Outshine

l-640-480-d044a0bd-8d6a-4a37-af29-7487b2205058.jpegI gave my seminar at the workshop yesterday and said goodbye to friends old and new, colleagues, staff, and so on. Today is a hello to tourist mode, with me exploring aspects of Vienna. It is raining today, so it is a good thing that I’d planned to spend a lot of time looking at art indoors.

I’m resting in the cafe at MUMOK (Museum Moderner Kunst), between bouts of exploration of the exhibits. There’s a modern art and modern science (together, and of course modern means early 20th Century) exhibit on the upper floors. They have the usual chatter […] Click to continue reading this post

Witten at Your Fingertips

l-333-194-98891247-3696-41e6-97c7-386cb6dbeef9.jpegI just noticed, via this article at the Guardian, that not only has Edward Witten been awarded the Institute for Physics’ Isaac Newton medal, but his lecture at the ceremony has been posted online for all to see! See the link below. It is not often that you get an opportunity to see Witten, one of today’s giants in theoretical physics, on the public stage, to the extent that most people outside the field have not heard of him at all. The public view of who is driving forward and massively contributing to the field is rather skewed as a result of the number of appearances and grand pronouncements (often on subjects they’d be better shutting the hell up about!) from certain other renown theoretical physicists. So here’s an opportunity to hear from one of the true masters of the field.

When you speak to sensible people in the subject, whatever their own work is about and whether they like some of the things he works on or not (such as string theory), they will quite readily concur that he has done a huge amount for the field, driving forth many powerful ideas, sharpening the way we think about certain kinds of problems, conceiving of new ideas, and overall strongly influencing much of the basic manner in which practitioners think about the physics they are doing. Often, even if he is not the originator of a particular […] Click to continue reading this post

Oh Vienna!

l-2048-1536-e513c70e-9db7-4c90-a4b6-4317082eb9ec.jpegVienna. (Yes, the 80s song’s refrain did ring in my head as I arrived. No, I still have no clue what the lyrics mean.)

I am at the Erwin Schrodinger Institute (named after one of the co-discoverers of the modern Quantum theory upon which so much of our science and technology depends, in case you were wondering – he with the cat) for a while. There is a workshop here on the study of aspects of nuclear physics using holographic methods from string theory, a topic I’ve told you quite a bit about before. This is week one, and there are some longer survey talks that have been put on to set the scene and get everyone on the same page. It is an excellent way to start a workshop. As a bonus, present are some of my old friends from my postdoc days who I last saw in Madrid earlier this year, Karl Landsteiner (one of the organizers) and Esperanza Lopez, (you may recall me chatting a bit about those days in an earlier post), and, as icing on the cake, to my surprise Rob Myers, a friend and collaborator from even further back, is here too.

It is not just about old friends and colleagues, but new ones too. I’ve met and re-met […] Click to continue reading this post

Come On LA!

p-2048-1536-5f4d380e-a365-44ad-9eb7-fc7a9f2c2bf3.jpegPerhaps ironically, since I tune into BBC Radio 4 every day when in Los Angeles, I’ve not been listening to it or any other UK radio or news source while here in London at all. So imagine my pleasant surprise on Thursday when I came across what clearly looked like a docking station for bikes (as opposed to super-fancy bike racks, which I thought it was at first)! Sure enough, once I got closer I confirmed it – a bike sharing scheme was starting in London. By the next day I saw some more stations on my walks, and a truck driving along full of the bikes, presumably going to load up the stations. As it turned out, I learned later that the scheme started that very next day, and today I saw several people out riding on them!

I am a little disappointed about one thing. I wanted to try them out and be out there seeing the streets of the city from one of these bikes instead of on foot (as I have been doing a lot in the last several days), but guess what? […] Click to continue reading this post

The Scary Stairs

l-2048-1536-655079d2-52f2-4383-962d-ae6e85ebb910.jpegThese stairs have a lot of significance for me. They are at Dartmouth House, just North of Piccadilly, in London’s Mayfair district. There you will find the home of the English-Speaking Union. The ESU is a charity that has an interesting history, all based on promoting friendship, communion and understanding amongst the English-Speaking nations and people of the world. This might seem an odd thing to build an organization on, but it might make more sense if you read the history. In any case, there are so many organizations of all sorts doing things, and in the scheme of things this is as good a reason as any to bring people together. The ESU administers a number of grants, fellowships, and scholarships, among other things, and one of them is the Lindemann fellowship. It is a one year postdoctoral stipend that you can get fresh out of your PhD, and it is designed to give young people a taste of America. It is highly competitive (only a couple are given out each year), and the final decision is made on the basis of an interview. You come up these stairs, all nervous and under stress since it is probably the first major interview upon which your career might depend, and the surrounding fancy parts of London may have helped make it all weigh a bit on your mind. You wait at the top of the stairs near the piano and listen for your name to be called and then you are ushered into the room and put in front of the interview panel.

I know this since I was here in 1992, being interviewed. I had set my sights on […] Click to continue reading this post

National Academy

As part of a report on a study (or several studies) I was writing last week (because evidently I can’t find enough things to keep me from making progress on the Project), I was including some data on the geographic distribution of members of the National Academy of Sciences within the US. The focus was on Physics, Astronomy, and Applied Physical Sciences. It was rather interesting, binned by state, especially if you grab the columns and tell Numbers to throw up a graph of it all. The concentrations are striking. I wondered whether the concentrations were simply following population, at least roughly, and so I went elsewhere and grabbed the population numbers for each state and ran that into a chart as well. I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions as to the results. I find them interesting. Look at California, Texas, and Florida, for example. […] Click to continue reading this post

Pub Breakfast

p-2048-1536-3e449aa4-72a9-4dcd-bac1-d73bb46ae5c3.jpegI find myself in the odd situation of being in a pub in London well before 9:00am, having breakfast. No, things have not got so bad that I’m resorting to alcohol so early in the day, you’ll be relieved (I hope) to hear. (Things are good, on balance. Thanks for asking.) It is just that I took a rather strangely timed flight over from Los Angeles that meant that I was flying during peak waking hours in my body’s internal clock, and then arriving at 6:30am London time. This meant that I did not do my usual trick of getting at least some sleep on the flight…. So I find myself in London bright and early – way too early to check into my hotel. I’m groggy and hungry. Happily I found a pub […] Click to continue reading this post

The Universe Returns – In 3D!

universe_glamour_shotSo I mentioned recently that we’d been filming for the fifth season of The History Channel’s The Universe, earlier this month and during some of the previous two. Well, I learned the other day to my surprise that the new season starts airing next week!

On Thursday 29th July at 9:00pm (8:00pm central, but check local listings) the first episode will air. It’s a survey of some of the wonderful things in our solar system. You can find a synopsis here.

Now do you remember that I did a post at some point about being filmed in 3D, and […] Click to continue reading this post

Ten

five_finger_shoes_in_actionWell, I got some. I recall blogging about seeing these some time back, and am impressed with them now that I’ve been trying them out for a week. Let me say however a couple of things. I’m not going to spout all the stuff being said about how this is all so much more “natural” than shoes, and so on and so forth. There’s a lot of that being said and I find myself generally deeply suspicious of the way the word “natural” is used to sell products, especially to a certain type of crowd who falls for this stuff. What does “natural” even mean, anyway?

I like these because they are like being barefoot without the pain and discomfort that often comes with it (stubbing toes, icky or sharp things underfoot, etc). I do not think these “five-finger” shoes (as they are called) will replace shoes for me in most circumstances. Apparently people are running in them, hiking, even mountain climbing. Good for them. I want much more support on my feet when I’m doing those things and that is why shoes were invented. Marvellous invention, shoes. Not clear to me shoes are any less “natural” than these are. They’re just different. Like cycling is not “natural”, but is a rather splendid thing humans came up with that I see nothing wrong with on the “natural” vs “non-natural” front.

See also shirts, pants, skirts, etc. Same thing.

But, in short – these are great. I was told by the fellow in the shop that they are becoming hugely popular now, although I am not sure I believe that since I’ve only ever seen one person out there wearing them, and that was a while back. (It is in shoe-sellers’ interest to make these claims.) I got them because I’ve a bit of a heel […] Click to continue reading this post

Bad Universe

Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy has announced what his super secret project has been. It’s a new science TV show for the Discovery Channel! It is called “Phil Plait’s Bad Universe”, and I imagine it’ll be a lot of fun and quite informative. There’s a trailer and some of his thoughts about the show here. I could not work out when it is going to air, so keep your eyes peeled*.

Enjoy!

-cvj

*Sorry. That’s such a dreadful image that phrase can sometimes project…
[…] Click to continue reading this post

A Vial of Calm

After spending more than half the day writing a report, fiddling with data gathering for the report, and dealing with various annoying issues in background over email, it is nice sometimes to be able to walk outside into the garden, pause to take a deep breath in the warm sunlight, and harvest some lovely tasty things.

red_green_yellow_orange

Aaaahh…

I really need this sometimes. It is good.
[…] Click to continue reading this post

Happy Higgs Hunting

lhcb_z_bosonIn case you were wondering, things are moving steadily along in the search for the Higgs boson, and in the general ramping up to study entirely new frontiers of particle physics. I noticed a couple of interesting articles today that give you a nice sample. The first, by Dick Ahlstrom in the Irish Times, and is about the announced “rediscovery” of the W and Z bosons at the Large Hadron Collider, by a team working at the LHCb experiment. (I personally think that the term “rediscovery” is somewhat misleading since it makes it seem like the community forgot where they (the key signatures of the unity of the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces at high energy) were since their discovery in the early 80s, but let me not quibble too much.) The point is that experimental teams are refining their searching techniques while sifting through all the new data being produced in the collisions at the LHC, and one thing you need to do before you begin to look for new things (like the Higgs) is to make sure you can find and recognize old things. Especially very important old things. […] Click to continue reading this post

Lemon and Chocolate for Breakfast

lemon_chocolate_cupcakes_1 Well, this morning I did an experiment. It began with zesting some lemons from the garden, and rapidly got into the business of mixing cupcake batter (recipe here – big on the lemon zest this time, and some of the juice), to make cupcakes… then melting chocolate (7 oz), pouring it over whipped butter (1 cup!), folding in some confectioner’s sugar (three cups or so), and a few drops of vanilla essence…. to make a chocolate frosting. More photos below, which you can click for larger views.

lemon_chocolate_cupcakes_2 lemon_chocolate_cupcakes_3 lemon_chocolate_cupcakes_4 lemon_chocolate_cupcakes_5 lemon_chocolate_cupcakes_6

This (and my dutiful munching on tester cakes that ensued this morning) was all in aid of a nice test of a lemon cake plus chocolate question raised earlier. You will recall from an earlier post that author Aimee Bender‘s reading at Skylight of her new[…] Click to continue reading this post

But is it Real? (Part Two)

Ah. Well, I was reserving the title of this post for a followup post to an earlier post about physics research. But, the film I went to last night at the wonderful Vista theatre was so engaging, and so excellently done – on the themes of dreams and memory – that I thought I’d use it.

escher_penrose_stairsChristopher Nolan has done it again! Inception (both written and directed by him) is yet another (remember my discussion of the Dark Knight two years back) example that shows that it is possible to make a big budget Summer Blockbuster that does not treat the audience as idiots. It tells you from the opening frames that you’re going to have to pay attention and think during the film, and that interesting ideas and themes are going to be explored, and it certainly lives up to that promise right through to the end. It is thrilling on all sort of levels, and for those who don’t care about ideas, there’s plenty of stuff blowing up and crashing into stuff to keep them happy.

I am going to say absolutely nothing more about it (more or less) since one of the […] Click to continue reading this post