Morning cup of tea, and short reflection - coming up for air before diving back in…
It’s a bit of a mess here, time-wise. Just not enough hours in the day. Everything totally fragmented. Yesterday was grueling… here’s some of it:
Up at 5:30am, finding that I’m immediately thinking about a physics project for a bit (I fell asleep doing so, having been the whole evening in the Casbah drinking coffee and doing the same) before having to break off to get ready, get to office early to start an insanely busy day. Answer a ton of email, and deal with other online stuff, planning to ignore it for the whole rest of morning. Note that flimmaker/journalist friend B has sent me an email with a list of comments and suggested changes to my script for the Video. Got to discuss it with A, my collaborator in Chemistry on this. Whenever are we going to meet in the next few days? Sigh. (Must remember to do blog post about this new project, and how I ended up involved with the Chemistry department!)
After some dithering, decided to drive in, since the plan was to stay super-late and probably involve driving someone home.
Cold as I walk to the office from where I parked on the street. Mostly in my mind, and Continue reading ‘Up for Air’
It is Earth Day today. Here’s a rose from my garden in celebration. The rose crop is fantastic right now…
Are you doing anything special for Earth Day? Links here.
-cvj
Stages of renewal. Click for larger views.
One of my cycads* had been worrying me for a while. It looked sad, very yellow and dry, and I began to wonder if it has departed this world. Then all of a sudden, as Continue reading ‘Renewal’
Well, I’ve been quiet here because I got rather swamped with lots of things over the last few days. The biggest thing was yesterday. I gave a colloquium at Caltech entitled “Cooking with Quarks and Gluons: Recipes from the String Theory Kitchen”*. The abstract is given below**. It is mostly based on what I wrote about last Summer.
With all the other things I had to do (including writing and giving two fun two hour lectures on cosmology in my undergraduate GR class) I still decided that it was time to totally rethink how I tell this exciting physics story, and how I present it. This meant designing and building many new slides. Each slide can take a long time to prepare, so this took two solid days of hiding away while designing and building them, only breaking for the other stuff.
Well, it was fun in the end, and today I am exhausted. I decided that you should not miss out entirely on the treats, so I made a little movie of the first parts of the talk to Continue reading ‘Some Unusual Recipes’
Well, Comedy Central fans, here’s something for you. Before you get settled into your nightly dose of the Daily Show on Wednesday night, tune in half an hour earlier, at 10:30 (at least on the coasts). It’s Lewis Black’s new show “Root of All Evil”, this week covering the issue of which of the two prevailing juggernauts in our culture, American Idol or High School, that reduce so much in our culture to popularity contests, is more Evil.
(This one I actually think speaks to a serious point. Sadly, in an presidential election year here, any attempt to parody this sort of thing for comedic effect is totally outshone by almost any news broadcast.)
Continue reading ‘Comedy Moments’
(The title refers to this post.)
Ok, this is a post of (probably pointless) complaint about one of society’s conventions. I do that from time to time. So as I said in an earlier post, I lost my bag within which I carry around my personal day to day stuff. It is small and fits on my shoulder and carries lots of useful stuff that I don’t like to carry in my pockets. My handbag, if you will. I happily carry such a bag, and call it by that name quite often. Sometimes I jokingly say that I’m “secure enough in my sexuality to call it what it is”, and not have to lamely resort to inventing a new name for something that already exists in the world serving that exact function - but carried by women. I’d forgotten just how serious and non-joking this whole business actually is. I did not recall how much trouble I’d previously gone to when I tried to find such a bag that suits my needs (practical and aesthetic). It’s a real pain. Losing it now meant that I had to go through this all over again, and discovering that I’d not really finished the job that previous time. (And the alternative names are so stupid - “manbag”, “murse”, etc… Haven’t they noticed that “handbag” is already gender neutral?)
What is the problem? Simply put, there’s an unbelievable amount of phobia here (and it is here in the USA more than, say Europe) about guys carrying such bags. Utterly Continue reading ‘Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag (Again)’
It was hard not to notice yellow all over Griffith Park this weekend. There were several Continue reading ‘Yellow Fields’
Takuya Okuda talking about Wilson Loops at the most recent SCSS, UCLA, Dec. 2007. Click to enlarge.
The next regional string meeting is a two-day one at Caltech, this Friday and Saturday, organized by Joseph Marsano. It’s going to be full of interesting talks and conversations, as usual. Please encourage your graduate students to come, especially, since special effort is made to make sure that each talk begins with a pedagogical portion to help non-experts in that subfield navigate and see the motivation.
