Asymptotia

…more to go. I’ve finished one of the papers I’ve been writing (this one co-authored with my student, Tameem) after delaying on it for months. I’m not sure how things got quite this backed up in terms of things I have to do, but they have. I meant to start on a new, long project last week, and all my efforts these days have been toward clearing away all those things I want to get done and dusted before focusing on that. It is taking time, but gradually the clearing is happening. Two more manuscripts to complete.

This paper reports on the continuation of the work we’ve been doing over the years in understanding the physics of various model systems in an applied magnetic field. This is in the context of holographic models of important strongly coupled phenomena that are of considerable interest in lots of fields of physics (particle physics, nuclear physics, condensed matter physics, atomic physics). (Since I don’t want to explain holography and so forth every time I talk about it, see a post I did about some of that here, and related posts in the list at the bottom of this one, if not sure what I’m talking about.) (Hmmmm, I see from my SPIRES listing that I’ve got seven papers mentioning magnetic field explicitly in the title in the last three years, and three or four more of the rest are occupied in large part with the issue too. No, really, I’m not obsessed.)

The issue here is the study of structures that suggest themselves as earmarks of Fermi surfaces in strongly coupled systems. It has been a goal for a long time in the context of gauge/gravity duals to understand what the signals of a Fermi surface would be. Would it be some geometrical object in the dual gravity theory, perhaps? Access to a computationally tractable description of such an object would be rather Continue reading ‘News From The Front, VIII: One Down…’

Ah yes. I’ll admit it: Except for the moustache and a few other details, the scene is eerily familiar… (The embed for the video is below.)

Does anyone know who originally started this brilliant series? For those who don’t know it is a 4 minute clip from the 2004 film Der Undergang that several people have periodically re-subtitled with words that have Hitler reacting to an event of some sort. (Warning: Many of them are full of language some might find a bit strong, so watch out!!)

Here it is*:
Continue reading ‘Peer Review Reactions’

Well, a very gentle sort of wham. Yesterday the Large Hadron Collider at CERN had its first collisions of protons! It is a warm start, making sure everything is working before ramping up the energies to regimes where we hope to see new physics, but it is a very exciting milestone nonetheless*. Recall that a few days back they hit the landmark of getting the machine to circulate beams again for the first time. (If you’ve forgotten what all of this is for, please search the blog for “LHC” and/or look in the related posts list at the bottom of this one.) Above right is a visual reconstruction of some of the collision data seen at the ALICE detector, and you can see more of this sort of data at CERN’s website (from where I got this graphic).

From the press release:

Continue reading ‘Wham!’

I’ve no idea why I do this to myself. I was just about managing things schedule-wise and aiming to make sure I have some fun on the weekend when the following thing happened. I went to Monday’s departmental colloquium and before it, ran into Moh, our organizer this year. I’d been trying to see if there was still room to schedule a speaker I’d thought of inviting, and he mentioned that the dates we’d earlier discussed had all been filled. Then he mentioned that he was desperately trying to find a speaker for next Monday, and was thinking that he’d have to simply cancel it that week.

This was at 4:05pm. Now watch how rapidly I move to ruin a perfectly good schedule Continue reading ‘There Goes the Weekend’

Mark your calendar for Sunday! The West Hollywood Book Fair is on from 10 am to 6:00 pm that day, and there’s so much to see and do with readings, panels, discussions, authors, special celebrity guests, food, exhibitions, writing workshops, discount book offers, signings, swag (no doubt), and so forth. I’ve not been before, but as you know from reading here I’m a big fan of cities going gaga over books for a while, being a regular visitor to the LA Times Book Festival when it comes in the Spring. The calendar of events and much more about the event can be found at the website here.

Here’s another thing. Despite the fact there was no mention of a spankingly splendid Continue reading ‘More Book Fun!’

