I don’t mean that in a bad way. It is what it is. Quite varied and wonderful, our universe is, with unexpected features I don’t think many would have guessed at not long ago (like the fact that we only understand what about 4% of it is!! Crazy, in a Continue reading ‘Still Crazy After All These Years’
A lovely release from the Hubble Heritage project. Well worth clicking on for more detail. The image was made using Hubble. It’s a planetary nebula (NGC 2371), the Continue reading ‘Warm and Fuzzy’
Not long ago David Morrison (UCSB) came to the mathematics department here at USC to give a colloquium.
This was a treat for me for many reasons. Here are three:
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’
There was a sweet, sweet moment during the afternoon Cosmology, Gravity, and Relativity session on Friday. (See here.) I don’t think I’ll be able to convey its full intensity to you, but I cannot let it go unmarked. The background comes from a personal place. In addition to my being, for many years, somewhat of a relative anomaly in being a black theoretical (high energy) physicist, there’s another component to that rare situation. My parentage is West Indian (or “Caribbean”, I might say, since in my experience the other term often does not register with many people from the USA), and until recently, I’ve not really known (m)any other such people in theoretical physics*. What struck me on Friday was a single syllable.
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (left), a graduate student at Waterloo/Perimeter, who has commented on this blog from time to time, and who I met for the first time on Thursday, was giving an excellent overview of her project to begin research on Doubly Special Relativity. Some of the motivating remarks involved simultaneously taking Newton’s constant, 
and Planck’s constant 
to zero (the idea is that quantum gravity’s Planck length might remain finite in this limit, and thus remain in the physics as a new scale that breaks Lorentz invariance at Continue reading ‘Haitch’
I find myself in Washington DC for two and a half days, attending an interesting conference. It’s the annual meeting of the National Society of Black Physicists* (NSBP), and I’ve been invited to give a talk (which I gave a few hours ago, entitled “The Dynamics of Flavour in Gauge/Gravity duals”, with a focus on what we can learn about experiments and observations of strongly interacting nuclear systems using string theory. Post about that here). I’m here for more just the talk, however. I also want to talk - in the sense of converse. Basically, it is of interest to me to get a feeling for what’s going on with the issues of underrepresented minorities (in this case, people of African descent) in Physics. As you know, the numbers are vanishingly small, and as you also know from reading my writings, I am very interested in this issue, and of course, how to make it not an issue, by helping more people find their way into the field and have as much opportunity to do well as the next person.
(Scene from the opening banquet on Thursday night. The featured speaker (no, not on stage in photo) was 2006 Physics Nobel Laureate, John C. Mather. Click for larger.)
It has been years since I came to one of these, and I must say it is a real pleasure to be here. There seems to be a lot of contrast to how I remember things from the Continue reading ‘DC Crossover’
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’
I’m pleased to introduce a guest blogger today. It’s Nick Halmagyi, who you might have seen comment here from time to time. Nick is a postdoctoral researcher in Theoretical Physics, currently at the Enrico Fermi Institute in Chicago. Before that, he was a graduate student in our High Energy Physics group at USC, which is where I met him. Nick wrote his reflections below for Seed, and he reproduces a version of it (with permission - see details below*) here. I hope you enjoy it.
-cvj
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Theoretical physics is a tough subject. Just one example of how hard things can get is when you ramp up the energy density of a system, the physics used to describe the system itself starts to change. At first it may be a small tweak in the parameters that appear in the equations (the electric charge for example), but then there can be large, abrupt transitions.
The biggest system we study is the universe, and immediately after the big bang all of its energy occupied a tiny region of space. Back then, the energy density was enormous, and as the universe grew over time it underwent several transitions before it became what we now observe.
I’m a theoretical physicist, in part, because I relish the challenge of studying the entire Continue reading ‘Nick Halmagyi: Why I do Science’
Neil deGrasse Tyson helped Stephen Colbert with his training to be an Astrophysicist recently. Neil’s advice is excellent of course, urging (for example) questioning and open-mindedness. You can learn from the clip below about Colbert’s take on this advice.
Among the many great exchanges:
Continue reading ‘Simple Steps to Becoming an Astrophysicist’
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’
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?’