The speakers are:
Continue reading ‘Southern California Strings Seminar’
Tomorrow I’m shooting all day for a TV show that is going to focus on the idea of alternative universes (or parallel universes, if you prefer). Should be fun. The setting at least will be interesting (more on that later) and it ought to be interesting to see how the writer puts all the material together into a coherent narrative. Part of my job will be to try to emphasize that while parallel/alternative universes show up a lot in actual scientific discussions (and have done for a long time), we have not yet had anything like a good observational or experimental reason to believe in their existence anywhere other than in our imaginations. It’s vital to get this across (I hope they don’t just edit it out) because people are so willing to believe in many half-baked fanciful ideas - and this is one of them - and when they show up in a science documentary (this is (again) for the History Channel’s “The Universe” series, which has been very good) with actual scientists being quoted, one should be especially careful (as we were on the “Cosmic Holes” episode (with different filmmakers), which has proven to be rather popular, and is full of speculative ideas like travel using wormholes and time machines right alongside equally fantastic-sounding things, like black holes, which are in fact a scientific reality). The rest of my job will be to talk about some of the places where the idea shows up in modern thought, some of the reasons why, and some of the opportunities for solving various challenging problems (and maybe creating a host of others!!) can be afforded by such ideas.
All that aside, this reminds me of something else entirely - Do you ever have those days when you feel like you’ve accidentally stepped sideways into an alternative universe? I do. Recently, I had a huge dose of it. Sit back and I’ll tell you the story…
Continue reading ‘Consider the Alternatives’
Spring is in full flow here, and there were lovely contrasts to see on my hike in Griffith Continue reading ‘Renewal’
Yesterday here at USC was my last lecture in the class about black holes (see also here). We’ve got to move on to other topics (Cosmology, Einstein’s equations, etc) and so cannot do any more. It was a fun last lecture though. I pulled together a few scraps of things I did not finish in the previous lecture (such as the extraordinarily high percentage of binding energy per unit rest mass you can extract with rotating black hole orbits - just what you need to power things like quasars) and then finished with:
-
A taste of Hawking radiation, the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy and the wonderful and beautiful subject of black hole thermodynamics that opens up when you combine gravity with quantum mechanics*, followed by…
- A quick discussion of the Penrose process for extracting energy from rotating black holes. (I’m sure that all (past, present or future) super-advanced civilizations must be using them as the ultimate emissions-free means of generating energy for heating their homes and so forth. No, really.)
*Of course, all undergraduates commonly hate it when you dare bring in stuff from other classes, so to Continue reading ‘A Farewell to Black Holes’
We’ve been studying rotating black holes in my class this week, which has been fun. We get to apply the techniques we’ve been honing in the context of the Schwarzschild solution (link to recent posts below) to a bit more complicated solution, the Kerr solution, which includes rotation. Some equations follow, although you needn’t be put off by them. Most of this will make sense without really understanding them much. Just so you can see the shape of the things we scribble, I’ll show you the equation that captures this curved spacetime geometry, with no real explanation (sorry):
Here 
and 
The parameter 
is the ratio of the solution’s spin or angular momentum 
to its total mass 
, measured in appropriate units. It’s a very important solution to get to grips with, since it’s not just fantasy physics, but highly relevant for astrophysics since black holes that are “out there” are unlikely to be non-rotating, and in fact, one can expect them to be rotating at quite a clip in many cases. A good many black holes - including some of the Continue reading ‘Bigger than the FCC’
It’s a bit more than a month away. It’s always fun every year. It’s a Los Angeles celebration of the written word, done in wonderful sunshine, with hundreds of marvellous events in three days for young and old - Yes, it is the LA Times Festival of Books, coming up the weekend starting April 25th. The main daytime proceedings take place on the 26th and 27th (Saturday and Sunday) and I recommend them to you if you’ve not been. Mark your calendar. (Once you’re over there on Sunday, stay for the Categorically Not! event in the evening (entitled “Loops”), which will involve among others, science writer Dava Sobel!!) (Above right: One of the 2008 theme images from the Festival’s website. More here.)
The Friday evening will see the book prizes given out, kicking off the festival as usual. I remembered this just now because I found myself curious about the shortlist of books in the Science and Technology category. I wondered if there was something on Continue reading ‘Festival of Books’
Continuing a bit about the microbiology to be found in the garden, I did a post not so long ago on Correlations giving an update about the composting system I started a while ago (post on that here). You might find it interesting, and so I thought I’d let you know about it. It is here.
All’s looking well for an exciting Spring season of gardening!