Today I’m pleased to announce that we have a guest post from a very distinguished colleague of mine, Len Adleman. Len is best known as the “A” in RSA and the inventor of DNA-computing. He is a Turing Award laureate. However, he considers himself “a rank amateur” (his words!) as a physicist. He’s one of my colleagues on whom I can always rely for a fun and interesting conversation, even if it is just for a fleeting moment during a chance encounter in an elevator. The other day he told me he’d been thinking a lot about quantum mechanics, and it seemed like it would be fun to share his thoughts with others here on the blog. So join in using the comment form if you’ve some thoughts of your own in response.

Here’s Len.

-cvj

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For a long time, physicists have struggled with perplexing “meta-questions” (my phrase): Does God play dice with the universe? Does a theory of everything exist? Do parallel universes exist? As the physics community is acutely aware, these are extremely difficult questions and one may despair of ever finding meaningful answers. The mathematical community has had its own meta-questions that are no less daunting: What is “truth”? Do infinitesimals exist? Is there a single set of axioms from which all of mathematics can be derived? In what many consider to be on the short list of great intellectual achievements, Frege, Russell, Tarski, Turing, Godel, and other logicians were able to clear away the fog and sort these questions out. The framework they created, mathematical logic, has put a foundation under mathematics, provided great insights and profound results. After many years of consideration, I have come to believe that mathematical logic, suitably extended and modified (perhaps to include complexity theoretic ideas), has the potential to provide the same benefits to physics. In the following remarks, I will explore this possibility.

But, be warned: I am not a physicist and these ideas are embryonic. At best they indicate a possible direction; a fully functional theoretical framework, if possible at all, would be the work of lifetimes.

For most of my academic life, my primary topic of research (and affection) has been Continue reading ‘Len Adleman: Quantum Mechanics and Mathematical Logic’

Here’s an odd coincidence. Thursday, just for fun, I declared it Monopole Day in my facebook status. It was largely because I was prepping a class on Dirac’s ideas about magnetic monopoles (roughly: point sources of magnetic fields analogous to point sources of electric fields), why it seems (from looking at Maxwell’s equations - the defining equations of electricity and magnetism) that Nature might very much like the idea of them (using a symmetry argument - roughly: electric and magnetic fields can turn into each other so if there’s one kind of point source, isn’t it strange that there’s not the other?) but chose to hide them away…

It’s a favourite topic of mine (and many physicists - it is one of the first grown-up tastes of modern ways of thinking about physics that you get as an advanced undergraduate, actually), and so I was excited to lecture about it (as I am every year… I find en excuse to bring monopoles into every course I teach… almost). I even handed out one of my class worksheets, which was all about how to build a monopole (on paper - you take a semi-infinite solenoid (a “Dirac String”) and let the magnetic flux lines spill out Continue reading ‘Thursday was Monopole Day’

I make it a rule to never do that. It’s bad form. Best to be avoided.

Seriously, though, over on the Intersection, Sheril wants your kiss and tell photos. What she’s really looking for is…. well, here are her words:

Have you ever taken a picture of bears nuzzling in the field or kissing fish? How about a provocative pair of human subjects? (With their permission!) Are you interested in having an image credited to you in a science book debuting next Fall? If you’re a photographer with intriguing pictures of kissing and cuddling [no higher than PG-13 content please], email me before September 14 at srkirshenbaum@yahoo.com.

So go and send her some of your material if you have what she’s looking for! If not, consider making some new material. It’s for science.

-cvj

On Friday I was involved in an interesting conversation in an unusual format. It was a chat with cosmologist Anthony Aguirre at UCSC, and it was all about research in aspects of cosmology and of string theory, touching on issues such as the nature of quantum Continue reading ‘Talking Heads’

The College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences here at USC has built a new website, and gone quite far in including extra media, and links and portals on YouTube, Facebook and so on. One of the things they did was have a filmmaker make lots of videos. Lots. Things about faculty, research, teaching, learning, etc. All very exciting. Have a look, here, if interested. Mira Zimet, who makes the films, gave me a call and asked me if I’d like to contribute, and I agreed. I chatted on and on for about 45 minutes to an hour and she cut two short films out of it. The shorter one is on the site and has me saying some general things about research, teaching, science, and USC. Mira made the second because she thought it might be a nice extra video for the College’s YouTube portal. It has me talking a bit more about what string theory is and does, Continue reading ‘Scenes from Work’

Here’s an interview that I missed when it first came out back in April. It is with Edward Witten, the single most influential person in my area of theoretical physics for quite some time now. This is for no other reason than his off-scale abilities in every key area of theoretical physics. He was my mentor back in the early ’90s, and the Continue reading ‘Witten Interview’

One of the words I dislike most in my field - or more accurately, a common usage thereof - is “fundamental”. This is because it is usually used as a weapon, very often by people in my area of physics (largely concerned with particle physics, high energy physics, origins questions and so forth), to dismiss the work of others as somehow uninteresting or irrelevant. I don’t like this. Never have. Not only is it often allied to a great deal of arrogance and misplaced swagger, it is often just plain short-sighted, since you never know where good ideas and techniques will come from. A glance at the history of physics shows just how much cross-pollination there is between fields in terms of ideas and techniques. You never know for sure where valuable insights into certain kinds of problems may come from.

Fundamental physics is a term I used to hear used a lot to refer to particle physics (also called high energy physics a lot more these days). This was especially true some years back when I was an undergraduate in the UK, and it persisted in graduate school too, and is still in use today, although I think it is declining a bit in favour of less loaded terms. Somehow, a lot of particle physics is regarded as being all about the “what is everything made of at the very smallest scales” sort of question, first discussing atoms, and then atoms being made of electrons surrounding a nucleus, and the nucleus being made of protons and neutrons, and those in turn being made of quarks, and so on, in this was arriving at a list of “fundamental” particles. There’s the parallel discussion about the “fundamental” forces (e.g., electromagnetism and the nuclear forces) being described in terms of exchanges of particles like photons, gluons, and W and Z particles and so forth. There’s no real harm in the use of the term fundamental in this context, but this is about where the word gets elevated beyond its usefulness and starts becoming a hurdle to progress, and then a barrier. Somehow, “fundamental”, meaning “building block” gets turned, oddly, into “most important”. The issue of what the smallest building blocks are gets elevated to the most important quest, when it is in reality only a component of the story. It is rather like saying that the most important things about the Taj Mahal are the beautiful stones, tiles, and other components from which it is constructed.

Perspectives have evolved a bit since my salad days, with the rise of wider Continue reading ‘News From The Front, VII: What is Fundamental, Anyway?’

…At least in my field, as submitted to the ArXiv. Just saw “Remarks on the world-sheet saga” by Bert Schroer. The abstract (and the paper) is full of excellently derisive turns of phrase that are hilarious to read! Example from the abstract:

Attention is given to how such misleading metaphors originate and how their support is maintained by quantum mechanical analogies to models which for good reasons never existed before in particle physics physics and whose only purpose is to uphold the string metaphor. The correct localization is inconsistent with the idea of world-sheets and the string-theoretical interpretation of T-duality.

He’s not actually trying to make the reader laugh, I think, but is attempting to make some serious physics points in there, apparently suggesting alternative lines of Continue reading ‘Best Abstract of the Year So Far?’

I’ve no idea why I’m writing a blog post about this, since I can’t really explain any of the details in a way that won’t sound tediously technical. I’m just pleased since I had a sort of perfect workshop moment for a couple of hours after the weekly picnic at the Center today. I’d been talking a bit last week with Lincoln Carr, an excellent condensed matter theorist at the Colorado School of Mines, and had also been talking with Allan Adams, another excellent physicist, from MIT. Allan and I seem to be on the same page as theorists and so I really enjoy talking with him. We work on string theory, but are not fussy about where the physics that it can be applied to might come from. As long as it is good physics. We both seem to love the idea that there’s so much rich physics, that might be accessible with string theory, Continue reading ‘Just Great!’

