This is a test of LaTeX on the site*.
The first equation I shall try is the following (for more on unpacking this equation and its meaning, see this post and links therein):
Yay! It works. I have implemented it in the comments too. So now we can have a new, sharper tool for our discussions and arguments.
Click to continue reading this post
Well, what else can it be? It is not April 1st, so my only explanation is that it is an Onion article that somehow was picked up by the BBC. What do you think? It reads exactly like one, right down to the picture of the pleasant bearded academic at the board, the well-scrubbed English schoolchildren, and the quotes from the children. The only thing missing is the […] Click to continue reading this post
You’ve possibly been following my efforts over here to discuss and explain the several weaknesses in Smolin’s and Woit’s arguments and positions, and why the current “string debate†is all an overblown (and media-fueled) fake controversy. (See for example the series of posts entitled “More Scenes from the Storm in a Teacupâ€, the last three especially, (links: I, II, III, IV, V, VI); use the search engine for other instances.)
I’ve no idea what the effect of these discussions has been. Woit recently said “my views haven’t changed at allâ€, and so has covered his ears and dug his heels in while Smolin has written some sort of response on his website. I don’t hold out much hope for them, but I do hope that readers of these discussions can see that there’s been a fair amount of wool pulled over their eyes, to say the least.
What to do? What more to say? Whatever more I say, I cannot say it all any better than Joe Polchinski, a true master from whom we’ve all learned so much physics. Read his review in a guest post over on Cosmic Variance!
In case you have not heard, NASA announced today that they have evidence that water flows on Mars. That’s the present tense, note. Not flowed some time ago – flows currently (albeit perhaps only in intermittent bursts). Here’s the link to their announcement. The picture:
[image]
An extract: Click to continue reading this post
There’s a new paper coming out telling of the observations (over two years) of the swallowing of a star by a black hole, from beginning to end. There’s no nice picture showing this, I’m afraid – the picture to the right (click for larger) is an artist’s impression (see description below). The team, led by Caltech’s Dr. Suvi Gezari, used the Galaxy Evolution Explorer and data from Chandra and some ground based telescopes, to track the ultraviolet radiation emitted from the star as it was consumed by the hole.
From the NASA/JPL press release: […] Click to continue reading this post
Many of us received a letter today from the Editorial office at SISSA about supporting not-for-profit journals like JHEP (Journal of High Energy Physics) and some of its siblings. Why? Simply put, the other journals seem to be less about the science and more about the money. We discussed this a lot in my field back way back when JHEP was starting out, and several physicists switched to JHEP -pointedly turning their backs on Nuclear Physics B for example- as a group. Basically, you do the research, submit it to a journal, and they sell it back to you and your institution at extortionate prices. Better, they get you to contribute to doing their job by doing all the typesetting, reviewing of other mugs’ papers, etc. In fact, most of their work involves just raking in the money, as far as I can tell… So people moved to a model which was more about distributing refereed work for people to read, making heavy use of cost-savings involved in using electronic communication and distribution. Below I reproduce the letter I received from Marc Henneaux and Hector Rubenstein about this matter*. I’ll be interested to hear your opinion.
One thing I am concerned about is the relative weight of physics vs other fields – how much of a difference will this make to science publishing at large? What else can we do to change things? Take some areas of Biology for example. Elsevier (who publish Nuclear physics B, for example) probably makes a huge amount more money out of them than physics, if you take into account the large number of colour figures, etc, (and the associated page rate) that go into a typical publication. Might it be that progress by Elsevier (and other publishers) in reforming their economic model to be a lot more fair might be less speedy until we get the Biologists (and other fields) to support their own versions of the alternatives? Biology journals run for the sake of the subect and not the money? Perhaps this process already has begun? I do not know. Does anyone? Last time I talked about this to a prominent biologist, they seemed to be under the impression that online distribution of published work (particularly online pre-print distribution like hep-th that I know is slightly different but not unrelated) was akin to hanging out in internet chat rooms, and said so explicitly…. but this was before Nature and others started doing their major online work, so perhaps attitudes have changed…. Thoughts?
Anyway, here is the letter: […] Click to continue reading this post
Have the “troubles†caused by string theory begun to run so deep so as to affect our high schools? Heavens yes! Well, at least one high school in Oregon anyway. Hurrah!
