Replenishing critical supplies of cinnamon-raisin bread for the household, a couple of days ago. Not a bad result, given that it is so long since I’ve made this kind of loaf. The recipe turned out a little raisin-poor for my tastes, and it was a little dry (possibly my fault), … Click to continue reading this post
This Wednesday (10th June), in support of #BlackLivesMatter and the demonstrations taking part worldwide, there will be a day of action in various parts of academia to simply stop doing “business as usual” while the horrors of what is routinely done to black people at all levels of society continue.
What people choose to do on that day is up to them, but there are suggestions as a number of websites. I encourage you to go there and read what they have to say, and make up your own mind. A good start is the ShutDownStem site, and search under #ShutDownAcademia, #ShutDownSTEM and #Strike4BlackLives on social media for chatter, activity, and more resources. The Particles For Justice group, led by people in or close to my field, have also joined in to lead and encourage, and their site is here, again with lots of suggestions for types of action to get involved in.
Frankly, having seen and heard […] Click to continue reading this post
Here’s a striking coincidence. Last Friday I was preparing to deliver a lecture on special relativity to my undergrad General Relativity class with this Hobbity thought experiment (that helps one discover Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction), when I heard that Christopher Tolkien (the boy the Hobbit was originally written for) had died. (RIP. … Click to continue reading this post
(A somewhat more technical post follows.) Well, I think I promised to say a bit more about what I’ve been up to in that work that resulted in the paper I talked about in an earlier post. The title of my paper, “Non-perturbative JT gravity” has JT (Jackiw-Teitelbiom) gravity in … Click to continue reading this post
The two pies were a success! -cvj
[caption id="attachment_19354" align="aligncenter" width="499"]
Avengers cosplayers in the audience of my Friday panel.[/caption]It might surprise you to know just how much science gets into the mix at Comic-Con. This never makes it to the news of course – instead its all stories about people dressing up in costumes, and of course features about big movie and TV announcements. Somewhere inside this legendary pop culture maelstrom there’s something for nearly everyone, and that includes science. Which is as it should be. Here’s a look at two days I spent there. [I took some photos! (All except two here – You can click on any photo to enlarge it.]
Day 1 – Friday
I finalized my schedule rather late, and so wasn’t sure of my hotel needs until it was far too late to find two nights in a decent hotel within walking distance of the San Diego Convention Center — well, not for prices that would fit with a typical scientist’s budget. So, I’m staying in a motel that’s about 20 minutes away from the venue if I jump into a Lyft.
My first meeting is over brunch at the Broken Yolk at 10:30am, with my fellow panellists for the panel at noon, “Entertaining Science: The Real, Fake, and Sometimes Ridiculous Ways Science Is Used in Film and TV”. They are Donna J. Nelson, chemist and science advisor for the TV show Breaking Bad (she has a book about it), Rebecca Thompson, Physicist and author of a new book about the science of Game of Thrones, and our moderator Rick Loverd, the director of the Science and Entertainment Exchange, an organization set up by the National Academy of Sciences. I’m on the panel also as an author (I wrote and drew a non-fiction graphic novel about science called The Dialogues). My book isn’t connected to a TV show, but I’ve worked on many TV shows and movies as a science advisor, and so this rounds out the panel. All our books are from […] Click to continue reading this post
Oh, that talk I did at Perimeter? It is available online now. It is all about the process of making the book “The Dialogues”, why I did it and how I did it. Along the way, I show some examples and talk about the science they’re bringing to life, but this is not primarily a science talk but a talk about talking about science, if you see what I mean.
The talk starts slowly, but bear with me and it warms up swiftly!
YouTube link here. Ended below:
[…] Click to continue reading this post
Oh, look what I found! It is my talk “Black Holes and Time Travel in your Everyday Life”, which I gave as the Klopsteg Award lecture at AAPT back in July. Someone put it on YouTube. I hope you enjoy it!
Two warnings: (1) Skip to about 6 minutes to start, to avoid all the embarrassing handshaking and awarding and stuff. (2) There’s a bit of early morning slowness + jet lag in my delivery here and there, so sorry about that. 🙂
Embed:
Abstract: […] Click to continue reading this post
I’m late to the party. Yes, I use the word party, because the outpouring of commentary noting the passing of Stan Lee has been, rightly, marked with a sense of celebration of his contributions to our culture. Celebration of a life full of activity. In the spirit of a few of the “what were you doing when you heard…” stories I’ve heard, involving nice coincidences and ironies, I’ve got one of my own. I’m not exactly sure when I heard the announcement on Monday, but I noticed today that it was also on Monday that I got an email giving me some news* about the piece I wrote about the Black Panther earlier this year for the publication The Conversation. The piece is about the (then) pending big splash the movie about the character (co-created by Stan Lee in the 60s) was about to make in the larger culture, the reasons for that, and why it was also a tremendous opportunity for science. For science? Yes, because, as I said there:
Vast audiences will see black heroes of both genders using their scientific ability to solve problems and make their way in the world, at an unrivaled level.
and
Improving science education for all is a core endeavor in a nation’s competitiveness and overall health, but outcomes are limited if people aren’t inspired to take an interest in science in the first place. There simply are not enough images of black scientists – male or female – in our media and entertainment to help inspire. Many people from underrepresented groups end up genuinely believing that scientific investigation is not a career path open to them.