Well, there are two Aspen cafes that are probably a bit sick of me. The last couple of days saw me frequenting one or other of them while I worked on a number of things, primarily finishing writing a paper. I’ve focused on little else but finishing it up so that I can get on with other things, such as my various other projects, and also to allow me to pay attention to the interesting talks coming up in the workshop Continue reading ‘Haunting while Working’

There were a couple of string theory stories in New Scientist last week. I forgot to mention them earlier. One is entitled “What string theory is really good for”, by Jessica Griggs. The other is entitled “Why cats fail to grasp string theory”, by Ewen Callaway.

Well, since cats are involved, of course I’m going to start with an extract from the second (even though it is obvious that the cats are deliberately skewing the results):

[...] Osthaus’s team attached fish or biscuit treats to one end of a string. A plastic screen with a small gap at the bottom separated cats from their reward, requiring the felines to tug on the string to get the treat.

With a single string attached to the food, most cats learned to paw at the string to get a snack. But when Osthaus’ team introduced a second piece of string, [...]

Well, that was to pique your interest. You’ll have to go off to the source article to get to grips of this second piece of stringy research. The first article? It’s a discussion of Continue reading ‘Uses For Strings?’

Well, it was an unusual day here in Aspen. It was a day with lots of talks. Six of them, I think. There were four workshop talks scheduled for the morning, each of half an hour I think. Also got into a discussion before the sessions began, helping to explain how gauge/gravity duals work to a condensed matter colleague. I checked a voicemail message (only a relatively limited set of people have my number and so I figured it was a call to which I’d want to respond) and, despite the fact that I’m in retreat mode and would normally ignore it, returned the call. It was an office at USC wanting to put me in touch with a journalist who needed help. From Esquire. No, it is not what you think. I suggested they can could call me at 13:05, and at 10:30 went to the talks.

Somehow, successive speakers kept running over time due to lots of (actually, pretty interesting) interruptions and discussions, so I did not mind that we got to 12:50, and my talk, which was scheduled for 12:00-12:30, had not happened yet. With Continue reading ‘An Odd Time’

Ah, time to relax a bit after a somewhat busy last couple of days glued to the notebook and computer. The results? (1) A hasty colloquium to an audience of mixed expertise to try to get across a sense of why some of us are excited about various applications of string theory a diverse range of physics including ongoing experiments in nuclear physics and condensed matter physics (the person who was going to do it was a bit ill apparently so I stepped in with some hastily prepared slides… a bit messy but hopefully some use)… (2) Two papers with my student Tameem on applications of string theory techniques to superconductivity (one will appear on the ArXiv in about 20 minutes if you are interested [update: it is here.])… (3) Notes for a talk I’ll give on Thursday about said new results… (4) Several discussions with and ideas sent to some documentary film makers about some new TV shows coming up - Season 4 of The Universe! Seems I’ll get involved in some of them (stay tuned)…

So this morning I went to sit and cool down a bit at a cafe I like to visit a lot when in Aspen. Ink Coffee. Ok, I see that I did not yet mention I was in Aspen. Have been for Continue reading ‘Ink Time…’

Jester at Resonaances reports on a talk by Jörg Wenninger about the progress at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

There’s information about the repairs, more thoughts about the accident last year, and somewhat frightening news about issues of quality control on some of the manufacturing of crucial parts that may haunt the entire project for some time to come.

Continue reading ‘LHC News’

Of all of the videos I’ve seen of people visiting the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), this one is the funniest by very far… yes… it’s John Oliver again:
Embed died, so link here.

The probability discussion is just priceless…
Continue reading ‘John Oliver at the LHC’

Gosh, time flies!

I almost did not get to announce this before it was upon us. Tomorrow and the day after combine into a notable event in the College Commons series here at USC. Some of us have been working on this for quite a while. On Tuesday we have Stephen Hawking giving a big public lecture entitled “Out of a Black Hole”. Here’s the announcement. Note that general tickets for seats in Bovard Auditorium all went within hours of us releasing the tickets several weeks ago, but there is room in the two spill rooms that we have set up where there will be screens relaying the talk. Make a bit of an event of it and go with friends! [Update: I forgot to mention that we had a competition in local high schools and also at USC where the prize was to ask Stephen Hawking a question. People submitted questions over the last few weeks and we selected some of the best. There will be three undergraduates and three high school students coming up from the audience (we've a lot of high school students visiting us for the talk) to ask him a question each at the end. Should be fun.]

The day after, there will be a related event. Some of us from the physics department Continue reading ‘Hawking Talking, and More’

I presume you’ve heard the news by now, concerning stem cell research in the USA. If not, listen to and read some of the NPR reporting on it here (by Julie Rovner Continue reading ‘The Great News Of The Day’

9:00pm - 10:00pm

…Must be here somewhere. Maybe inside the monolith? No. Seems it is not inside the jumbo suitcase, which I have not used since Aspen last year anyway, and I’m pretty sure that I did not use it on that trip. Where can it be? That box over there? No. (But I found that bag of plastic book covers that I’ve been using sparingly since I left Preston for London in 1986. Excellent. The things I don’t throw away…) Well, never mind, would be silly to make myself miss a flight over an inflatable pillow that I have not seen in over a year. If I play my cards right, I won’t need it anyway….

9:10pm Now to put all those things I set aside earlier into my trusty little day trip bag. Change of clothes, electric shaver, toothbrush and so forth. I suppose I will bring the laptop. And some bits of equipment that might be useful as backup for Peter’s plan. Or whatever. You never know. Yes, I throw in my copy of Accordion Crimes. Almost finished it, and if I do, would be good to get another Annie Proulx to continue enjoying her wonderful writing…

9:17pm Will someone tell me how I managed to be perfectly on time, and then fritter away some of it to make sure I’m slightly panicky late again? Sigh. I was more or less ready at 9:00, when I should have left. Despite all the events of the previous 24 hours ((Day One) - Valentine’s Day Diary - Available on DVD) I got everything together on time, and wouldn’t it be rich if I missed the flight?

9:23pm I leave finally, using the batcave, slowing to check that entrance closes, then vanish into the night toward the airport. Saturday night late in LA. Surely everyone is out having awkward dates? The roads will be clear this late on a Saturday night, right? I can make my 10:07 check-in cutoff, I’m sure.

9:33pm. 101 Freeway. Full of traffic. Don’t you people have dates you’re supposed to be on!!?? This is my road! My! Road!

Continue reading ‘24 - Physics Edition (Day Two)’

Well, the good news is that there’s a definite schedule in mind for the restart of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). (See related posts below for more.) We can resume licking our chops in anticipation of exciting new physics of various sorts! I learned about this from US LHC Blogs with posts by Steve and Peter. Some key things (apparently from a widely circulated email that heralds an official press release to follow soon) are as follows. First, Steve’s synopsis of the schedule:
Continue reading ‘Once More, With Feeling?’

No, it’s not my solution to things (you know, when patient, tiring, endless, circular discussion and explaining that it is work in progress does nothing to stop the whining of those who’ve made up their mind in advance…) but it certainly makes me laugh out loud! Enjoy:

(Click to go to larger version.)

Taken from Abstruse Goose, which is hilarious!* This follows on nicely from Continue reading ‘Another Approach?’

The usual answer you’ll get from the person on the street (as it were) includes lots of nice words about wiggling strings that look like particles, and so forth, and that’s fine. However, the [informed] next level answer, when you’ve worked enough in the field, is that we don’t know. I’ve told you why (at least in part) in previous posts and so I’ll let you read them. We’re still working on it.

While we work, we’ve learned that it is a quite marvellous thing (from the bits of it we’ve come to grips with) that is teaching us a lot about all kinds of physics, and mathematics too. Some of this may be good for describing things about Nature, and we’re still working out lots of that (although see some of the exciting things I’ve been talking about in my previous post and the links therein).

So what do we put on the T-shirt? (You know, the analogue of Maxwell’s equations for electromagnetism - light, etc - that every physics undergrad likes to have on their T-shirt). Well, we don’t know yet.

