Asymptotia

I’ve been on the road for a while now (see the last several posts, e.g. here), and it has been good for me. Why? Well, I think that it has been good to get out of some of the routines that I normally find myself in, and have a change of perspective. This feeds my thoughts about things, whether it be work-related, play, or personal life. So being in a mode where I’m living out of a suitcase and moving from location to location helps me simplify somewhat. Work has been good. Some aspects have not been as efficient as they might have been were I in my home office or in my office at USC, but efficiency is not really the point. There’s plenty of time for that later, and in travelling mode, the value of the high quality reflection about the work I’m doing or an approach I’m going to take on the project I’m working on is something I’d not trade for the equivalent time sitting in my office being highly efficient at some task.

So where am I? Well, I’m a month into hardcore sabbatical time (recall that the first Continue reading ‘Road Benefits’

These are not really my cup of tea (at least not first choice), so to speak, but they are very pretty.

While working at the countertop of a coffee bar at Mercado San Miguel, in Madrid, (drinking my usual café cortado) I watched the fellow at the counter making them for some customers.

It was a rather elaborate process, and quite fascinating to watch. It might seem odd Continue reading ‘Dessert Coffees’

My Walkabout finds me in Madrid for a little while, and I find myself reporting joyfully on rain, once again. Not because it has been raining an unusual amount here, but because of a production I went to the other night. It was primarily a dance event, celebrating and dramatizing the work of poet Frederico Garcia Lorca during his time in New York in the 1920s. The choreography was by (I’ve forgotten… will find ticket and update shortly) [update: Blanca Li. Title: ¨Poeta en Nueva York¨] with flamenco as the primary form, mixed with several other dance traditions. There was a lot of good and enjoyable work to see, but I’ll admit to being blown away by the theatre’s (and associated production staff’s) ability to suddenly create a rainstorm on the stage, and sustain it for a prolonged period while one of the dances (using the water, as you can see) used it to great and stunning effect. I had to sneak a (no flash and no disturbing of neighbours of course) photo for you. Click for larger view.

A bit like the first time you saw Jurassic Park back when it was first released and utterly groundbreaking visually, I (and maybe you?) spent time thinking, “this is amazing!”, “how did they pull off this illusion?”, before concluding that maybe the Continue reading ‘Waterfall’

One of the things I tend to do when on Walkabout is seek out pleasant public spaces in which to work. Sometimes institutions to which I might have some connection might give me access to a guest office, or something similar, but often I go “off the grid”, where the grid here refers to the network of academic connections and arrangements that produces such (generous and vital) courtesies. So every city I spend time in, I try to work build a personal network of hideouts. Sometimes, these are just favourite cafes of one sort or another (you’ve maybe seen posts on those), but at times it can also be libraries or other spaces at one sort of institution or another. Some of them are quite splendid, or simply pleasant or convenient. Among the examples for me are the Santa Monica public library, the (downtown) Los Angeles public library (yes, even close to home I like to get away from my standard offices), the Butler Library at Columbia University in New York, the New York Public Library Continue reading ‘Hideouts’

Well, having finished the various papers I wanted completed before turning to other things, I’ve now turned to other things. What I’ve not mentioned so far is that I’m actually on sabbatical this semester. Due to being too stupid to say flat out NO to various things, even though it was supposed to start in early January, I did not really get things together until the end of the month, but I’m happy to report that I’m properly in sabbatical mode now.

My plan for the sabbatical is to work on a specific project, and little else, right through until the late Summer. Sabbaticals come only once every seven years, and so I want to structure things to use the time as well as I can, but the nature of what I want to do with the time means I need to disconnect a bit, so I won’t be attached to a particular institution (as is common with sabbaticals), but instead will be a bit of a nomad. At times, I’m just going to be on Walkabout for a long stretch, taking my work with me wherever I go (the wandering is actually part of the work, in a sense) and just lying low, drifting from town to town like Kwai Chang Caine (I’ll try not to get into any fights, and, for the record, I’ve no plans to go to Thailand). Appropriately, therefore, I’ve dug out a snap from a recent visit to the desert by way of illustration.

From time to time I might show up in your town, so wave if you see me. My current Continue reading ‘Walkabout’

(Image above was used in an earlier post. It is of a pool at the Getty Villa.)

(Somewhat technical post follows.)