-cvj
Wow, a lot of time has passed since I thought I’d get around to posting about this. You’ll recall that I went to take part in the taping of a segment for Comedy Central some time ago. Well, later on I went to the taping of the full show in which it will appear, and it was an amusing and interesting experience.
The show? Comedy Central, and in particular, Daily Show fans will be pleased to learn that Lewis Black finally has a show of his own, and it is called “The Root of All Evil”. The format is that he presides as a judge over a case examining which of two popular Continue reading ‘Tales From The Industry XIX - Black Comedy’
The next Categorically Not! is on Sunday March 9th (upcoming). The Categorically Not! series of events that are held at the Santa Monica Art Studios, (with occasional exceptions). It’s a series - started and run by science writer K. C. Cole - of fun and informative conversations deliberately ignoring the traditional boundaries between art, science, humanities, and other subjects. I strongly encourage you to come to them if you’re in the area. Here is the website that describes past ones, and upcoming ones. See also the links at the end of the post for some announcements and descriptions (and even video) of previous events.
The theme this month is Puzzles! Here’s the description from K C Cole:
What isn’t a puzzle? The universe, life and everything are essentially puzzles that, to borrow from Einstein, “beckon like a liberation.” Designing buildings, choreographing dances, cooking meals and getting along with other people all involve solving puzzles (as, of course, does figuring out what’s right in front of your eyes—not to mention putting together a program such as Categorically Not!) A love of puzzles and the challenge of solving them is deeply embedded in human nature.
Gwen Roberts, Scott Kim, Gavin Scott.
Our March 9th Categorically Not! features puzzlemaster Scott Kim, who’s Continue reading ‘Categorically Not! - Puzzles!’
No doubt about it: Spring has sprung. Whoever says there are no seasons in LA - and there are many who do - have no idea what they are talking about. The signs are in the air - there’s been a distinct change of the smell; lots of flowers are blooming. A parade of displays has begun. These are some of the poppies that are in various corners of the campus here at USC:
Here’s another shot….
Continue reading ‘Spring Sprung’
I had some unusual guests in my General Relativity lecture yesterday, Eric Salat and Philip Shane, two film makers from Left/Right productions. They’re working on a documentary for the History Channel on the development of various ideas in physics in the early 20th Century, and they wanted to know more about the topics, and to see a full (1 hour and 50 minute) lecture from me.
While it is the History Channel (hence the dramatic subtitle - sorry), it is not part of the series “The Universe”, by the way. It is another separate part of the increased very welcome expansion of that channel’s science programming. Have you noticed the diversification of their programming that they’ve been doing? I’ve mentioned it before, and a number of people have commented on it to me elsewhere. It has been great to see.
It’s always fun to have more people in the classroom, and so we had a lot of fun… (Or at least, I did…I hope everyone else did too.) I happened to be doing a lecture on Continue reading ‘Tales From The Industry XVIII - History Looked On’
Nicholas Payton came to town last Wednesday. For me, this means drop everything and go and hear him play. Two happy coincidences took place as well, contributing to making it a bit more special. The first was that my friend and colleague from UBC, Moshe Rozali (who sometimes comments here on the blog) was visiting to give a seminar that day. As I’ve been discovering (as a result of this blog more than anything else) we are very much in the same place when it comes to music, books and many things, and so it was just fantastic to be able to take him along. The second was that my friend of many years, cosmologist Marc Kamionkowski, got in touch just on the off-chance by email (I’d not seen him in many months) to ask if I knew if there was any good jazz coming to town! Marc and I have shared our love of Jazz for about 16 years now, going back to our days of meeting up in New York together at various Jazz clubs. So the three of us sat there and enjoyed the concert together. It was at the Jazz Bakery (to which you’ve possibly read me refer here before), and since I’ve not been there in a while, I was pleasantly surprised to see that they’ve replaced the plastic picnic chairs with some more comfortable padded ones. Quite an improvement.
Payton was joined by four excellent musicians, who were just great too: Russell Continue reading ‘Energized’
Fantastic news! There’s going to be a farmer’s market on campus at USC. The first one is on Thursday this week, and rumour has it that it is expected to be monthly! If anyone has more information about this, please let me know in the comments or by email. (Right, enlargeable image of one of the results of my weekly visits to the Hollywood Farmer’s Market. More here.)
Here’s the announcement for Thursday:
Continue reading ‘A Farmer’s Market at USC’
There’s a total eclipse of the moon tonight (Wednesday 20th)! NASA has a nice website on the timings, and some background information. Totality is at about 10:26pm EST, (see the NASA graphic to the right (click for larger)) but you should start watching before that to see the changes, which are always lovely to see. Naked eye is good, but if you have a pair of binoculars to help - even better!