But that’s all my opinion. Every now and again it is good to hear from one of the masters about what they think of string theory*, and what it is and so forth. Happily, Joe Polchinski has been known to agree to stand up and give an exposition on this Continue reading ‘So What Is String Theory, Anyway?’

Yes, I’ve been a bit quiet of late, I know. I’ve so many things on, both professional and personal that it sometimes keeps me occupied from when I wake up just before sunrise right through to falling asleep a bit after midnight. And yes I know that means I’ve been not getting the traditional full nights of sleep, but if my body insists on getting up at 5:30am, who am I to resist? I thought it was due to jetlag from the trip a couple of weeks ago, but it seems to have taken. I don’t mind too much since watching the light change as the sun rises is a marvellous way to start the day.

Among the things I’m up to (yesterday and today so far) is a strip-down-and-redesign of a short talk for an exciting symposium that is coming up in a few weeks in Chicago. The American Association for the Advancement of Science is having their big annual shindig there (apparently the biggest science conference in the world) and there will be a number of addresses, plenary talks, and keynote speakers and the like (including Al Gore, by the way), and also several sessions of symposia and other presentations on various topics.

While slightly annoyed at the fact that one major day of the conference is on Valentine’s day (which means I’ll have to be out of town on just the day that maybe, just maybe, on the off-chance, you know - if the universe sneezes or something, somebody might want me to be their Valentine…*), I was looking at that day’s schedule and it caught my eye that there’ll be a session (with several presenters) entitled “The Science of Kissing”, and three hours long, no less:

Continue reading ‘Preparation’

For some reason I don’t understand, I occasionally get a copy of some random (as far as I can tell) issue the International Journal of Modern Physics A in the post. It just arrives. The people at World Scientific are presumably hoping I’ll get hooked by it and take out a personal subscription or something. Not sure. Well, it has not happened yet (just as it did not with the unsolicited regular arrivals of Angeleno a while back). But you never know.

Anyway, before putting the one that arrived recently on to my shelf (I can’t easily throw things like that away… it’s a problem, I know) I glanced through the contents to see if there were clues as to why this one was sent to me. I found no obvious ones, but the very first article caught my eye. It was a rather good essay by Steven Weinberg (1979 Nobel Prize in Physics) on BCS (J Bardeen, L N Cooper and J R Schrieffer - No, nothing to do with College Football’s BCS.) theory of superconductivity and the importance of the idea of spontaneously broken symmetry in condensed matter physics and then in particle physics (see last year’s Physics Nobel, by the way). I thought I’d point it out to you, since it is rather nicely written and very instructive (whether or not you’re already familiar with the phenomenon/idea).

He begins with some overstatement, however. He expounds upon the difference between particle physicists and condensed matter physicists and although it is amusingly written in parts (I assume intentionally) he really over-eggs the pudding, in my opinion. Look at this:
Continue reading ‘Weinberg on BCS’

I noticed that Robert Helling shared some thoughts about thermodynamics and gravity today on his blog. He is understandably confused about several aspects of the issue, especially when applied to cosmological issues. (What is the entropy of our universe? Does the Second Law really apply? Does equilibrium thermodynamics even apply here?)

I’ve nothing remarkable to add to the discussion at this time except to note that a blanket statement that thermodynamics and gravity don’t seem to go together (which I don’t think he’s strongly saying) is not one I’d make, since we have a major class of working counterexamples.

The context is the gauge/gravity duals I’ve talked about here a lot, starting with AdS/CFT and beyond. There we know that the gravitational systems are essentially able to display the more garden variety thermodynamics by being immersed in the (regulating-box-like) anti-De Sitter type backgrounds. Then we see that black holes Continue reading ‘Thermodynamics and Gravity’

Takuya Okuda talking about Wilson Loops at the SCSS, UCLA, Dec. 2007. Click to enlarge.

The next regional string meeting is a two-day one at USC, this Monday and Tuesday. 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’

I learned from Katherine on the US/LHC blog earlier that tonight on PBS is an airing of a documentary called “The Atom Smashers”. It’s about particle physicists at Fermilab, in Illinois (including my friend Marcela Carena in the photo above). I’m curious to see what they’ve put together, hoping that it’ll give the public some insights into the life of the various kinds of scientist involved, and the exciting physics that engages them - and those of us on the outside who eagerly await the results of their work. The search for the Higgs boson is a focus. You can see a trailer here. I’ll be watching, I think. It is at 10:30pm on PBS, in the Independent Lens series, but be sure to check your local listings since times and days may vary.

Enjoy!

-cvj

To the left is Mount Hood, in Oregon. I often see it when I fly on my way up North. I love seeing it as it emerges from the clouds rather pleasantly, looking a bit like a cloud itself for a moment, perhaps oddly shaped, but then becoming something rather different entirely.

I was in Vancouver for a few days last week, and chatted with a few friends and colleagues (such as Moshe Rozali, Mark Van Raamsdonk, and Joanna Karczmarek) at the Physics department at UBC, and gave a seminar. I talked about ongoing work on ideas I’m still struggling to beat into shape (mentioned a lot in earlier posts about my retreat at Aspen this Summer). This was a deliberate choice. Sometimes it is very useful to force oneself to do a pedagogical seminar on work in progress. This is not so much because someone in the audience might toss up an idea that you did not consider (this can happen, sometimes as a result of a good question - but it is less likely when the audience has no expertise in the area under discussion, as was the case here) but mostly because of the very act of preparing the seminar itself. It forces you to take the wider view, consider the big picture, and try to motivate why you are doing what you’re doing, or why you picked on path over another along the way. I find this process can be quite valuable as an internal pruning and self-checking exercise.

So it was that I spent three hours at LAX writing the first 2/3 of the talk. This is not Continue reading ‘Tiring, but Good’

Actually, this is a bit of a late announcement, but worth doing anyway, in case you happen to be looking for something fun to do with the Society of Physics Students. From yesterday’s talk at the Center For Inquiry on particle physics and string theory (thanks to the many of you who came!), I now go to join a panel tonight here on the USC campus to talk about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). There have been many posts here on that… search the archives for more information, or type LHC into the search engine on the right. It should be fun and there’s free food from Mama’s Hot Tamales! It should be noted, for anyone keeping track, that in order to serve on this panel, I am giving up a dream: An Evening With Helen Mirren. Sigh. Also taking part on campus tonight. Click the poster for a larger view.

-cvj

Via the excellent new blog by two (so far) of our regular commenters, “Shores of the Dirac Sea”, (check it out!), I noticed that Brian Greene has an op-ed in the New York Times today.

For those of you who want a short version of some of the things that are hoped for from the large hadron collider (LHC), Brian’s piece is the article you might want to start with!

-cvj

Just the other day, while coordinating some work being done on my house, I was thinking that it is time I learned Spanish. Most of the people working in the construction industry here in Los Angeles have Spanish as their first language, and besides the usefulness it would give in communicating difficult ideas about a piece of work to be carried out, I really don’t like the feeling that I’m disconnected from them. I’d like to be able at least to, in Spanish, offer a cup of coffee, or a glass of iced water, and have a little small talk - treat them like fellow human beings as opposed to “the help” as is done so much in this city, to my disgust. I interact a lot with the Spanish-speaking parts of the city through my use of public transport, places I go to grab tasty food from time to time, and so on, but there is still a sense that there is an entire alternative Los Angeles out there that I am only barely touching upon by not knowing the language.

Then yesterday this whole Spanish language issue came up again in a big way. There was a phone call to the department from Univision, the Spanish-language TV network. Probably most of you are wondering what that is. You know those several channels that you never watch and when you flick by them, all clustered together, they’re always speaking Spanish and discussing issues or people that you seldom (if ever) have heard of? Yes. This is one of those channels. There’s a huge part of America (and elsewhere) that tune to those channels primarily.