So the Onion’s gone and mixed some astrophysics with basketball. Headline:
“Shaq Terrified Of Phoenix Suns After Reading About Supernovas”
(Image on right also from the Onion.)
You can tell how it’s going to go from the title, although it’s rather amusing just how much stellar astrophysics they pour into the article (not even trying to disguise it much). Extract:
…new Phoenix Suns center Shaquille O’Neal admitted Monday that, upon reading about the phenomenon of massive stellar explosions popularly known as supernovas, he is now terrified of the entire organization.
(Wow… Shaq isn’t in LA any more? Huh. I’m so out of it. Update: Oh, yeah, I remember now. He went to Miami in 2004. Evidently I don’t follow the NBA.)
…and further:
A match made in the heavens? (sorry….couldn’t resist…)
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’
My first time sitting down to watch this show in a while and, bizarrely enough, there’s a colleague on the telly! Well, I think that perhaps Lisa was trying a little bit too hard in one or two places to get the physics out. On Colbert, I think you just have to go with the flow and the comedy! But she got quite a bit out in the short time she had…
My favourite bit:
Randall: “Like…the fact that Einstein has taught us that spacetime can be curved or warped…”
Colbert: “Don’t patronize me, I know that…”
So Chris and Sheril have announced the next step in the journey to a real debate about science issues of note that intersect with the current political sphere. And they’ve come a long way in a short time! Here’s some of what they said in a recent post:
ScienceDebate2008 is now co-sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Academies, and the Council on Competitiveness. We were looking at venues, and finally settled on an offer from the Philadelphia-based Franklin Institute–named, of course, after one of this country’s first and greatest scientists. We can’t think of a more appropriate venue.
And guess what?! They’ve actually invited the candidates: Hillary Clinton, Mike Huckabee, John McCain, and Barack Obama.
So the next step is to get the event (they suggest April 18, 2008) taken seriously by Continue reading ‘Science Debate 2008 - Closer to Reality’
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’
Today is the 50th anniversary of the day the USA replied to the world-changing Sputnik launch by the USSR almost four months earlier (see my post), as well as Sputnik 2 (carrying the dog Laika) a month after. In some sense, the space race began in earnest with this launch of the craft called Explorer.
A great thing about the Explorer 1 craft was that it even did some groundbreaking Continue reading ‘The Reply’
Oliver Sacks must have a new book out or something*. I’ve heard him twice in as many days in radio pieces, and that usually means only one thing. He’s always an interesting interviewee, and this time the focus is on music. The first piece I heard was one of those amusingly produced pieces by Robert Krulwich, on NPR’s Morning Edition. It was all about people who essentially hallucinate music - it spontaneously appears in their ears and there’s often nothing they can do about it. The audio for the piece can be heard here. It was quite a good piece and I recommend it.
The next thing I heard was on the BBC World Service (my usual late night listening) the segment called “The Interview”. This is a much longer piece, talking about the role of Continue reading ‘Oliver Sacks on Music’
At the Science Blogging conference earlier this month, there was a very interesting discussion about communication of science, science and the media, and science in politics. It was led by Jennifer Jacquet of Shifting Baselines, and Sheril Kirshenbaum and Chris Mooney (both of The Intersection), who each did a mini-presentation (Sheril and Chris doing a sort of tag-team double act, starting off with discussing Sciencedebate 2008, and moving into discussions of “framing” science, the separation of the cultures, and so forth - and of course, opportunities for bloggers). Happily there was a video made, and I’ve embedded it below (the quality is mixed, but overall Continue reading ‘Science Communication’
It’s not going to be naked-eye visible, but give a thought tonight to the 250 metre asteroid (2007 tu24) that is going to swing by close to earth tonight! Or, if you have a “modest” telescope, go and look at it. It’s going to scrape by at 1.4 times the distance of the moon. That’s pretty close, by astronomical standards, and gives scientists a chance to see a near earth object rather more closely than usual. From the Continue reading ‘Near Enough’
So while you have a look at the following enthusiastic and amusing discussion about how far the Balrog and Gandalf must have fallen (in the film version of the Two Towers), involving discussions of terminal velocities and Balrog profile approximations for air resistance estimates (and so forth)…
…ask yourself why on earth nobody in the discussion (as far as I can tell from a quick Continue reading ‘Gandalf, Balrog, Physics…’
So yesterday at Pinewood Studios they announced the name of the upcoming second James Bond film in the new series that (excellently, in my opinion) re-envisions the Bond movie universe. Last year’s first one was “Casino Royale”, you may recall. Did you hear what the next one will be called?