Locally, if you’re interested you can join some of the Astronomy 100 students and TAs Continue reading ‘Total Eclipse of the Moon’
A commenter asked how the aforementioned movie viewing and panel discussion went on Friday (movie: Jumper), and so I thought expand a bit on the answer I gave:
___________________________________________________________________________________
It went very well. We were at the School of Cinematic Arts, at USC. We had a full house in the Norris Theatre, which was great to see. Most of the audience was students from the SCA, I think, with some of the faculty present, and people from the film’s parent studio, and several others. For the panel, present were two of the film’s producers, the visual effects supervisor, costume supervisor, production designer… basically, the perfect people to have a discussion with about the physics! I won’t try to list all names since I did not catch all of them and don’t want to mis-credit people for being there who weren’t.
Teleportation physics aside for a moment, I’m very impressed with how they realized Continue reading ‘Tales From the Industry XVII: Jump Thoughts’
(Camellia blossoms. Click for larger view.)
Continue reading ‘Camellias’
No, not spoiler in that sense. Doug Liman’s new action movie “Jumper” is all about teleportation, you see, and one of the questions that’s going to be on people’s minds is something like “Is teleportation really possible, or is it just some silly science fiction thing?”. I like it when such questions come up, and I like trying to answer them too.
This time I get to do it officially, since Doug Liman’s people are doing a private screening of the film this evening and there’ll be a panel of some of the film’s creators and a scientist for questions and answers afterward. I’ll be the scientist.
The downside is that I’ll be the bad guy of the evening by having to pour a bit of cold water on some of the flights of fancy. The spoiler, you see, as in spoilsport. The upside (besides, you know, free movie) is that I’ll maybe get to explain some really Continue reading ‘Movie Spoiler?’
I’ve mentioned it before a number of times, but it’s always worth remembering the downtown Los Angeles Art Walk every second Thursday of the month. Lots of local people still don’t know about it, so I like to remind from time to time.
For the one today, given the day, you can take your sweetheart along for a Valentine’s day ramble around the neighbourhood. Or, if you’ve either too many or too few to choose from… never mind - just go along yourself! There’s always lots to see.
Some months back I made a huge effort to document photographically (sometimes surreptitiously) some of the work I saw, to show you it. I was planning on doing a long post describing all of it and of course I was so exhausted when I got home that I never did and then I sort of went off the boil on that project. I’ve no idea why I’m mentioning it now - it just came to mind.
Continue reading ‘Art, Walk’
Well, only four weeks and change behind us in this course, and… the class (see here and here) is ready to understand this wonderful equation:
and all that it implies. What is it? It encodes the shape of spacetime around a spherical blob of mass of total mass M. No, don’t worry too much about the details, since this is not a lecture about General Relativity….. it is just nice (I hope) every now and again to get a look at the sorts of things we use in our day to day work. This “warped” spacetime encodes what we interpret as the gravitational field (in the old Newtonian language) due to a spherical (or, to a good approximation, almost spherical) mass. Like the sun, or the earth, or that tennis ball in the corner there*. It is an exact solution Continue reading ‘Mass Matters’
A small Romanesque Cauliflower. (Click for larger view.)
Imagine my delight when I spotted this lovely piece of edible mathematics in the Hollywood Farmer’s Market this morning. The stall has several of them of many sizes (this was a very little one) and of several colours. Wonderful. If you don’t know what I mean when I talk about the mathematics, or use the term fractal, look it up. There are several things of note, among which are the wonderful spiral structures that you can Continue reading ‘A Delicious Fractal’
It was one of those Friday nights when I was in the mood to get out of the house, but not entirely sure what to get out to. “Out” was more important than “where”, you see. Wanted to do a bit of thinking and to relax and let the heavy week of too many meetings fall away from my shoulders.
In the end, I did a combination of things. After my mood, followed by my 
trajectory, turned away from Pasadena (where I was planning to see Persepolis, as was my original plan - I’ll do it later… really want to see that film) at about 10:30pm I arrived in the Valley and hung out at Charlie O’s which is one of the more happening of the neighbourhoody jazz clubs in LA. (Sadly, in this context, “happening” by LA late night standards means that there’s more than about nine people present.)
There’s always something on each night and you can just walk in and sit at the bar to Continue reading ‘Friday Night Wanderings’
(Meyer lemons in my garden, in the warm sun this morning. Click for larger, warmer view.)