Well, the people at Univision had heard about the excitement about the Large Hadron Collider (see, e.g. last post) and wanted to do a piece on it, and have someone in the studio to talk about it live on their breakfast show. They were looking for a Continue reading ‘Tales From The Industry XXII - Live LHC Chats’

Well, it seems that the largest and most complicated experiment in the history of humankind is…. working so far. They circulated the first beams at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) earlier today! Even Google is excited. Check out their front page:

Fun live blogging reports from the scene of events over at Resonaances, US/LHC Blogs (several posts), and Superweak, for example. I got the ATLAS readout/image below from the latter. (Presumably this is the shower of particles produced when they did the “dumping” described in Resonaances? Or just stuff produced by the edges of the beam as it passes through?) Press release from CERN here.

Update: NPR’s Morning Edition had a nice report this morning in the form of a chat between Rene Montagne and reporter David Kestenbaum. Fun to hear the audio clip of the control room. Link here.

Oh, right. The silliness. Click on that useful site I mentioned earlier to see if the earth Continue reading ‘It Works!!!’

Well, it is the first day of the new semester here at USC, and of the new academic year. Whether I like it or not, everything changes today, in terms of my work patterns. I have to squeeze the sprawl of my research (recent posts about that here, here, here, and here) back into a more confined space to make room for other things. Chief among those is my Physics 151 class, where I teach about 90 freshmen (science and engineering majors) the ins and outs (but mostly the ins) of mechanics and thermodynamics. I’ll also be dealing with a number of service and outreach projects that I’ve had on hold for a few months, and, of course, I’ll be serving on a number of committees doing various things in the department and the university at large.

Am I ready? Not entirely. I’m not fully in the right frame of mind, it has to be said. The various research projects I was working on did not get as far as I would have liked, and I could benefit from more of the full-immersion mode that Summer affords in order to follow up lots of ideas and computations. Also, there are entire projects I did not even get to.

But you do what you can, and that’s all there is. I’ve been dumped into a weird time Continue reading ‘Reconfiguring’

(…but without the relentless parade of bikinis, happily.)

What am I talking about? You can watch live over the web the proceedings of the Strings 2008 conference taking place at CERN. The official site is here, with links to the webcast, schedule, talk titles, and so forth. (Sorry I’m a bit late in pointing to it!)

Enjoy!

-cvj

I’ve been quiet here recently, I know. Was mostly working, thinking and reading on the weekend. Did not even go on a huge hike (although I did do a nice walk or two). Sometimes, on an evening, I go and read a novel in a bar. (I’m weird that way, I know.) I’ve not been going to the noisy bars full of yelling and the party crowd, but instead like to find a nice sofa in one of the bar/lobby areas of the nicer hotels. Great for reading, and the drink prices are merely extortionate, as opposed to just plain offensive in the more popular places. (Photo: a naughts and crosses game I spotted on a table in one such lobby.)

Well, it’s a draw so far in the battle with my equations and ideas, but I think I’m developing a stronger position. (From this you can deduce that I decided to stick with the same project and hold my ground and struggle on some more.) Perhaps the next Continue reading ‘Draw’

Well, you may not have gone to the chat between K C Cole and Leonard Susskind that I mentioned a while ago at the LA Central Library downtown. I couldn’t make it either, being away at the Aspen Center for Physics. I expect it was good. Anyway, I found a little bit of a report on the conversation, done by reporter John Johnson for the LA Times. It is here. (Clickable image of Susskind to the right is by Matthew Black, for the LA Times.)

It gives you some of the simply-stated reasons as to why there was a big argument between Stephen Hawking and Leonard Susskind in the first place (and between several other physicists too… there are hosts of people working on these things, and it took hosts of people to sort it out to where we are now, not just those two, giants though they are). I recommend having a look, as it is especially for the lay-person, and will give you a good idea of what the fuss is about.

You can also see a little bit about his new book on the subject and a link to a video interview with Brian Cox (the physicist, not the actor) at the LA Times blogs here. There are also links to his Stanford continuing education course on quantum mechanics, including the online lectures you can view at your convenience. What a resource!

You might wonder why we care about all this, since currently the only way we know for sure to make black holes in the universe (astrophysical processes making stellar black Continue reading ‘Quantum Black Holes - Why Worry?’