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’
Well, actually it sounds like a really lovely book, and the louse to the right (among other creatures) features quite a bit. (Photo by Louis de Vos.) I read about it in a splendid little article in LA Weekly today on the bus home on a wonderfully rainy afternoon here in LA. The book’s all about the common creatures in our homes - “bugs” of various sorts, and the LA Weekly article by Gendy Alimurung is mostly an interview with the authors, Joshua Abarbanel and Jeff Swimmer. The book is called “A Continue reading ‘Lousy Book’
Brief note before running off to a long meeting…
Can’t work out whether today’s second long class on the structure of Special Relativity was scary or not. Last lecture we did the classic thought (and real) experiments that lead to the deduction of the Lorentz transformations, and the realization that the words “space” and “time” really should be combined into “spacetime”, and that they need to be thinking in those terms. At the end of the lecture and for most of today, I spent a lot of time emphasizing why Special Relativity is really not weird at all, and developed everything from there on as a very simple analogy to rotations in Euclidean space. The only thing that’s different is this minus sign in front of the “t” part, which is either annoying or beautiful. I urged them to pick the latter since without it there’d be just boring Euclidean four-space, with no yesterdays or tomorrows…
Of course, a bit of time must be spent (forgive the unintended pun) developing some Continue reading ‘Did I Scare Them?’
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’
Anti-matter. Seeing the previous word, you immediately glance back at the title, right? Strangely, it has been 80 years since the discovery of anti-matter, and we use it routinely in our technology. Nevertheless, anti-matter is still thought of as something from science fiction (and mostly bad science fiction at that).
It all goes back to one of my favourite theoretical physicists, Paul Dirac, and you might like how he found it (roughly). He essentially did it by taking the Continue reading ‘Not Science Fiction’
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’
“Inside” meaning the inner part of the Solar System. “Messages” meaning the new pictures from MESSENGER spacecraft.
MESSENGER is short for MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging. Now you and I know that they spent a bit of time coming up with the unpacking of the name, wanting of course to have the name MESSENGER because that’s what the Mercury of mythology was - the messenger of the Gods, among his other duties. Nice. However I’d have been really impressed if they’d managed to call it QUICKSILVER, and found a way to unpack that - any takers?
Anyway, I digress. In more news showing the triumph of the wisdom of relatively cheap unmanned exploratory craft, MESSENGER sent some wonderful pictures of Mercury this week, along with lots of other scientific data that will help us learn a great deal about the innermost planet. Here’s the one that’s been going around a lot (click for impressive larger version):
Image credit to NASA. Caption taken from a space.com article reads: This photo supplied by NASA Continue reading ‘Messages from Inside’
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
Tomorrow afternoon at 4:00pm there’s be an interesting conversation on campus for sure. It’ll be between the science writer and journalist KC Cole and the actor Alan Alda. He’s such an interesting person, and (among other things) currently presents Scientific American Frontiers.
KC’s always so good at steering these conversations, so while I’ve no idea what they’ll be talking Continue reading ‘Alan Alda Chats With KC Cole’
Now have a look at this object (and its enlargement on the right):
What is it? It’s a double Einstein ring! An Einstein ring is formed by gravitational lensing - the bending of light from one object by the gravity of another object - and is typically formed when a distant galaxy lines up with another, closer galaxy. The result is a rather nice ring shape.
To find a double Einstein ring is rare! In fact, this is the first one that’s been announced. Not only is it novel, it can also use used to do a good deal of science, such Continue reading ‘Two Rings’
This is a quick note to let you know that today’s Science Friday will feature the Science Debate 2008 (which has been nicely gathering momentum since I blogged about it):
Friday, January 11th, 2008
Hour One- 2pm EDT
The Call for A Science Debate“Should the presidential candidates participate in a debate focusing on science, technology, and the environment? A group of voters has started a petition movement calling for a science debate.”