I was sitting in a random city somewhere watching the rain and it reminded me that I did not get to mentioning the completion of my other project. I reported on it in a paper with two students, Ram and Jeff, and the title was (perhaps intriguingly?) “String Theory and Water Waves”. You can see it here.

The work follows on from some projects I did a while back, and concerns attempts to gain understanding of string theory at a (perhaps) deeper level by working with various simple models of string theory that are complicated enough to capture many of the theory’s remarkable features while being simple enough to actually solve completely (in a sense). Actually, I laid a lot of the groundwork for this post by writing three earlier blog posts in the “News…” series, and you can find them here, here and here.

Here are some words from the introduction to get you excited. What you may have Continue reading ‘News From the Front IX: Water Everywhere’

A little while ago, this season’s edition of the USC College magazine came out, and it is available online. Notably, it is featuring writers and writing, and there are several pieces in there about both faculty and students and their writing, in various forms. There are articles about superstars such as TC Boyle and Aimee Bender, as well as pieces by excellent writers such as California Poet Laureate Carol Muske-Dukes, and M. G. Lord. I recommend having a read of it.

It is with a mixture of mild amusement and embarrassment that I mention that among all that excellent writerly material is, perhaps oddly, an article on yours truly. It is about this blog, what it is about and for, and why I do it. (The blog is, of course, not to be mistaken for great writing, and so I will apologize personally to Aimee Continue reading ‘The Write Stuff’

A lovely morning in Griffith park, overlooking the city, with a splendid view of downtown Los Angeles. In this photo (click for larger view), everything is lovely and clear after the recent rain. I’ll admit that I took this last Sunday and not this one. Somehow, procrastination, two loads of laundry, a batch of sweet potato biscuits, and staying up until 3:00am all contributed to me not getting up there this morning. Perhaps later.

For me, overviewing physically (as in the above) is always welcome, but it is also good to do so in other ways. I’ve been in that mode recently too. Friday and Saturday saw me brainstorming in a group of 20 or so other USC professors at a retreat over Continue reading ‘Overview’

Today I’ve got to give a guest lecture in a class of KC Cole’s at USC’s Annenberg School. I’m supposed to talk on the theme of Art and Science. I’ll cover a number of aspects, I expect (have not written it yet), but it put me in mind of two posts I did a while back on the subject. One was over at Correlations (remember that?) and the other, called Transcendence, was here. I thought I’d reproduce some of the Correlations post, called Essence, here. The back story was that I was working up a contribution to SEED magazine (the December 2007 issue I think) which was doing a cover story on Science and Art, and… well, I’ll let the 2007 me tell you the rest:

While working on the contribution, I was hugely conflicted, for many reasons (variety of themes, variety of pieces, art forms, only 100 words, etc…) and another major theme struggled for dominance - “essence”. How both science and art strive to identify the essential truth about a subject. My original contribution that I submitted to the editors to get their feedback on whether I was on the right track for what they were looking for therefore had a bit more of this in it, and referred to two pieces of art (I eventually chose one and focussed on developing and rewriting around that, using the “transcendence” theme). The piece I used that did I did not use for the final article is perfect for illustrating the “essence” theme, and so to provoke some thoughts in you [...] I include it here, along with some fragments of the paragraphs I was playing with at the time:

Continue reading ‘Essence’

So I was chatting with a friend of mine the other day about science and scientists, and in particular what on earth we theoretical physicists actually do.

She (mostly jokingly I think) said we’re really all a bit weird, just sitting around thinking about quantum physics all day. I tried to begin to explain that we don’t sit around thinking about quantum mechanics all day any more than a tailor sits around all day thinking about needles. (Or how many angels or demons can fly through the eyes of said needles at the same time.) No, we’re mostly getting on with using the needles in the making of new suits and so forth. (To continue the allegory.)

But I did not get to that analogy, because another thing came up. She went on to say “…like Einstein, with crazy hair…”, to invoke her primary example of the crazy quantum scientist. Now, given that she was talking to me (er… no crazy hair, in case you are wondering), she was clearly joking, but in my view, at the core of all that is a serious image problem that science has to deal with - bizarre clichés about who we are and what we look like. So I thought I’d point something out.

