Sea Fever I must go down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky, And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by, And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking, And a grey mist on … Click to continue reading this post
Following on from her earlier post (with Stefan) on the research effort to understand Brookhaven’s RHIC physics with string theory, Bee reports some things she heard about a nuclear physics conference in Shanghai (Quark Matter ’06). Apparently Larry McLerran -who is at Brookhaven- did a 20 minute anti-string (and anti-Brian Greene) rant. You can see some slides etc, over there.
(Note for the non-expert:- RHIC means “Relativisitc Heavy Ion Collider”. Picture on right (click for larger): Tracks from collision of two beams of gold nuclei -the heavy ions- recorded by the STAR detector at the RHIC experiment. More here. In a sense, a new form of matter is formed in these conditions – the issue is how to understand its properties.)
This sort of thing is rather funny, so far (apparently Brian Greene was given a “Pinocchio award” in the talk?! ). Let’s hope it does not turn into something serious.
In moving forward: […] Click to continue reading this post
Tuesday saw the official agreement between a consortium of countries to construct a fully functional fusion reactor, at a cost of 12.8 billion dollars, or thereabouts. The project is called the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, ITER. It is indeed a huge undertaking, and we could end up with nothing to show for it, but on the other hand it would be a miniscule price to pay if we were to get the scheme off the ground. The promise of an abundant source of energy that is (supposedly) less polluting and safer to run than fission and does not add to our upcoming woes caused by climate change is too tantalizing not to pursue.
In case you’re wondering, the image to the right (click for larger) is a schematic representation of the 500MW reactor. It is of the classic “Tokamak†type, in which there is a torus (doughnut) shaped region where the plasma will be magnetically contained, at a temperature of 100 million K. To learn more about fusion, you can go to the article from the UKAEA here, and the article on ITER here at their website. From the latter, you can learn about the specific scientific objectives of ITER:
While looking for something else I’ll blog about in a short while, I stumbled upon one of the most annoying of the articles on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN (or any other particle physics experiment) that I’ve read in a long time. This is because of this utterly ridiculous business of calling the Higgs particle the “God particleâ€. Who started this? It really is so misleading and annoying. The title of the Guardian article is “In the beginning: scientists get ready to hunt for God particleâ€, and it is by Ian Sample. Some random bits:
It should certainly discover what some call the “God particleâ€, finally answering the embarrassingly simple but elusive question of why things have mass.
and…
Finding the Higgs boson will confirm scientists’ most complete theory of the universe and the matter from which it is created. “It’s probably the closest to God that we’ll get,†said Jos Engelen, Cern’s chief scientist.
Aaaaargh!!!
Some?! Who are these people who call it the “God particleâ€?! If you know anybody in the field who calls it the “God particle†(or even out of the field, for that matter) please […] Click to continue reading this post
I learned from Often In Error that the paper of Riess et al, reporting on the research that was buzzed in the NASA press release, is out. It is here.
(I must use the term “cosmic jerk†in an everyday sentence one day…. probably not as a term of endearment….)
I don’t know whether you caught this already, but if not, do consider listening to the 2nd November edition of BBC Radio 4’s “In Our Timeâ€. It is about Poincaré, his work, and the famous conjecture. From their website’s page on the programme:
The great French mathematician Henri Poincaré declared: “The scientist does not study mathematics because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing and life would not be worth living. And it is because simplicity, because grandeur, is beautiful that we preferably seek simple facts, sublime facts, and that we delight now to follow the majestic course of the stars.â€
Poincaré’s ground-breaking work in the 19th and early 20th century has indeed led us to the stars and the consideration of the shape of the universe itself. He is known as the father of topology – the study of the properties of shapes and how they can be deformed. His famous Conjecture in this field has been causing mathematicians sleepless nights ever since. He is also credited as the Father of Chaos Theory.So how did this great polymath change the way we understand the world and indeed the universe? Why did his conjecture remain unproved for almost a century? And has it finally been cracked?
It is a particulalry good programme this time. This is a programme that focuses mostly on philosophy, and is often accused of being only rather superficial when it comes to covering the more hardcore and up-to-date science, but not this time. The guests are […] Click to continue reading this post
Friday saw me involved in the shooting of two more segments for a television show. Seems that the ones from last time did not work out too badly, so the program makers wanted to do more. Hurrah!