Continue reading ‘Warm Yellow’
Well, Tuesday was a big day in class. We reached a landmark - the introduction of one of my very favourite thoughts of the 20th Century: the Equivalence Principle. This is the realization of Einstein’s that there’s something profoundly odd about Newtonian mechanics and Newtonian gravity that hints at something deeper.
Quick reminder from high school (just two formulae, please bear with me): You know Continue reading ‘Equivalence’
(Giant Banyan Tree on the USC campus. Click for larger view.)
This is one of my most favourite features of the landscaping on the campus here at USC. It’s one of the very earliest features that made me feel very much at home on the campus when I first arrived. I remember coming around a corner, seeing it, and Continue reading ‘The Tree, I’
Layers in Los Angeles. Click for details.
Lovely layers in the distance on a hike at Runyon Canyon this morning, looking North East. There’s breadth and depth here. You have the Hollywood sign on the left, all the Continue reading ‘Layers’
While the wonderful downpour carries on outside (the whole of Southern California is in the grips of a powerful storm), I’ll continue with the discussion of the re-invigoration of the study that I started a short while ago…
(One of my all-time favourite wood-working tools. The good old-fashioned plane. Planing a bit of wood is jolly good therapy too.)
One of the main things I envisioned, and put into my sketches, was lots of space for books. Lots. I wanted big bookcases that fit the room, and so I planned a simple but robust design that stretched them eight feet from the floor to the ceiling. Of course, I wanted to make them myself - Building them myself would be more fun and much Continue reading ‘Bookcases’
The next Categorically Not! is on Sunday January 27th (upcoming). The Categorically Not! series of events that are held at the Santa Monica Art Studios, (with occasional exceptions). It’s a series - started and run by science writer K. C. Cole 
- of fun and informative conversations deliberately ignoring the traditional boundaries between art, science, humanities, and other subjects. I strongly encourage you to come to them if you’re in the area. Here is the website that describes past ones, and upcoming ones. See also the links at the end of the post for some announcements and descriptions (and even video) of previous events. (Above right and left: Reza Aslan speaking on the origin of various ideas in Religion at the event entitled “Beginnings” on 16th December, 2007. Click right one for larger view.)
The theme this month is Science Goes Hollywood. Here’s the description from K C Cole:
Despite our prejudices to the contrary, Hollywood and Science have a lot to say to each other. Take special effects: Nothing Disney dreams up can Continue reading ‘Categorically Not! - Science Goes Hollywood’
By the way, do you remember that I had to do that presentation entitled “What Matters to Me and Why”*, last semester? (Blog post here, with follow-up post with transcript and audio here.) Well, it turns out that science writer and journalist KC Cole (of USC’s Continue reading ‘What Matters to KC Cole’
I like the crooked neck on this device, with a very clever low-cost adjustment to make it that the rotating part is level (cute use of geometry - simply rotate the two obliquely Continue reading ‘Crook on Roof’
Excellent evening on Wednesday night. As I expected, KC worked her magic and steered the conversation in many interesting directions, with Alan Alda turning out to be - not unexpectedly - quite the character. I suspect that it was recorded (on video) and so I will update this post or do a later post with a pointer to it later. Alda was swamped by people buying his book and getting is signed and so forth at the reception. It was great to see such a good attendance at this USC Visions and Voices event all about science and the arts - very much in the spirit of what this is all supposed to be about*.
Among the many things of note that were said, one thing I liked a lot was the telling by Continue reading ‘Put Yourself In Their Shoes’
So it is that time. A new semester is upon me, and a totally new course to deliver. Today was my first day back on campus after the break (at least during a regular working day).
Sunday saw me sitting down (in the newly completed study) thinking about how I was going to structure the course. This usually has me sitting with the textbook, a pen, a hand drawn calendar on a big sheet of paper, and a frown on my face trying to figure out roughly what topics I will cover, how many lectures I will devote to each, how many class worksheets (see earlier post) I might have, when the midterms will be, and so forth.
What I am teaching? Why, only one of my most favourite topics to teach in the entire Continue reading ‘Lecture One’
This is a quick note to point you to the Women in Physics conference (aimed primarily at undergraduates) being held at USC again this year. It’s on Saturday and Sunday coming. It looks like another excellent program (see here), so well done to the organizers for keeping going what Amy and Katie started (it has also spread elsewhere - see the site for more conferences, and consider starting one in your area). Parenthetically, I’ve heard that one or two readers of the blog will be attending, so don’t hesitate to say Hi! if you see me around.
Enjoy!
-cvj
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