The most famous image of the crazy/eccentric scientist is largely based on a lie (or Continue reading ‘Crazy Al’

“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”

Do you know who said that? I’ll break the post here to give you a moment to think about it. I’m not going to ask for the answer in the comments since you have Google on your side, but you can, if you like, share in the comments whether you knew or guessed it right before you moved to the rest of the post below to learn the answer. (Image above is an illustration by Walter Crane for ‘Snow White’ (1882).) Continuing…
Continue reading ‘On Art, Fairy Tales, and Creativity’

…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…’

We’ve been having wonderful storms here the last few days, and it is expected that it will remain like this through Sunday. It has been great. There’s something wonderful to me about torrential rain pouring down outside through the day while I’m inside working, glancing out of the windows from time to time, and making endless cups of tea. In the afternoon there usually is a break in it all. The sky clears a little, maybe the sun even comes out, and I go for a walk in a long coat, with umbrella, to take the air and clear my head. Night falls early, I eventually get home, and the rain begins again sometime later. If not immediately, then sometime during the night I awake to hear it: The lovely rhythm of rain on the roof, the trickle of water in the gutters, the splashing as some accumulation falls from some great height onto the ground somewhere nearby.

-cvj

I’m taking a short break from it while I wait for my soup - that wonderful soup I made a huge vat of last night, using the essence of the left over carcass of a roast chicken I served on Christmas day combined with various delicious vegetables from the farmer’s market - to heat up for dinner. I need the break, as I’m mentally exhausted. Although I strongly feel like having a nice evening glass of wine, I am forbidding myself from having one since I must stay sharp for much longer this evening, despite my exhaustion. So a bit of blogging about my ongoing task will somehow serve as my relaxation. Oddly enough. Well, let’s see if it does.

I’ve been wandering an incredibly striking landscape, with such remarkable variety, detail, texture and hue. There are features that move me to tears at times, reduce me to fits of uncontrollable laughter at others, but mostly intense reflection throughout. I should be simply enjoying it for its own sake, drinking it in where I want to, letting it simply wash over me at times, while at others, cupping some of it in my hands and looking at it close up, before letting it flow away and moving on. But I do not have that freedom. Instead I have to look at it all with a view to ranking various features over others - putting it all into some sort of order. This is a terrible task to have to do, since so very much of it is simply wonderful in its own right, and there’s hardly any meaning to ranking some parts over the other.

What on earth am I talking about?

Well, as is so often the case with some of the things I get myself involved in, I can’t tell you much detail, since the process itself is ongoing, and rather sensitive. I’d not Continue reading ‘The Read’

I just thought you’d like to know this. I’m a Specialty Act. Got that?

Last month, just before taping some material for a new TV show (that you can see on a major broadcast network starting in a week or so) I signed some routine documents. One of them involved me ticking a box to specify my official status for Continue reading ‘Tales from the Industry XXX - Specialty Act’

I noticed yesterday that there’s a new group blog, at NPR, on science and culture, and - to my pleasant surprise - one of the co-authors is my friend and colleague KC Cole, the well known (and quite marvellous) science writer! I’ve met the physicist Marcelo Gleiser who will be a co-author and he seems like an excellent new voice to hear from. Astrophysicist Adam Frank and Biologists Ursula Goodenough and Stuart Kauffman round out the exciting-looking roster. (I cheekily grabbed a screen shot of the roster photos (left) from their site.) There are a number of lovely pieces up on the site already for you to read.

The blog is called 13.7, a number that might be familiar to you.

No? You might be thinking that it is the new high price for a basic over-priced cup of “gourmet” coffee in some new tediously pretentious cafe in LA (and believe me, I’d not be at all surprised), but I was in fact referring to the 13.7 billion years that is the age of our universe. I think that is the primary meaning they had in mind too. I’m pleased to see these new voices in the blogosphere, and pleased that authors of blogs of this sort can still come up with excellent names! 13.7 is a really rather nice name and, in a slightly inside way, captures the scope, variety, and grandeur of the themes I expect they’ll explore in much the same way that the name Cosmic Variance promised (and delivered) for that group blog back in 2005. I came up with that name a little before we launched the blog (we mulled Continue reading ‘New Voices, Great Name’

Sometimes I find the most elaborate ways of procrastinating when faced with a tedious task (this time, gathering all my grade data for my class together and doing the analysis to produce a final letter grade):

It is good when the distraction produces good and useful results, of course, and a Continue reading ‘Wants and Kneads’

They’re sitting the final exam for my graduate electromagnetism class right now, having started at the ungodly hour of 8:00am. I’m sitting outside in the bright, lukewarm Winter sun with a cup of coffee, two cheesy biscuits I baked at 6:30am for no reason other than feeling in a baking mood (see right), my phone in case there’s a reason for the TA on duty to contact me, and my iPod, which I am of course using to write to you.

It has been an odd few days. Not so much because of the pair of them that had me wandering around a huge studio lot, being wardrobe-checked and make-up checked, shot from all angles with a live cheering studio audience in attendance (for your viewing pleasure on a new prime-time series on Fox to begin airing next month - more on this later, perhaps), but because early on Saturday I woke up with a severe vertigo attack. Very odd indeed and although I managed to get it under control and it had worn off over the days, every now and again it gets close to being triggered again. I don’t know the source for sure - I think it was correlated with a reaction to some of the food I had on set, maybe combined somehow with the severe ear blockage I had about a month ago after catching a (short-lived) cold on a long transatlantic flight? - but I have to say (and this is the point of my digression here) that it is a remarkably odd experience for me to feel slightly off balance for such an extended period. I’m used to being on the tips of my toes ready to skitter along the line at the edge of a low wall if the mood takes me while walking along. But I can’t imagine doing that now. I feel like I’ve lost my powers… it’s often amazing to me how little it takes to make a person feel very mortal, even fragile, again. It will no doubt pass.

I’ve been gentle on this final exam. I still find it disturbing that kids today (yes, I said “kids today” - perhaps my lack of equilibrium has put me in crotchety-old-man mode), even the very smart ones, typically do badly on any advanced exam that Continue reading ‘Final Morsels’

Well, I’m back.

It is early in the morning, at home. At 5:30 am, with my first cup of tea in hand as I breathe in deeply and simply listen, the rest of the City of Angels seems asleep still. It is covered with a fluffy blanket of grey clouds, and it looks strangely snug under it.

It has been quite the trip, as you may have gathered from the past several posts. I managed to get a great deal done in that last day or two, as I was planning when I last reported in. This included more food, jazz, some flamenco in two unexpected but fascinating settings, the excellent collection at Reina Sophia (focused mostly on Picasso), and more.

I’ll try to tell you some of it in the next few days.

But now I must focus on being back. I spent a long day travelling back from MAD to LAX yesterday and need to recover and get on with business immediately. There is a final big lecture for my Electromagnetism class to write and deliver, for example. All Continue reading ‘MAD to LAX’

Well, the weekend is here and so I have wrapped up most of the official part of my visit to Madrid. Lest you think that I spent most of my time eating (not that there’s anything wrong with that), let me mention that I ended up, from Monday to Thursday giving about eight hours of detailed exposition at the board and fielding questions (the lectures and seminar), umpteen (an official number, I’ll have you know) hours of preparation of the notes needed to do this in a successful and clear way, and several more chunks of time in private physics conversations of various sorts. Quite fulfilling, tiring, but worthwhile for all concerned. (I even heard that various people liked the lectures and the seminar, so that’s a real bonus!) It has been a good week.

Thursday night saw me wandering the city streets in the drizzle for several hours. It all started out with a quick walk near my hotel to see if I could stumble on a restaurant, but eventually turned into a longer walk and then an epic quest, as happens to me so often in such situations. I start applying a list of criteria for what I Continue reading ‘Less Work, More Play’

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, I’m simply exhausted. I gave my second two-hour lecture today and drained my energy resources quite a bit. This is after an early(ish) start to the morning (7:30am) and with going late to bed last night (1:30am). A good lunch afterward helped restore things to a balance a bit, but I need to rest some more.

I’ve been modifying my lectures during the process of giving them, making adjustments for time and the kind of questions I get. This means that I end up kicking some parts to later lectures, and then trying to spend some of the afternoon writing new material, as well as on the train back to my hotel, and in the evenings.

