something wrong with that Darth Vader guy, don’t you think?

An official diagnosis was reported in the journal Psychiatry Research. Seems the poor fellow was afflicted with a personality disorder. This is the claim, anyway. There’s a post about it here that’s worth looking at*. The most entertaining bit (for me) is probably the comment stream from the rabid fanboysandgirls (as you might imagine for something about Star Wars).

For me, the best insights into the fellow are to be found in his blog which I remember from a few years back. Still quite brilliant. (Be sure to scroll to the bottom and read the posts in reverse order to get them in the right order.)

Back to the diagnosis post. One of my favourite comments, after all the people […] Click to continue reading this post →

Understanding Artificial Life

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You’ll remember the recent announcement about the first synthetic life form, created by team Venter. But what does that mean, really? How truly synthetic is it really? What aspects of Nature needed to be input in order for it to be viable? Too much for it to be called truly synthetic? What dreams are out there to do better? What’s the science behind such a challenge? How did the mechanisms for life that we know know actually evolve, and what steps are adjustable or reproducible?

These questions and many more are addressed in a lovely special edition of BBC […] Click to continue reading this post →

Search Results

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Googling people is often interesting. One thing I’ve noticed is that in the search results it seems people are showing up a lot more on various kinds of databases, business networking groups, social networking groups (of course) and so forth. Is this a growing phenomenon? Are people joining more of theses, or are various network entries automatically generated? (I ask this as someone who walked away from facebook, for example. Perhaps I’ll talk more about why some other time…)

In this vein, I forgot to mention that a little while ago I discovered that I have a Wikipedia entry. I am not sure how I feel about this, but it is (I suppose) flattering that someone took the time to add this to the things out there on the web about me. (I don’t think it was automatically generated.) I’d previously assumed that if an ordinary person had a Wikipedia entry it must mean that they wrote it themselves. After all, who would be interested enough to write one about someone else? Seems […] Click to continue reading this post →

A Short Cut to Mushrooms (Again)

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Yeah, I know I’ve used this post title before, but I do love it. So… sorry.

One of the things that really sets my week up nicely is my Sunday visit to the Hollywood Farmer’s Market. Today was an exceptionally nice day for it, but weatherwise and just the overall atmosphere of the market. The people making their food purchases and simply socializing, the vendors, the many musicians (even the corny ones sounded really good today), and of course – the food itself.

One of the highlights for me today was a new (ish) vendor, specializing entirely in mushrooms.

mushroom_stall_1

The variety was fascinating, and I stood there with a friend sniffing and sampling for a while (encouraged by the vendors, I hasten to add) before purchasing a lovely persimmon enoki (the ones in the middle of the first photo):
[…] Click to continue reading this post →

Organized Skepticism

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(The title is an important way of thinking about what science is all about, at least in part. It is one of the things mentioned and discussed in the lectures discussed below.)

martin_reesThe annual Reith Lectures at the BBC over in the UK are under way. This year, they are given by a giant of astrophysics, Sir Martin Rees. I strongly – very strongly – recommend listening to these lectures. There are four of them. Of the senior superstars of science who I’ve come to know a little, Martin Rees comes across as one of the most gentle and quietly thoughtful I can think of while at the same time being sharp and insightful on all sorts of aspects of science (not just the confines of his field). I mention these characteristics since they are of great value to me – I tend to be repulsed by the practitioners of the more arrogant style that is also common in prominent (and not so prominent) scientists, no matter how good their science might be. He’s the President of the Royal Society, the Astronomer Royal, and the Master of Trinity College (Cambridge), among other distinctions, and so naturally is called upon to express views on a range of topics about science, including how it intersects with society.

Indeed, the intersection between science and policy issues and society is the subject of the first of his lectures. The whole series is called “Scientific Horizons”. The first […] Click to continue reading this post →

Formal Physicists

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Since (as high energy theorists working on foundational issues for most (but not all) of our effort) we can be called by some “formal” physicists, or physicists who are concerned with only “academic” issues, I thought our outfits in this picture from last month were quite appropriate*. (Now don’t you just want to hire this dream team to swoop in and solve all your problems? Click for larger view. )

faculty_and_students_at_graduation_phd_2010

Backstory: Some of the students in the group did a bit of pomp and ceremony to receive their Ph.Ds, and some of the faculty joined in.

Hilarity ensued.

-cvj

(*Of course for all you know, some of us were wearing sequinned bikinis under our gowns. That’s only formal wear in Vegas, I think…) Click to continue reading this post →

Summer Reading: Of Bookstores and Lemon Cake

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There’s something enduringly lovely about local independent bookstores. I love stopping by to visit them, try to give my local ones the first shot at supplying me with a book I’m looking for, but most of all I value them as community centres at the heart of the villages (real and virtual) that exist in our neighbourhoods, even in a vast city like Los Angeles. People gather and linger at them, bonding over the written word for the most part, but sometimes just for the sake of gathering and lingering. In that role they are a lot like public libraries, another favourite of mine. Much of what I said can apply to the large chain bookstores too, but somehow I find them less likely to have that community feel that independent stores have. I’m not sure why (location? focus? less of a personal touch in the organization of the material?), but this is the way it seems to me. (I’m speaking about the USA; the feel of bookstores is different to me in different countries.)

aimee_bender_reading_3Last night, after a quiet evening meal after a long day of working on the Project, I went for a nice long walk, heading to Skylight books in Los Feliz. (That’s the neighbourhood at the base of the hills of Griffith Park, in case you don’t know.) My friend and colleague Aimee Bender was launching her new (long awaited) novel “The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake”, and I thought I’d go along to support the launch, hear about the book, and absorb a bit of the buzz. And buzz there was, since in addition to […] Click to continue reading this post →