This from the Siemens Foundation press release about the winners of their annual high school science and technology competition:
Dmitry Vaintrob, a senior at South Eugene High School in Eugene, Oregon, won the $100,000 Grand Prize scholarship in the individual category for exciting research in an abstract new area of math called string topology.
I don’t really know what “string topology†is (as opposed to just topology applied to string theory), so I went to their site to read the synopsis of this prize winner, and I found: […] Click to continue reading this post
Just caught a Futurama episode on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim. All I can say is: Go and find the episode called “Time Keeps on Slipping”. It is hilarious. It is a brilliant mixture of physics and basketball jokes. Time is slipping uncontrollably due to an interplanetary basketball game…. Earth has been challenged by the planet Globetrotter, for … No reason – absolutely no stakes beyond the shame of defeat. (Found a random site here with some information that may or may not be helpful.)
Two random very funny (in context) lines I sort of remember (not accurate): Click to continue reading this post
I meant to tell you about this on Thursday or Friday, but I had to focus on the Southern California String Seminar, and so did not get to it sooner. So you might not get to listen to it as part of a Sunday afternoon relaxation. The Royal Society gave … Click to continue reading this post
So, I have questions.
About what? Well, by now you’ve heard about this wonderful machine that was found 100 years or so ago, which after a lot of research, has been found to be a remarkably sophisticated mechanical computer designed and built in ancient Greece about 2,100 years ago. There’s a nice LA Times story on it by Thomas H. Maugh II here, and a New York Times story* by John Noble Wilford here and a Reuters article by Patricia Reaney here. (The image to the right (click for larger) is from the University of Cardiff.)
From the articles you can learn that the machine was able to perform computational tasks 1400 years or so before the time when machines of this sort (but less sophisticated) were thought to have appeared. What sort of tasks? Well, using 37 gears or so it can do subtractions, multiplications and divisions to show the cycles of […] Click to continue reading this post
Have a look at some of the sunspot movies and eruptions on the sun’s surface that have been released recently by the new Japanese probe Hinode. […] Click to continue reading this post
For a refreshingly straightforward point of view from a young person in the field who just wants to get on with doing some good physics with what seems like a promising approach, read Jonathan Shock’s description of his recent attendance of meetings (including the one to which I earlier referred) on heavy ion collisions and related physics. (See also an interesting comment by Xin-Nian Wang on the comment thread of my earlier post.) Jonathan gives some useful links to presentations on some of the attempts to model some of the new physics using string theory models.
The title? Oh, yes, he gets beaten up a bit by those around him for working on strings. […] Click to continue reading this post
On Friday and Saturday of this week (December 1st and 2nd), the next Southern California Strings Seminar will be happening! It’s a regional meeting for people doing research in string theory and related topics, and as I’ve said before, I’d especially like to see more young people come out and take part. We make a special effort to ask the speakers to spend a little time at the beginning of their talk setting the scene (speaking about motivations, what has gone before, etc) so that the series can be of great value to people who are trying to learn what’s going on in a particular topic at research level (this can be students, postdocs, or faculty, in fact).
If you’re doing this kind of physics research anywhere in the Southern California region, and want to take part, please come. See the website for details, and try to let […] Click to continue reading this post
The good people at the US Postal service do produce some splendid sets of stamps on quite a regular basis. Today, to my delight, I was offered this set as one of my choices at the post office:
[image: stamps/snowflakes]
There’s so much physics behind the microscopic lattice of H2O molecules underlying such a lovely shape, with the pleasant C6 symmetry of the macroscopic result – the snowflake. I found a lovely “morphology diagram†showing the sorts of shapes you get depending upon temperature and supersaturation of the water vapour that condenses to […] Click to continue reading this post
Before I point you to the link about the latest important activity on the International Space Station, I’d like to ask for your help: – This might be a bit impolite, but may I ask what is the actual point of the International Space Station? I spent a bit of time (not a huge amount, I admit) at NASA’s site, for example, and can’t really find an overall scientific or engineering statement of purpose. There’s a bit of chatter about learning about the effects of long spaceflights on the physiology of human beings, and how to meet engineering challenges of various sorts, but that seems to be it. The weekly science reports that you can read on there don’t sound very encouraging either, but I imagine I’m seeing the digest for the media and non-experts.
[Update: – Ok! I found some interesting sites here and here. They do help a bit.]
I’m not being sarcastic here…. I’d really like to know. I’m sure that there must be a […] Click to continue reading this post