Well, briefly in the evenings so far. That is because last night was set aside for a tour of some of the tapas you can find in the old part of Madrid. I had the presence of mind to go back to my hotel and get a short nap first, and then met my gracious Continue reading ‘Working and Playing Hard’

Well, it has been quite the week so far. I’ve been mostly in England. First I spent Tuesday getting over the main effects of jetlag and a short but strong cold (both more or less gone now), and then Wednesday I went to King’s College London to give a seminar to the three groups in the Triangle series of seminars - King’s, Imperial, Queen Mary are the three places the participating research groups in theoretical high energy physics come from. It was excellent to see so many old friends and colleagues, meet some new ones, and chat physics at the pub and over dinner later on. The seminar seemed to be well received, although I know I was far from my best, given jetlag and cold. The next two days saw me saying hi to family and friends at coffee and dinner in the evenings and visiting at Queen Mary and Imperial for the day, and hiding in the British Library for most of Friday, writing.

What am I writing? Four lectures on D-branes and string theory and M-theory, with a focus on some of the fun and instructive applications (and potential applications) of Continue reading ‘Here, There, and Everywhere’

You may recall my mentioning a desert trip to shoot something for TV, some time back. One done at precisely the wrong time of year. And to Death Valley, one of the hottest places on earth, to boot. Well, I meant to mention that the episode of the History Channel’s The Universe that the shoot was for aired a week or two ago and it was really excellent. It was entitled “Liquid Universe” and it was a rather beautiful and thoroughly pleasant episode exploring the role of liquids in our universe, a matter not often raised in questions of astronomy except when it comes to matters of water from time to time. This was not about water per se, but rather the whole matter of material that flows and the role it plays in diverse areas of the solar system and perhaps the universe at large. I was using sand to demonstrate how sometimes there are surprising places where you can find fluid/liquid behaviour, and mentioned some of the new phases of matter found in the context, for example, of quarks and gluons at RHIC. (I’ve spoken about that here a number of times in the context of some of my research. See the archives.)

It was an excellent episode and another example of how one can take a topic under the “The Universe” heading and showcase lots of exciting science quite accessibly Continue reading ‘The Universe: Cool Cars, Hot Sand, and Fast Balls’

Despite the title, which is also the title of an utterly depressing but wonderful song that I love, which starts out: “Sunday is gloomy/my hours are slumberless/dearest the shadows/I live with are numberless/…” and wallows in further and darker gloom for the rest of the song until near the end, I mean gloomy here in a neutral way.

It applies not to my mood but to the skies over Vancouver on the Saturday and Sunday set aside for wandering and exploring. I actually found a lot of it quite refreshing (recall that we’ve not had much rain in LA all year) and managed to see several beautiful scenes made all the more lovely for the shades of grey provided by the rain and clouds. The scene with the boats above left is an example. Overall I had a great time exploring, and was shown some nice parts of the city by my hosts, Moshe Rozali and his family (thanks guys!).

The trip was a success, in that I had a lot of great conversations with various people about physics research matters, and also in terms of the main point of the trip which Continue reading ‘Gloomy Sunday’

Well, that was not altogether terrible, I gather, but I was so tired and a little bit out of sorts* when I started giving the talk that I was running very slowly. So by time I got to the end (even though I hit my right pace later on) I was some 15 minutes over. Ugh. People seemed to like it, but I definitely need to whittle out a few of the more superfluous slides (which I’d always intended to) and strike the intended pace I wanted to hit earlier than 3/4 of the way through the talk. My reward (besides some nice remarks at the end of the talk that sort of made my day) was a visit to another excellent restaurant for dinner, with some good company. The extraordinarily good Vij’s. The hour’s wait for the food was perfectly fine given the nibbles they bring you while you wait, and the food itself once you get it. Here’s a shot or two of some of the excellent food just after its arrival, and the empty dishes and satisfied hosts just after polishing it all off: Continue reading ‘Time Bandit’

I’m in remote office mode again. I’ve to give two colloquia while visiting two physics departments in Vancouver area over the next two days. (Subject matter will be essentially the same as the one I gave a month ago.) So tonight, I’m eating dinner at the splendid restaurant Banana Leaf not far from my hotel while reviewing the slides of my presentations on my pda (my iTouch - I dump lots of files I want to read on it using an application called filemagnet. Very useful. See here. In this case I’m looking at the pdf output from the keynote presentation software I use. ) I’m making a few notes on changes I’ll make when I get back to my hotel. I’m also reviewing a few other documents that were sent to me for response, and tying off various loose ends here and there before the evening ends.

I sometimes worry that it might be considered rude that I’m apparently doing a bit of work and so not fully paying attention to the food, but I’m not too worried, really. Once the actual food arrives I’ve been quite appreciative of it, giving it my full Continue reading ‘Remote Office’

…to lots of happy reading soon! My new crop of shopping (click for larger view) includes three Octavia Butler novels, two Murakami novels (I think I’ve talked about both authors here before) and a science book by Garfinkle and Garfinkle (I’ve spoken about this excellent book here before) that is a gift for a friend. I actually tend to cluster authors from time to time, meaning that I read something of theirs and then consume several more of their pieces of work immediately after. I did that with Murakami a while back and it is time to come back to him and read some more. Then it’ll be a Butler cluster.

Now… just need to read them. I can’t wait…. but I must finish the astonishingly good Continue reading ‘Looking Forward…’

I always like an excuse to look for blue skies, and to have others look too, even in the worst of times. I had a great reason to do it today.

Early this morning before sunrise I settled down to write my ten o’clock lecture for my Electricity and Magnetism class. On Tuesday I had ended with a computation that is the essence of the reason the sky is blue, which is a nice enough thing to talk about, but today I wanted to go more in depth on the whole thing, and show that you can in a few steps show that the blueness has a particular pattern to it. I wrote out the final equations in a few steps and looked at them for a moment or two and realized that with the sun rising at that very moment, it was the perfect situation to have! So I went outside to enjoy the beautiful Autumn day and the beauty there is in seeing an equation writ large in the sky - and it really was all there.

It is particularly at times like this that one remembers why it is that it is hard not to just love Physics! (I hope you’ll forgive my unashamed love of what I do.)

Here is the sky I saw, looking toward sunrise, and directly in the opposite direction:

Oh, you’re wondering what I am talking about..? Why is the sky blue? What pattern in the sky? Thanks for asking! There are two things I’m looking at. First, light from the Continue reading ‘Blue Skies…’

Once again I find myself in the position of having far more to tell you about than I have either time or energy for - and so much of it is really good!!

I was supposed to tell you about the first of the Nobel Prize lunches that I helped put on last Thursday… Never got to blogging it, and now the second one finished an hour ago. The whole business was quite a success, I am happy to say. I’ll maybe come back to say some more… But I’m zonked right now with tiredness. Super-long day that started early, and I sort of started off tired to begin with. I’m sitting on the bus letting it drag me toward home… From the bus stop I will wheel the bike home because it has an inexplicable medium-slow puncture, and I’m too tired to ride anyway.

What other things have I not told you about?

Well, on Friday I went along to another wonderful event. The Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities had Josh Kuhn give a talk in their fortnightly luncheon at the USC campus. It was about Mexican music in Los Angeles. It was a wonderful and Continue reading ‘Sketches while Zonked’

Following hot on the heels of Margaret Atwood coming to town last week (over at UCLA), we have A. S. Byatt over at USC today! Very exciting. It is actually partly one of our College Commons events as well, and last week as a College Commons event (with a Darwin tinge) we had a viewing of the film of her book Angels and Insects, which I thought was really excellent!

Her lecture is entitled: “The Novel as Natural History”, (and will resonate with some of the themes I talked about in my report on the CC event about Collections) and I expect it is going to be quite wonderful. Details here, and the blurb goes:

Continue reading ‘A. S. Byatt’

Yes. Really. I got up early as usual and decided after to go back to bed with a cup of tea. Then I made a cup of coffee and retired again. I’ve decided to be a bit decadent this morning and try to take it slow and spend some quality time with my laptop doing some long overdue things such as replying to a number of emails, and….. shopping!

No, I’m not buying lots of shiny toys. It’s plane tickets and train tickets. For work travel. Three separate trips. Lots of planning, poking about on the calendar, hunting for good slots for flights, anticipating delays and building in appropriate lag times, coordinating various errands and meetings here and there… Basically, looking into the future and squeezing parts of it into some sort of shape. A scaffolding, as it were, for draping the details onto later.