Moreover, many people still see the dedication and study needed to excel in science as “nerdy.” A cultural injection of Black Panther heroics could help continue to erode the crumbling tropes that science is only for white men or reserved for people with a special “science gene.”
And here we are many months later, and I was delighted to see that people did get a massive dose of science inspiration from T’Challa and his sister Shuri, and the whole of the Wakanda nation, not just in Black Panther, but also in the Avengers: Infinity War movie a short while after.
But my larger point here is that so much of this goes back to Stan Lee’s work with collaborators in not just making “relatable” superheroes, as you’ve heard said so many times — showing their flawed human side so much more than the dominant superhero trope (represented by Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman, etc.,) allowed for at the time — but making science and scientists be at the forefront of much of it. So many of the characters either were scientists (Banner (Hulk), Richards (Mr.Fantastic), T’Challa (BlackPanther), Pym (Ant Man), Stark (Ironman), etc) or used science actively to solve problems (e.g. Parker/Spiderman).
This was hugely influential on young minds, I have no doubt. This is not a small number of […] Click to continue reading this post
Maybe a decade or so ago* I made a Halloween costume which featured this simple mask decorated with symbols. “The scary face of science” I called it, mostly referring to people’s irrational fear of mathematics. I think I was being ironic. In retrospect, I don’t think it was funny at all.
(Originally posted on Instagram here.)
-cvj
(*I’ve since found the link. Seems it was actually 7 years ago.) Click to continue reading this post
And then two come along at once… Following on yesterday, another of the longer interviews I’ve done recently has appeared. This one was for Sean Carroll’s excellent Mindscape podcast. This interview/chat is all about string theory, including some of the core ideas, its history, what that “quantum gravity” thing is anyway, and why it isn’t actually a theory of (just) strings. Here’s a direct link to the audio, and here’s a link to the page about it on Sean’s blog.
The whole Mindscape podcast has had some fantastic conversations, by the way, so do check it out on iTunes or your favourite podcast supplier!
I hope you enjoy it!!
For your listening pleasure: I’ve been asked to do a number of longer interviews recently. One of these was for the “Futuristic Podcast of Mark Gerlach”, who interviews all sorts of people from the arts (normally) over to the sciences (well, he hopes to do more of that starting with me). Go and check out his show on iTunes. The particular episode with me can be found as episode 31. We talk about a lot of things, from how people get into science (including my take on the nature vs nurture discussion), through the changes in how people get information about science to the development of string theory, to black holes and quantum entanglement – and a host of things in between. We even talked about The Dialogues, you’ll be happy to hear. I hope you enjoy listening!
(The picture? Not immediately relevant, except for the fact that I did cycle to the place the recording took place. I mostly put it there because I was fixing my bike not long ago and it is good to have a photo in a post. That is all.)
I was asked by editors of the magazine Physics World’s 30th anniversary edition to do a drawing that somehow captures changes in physics over the last 30 years, and looks forward to 30 years from now. This was an interesting challenge. There was not anything like the freedom to use space that I had in other works I’ve done, like my graphic book about science “The Dialogues”, or my glimpse of the near future in my SF story “Resolution” in the Twelve Tomorrows anthology. I had over 230 pages for the former, and 20 pages for the latter. Here, I had one page. Well, actually a little over 2/3 of a page (once you take into account the introductory text, etc).
So I thought about it a lot. The editors wanted to show an active working environment, and so I thought about the interiors of labs for some time, looked up lots of physics breakthroughs over the years, and reflected on what might come. I eventually realized that the most important single change in the science that can be visually depicted (and arguably the single most important change of any kind) is the change that’s happened to the scientists. Most importantly, we’ve become more diverse in various ways (not uniformly across all fields though), much more collaborative, and the means by which we communicate in order to do science have expanded greatly. All of this has benefited the science greatly, and I think that if you were to get a time machine and visit a lab 30 years ago, or 30 years from now, it will be the changes in the people that will most strike you, if you’re paying attention. So I decided to focus on the break/discussion area of the lab, and imagined that someone stood in the same spot each year and took a snapshot. What we’re seeing is those photos tacked to a noticeboard somewhere, and that’s our time machine. Have a look, and keep an eye out for various details I put in to reflect the different periods. Enjoy! (Direct link here, and below I’ve embedded the image itself that’s from the magazine. I recommend reading the whole issue, as it is a great survey of the last 30 years.)
If you’ve been following on instagram you’ll know that I spent some time over the last weeks working on an illustration that was commissioned by a physics magazine. (Feels odd saying that, commissioned, but that’s exactly what happened. Apparently I’m able to add professional illustrator to my CV now. Huh.) Anyway, the illustration will show the interior of a lab. I’ll let you know more about it closer to publication. Much of the focus was on the people, and for reasons that will become clear, I did a bit of a throwback to the 80s, and so tried to reflect that period somewhat, old computers and ghastly sweaters and all. Here’s a sequence of stages of a corner of the work (click on it for a larger view):
The working title for this was “when you forget to bring your camera on holiday…” but I know you won’t believe that’s why I drew it! (This was actually a quick sketch done at the beach on Sunday, with a few tweaks added over dinner and some shadows added using iPad.)
I’m working toward doing finish work on a commissioned illustration for a magazine (I’ll tell you about it more when I can – check instagram, etc., for updates/peeks), and am finding my drawing skills very rusty –so opportunities to do sketches, whenever I can find them, are very welcome.