There’s a bit more information on their site, along with a quiz about the current Continue reading ‘Science Debate 2008 on Science Friday’
Being a loyal fan of Scottish single malt whisky, I never thought I’d be blogging about Irish whiskey, but this is why we get out of bed in the morning - we seek the stuff we can’t guess*.
So I was going to point out to you an amusing distraction. The series of radio ads for Jameson Irish Whiskey that you can listen to here. There’s one featuring a physicist, you see, and a friend of mine sent me the link for that reason**. There’s the idea of attraction, and so gravity is brought in by the ad man trying to use the concept to sell the product, and the physicist is obviously not having it… a short bit of fun play between segments of some program on some station somewhere or another. I can see that they’d work rather well. Have a listen.
That was going to be it, until I found another - real - physics connection. Turns out that Guglielmo Marconi - he of the use of electromagnetic waves for telegraph communication, Nobel prize, and so forth - is the the key to the connection. Do you know what it is?
… but pass it on a retake!
While quickly building an ad hoc washing line pulley assembly from a bag of hooks, eyes, and pulleys, and a 2×4, I put this together at first (blotted out some background for privacy of myself and neighbours - click for larger view):
Huh. Does not want to hang level. Why? A tenth of a second after the thought, I burst out laughing loudly at my error. Ironic since I love teaching about pulleys in basic physics, and for some reason students are scared of pulleys. (Not as scared as they are of torque (why?), but scared nonetheless. I try to help them overcome those fears.) I made an obvious mistake. (Do you see it?)
It all began over dinner on Thursday night, before the rains began. Some of us met up at Ciudad (a favourite place of mine to eat in downtown Los Angeles, primarily for the mojitos) and the began to get to know each other in person, as opposed to online. I’m talking about the Correlations bloggers, and members of the team who work on the entire Wired Science website (which is excellent, by the way) with which Correlations is embedded. I met most of the latter group at various KCET events (the first screening of episode 1, the wrap party a few weeks ago I never got around to blogging, etc). This however, was the first time I got to meet Sheril Kirshenbaum, although we’d got to know each other so well online I have to say that it sort of felt as though we’d already met. Co-blogger (and show producer) Damon Gambuto arrived a bit later - I’d met him before at the party. The other bloggers coming from out of town to the meeting, Tara Smith and Michael Tobis, I would meet the next day since Michael’s flight was coming in late, and Tara was not feeling well. Tamsin Gray, being stationed in Antarctica, was not going to attend. Of the show host co-bloggers, Chris Hardwick (who I’d already met at the wrap party) would be there next day too. Ziya Tong was away.
Here’s a shot of some of us chatting at dinner (see also Sheril’s thoughts on this here):
Damon Gambuto is second from left, and there’s Sheril Kirshenbaum and cvj on the right - click for larger view. There’s also Liz on the left, and Philip Dunn in the centre, both from New Media.
The main purpose of all of this from the bloggers perspective was simply to meet and Continue reading ‘Tales From The Industry XVI - Correlations Meetup and More’
Has the ring of a Harry Potter novel’s title, doesn’t it? Well, it’s about physics. The history of the physics of cold, particularly its extremes. It’s a TV show on PBS’ Nova (based on the Tom Shachtman book of the same title), to appear this week, and it looks rather good! You can see the PBS website for it here. The good news is that this program has been a while in the making, with lots of physicists involved behind the scenes to get it right, so I’ve got my fingers crossed that it will not just be entertainment for the moment, but actually a rather good information resource (as well as being entertaining - the two are not mutually exclusive). It first airs on January 8th and 15th (there are two hours, one on each day). There are preview videos to look at Continue reading ‘Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold’
This might be a bit late for some of you, but since it’s rather good I’ll mention it anyway. Recall that I was discussing various “top n of the year” lists that came out in various publications over the last few weeks. Well, I thought that the Physics World one, a list of twelve (one for each month), was rather nice. I saw it only recently*, and Continue reading ‘Physics World’s List’