One annoyance and one delight:

(1) Why do airlines insist on assuming that people prefer aisle seats over window Continue reading ‘Saturday Shopping in Bed’

A shot of the gathering audience for my colloquium two weeks ago. (Click for larger view. I mentioned the circumstance behind it here.) It was a lot of fun, I must say. I spent a good deal of time preparing the slides in the day and a half leading up to it, and it was worth it. The audience seemed very attentive (or perhaps they are collectively very good at faking) and I got some great questions along the way, and at the end. My hope was to do a short and sweet colloquium Continue reading ‘Audience View’

Yep…

-cvj

You might remember a post I did back in January from Cambridge (the one in England), mentioning what I was up to on that quick trip.

It was a board meeting of the Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter (ICAM), and I said, among other things:

ICAM has a great deal of interest in outreach -communicating science to the general public- and education, and this is one of the reasons I’ve been added to the board, since I’ve some experience and ideas to share in an advisory role. I’ll be giving a talk about some of these things using some projects of mine as examples (ASTI, blogging, etc). They’ve already been doing wonderful things in education and outreach, and have made it a priority to make it a major part of future activity. [...]

I mentioned that one of the projects under development was their site called Emergent Universe, which promised to be rather fantastic to explore. It was under development at the time, and we (the board) spent some time at the meeting commenting on and making suggestions for its improvement. Well, it is finished, and boy it looks great! Suzi Tucker and her team should be immensely proud of their accomplishment.

There’s so much material there, beautifully presented (a still taken from it is Continue reading ‘Emergence’

As you already know, I am sure, it is Nobel Prize week. (See posts below for earlier such discussions.) Physiology/medicine has already been announced (see here: Yes, I definitely approve any effort to encourage research work on how aging and related mechanisms work)…. what was I saying again?… Oh, right …and Physics, Chemistry, literature, Peace and Economics will trot along into the spotlight day by day, into next week. All very exciting.

[Update on the Physics prize at bottom of post!]

Now I have to say I don’t have any good ideas or strong feelings for what the Physics prize might be this year. Do you? I’ve a vague feeling that it might be some sort of important experimental effect (you know, like GMR a few years back - perhaps whatever it is that makes my ipod know which way is up all the time) instead of something flashier (but no less important) like inflation (the cosmic kind), which I am sure will have its day one day soon.

Ideas?

By the way, my “Nobel Prize: Who/What/Why” colloquium idea of a few years back has now been converted into a pair of lunches for the College Commons series. Continue reading ‘The Nobel Prize Week is here!’

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’

Well, I’m always a bit embarrassed to point to articles that are about me, especially ones that are decidedly generous - I’m British, remember - but it is specifically about some of the work I do when I’m not doing research, classroom teaching, sitting on committees, and so on and so forth. Things like blogging, and things that might be called “media outreach”. Lots of people ask why I do so much of this sort of thing, and so it is worth pointing to this recent piece by way of a partial answer. (The other part of the answer is to do with the response to and (possible) lasting effects of this sort of work. It is surprising in both quantity and variety, and quite humbling at times, and I’ll tell you about it in another post.) The article, written by Laurie Hartzell (with photo above left by Mara Zimet) for USC Continue reading ‘Out There’

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’

Well that was fun! I’m sitting on the bus on the way home [editorial note: I wrote most of this on Thursday afternoon], with the memory of the College Commons event that I just went to still fresh in my mind. (That and the tasty food at the end of the event.)

This event (”Discovering the World: Collections, Curiosity and Evolution”) was all about collecting and collections, from the institutional collections we have in our society today such as museums and libraries, through the “cabinets of curiosity” of earlier centuries, to the sort of obsessive collections of random stuff that sort of becomes a disease (I mentally glance over at the shelves, piles, and boxes of old New Yorkers in my house; I’ve not been able to throw away a single one since I started subscribing in the early 90s. Yes, I know, I know… I know.)

So many of these types of collections (and the resulting books and compendia which they themselves become the objects of collections and subjects of books and so on and so forth) formed the foundations of the culture, the raw material for scientific study, the inspiration for more collections and for more study, and so on…. So the event used that as a basis and dug out some wonderful articles for us to look and marvel at. The digging was done at USC’s own splendid Doheny library (original Audubon volumes, Cook’s journals, etc) the Huntington library (several illustrated tomes of natural history and an actual plate used long ago for printing Audubon illustrations which were then later hand-coloured by artists) and the Los Angeles Natural History Museum across the street. A number of my colleagues who are scholars in areas that these objects pertain to gave short, informative and Continue reading ‘Collections!’