[image from Friday shoot]
This session was also a lot of fun, and one of the segments (especially) could end up being a particularly good example of getting a good chunk of a whole science story – showing the actual processes involved in doing science – on TV, er, depending upon how it is edited, of course. This is one reason I do this sort of thing. At least as important (in my opinion) as talking, as I also sometimes do, to the press about the fancier things we do (perhaps involving the origin of mass, and whether the universe may or may not have extra dimensions, etc) is the process of getting involved with people in the media to help them bring the cornerstones of all of science to a general audience. No fancy stuff, just the basic but ever so important connection between the physical world around them and simple scientific reasoning. This achieves some very important things, which I bet will last longer in a person’s mind and everyday life than […] Click to continue reading this post
Remember the Orionids? Well, it is the turn of the Leonids. These comets are the result of us passing through the debris left by comet Tempel-Tuttle. The peak will be on the 19th November…. Viewing and other information here (Armagh Observatory), here (a NASA site), and here, from Gary W. Kronk’s site (as is the diagram below). Here’s a nice Space.com article by Joe Rao.
There is expected to be quite a spike in the viewing rate this year… enhanced by a factor of ten to maybe as many as 100 or 200 per hour. This is for the lucky viewers in Western Europe (and the British Isles 🙂 ), North Wester Africa, North Eastern USA and Eastern Canada, […] Click to continue reading this post
So the press conference is over. I did not listen to it, but the gist of it, from the press release, seems to be that they’ve observed several more supernovae to pin down even more accurately what the universe’s expansion rate was at very early times (up to nine or ten billion years ago). Image below from their site:
[image]
From the site we learn (for background): Click to continue reading this post
From NASA, tomorrow, at 1:00pm EST: An announcement about Dark Energy. If the pattern of last time is to be followed, there must be new evidence from the space telescope team (represented by Riess and Livio at the press conference) in favour of one interpretation or another. Since they are saying that they will “announce the discovery that dark energy has been an ever-present constituent of space for most of the universe’s historyâ€, I imagine that means that there is stronger evidence than before for Dark Energy being a cosmological constant. […] Click to continue reading this post
Those are the words of Kofi Annan at the UN conference on Climate Change earlier today (see AP story by Charles Hanley). His speech emphasized the “frightening lack of leadership” in forming strategies for how to tackle the huge task that lies ahead for our planet with regards emissions. Getting … Click to continue reading this post
Not many Mondays ago we had a colloquium entitled “Quantum Chaos and the Foundations of Statistical Mechanics”, by Mark Srednicki, of UCSB.
This was a double treat for me, since I’ve known Mark since my days in Santa Barbara, and remember many happy lunchtimes sitting at lunch with him overlooking the lagoon talking about everything from physics to Bablyon 5. That was during those truly amazing days of being a postdoc in string theory at the time when D-brane technology was turning the field upside down, and a lot of the torque needed for this was being generated right there in Santa Barbara, sometimes in lunchtime conversations. I was reminiscing about those days just a week before in Cambridge, having run into Karl Landsteiner and Roberto Emparan, two other postdocs from those fantastic times. The reason for us all being in Cambridge was to attend the Andrew Chamblin memorial conference, which I told you about in an earlier post. Andrew was also a postdoc there, around the same time as us, and we rapidly forged the good friendships that you’ve read about in a number of earlier posts linked from the previous link.
Mark used to tell me a bit about Quantum Chaos back then too, and I found it interesting, but always wanted to hear the story laid out properly, and to hear what he […] Click to continue reading this post
You may recall the very successful event called “Uncertainty”, back at the end of August. I blogged about it here and here, among other places. Well it is time for the second one in the series. Recall that it is part of the Provost’s Visions and Voices series, which has … Click to continue reading this post
The Eye of Sauron is rising again, but now on Saturn!?
No, here’s what’s actually going on:
On the site Space.com, I found a nice article by David Powell about the Cassini spacecraft’s future. (Cassini has done some wonderful work recently, including bringing us wonderful images such as the one below of Titan and Epimetheus, and Saturn’s rings.)
[image]
Cassini’s NASA handlers are wondering about what they will do with it when its mission is over. Here are some of the options they are considering:
